In InterAsian Intimacies across Race, Religion, and Colonialism, Chie Ikeya asks how interAsian marriage, conversion, and collaboration in Burma under British colonial rule became the subject of political agitation, legislative activism, and collective violence. Over the course of the twentieth century relations between Burmese Muslims, Sino-Burmese, Indo-Burmese, and other mixed families and communities became flashpoints for far-reaching legal reforms and Buddhist revivalist, feminist, and nationalist campaigns aimed at consigning minority Asians to subordinate status and regulating women's conjugal and reproductive choices. Out of these efforts emerged understandings of religion, race, and nation that continue to vex Burma and its neighbors today. Combining multilingual archival research with family history and intergenerational storytelling, Ikeya highlights how the people targeted by such movements made and remade their lives under the shifting circumstances of colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism. The book illuminates a history of belonging across boundaries, a history that has been overshadowed by Eurocentric narratives about the mixing of white colonial masters and native mistresses. InterAsian intimacy was—and remains—foundational to modern regimes of knowledge, power, and desire throughout Asia.

In Strangers in the Family, Guo-Quan Seng provides a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). At the heart of this story lies the creolization of patrilineal Confucian marital and familial norms to the colonial legal, moral, and sexual conditions of urban Java. Departing from male-centered narratives of Ooverseas Chinese communities, Strangers in the Family tells the history of community- formation from the perspective of women who were subordinate to, and alienated from, full Chinese selfhood. From native concubines and mothers, creole Chinese daughters, and wives and matriarchs, to the first generation of colonial-educated feminists, Seng showcases women's moral agency as they negotiated, manipulated, and debated men in positions of authority over their rights in marriage formation and dissolution. In dialogue with critical studies of colonial Eurasian intimacies, this book explores Asian-centered inter-ethnic patterns of intimate encounters. It shows how contestations over women's place in marriage and in society were formative of a Chinese racial identity in colonial Indonesia.

In Civilizational Imperatives, Oliver Charbonneau reveals the little-known history of the United States' colonization of the Philippines' Muslim South in the early twentieth century. Often referred to as Moroland, the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao were sites of intense US engagement and laboratories of colonial modernity during an age of global imperialism. Exploring the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized from the late nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War, Charbonneau argues that American power in the Islamic Philippines rested upon a transformative vision of colonial rule. Civilization, protection, and instruction became watchwords for US military officers and civilian administrators, who enacted fantasies of racial reform among the diverse societies of the region. Violence saturated their efforts to remake indigenous politics and culture, embedding itself into governance strategies used across four decades. Although it took place on the edges of the Philippine colonial state, this fraught civilizing mission did not occur in isolation. It shared structural and ideological connections to US settler conquest in North America and also borrowed liberally from European and Islamic empires. These circuits of cultural, political, and institutional exchange—accessed by colonial and anticolonial actors alike—gave empire in the Southern Philippines its hybrid character. Civilizational Imperatives is a story of colonization and connection, reaching across nations and empires in its examination of a Southeast Asian space under US sovereignty. It presents an innovative new portrait of the American empire's global dimensions and the many ways they shaped the colonial encounter in the Southern Philippines.

Intimacy Across the Fencelines examines intimacy in the form of sexual encounters, dating, marriage, and family that involve US service members and local residents. Rebecca Forgash analyzes the stories of individual US service members and their Okinawan spouses and family members against the backdrop of Okinawan history, political and economic entanglements with Japan and the United States, and a longstanding anti-base movement. The narratives highlight the simultaneously repressive and creative power of military "fencelines," sites of symbolic negotiation and struggle involving gender, race, and class that divide the social landscape in communities that host US bases. Intimacy Across the Fencelines anchors the global US military complex and US-Japan security alliance in intimate everyday experiences and emotions, illuminating important aspects of the lived experiences of war and imperialism.

Wives, Slaves, and Concubines argues that Dutch colonial practices and law created a new set of social and economic divisions in Batavia-Jakarta, modern-day Indonesia, to deal with difficult realities in Southeast Asia. Jones uses compelling stories from ordinary Asian women to explore the profound structural changes occurring at the end of the early colonial period—changes that helped birth the modern world order. Based on previously untapped criminal proceedings and testimonies by women who appeared before the Dutch East India Company's Court of Alderman, this fascinating study details the ways in which demographic and economic realities transformed the social and legal landscape of eighteenth-century Batavia-Jakarta. Southeast Asian women played an inordinately important role in the functioning of the early modern Asia Trade and in the short- and long-term operations of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Southeast Asia was a place where most individuals operated within an intricate web of multiple, fluid, situational, and reciprocal social relationships ranging from dependence to bondedness to slavery. The eighteenth century represents an important turning point: the relatively open and autonomous Asia Trade that prompted Columbus to set sail had begun to give way to an age of high imperialism and European economic hegemony. How did these changes affect life for ordinary women in early modern Dutch Asia, and how did the transformations wrought by Dutch colonialism alter their lives? The VOC created a legal division that favored members of mixed VOC families, those in which Asian women married men employed by the VOC. Thus, employment—not race—became the path to legal preference, a factor that disadvantaged the rest of the Asian women. In short, colonialism created a new underclass in Asia, one that had a particularly female cast. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, an increasingly operational dichotomy of slave and free supplanted an otherwise fluid system of reciprocal bondedness. The inherent divisions of this new system engendered social friction, especially as the emergent early modern economic order demanded new, tractable forms of labor. Dutch domestic law gave power to female elites in Dutch Asia, but it left the majority of women vulnerable to the more privileged on both sides of this legal divide. Slaves fled and violence erupted when traditional expectations of social mobility collided with new demands from the masters and the state.

