“Capital Heroes and a Hokkien Nation” highlights efforts by Chinese in the Philippines to reinvigorate and protect their hometowns in southern Fujian during an era of militarism and turmoil. The narrative follows the community leaders and China Banking Corporation founders Dee C. Chuan, Oei Tjoe, and Tan Guin Lai, as well as an outside ally, Cai Tingkai. It explores how their hometown investments and remittances transformed into political maneuvering as the leaders leaned on Hokkien affinity to effect change. Dee C. Chuan, Oei Tjoe, and Tan Guin Lai all devoted considerable sums to building hometown infrastructure, funding schools, constructing personal villas, and supporting family members. However, after encountering numerous obstacles, especially when it came to constructing a railway that would connect the resource-rich interior of the province with the seaports, the Founders began to turn toward political solutions. They founded the Southeast Asian Hokkien Overseas Save the Hometown Association to aid in their efforts, and they threw their support behind the famous general Cai Tingkai, who helped them achieve some of their objectives as head of the Fujian People’s Revolutionary Government. All these efforts eventually fell apart, but they point toward a vibrant if unfulfilled Hokkien nationalism.

This chapter is a case study that describes the reality of innovation and reform of the content of school education in a single region in the south of Kazakhstan. The region has a mix of urban and rural schools, although the majority are rural in nature since agricultural employment dominates the local economy with some very remote locations and many families on low incomes. Despite the difficulties of geography, ethnic diversity and poverty, the research showed that the regional authority tended to adopt a ‘can-do’ attitude and looked for solutions to implement the Renewed Content of Education successfully rather than respond passively. There were pockets of resistance evident which prevented full implementation of the Renewed Content of Education. Such instances demonstrated the magnitude of transformation expected and the critical role of communication between regional authorities, district authorities, schools and parents.

“Trumpets and Ledgers” expands on the groundwork laid in the first chapter by exploring the intricacies of life for Filipinos in Shanghai and Chinese in Manila. The first section, trumpets, uses records from the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, which employed many Filipino musicians, to piece together a social history of Filipinos in Shanghai. It then pivots to the cabaret scene in the metropolis, which likewise featured many famous Filipino jazz bands. It argues that Filipinos, as the face of jazz and classical music in Shanghai, became caretakers and representatives of the genres for the Chinese residents of the city. The second section examines Chinese connections with business and trade in the Philippines and efforts by Filipino lawmakers to expand global exclusionary legislation by limiting the ability of Chinese in the archipelago to conduct business. The Bookkeeping Act, which banned the use of the Chinese language in bookkeeping, ultimately fell apart due to a coordinated campaign by prominent, well-connected Chinese leaders from the archipelago, but the passage of the act reveals some of the challenges that Chinese in Manila and Filipinos in Shanghai faced as foreign Asian migrants without imperial protection.

In Chapter 4, we examine how perspective taking has been conceptualized in literary studies and elements of writing style affect perspective taking by the reader. We begin with an analysis of concepts commonly associated with perspective taking, including identification and transportation. In our analysis of the effect of the text on perspective taking, we distinguish two classes of features: First-order features are those that have often been assumed to produce perspective taking, such as the use of personal pronouns, providing mental access to a character, and the use of free-indirect speech. We conclude that there is little clear evidence for a simple causal relation between such features and perspective taking by the reader. Second-order features are those that, we argue, lead to elaborative processing by the reader and thus lay the foundation for perspective-taking analogies. Such features include showing versus telling styles, textual gaps, embodied descriptions, and foregrounding. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the role of the narrator and the relation between the reader and the character.

“Achieving Modernity by Studying in the Philippines” shifts from educational tours to study abroad, exploring the experiences of Chinese students in the Philippines. It argues that Chinese parents and students increasingly viewed the Philippines as an attractive alternative to Japan and even the United States and Europe. Japanese military aggression soured Chinese desires to study in that country, and World War I and World War II effectively curtailed opportunities to study in Europe. The Philippines also had many advantages, like geographical proximity and English-language education, that made it a draw in its own right. However, the Philippines during this time was under American colonial occupation, so this chapter also addresses whether Chinese were interested in the Philippines as a unique model of modernity or a colonial derivative. It seeks to complicate the picture of agency under occupation by showing how Filipino agents along with American colonials funneled money toward education, forestry, infrastructure, public health, and other elements of a “modern” state. It stresses that Filipinos played a critical role in transforming the archipelago, and many Chinese observers accepted the Philippines as a unique and inspirational form when molding their own such model.

