Before the opening of the Second World Congress of the Communist International (July 19–August 7, 1920) [which met on the first day in Petrograd but subsequently in Moscow], Lenin prepared a draft thesis on the national and colonial question. M. N. Roy, a young Bengali attending his first international Communist gathering, eagerly responded to Lenin's request for criticisms. As a result, Lenin invited him to write an alternative thesis. Both theses were modified as a result of discussions within the National and Colonial Commission, and both were subsequently adopted by the Congress. After his encounter with Lenin, Roy rose rapidly in the Comintern hierarchy. In 1922 he was elected a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), and a full voting member in 1924. He became a member of the Presidium in 1924. It was in the year 1926, however, that Roy attained the peak of his influence in the Comintern. In February of that year he was appointed to the editorial staff of the Communist International, and in the following December he was reelected to the Presidium and joined the Political Secretariat of the ECCI. At the time of the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI (November 12–December 16, 1926), Roy became Secretary of the Chinese Commission, a post he held jointly with Petrov, and a member of the Agrarian Commission. The Plenum, convened for the purpose of considering the China problem, adopted a thesis on the question and Roy was sent to China as a representative of the Comintern to carry it out. Following the events in China in 1927, Roy's influence declined precipitately, though he was not formally expelled until December, 1929.

Among their fellow Bengalis, the Bauls, who constitute a religious sect, are esteemed because their iconoclasm, disregard of caste, and merger of Hindu and Islamic traditions gives them an enviable freedom to confront life as individuals outside the prevailing social and religious confines. They are loved, too, because they do not preach but rather woo with charming poems set to irresistible tunes that may compel them to dance.

Gail Hershatter's presidential address at the March 2012 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) encouraged historians to regard gender as a tool with which one navigates a messy, fragmented historical terrain, rather than an enclosed house in which one can “sit back and enjoy the view from a single well-appointed location.” The paper that follows can be regarded as an enthusiastic endorsement. Gender history has made enormous inroads into mainstream academia; “gender is everywhere in the scholarship.” But, as Hershatter observes, “it is not the self-same thing wherever it is to be found.” Each of the stories she told illustrated a complex landscape of political change that was only partially visible or legible from inside the “house of gender,” hard-won though it has been. “Perhaps,” she commented wryly, “we need to get out of the house.” For Chinese historians, “disquiet in the house of gender” promises to be immensely productive, offering fresh views of the junctures in Chinese history in which large political projects affect changes in the smaller projects of everyday life, to arrive at an expanded notion of political change and a more complex understanding of what the revolution meant for Chinese women.

There is no easy answer to the question: What is the status of Chinese philosophy? On the Chinese side, philosophy is much more than a professional commentary on and the extension of a canonical tradition constituted by philosophical systems and theories. Chinese philosophers have traditionally been scholar-officials whose theoretical reflections have been tempered by practical responsibilities—fully, the daily workings of government and society. “Philosophy” in the contemporary Chinese context, then, despite the avowedly Marxist orientation of the state, continues to range over the relationship between cultural values and the social and political life of the people. Philosophers have been and still are the intellectual leaders of society. Hence, a “state-of-the-art” reflection on Chinese philosophy from an internal Chinese perspective would be primarily practical: a survey of the intellectual discourse as it has driven and shaped recent social, political, and cultural developments.

It is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble by the feminist philosopher of gender, sexuality, and governmentality, Judith Butler. When Gender Trouble came out in the United States, it hit the stands like a hit; it transformed and unraveled the modalities through which ontologies and epistemologies of gender came to be. This was especially the case with the trouble, the disturbances, the turbulence that Gender Trouble carried along with it. Gender Trouble's thematics sometimes syncopated against familiar habits of belief that were and are carefully nursed and held to one's heart, upending them in sometimes unexpected ways. The concept of “performativity,” for instance, generated a buzz, partly because it unhinged and reoriented several fail-safe, deeply felt materialized beliefs, such as the ontological immutability of gender cohering resolutely and unremittingly in and through an inveterate notion of the biological (belief certainty in the sense that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might intend as the unnoticed grounding of one's sense of and use of language itself laid in so deeply that it disappeared from immediate purchase). Gender Trouble also asked us to address the seemingly intransigent separations between interiority and exteriority and the obdurate artifice of an “interior core” (psyche, soul, etc.), which, because it was constituted as a priori, meant that people believed it lay beyond being touched or constituted by any social, economic, or political exigencies, “regulations,” or “disciplinary practices” and thus “preclude[d] an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject.”