Can a subject be sovereign in a hegemony? Can creativity be reined in by forces of empire? Studying closely the oral narrations and writings of four Indian authors in colonial India, The Audacious Raconteur argues that even the most hegemonic circumstances cannot suppress "audacious raconteurs": skilled storytellers who fashion narrative spaces that allow themselves to remain sovereign and beyond subjugation. By drawing attention to the vigorous orality, maverick use of photography, literary ventriloquism, and bilingualism in the narratives of these raconteurs, Leela Prasad shows how the ideological bulwark of colonialism—formed by concepts of colonial modernity, history, science, and native knowledge—is dismantled. Audacious raconteurs wrest back meanings of religion, culture, and history that are closer to their lived understandings. The figure of the audacious raconteur does not only hover in an archive but suffuses everyday life. Underlying these ideas, Prasad's personal interactions with the narrators' descendants give weight to her innovative argument that the audacious raconteur is a necessary ethical and artistic figure in human experience. Thanks to generous funding from Duke University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

A Man among Other Men examines competing constructions of modern manhood in the West African metropolis of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Engaging the histories, representational repertoires, and performative identities of men in Abidjan and across the Black Atlantic, Jordanna Matlon shows how French colonial legacies and media tropes of Blackness act as powerful axes, rooting masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification. Through a broad chronological and transatlantic scope that culminates in a deep ethnography of the livelihoods and lifestyles of men in Abidjan's informal economy, Matlon demonstrates how men's subjectivities are formed in dialectical tension by and through hegemonic ideologies of race and patriarchy. A Man among Other Men provides a theoretically innovative, historically grounded, and empirically rich account of Black masculinity that illuminates the sustained power of imaginaries even as capitalism affords a deficit of material opportunities. Revealed is a story of Black abjection set against the anticipation of male privilege, a story of the long crisis of Black masculinity in racial capitalism.

In the rich and varied life stories in Under the Black Umbrella, elderly Koreans recall incidents that illustrate the complexities of Korea during the colonial period. Hildi Kang here reinvigorates a period of Korean history long shrouded in the silence of those who endured under the "black umbrella" of Japanese colonial rule. Existing descriptions of the colonial period tend to focus on extremes: imperial repression and national resistance, Japanese subjugation and Korean suffering, Korean backwardness and Japanese progress. "Most people," Kang says, "have read or heard only the horror stories which, although true, tell only a small segment of colonial life."The varied accounts in Under the Black Umbrella reveal a truth that is both more ambiguous and more human—the small-scale, mundane realities of life in colonial Korea. Accessible and attractive narratives, linked by brief historical overviews, provide a large and fully textured view of Korea under Japanese rule. Looking past racial hatred and repression, Kang reveals small acts of resistance carried out by Koreans, as well as gestures of fairness by Japanese colonizers. Impressive for the history it recovers and preserves, Under the Black Umbrella is a candid, human account of a complicated time in a contested place.

Black Market Business is a grassroots social history of the clandestine market for sex in colonial Tonkin. Lively and well told, it explores the ways in which sex workers, managers, and clients evaded the colonial regulation system in the turbulent economy of the interwar years. Christina Elizabeth Firpo argues that the confluence of economic, demographic, and cultural changes sweeping late colonial Tonkin created spaces of tension in which the interwar black market sex industry thrived. The clandestine sex industry flourished in sites of legal inconsistency, cultural changes, economic disparity, rural-urban division, and demographic shifts. As a nexus of the many tensions besetting late colonial Tonkin, the black market sex industry serves as a useful lens through which to examine these tensions and the ways they affected marginalized populations. More specifically, an investigation of this black market shows how a particular population of impoverished women—a group regrettably understudied by historians—experienced the tensions. Drawing on an astonishingly diverse and multilingual source base, Black Market Business includes detailed cases of juvenile prostitution, human trafficking, and debt bondage arrangements in sex work, as well as cases in Tonkin's bars, hotels, singing houses, and dance clubs. Using GIS technology and big data sets to track individual actors in history, it serves as a model for teaching new methodological approaches to conducting social histories of women and marginalized people.

Phan Chau Trinh (1872-1926) was the earliest proponent of democracy and popular rights in Vietnam. Throughout his life, he favored a moderate approach to political change and advised the country's leaders to seek gradual progress for Vietnam within the French colonial system. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not favor anti-French military alliances or insurgent military resistance, arguing that "to depend on foreign help is foolish and to resort to violence is self-destructive." As a result of his exposure to Chinese reformist literature, Phan Chau Trinh assigned top priority to promoting democracy and human rights and to improving Vietnamese people's lives. He believed that true independence could only be achieved by changing the Vietnamese political culture, and he articulated penetrating criticism of the corruption and superficiality of Vietnam's officials. His emphasis on changing the fundamental values governing the ruling class's behavior, as well as his skepticism regarding anticolonial resistance, set Phan Chau Trinh apart from his contemporaries and mark him as a true revolutionary. Vinh Sinh's masterly introduction to Phan Chau Trinh's essays illuminate both this turbulent era and the courageous intelligence of the author.