Author: Louisa Lim Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0593191838 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR An award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger indelibly captures the place, its people, and the untold history they are claiming, just as it is being erased. The story of Hong Kong has long been dominated by competing myths: to Britain, a “barren rock” with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial, at last returned to the ancestral fold. For decades, Hong Kong’s history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion. When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim—raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who has covered the region for nearly two decades—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth the city’s untold stories. Lim’s deeply researched and personal account casts startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Indelible City features guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and others who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story. Wending through it all is the King of Kowloon, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the identity of Hong Kong—a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation.
Author: Liao Yiwu Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers ISBN: 1982126655 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
A “memorable series of portraits of the working class people who defended Tiananmen Square” (The New York Review of Books) during the protests from the award-winning poet, dissident, and “one of the most original and remarkable Chinese writers of our time” (Philip Gourevitch). Much has been written about the Tiananmen Square protests, but very little exists in the words of those who were actually there. For over seven years, Liao Yiwu—a master of contemporary Chinese literature, imprisoned and persecuted as a counter-revolutionary until he fled the country in 2011—secretly interviewed survivors of the devastating 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Tortured, imprisoned, and forced into silence and the margins of Chinese society for thirty years, their harrowing and unforgettable stories are now finally revealed in this “indispensable historical document” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Author: Gore Vidal Publisher: Bold Type Books ISBN: 078673826X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Gore Vidal has been described as the last 'noble defender" of the American republic. In Imperial America, Vidal steals the thunder of a right wing America -- those who have camouflaged their extremist rhetoric in the Old Glory and the Red, White, and Blue -- by demonstrating that those whose protest arbitrary and secret government, those who defend the bill of rights, those who seek to restrain America's international power, are the true patriots. "Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic politics are not defeatist or neurotic," he writes. "They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distinguished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America."
Author: Leta Hong Fincher Publisher: Zed Books Ltd. ISBN: 1783607912 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 176
Book Description
‘Scattered with inspiring life-stories of courageous women.’ The Guardian In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations. Yet those gains have been steadily eroded in China’s post-socialist era. Contrary to the image presented by China’s media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men. In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher exposes shocking levels of structural discrimination against women, and the broader damage this has caused to China’s economy, politics, and development.
Author: Linda Jaivin Publisher: The Experiment, LLC ISBN: 1615198210 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Journey across epic China—through millennia of early innovation to modern dominance. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read. As we enter the “Asian century,” China demands our attention for being an economic powerhouse, a beacon of rapid modernization, and an assertive geopolitical player. To understand the nation behind the headlines, we must take in its vibrant, tumultuous past—a story of “larger-than-life characters, philosophical arguments and political intrigues, military conflicts and social upheavals, artistic invention and technological innovation.” The Shortest History of China charts a path from China’s tribal origins through its storied imperial era and up to the modern Communist Party under Xi Jinping—including the rarely told story of women in China and the specters of corruption and disunity that continue to haunt the People’s Republic today. A master storyteller and exacting historian, Linda Jaivin distills this vast history into a short, riveting account that today’s globally minded readers will find indispensable.
Author: Rana Mitter Publisher: Belknap Press ISBN: 0674984269 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “Insightful...a deft, textured work of intellectual history.” —Foreign Affairs “A timely insight into how memories and ideas about the second world war play a hugely important role in conceptualizations about the past and the present in contemporary China.” —Peter Frankopan, The Spectator For most of its history, China frowned on public discussion of the war against Japan. But as the country has grown more powerful, a wide-ranging reassessment of the war years has been central to new confidence abroad and mounting nationalism at home. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, Chinese scholars began to examine the long-taboo Guomindang war effort, and to investigate collaboration with the Japanese and China’s role in the post-war global order. Today museums, television shows, magazines, and social media present the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China that emerges as victor rather than victim. One narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order—a virtuous system that many in China now believe to be under threat from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its own past is a new founding myth for a nation that sees itself as destined to shape the world. “A detailed and fascinating account of how the Chinese leadership’s strategy has evolved across eras...At its most interesting when probing Beijing’s motives for undertaking such an ambitious retooling of its past.” —Wall Street Journal “The range of evidence that Mitter marshals is impressive. The argument he makes about war, memory, and the international order is...original.” —The Economist
Author: Esra Özyürek Publisher: Syracuse University Press ISBN: 9780815631316 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
Turkish society is frequently accused of having amnesia. It has been said that there is no social memory in Turkey before Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded modern Turkey after World War I. Indeed, in 1923, the newly founded Turkish Republic committed to a modernist future by erasing the memory of its Ottoman past. Now, almost eighty years after the establishment of the republic, the grandchildren of the founders have a different relationship with history. New generations make every effort to remember, record, and reconcile earlier periods. The multiple, personalized representations of the past that they have recovered allow contemporary Turkish citizens to create alternative identities for themselves and their communities. Unlike its futuristic and homogenizing character at the turn of the twentieth century, Turkish nationalism today uses memory to generate varied narratives for the nation and its minority groups. Contributors to this volume come from such diverse disciplines as anthropology, comparative literature, and sociology, but they share a common understanding of contemporary Turkey and how its different representations of the past have become metaphors through which individuals and groups define their cultural identity and political position. They explore the ways people challenge, reaffirm, or transform the concepts of history, nation, homeland, and “Republic” through acts of memory, effectively demonstrating that memory can be both the basis of cultural reproduction and a form of resistance.
Author: Man-Sik Chae Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317463137 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
Originally published in Seoul in 1938, soon after the outbreak of the Pacific War, "Peace Under Heaven" is a satirical novel centering on the household of a Korean landlord during the Japanese colonial occupation. Master Yun, embodying the traditional ambitions of a standard Korean paterfamilias, by being projected fast forward into a modern urban environment, caricatures the increasing irrelevance of Confucian mores to 20th-century social reality. Depicting the anomic lives of the Yun household in colonial Seoul, Chase Man-Sik, one of modern Korea's best-known writers, uses black comedy to underscore the collapse of ritualistic traditional values in the face of capitalist modernisation. The decadence of the nouveau riche pseudo-aristocrat Master Yun is interwoven with insights into the customary bases of oppression of Korean women into the self-deceptions underlying collaboration by Koreans with the Japanese oppressor. The savage hilarity of Chae's style lends force and historical relevance to his insight into the attitudes of the milieu in which his narrative is set.
Author: Louisa Lim
Author: Louisa Lim
Author: Liao Yiwu
Author: Gore Vidal
Author: Leta Hong Fincher
Author: Linda Jaivin
Author: Rana Mitter
Author: Esra Özyürek
Author: Man-Sik Chae
Author: Francis Allard