This article aims to establish the importance of pamphlets as a medium of political propaganda in early twentieth-century colonial Bengal. Through an analysis of pamphlets issued by revolutionary terrorists in Bengal, the author shows that pamphlet propaganda proved to be an effective means of legitimizing the ideology and practices of terrorism. The effectiveness of pamphlet propaganda was largely attributable to the propagandists' skillful use of rhetorical mechanisms to establish an emotional connection with the targeted audience. In the process of framing public meaning for the political beliefs they sought to propagandize, the pamphlet writers made clever use of cultural symbols such as stories, images, and figures that had immediate resonance in Bengali society. Ultimately, this process of politicization through the reinforcement of cultural identity deepened cultural and political divisions in Bengal.

Despite the impact of the Allied occupation (1945–52), Japanese photography in the immediate postwar period was neither “art” nor “documentary” by American definitions. Instead, as the vigorous 1953 debate over “realism” shows, photographers such as Domon Ken and critics such as Tanaka Masao and Watanabe Kosho insisted that photography—at least real photography—was a political practice. It was political not because its aesthetic accomplishments bolstered national prestige in the arts nor because it provided visual evidence for public policies by documenting social conditions. A real photograph, whether of a beauty, a beggar, or a bourgeois, attempted to make manifest a reality often invisible to the naked eye: the reality of power and how power ought to work after Japan's defeat. These photographic practices show us that postwar conditions were so unsettled that the very nature of social reality—what it was, how one should see it, what one could hope for—was still undefined. By participating in the ideological effort to “constitute reality,” photography in Japan sought to establish political, social, and aesthetic norms that were taken for granted elsewhere.

In the late 1990s, a marketplace trader in Hồ Chí Minh City reported being plagued by wandering ghosts. The postwar Vietnamese landscape teems with angry spirits who died violently without descendents to honor them, but the trader's wandering ghosts were living: male market officials who demanded that merchants, most of them women, pay a fee for use rights to their stalls. Examining the conflict that ensued, this article argues that the wandering ghosts metaphor aptly captures the bitter struggles over resources and status that have accompanied late socialist economic reforms. More subtly, the metaphor also alludes to lingering wartime animosities. Market officials supported the victors, whereas many traders sided with the losers. Although daily interactions have intersubjectively reworked these tensions so that they seem instead to reflect gender differences, “ghosts” inevitably emerge: odd fragments of memory that wander homeless in the wake of social and individual efforts to render the past coherent.

The claim that Vietnamese inheritance patterns were bilateral and indicative of wider patterns of Southeast Asian women's autonomy or Vietnamese protonational uniqueness reflect major themes in the historiography on Vieệtnam. Past scholarship suggests that lawmakers of the Lê (1427–1783) and Mạc (1527–60) dynasties codified bilateral succession practices, attesting to the relative autonomy that Vietnamese women shared with their Southeast Asian counterparts. This essay challenges the claims of bilateralism and argues that Lê dynasty law, local custom, and legal practice preserved the principles of patrilineal succession. Though the language and adjudication of the law limited daughters' succession rights, ironically, these restrictions on their private rights enabled women to carve out spaces of authority in village economic and religious life. To avoid the transfer of their property to male relatives, some women instead transferred property to local institutions in order to lay claim over their personal property and to ensure the maintenance of their ancestral rites in perpetuity. In effect, rather than a system that elevated women's status, the property regime served as a site of contestation in which women could claim large economic and religious roles in local settings.

Focusing on the Chinese Communists' mobilizational efforts at the Anyuan coal mine in the early 1920s, the author argues for reconsidering a sometimes forgotten part of Chinese revolutionary history. At Anyuan, idealistic young Communist cadres led a highly successful nonviolent strike and launched a major educational program for workers, peasants, and their families. The result was a remarkable outpouring of popular support for the Communist revolutionary effort. Although the meaning of the “Anyuan revolutionary tradition” has been obscured and distorted over the years to serve a variety of personal, political, and pecuniary agendas, the author seeks to recover from its early history the possibility of alternative revolutionary paths, driven less by class struggle and cults of personality than by the quest for human dignity through grassroots organization.

The history of photography in Indonesia reveals Chinese Indonesians—members of a marginalized, transnational minority—as active participants in the project of nation making, rendering visible the cosmopolitan origins of national formations. In the early postcolonial period, Chinese Indonesian amateur and studio photographers acted as cultural brokers who mediated global currents and reworked colonial-era conventions to forge new national visual idioms. The specific cosmopolitanisms of these two distinct groups of ethnic Chinese photographers yielded divergent iconographies that have remained important strands in Indonesia's visual and political culture, in which a nostalgic ideology of the “asli” (authentic, original, or indigenous) competes with an outward-looking vision of Indonesia as a location from which to participate in global modernity.

This paper analyzes the role of rumor as a mobilizing agent in communal violence. Taking as its point of departure a series of violent clashes in North Maluku in Indonesia during 1999 and 2000, it shows that rumor often took a written form. Outlining the contested origins and composite effects of a particular rumor—as it appeared on the political scene in leaflet form—I argue that these “hardcopy rumors” became social agents in the paranoid politics of the “Maluku wars.” Recent scholarship has rightly stressed the mobilizing role of rumor. This paper demonstrates how the affectivity of rumor, usually attributed to its spontaneous and anonymous nature, may in fact be boosted by the authority of writing. It suggests that “xeroxlore,” the circulation of written and photocopied rumors, may play an essential role in generating the murky political atmosphere in which sectarian violence is instigated, enacted, and justified.

