The fourteen essays presented in this volume examine the diverse ways in which cultural products are shaped and re-shaped in public spaces in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and some other countries in the Pacific in their continuing encounters with the forces of localism and globalism. Various theories of globalisation have been proposed since the 1970s to predict the trend of development toward homogenisation and explain the tensions hitherto created. However diverse the theories may be, there is one fact that assumes the form of a challenge. As the world has become seemingly less and less divergent in its "shrinkage," the traditional categories of cultural division and opposition, such as the East versus the West, may no longer be adequate in analysing the world we live in today. Paradoxically enough, this very shrinkage and restructuring of the world has the effect of focusing more sharply on questions of localism, identity and cultural roots. This is, in fact, a moment in history when the local and the global are co-implicated in complex and unanticipated ways. How do cultural workers, who are primarily writers, intellectuals, journalists, filmmakers and educators, in Asia and the Pacific respond to this challenging phenomenon? How do they conceptualise it? What are the prospects and problems they foresee with regard to their own societies and cultures? These are questions of utmost significance as one seeks to come to terms with East Asia and the emerging Pacific as a space of contestation and resistance in the global/local process of cultural production. The fourteen essays collected in this book certainly represent the views of some of the prominent scholars in the region.

This book is a collection of essays written by emerging scholars at the University of Basel on the basis of their subjective encounters with a specific archival collection housed in the Basler Afrika Bibliographien in Basel. The Ernst and Ruth Dammann collection consists of around 8100 images, 750 audio recordings and numerous manuscripts, diaries and notes. The German couple conducted research on Namibian oral literatures and languages as they were spoken and performed across the country in the early 1950s. Based on in-depth engagement with the textual, visual and audio records assembled in this intricate collection, the authors of this book critically interrogated the implications of opening a colonial archive, exploring alternative ways of reading and understanding the historical material. As unique examples of close reading and listening, the essays propose creative ways of attending to the politics of race, gender, famine, ethnography, biography and fiction in colonial knowledge production.

This collection of essays interrogates library practices relating to archives and special collections.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays offers a window onto the overseas Indian and Chinese communities in Asia. Contributors discuss the interactive role of the cultural and religious ‘other’, the diasporic absorption of local beliefs and customs, and the practical business networks and operational mechanisms unique to these communities. Growing out of an international workshop organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong, this volume explores material, cultural and imaginative features of the immigrant communities and brings together these two important communities within a comparative framework.

Could we analyze power-sharing through the rear-view mirror? The politics of Lebanon and Northern Ireland are relevant case studies to answer this question. Using Pierre Nora’s lieux de memoire scheme of historical memory, this book crafts a theory of sites of social interaction (SSI) and strategies of social cohesion in power-sharing institutions. SSIs and cohesion strategies that increase tensions will cause power-sharing failure in the long run, and vice versa. Thus, there is a causal link between power-sharing and ethnic tensions in divided societies, through mechanisms of SSIs and cohesion strategies. Lebanon and Northern Ireland encode power-sharing with different sites of social interaction and cohesion strategies, as a reflection of a society's composition and institutional design, respectively. Power-sharing implementation provides the missing link in our knowledge of power-sharing and ethnic tensions. At Boston College, this work won the 2021 Donald S. Carlisle Award for academic excellence in political science.

These essays survey the histories, the theories and the fault lines that compose the field of memory research. Drawing on the advances in the sciences and in the humanities, they address the question of how memory works, highlighting transactions between the interiority of subjective memory and the larger fields of public or collective memory.

This book examines the changing character of European citizenship, focusing on 'acts' of citizenship.

The Women of the Wall are leading a groundbreaking struggle to gain the Israeli authorities' permission to pray according to their manner at Judaism's holiest prayer site, the Western Wall. This book is the first comprehensive academic study of their struggle, placing it in a comparative and theoretical context of wider religion-state conflicts and models.

The Art of Subtraction is the first full-length study on the CD-ROM as a creative platform. Bruno Lessard traces the rise and relatively rapid fall of the CD-ROM in the 1980s and 1990s and its impact as a creative platform for media artists such as Jean-Louis Boissier, Zoe Beloff, Adriene Jenik, and Chris Marker. Although the CD-ROM was not a lasting commercial success it was a vibrant medium that allowed for experimentation in adapting literary works. Building on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michele Foucault, Lessard establishes a comparative framework for linking digital adaptations with innovative concepts such as 'subtractive adaptation' and the 'object image' that will be of interest to researchers examining literary adaptations on other digital platforms such as websites, smart phones, tablets, and digital games. The Art of Subtraction is a fascinating study of intermediality in the late twentieth century and it provides the first chapter in the yet unwritten history of digital adaptation.