The galaxy of non-indigenous elements confronting the student of Indonesian cultural history has often obscured the fact that, in order to elucidate a valid picture of their role and significance, these elements need to be studied in their own terms, in relation to their own environment and at specific synchronic levels, such levels being but points on the continuum of the historical process. Thus to consider Javanese culture exclusively as a linear (and corrupt) descendant of Indian culture on the one hand, or as perpetually conditioned by a hypothetical indigenous ur-society in the manner of Rassers on the other, leads to a dead end, and has stultified much otherwise useful and impressive research.

In his 1955 book, The Political Role of Women, Maurice Duverger brought our attention to the lack of representation of women in politics. Since that time, the dismal underrepresentation of women in politics has not much improved. Few women rise to leadership positions in politics; as Jean Blondel found in a more recent cross-cultural comparison of political leaders, less than 0.005 percent of all leaders were women (1987, 116–17). Regarding women's political participation, political scientists used to assert that women tended to “limit attention to the superficial and irrelevant aspects of politics” (Lane 1959, 213). Many argued that women had a different political view than did men: they were apolitical, they personalized politics, and they adopted their husbands' political orientations. Accordingly, they became political leaders only by default, as substitutes for deceased husbands or fathers.

Most discussions of economic growth and economic policy in postwar Japan focus on the economy as an isolated sector, neglecting its place in Japanese history as a whole. Partly this is because discussion of the economy usually moves quickly to technical problems. Partly it is due to the common assumption that high-speed economic growth emerged out of an attempt to create high-speed economic growth for its own sake-thus making redundant any sustained inquiry into its origins (as opposed to its mechanisms). We now have a fairly clear understanding of the technical means by which Japan became rich: rapid growth was achieved through high savings used for technology-led investment, based both on market forces channeled into planned directions and a flexible response to unplanned opportunities, such as American assistance to Japanese economic development. What is murkier is the social and political context for economic growth.

Korea is a small peninsula with an area of 220,839 square kilometers. It is a mountainous land, with only one-fifth of the area available for cultivation. The peninsula belongs to the temperate zone, but the north is colder and more arid while the south is humid and hot in the summer, like the monsoon zone of southeast Asia and Japan. The south has a yearly rainfall of 800 to 1,000 millimeters, and 60 percent of the precipitation occurs in the summer months from June to early September.

Japan's role in Far Eastern history has been unique in many respects. Traditionally an integral part of the Chinese zone of civilization, Japan has nonetheless demonstrated a marked ability to remain independent of continental influence. In recent years Japan's remarkable record of adjustment to the conditions imposed upon her by the spread of Western civilization to the Orient has raised the provocative question of why Japan, of all Far Eastern societies, should be the first to climb into the ranks of the modern industrial powers. Is it possible, as one scholar has suggested, that Japan “has been the country which has diverged the most consistently and markedly from Far Eastern norms, and these points of difference have been by and large, points of basic resemblance to the West”?

The problem of the relations between religious and political organizations and systems has been of long standing in the broad field of comparative historical studies and in the sociology of religion. The work of Max Weber, although more explicitly focused on the relations between economics and religion has, of course, contained many general and concrete analyses on the interrelations between religion and politics in general and between specific types of religious and political systems in particular. Some of the recent works dealing with this area have been devoted to the more general problem of “The State and Religion.” These discussions have emphasized the problem of their interdependence and mutual influence, especially in the more “developed” forms of both religious and political institutions, but have not always specified the exact types of religious and political structures whose interaction formed the object of the analysis.

Historians on the Chinese mainland maintain that the self-strengthening movement became “bankrupt” after the Sino-French War of 1884–1885. Their phraseology is typically value-laden, and contains the usual quotient of exaggeration. Yet these Communist scholars do point to a development in the late Ch'ing period that is usually overlooked by students in the West. During the Sino-French War, French forces had sailed almost at will along the entire coast of the empire, had temporarily occupied a part of Taiwan, and finally had snuffed out the dynasty's last pretensions to sovereignty in Vietnam. In the wake of this conflict, growing threats of Russian and Japanese aggression further raised doubts that the self-strengthening policy was effective as a means of securing the defense of the empire.