The conventional views of road construction in late developing countries are not very positive. Scholars of provincial Thai politics, in particular, dismiss road-building projects as dirty pork-barrel politics. Using the case of Suphanburi Province, this essay argues that roads can constitute sources of collective prestige and pride. Suphanburi was once a remote province, and Suphanburians spoke pitifully of its backwardness. At present, however, Suphanburi boasts many roads of unmatched quality, thanks to massive road construction projects that Banharn Silpa-archa, Suphanburi's member of Parliament (1976–present), has channeled from the central state. In a global context that attaches a social stigma to backwardness, the appearance of these roads symbolizes Suphanburi's “modernity,” which non-Suphanburians admire, envy, and resent. Consequently, Suphanburians have come to take immense pride in their province. To understand why Banharn commands fervent local-level support, we must understand how he has transformed Suphanburians' social identity.

In 1963 Hakim Mohammed Said took a Pakistani delegation from the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine on a monthlong trip to China to meet with and learn from practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine. This essay focuses on Said's interpretation of the history of medicine in Asia, which was inspired by this trip and informed by a broad, global understanding of how Unani medicine developed from the eighth century to the present. Said's advocacy of Eastern Medicine provides a way to think about the history of medicine and medical revitalization that is not limited by colonial, postcolonial, or nationalist assumptions and priorities.

This essay explores the convergence of maps, mother/goddesses, and acts of martyrdom in patriotic pictures produced during the twentieth century in India in order to understand how artists pictorially transformed national territory into a tangible and enduring object deemed deserving of the bodily sacrifice of the citizenry. The archive for the essay is constituted by visualizations of Indian national territory produced by “barefoot” cartographic practice, which routinely supplemented the scientific map form of the nation with the anthropomorphic presence of Mother India. Such anthropomorphized maps, the author argues, prepared the ground pictorially for the map of the nation to receive the sacrifice of the passionate patriot.

This article examines Buddhist nationalism as an effort to resist the intrusion of globalizing forces into local religious and cultural heritage. By analyzing the discourse, persona, and life of Venerable Gangodawila Soma (1948–2003), a renowned and controversial Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka, the author demonstrates that Buddhist nationalism is largely a discursive formation that affirms an essential relationship between Buddhism and nation over against external forces that threaten their existence. A charismatic and skillful preacher, Venerable Soma employed a variety of media to reverse the perceived decline of Buddhism and the nation in the face of what he saw as immoral and hostile interests—including corrupt politicians, Tamil separatists, Evangelical Christians, and nongovernmental organizations. Venerable Soma's discourse, which privileges local forms of knowledge and morality, shows how globalization stimulates both new possibilities and new contradictions in contemporary forms of Buddhist nationalism.

Over the last thirty years or so, there has been a broad consensus about what constitutes modern forms of Theravāda Buddhism. “Buddhist modernism,” as it has been called, has been marked by an understanding of the Buddha's thought as in accord with scientific rationalism; increased lay participation, particularly in meditation practice and leadership of the Buddhist community; and increased participation by women in the leadership of the Sangha. In this paper, I call into question the universality of these forms by examining a contemporary Theravāda Buddhist community in southwest China, where Buddhism is best understood within the context of the modern governance practices of the Chinese state. Buddhists of the region describe their knowledge and practices not in terms of scientific rationality, for example, but within the ethnic categories of the Chinese state. I suggest that instead of understanding modern forms of Buddhism as a natural response to modernity, scholars should pay attention to how Buddhist institutions shift within the context of modern forms of state power.

Focusing on intersections of Asian area studies and U.S. ethnic studies, this article probes overlapping but hitherto neglected trajectories of Japanese colonialism and transpacific migrant experience and of modern Japanese history and Japanese American history. Constructed during the 1930s, expansionist orthodoxy of imperial Japan justified and idealized the agricultural colonization of Manchuria on the basis of historical precedence found in a contrived chronicle of Japanese “overseas development” in the American frontier. This study documents how Japanese intelligentsia, popular culture, and the state concertedly co-opted U.S. Japanese immigrant history in service of the policies of imperial expansion and national mobilization in Asia before the Pacific War. While involving conflicting agendas and interests between the colonial metropolis in imperial Japan and the expatriate society in the American West, the example of transnational history making elucidates borderless dimensions of prewar Japanese colonialism, which influenced, and was concurrently influenced by, the presence and practices of Japanese emigrants across the Pacific.

Vote buying has long been considered a major obstacle to democracy in Thailand. As reiterated in explanations of Thailand's 2006 military coup, vote buying in Thai electoral politics has often been attributed to traditional village culture and rural ignorance. Placing a 1995 northern Thai election for kamnan (subdistrict head) in historical context, this essay suggests that vote buying did not typify village electoral politics but was an aberration that reached its zenith during the mid-1990s. Legal ambiguities, not rural apathy or ignorance, impeded villagers' ability to protest corrupt practices and safeguard their internal democracy. These ambiguities emerged as new democratic laws implemented in 1992 and 1995 to decentralize power conflicted with older laws dating from the days of absolute monarchy. Subsequent legal reforms appear to have mitigated the importance of vote buying in village electoral politics. How these reforms will affect national electoral politics remains to be seen.

The contested historiography of the 1857 rebellion and its importance in shaping the Indian nationalist imagination make it an excellent entry point into an investigation of nationalist pasts and their archival bases. This paper examines a concatenation of influential narratives of different genres that have become critical sources for a history of the rebel leader Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and for configuring her as an icon of heroic Indian womanhood. It places each of these sources, ranging from late nineteenth-century Marathi texts to mid-twentieth-century Hindi narratives, within their specific spatiotemporal setting and highlights the contradictory regional projects underlying apparently smooth nationalist narratives. Through a close examination of the making of the Lakshmibai archive, the author argues that a consideration of the editorial and textual practices that went into the making of reliable and usable archives for a modern historiography is critical to the unpacking of nationalist historiographies.