This chapter is a historical account and review of the educational reform in Kazakhstan from the perspective of those engaged in establishing the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS). It also describes the rationale for establishing the NIS, what drove it and the premises for the renewal of curricula for secondary education.

In Chapter 6, we elaborate on the difficulties that may arise in perspective taking. These depend on individual, contextual, and textual variables. Among the individual factors are motivation, cognitive skills and capacities, and empathic dispositions. Variations in the situation and context, such as available information and feedback, can affect perspective taking. Specific difficulties include: the failure to identify relevant personal knowledge and experience, inconsistent and conflicting perspectives, problems reconciling a character’s perspective with the reader’s own evaluations, and/or the relationship of the reader’s cultural background to that of the character. Subtleties in the text, such as multiple perspectives, unreliable perspectives, and multiple perspective-taking targets, pose their own challenges.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore linked the scholarly quest for ‘India in Asia’ to visions of an Indian cultural renaissance, Asianist agendas and the Visva-Bharati project to inaugurate a global civilizational dialogue. This chapter examines the relationship between Orientalist scholarship, interwar Asianism and emerging visions of Indian exceptionalism. Tagore and like-minded GIS-members mobilized the ancient, transregional circulation of Buddhism to pitch Greater India as an internationalist template with contemporary relevance. Epitomizing India’s civilizational legacies abroad, the ancient Pan-Asian Buddhist ecumene was evoked as a cultural counter-geography and harmonious ‘empire of culture’. Reinforcing Theosophical visions of ancient India as Asia’s spiritual fount, and drawing on the visionary writings of the Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin, this Buddhist past, and especially the legacies of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, were contrasted with the aggressive mode of past and present Western colonizing schemes. The topos of ‘ancient bonds’ energized calls to unite under the spiritual banner of a ‘Greater India’ and a rejuvenated ‘East’.

This book has both examined and reconceived the notion that Romantic epics tend towards fragmentation. By attending to the epic revival’s relationship to the friction between the missionary enterprise and imperialism, I have shown how Romantic epics often deploy tropes of the genre to respond to disjunctions in their own form and content, especially the conceptual contradictions within their developing ideologies. While works like Pye’s Alfred seek to contain and diminish these conflicts to promote unified ideas of the nation or empire, more audacious engagements with epic expose the fissures in imperial discourse. The most daring of these epics are the most imaginatively powerful, and they have survived in the Romantic canon.

My examination of the general trends in epic writings of the 1790s lays the ground for my fourth chapter to explore one of the more curious epics of that decade: ‘Brutus’, by Ann Yearsley. The chapter explores how Yearsley uses the resources of the epic genre to claim a cultural authority that permits her to promote the idea of an uplifting colonialism that seeks to transform indigenous populations. Yet she seeks to qualify and critique this ideology of Christian imperialism by calling attention to its accompanying dangers. Attending to the ways she draws attention to the racial hybridity of conversion narratives – as well as the ways she deflects the anxieties summoned by such hybridity – I show how Yearsley implicitly claims for herself a transcendent interiority that both aligns her with the middle class and allows her to assert independence from those who would exert authority over her, such as her former patron Hannah More.

Chen’s concluding chapter is a full-fledged defense of Brown and Levinson against their critics. In terms of theoretical assumption, Chen argues that rationality, per Brown and Levinson, does not belong to Westerners only, neither is individualism monopolized by them. In terms of utility, Chen demonstrates that Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness is perfectly capable of accounting – and, in fact, was designed to account – for the dynamism of social interaction. The accusations that it cannot stems from an insufficient appreciation of the richness of the theory, particularly the formula for measuring the weightiness of face threat. The second part of the chapter is a critique of the research strand “politeness evaluation.” Chen argues that this strand suffers several weaknesses. It is proposed as a reaction to the norm-based approach in politeness research but ends up being norm-searching. It is meant to capture variation, but what it has offered the field is little more than a list of facts that were expected in the first place. Finally, it is claimed to investigate the “moment of evaluation,” but such a moment – the judgment of politeness at the time of speaking – is practically impossible to capture.