The state of housing in a country has a direct impact on the level of public health, on the crime rate, and on many other social problems of importance. It also has an indirect effect on labor productivity in the economy through the general morale of workers. Practically all countries today are facing housing problems in varying degrees, especially in urban areas. For an underdeveloped country, its ability to provide adequate housing in urban areas is a vital prerequisite for successful industrialization. In countries which are relatively well developed, the rising income level of the population creates a constantly increasing demand for better dwellings.

Many of the stores in and around Peiping (Peking) keep very full and complete accounts, recording in separate books the purchases and sales of the commodities in which they deal, their silver-copper exchange transactions, the expenditures for food purchased for their employees, their sundry purchases and their expenditures for wages. These account books have been looked on as valuable records and many of the stores have preserved them for many years. Some of the books have been lost through the years, but in many instances it is still possible to secure a relatively complete set of accounts covering from 100 to 150 years.

This essay discusses changing images of island Southeast Asia and its Muslim populations in the modern Arabic press during the late colonial period. It commences by surveying the general informational letters sent to the largely pro-Ottoman papers of Beirut and Cairo during the 1890s by increasingly vocal local Arabs who were seeking to redress their situation as second-class colonial citizens. Thereafter, it considers the role played by Malays, Javanese, and other Southeast Asians in the globalizing Arabic media. In doing so, it demonstrates that although many Southeast Asians bought into and actively participated in the often Arabocentric program for Islamic reform in their homelands, they were by no means in agreement that their situations were any worse than those of other Muslims or that they could all be treated under one ethnic rubric.

The author demonstrates how a Buddhist pilgrimage tradition affected symbolic and social changes in early modern Japan. After exploring the history of the Saikoku pilgrimage and its practice in the Tokugawa period, he suggests that Victor Turner's theories of “communitas” and “liminality,” while adequately explaining the “social modality” of the pilgrimage, do not account for the religious and cultural paradigms encountered by the pilgrim. To understand these paradigms, eighteenth and nineteenth century pilgrim guides are analyzed to show how the semantic field of the pilgrim integrated the universal salvation of Buddhism with a distinctly national tradition.

Throughout east and southeast asia multilingual speech communities are the norm rather than the exception. In most countries in the region, nonstandard dialects and ethnic languages survive and even thrive despite the introduction of national languages and their utilization in government, business, and education. Where communicative isolation is not the cause of their survival, the persistence of such regional languages often signals the continuing importance of distinctive infranational identities, operating within (and sometimes across) the boundaries of the modern nation state. Although surely not the only important marker of ethnic or social distinctiveness, language is a particularly rich medium for the expression of social identity. Conversely, the adoption of a new linguistic standard often requires the resolution of what are perceived as competing social identities. In much of developing Asia, therefore, researchers on language history regularly encounter some variant of the same question: what social and historical conditions determine the ways that speakers in multilingual communities resolve problems of language and identity? More specifically, what mix of cultural and political forces ensures that some linguistic varieties persist while others decline or even disappear?

This essay discusses three contrasting versions of the relationship between good and evil in contemporary China: a spirit medium who maneuvers between them, a charismatic Christian group that forges an identity by defending the border between them, and an official state and religious discourse of banal goodness and universal love that seeks to annihilate evil. Each defines good and evil differently, but more importantly, each imagines the nature of the boundary itself differently—as permeable and negotiable, clear and defensible, or simply intolerable. These varied conceptions help to shape alternate views of empathy, pluralism, and the problem of how to live with otherness.

I am most honored and perhaps also startled to read these comprehensive scholarly essays dedicated to the question of the appropriation of Gender Trouble in Asian studies. Sometimes “appropriation” is a problematic activity, such as the cultural appropriation of artworks and styles from minority communities, such as the indigenous, for the purposes of market circulation, profit, or the augmentation of human capital. But when texts such as Gender Trouble enter the global market of books, a different kind of appropriation becomes possible. The book is at once taken up and refused, indicating the limits of translation or marking a resistance to cultural imperialism.