A friend, long deceased, once told me how he had decided to specialize in Japanese literature. In the early 1970s, he heard a talk by a well-known Japanologist, who contrasted China study and Japan study by citing the opening lines of two primers for foreign students. The Chinese primer began with the line “I am hungry”; the Japanese one began with the line “The cherry blossoms are falling from the sky.” My friend chose to go the way of the cherry blossoms.

Good evening, colleagues and friends. Tonight I have the honor of talking with you about my decided passion, narrating lives.

Emerging from dispersed global locations, circulated for difering purposes, life narration moves along predictable and unpredictable routes to publics and to archives near and far. High forms and low forms. Long forms and short forms. Lyric forms and documentary forms. Narrated lives in the irst, second, third, and plural persons. Life stories in print, comics, photography, ilm, and Second Life.

This essay considers questions of Dalit historicity in terms of narrative time. Largely a product of the last two decades, Dalit (“untouchable-caste”) literature in Hindi is often read as an uncomplicated expression of Dalit consciousness, an ethnographically revelatory body of writing. I suggest that Dalit literature might be read differently, as coding a distinct meaning of the historical. he model of narrative time configured in Dalit writing poses a problem for critics of postcolonial and subaltern studies because it challenges underlying assumptions regarding the “historical”—assumptions largely inherited from studies of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, in which subjects are defined by their place in history. Unlike the bildungsroman, Dalit texts posit a model for the narrative construction of the subject that does not rely on the category of historical knowledge and the historical event. By introducing the terms event-fulness and unreading, I argue that the Dalit text challenges the putative relation between history and the narrative recovery of self. Dalit writing therefore creates a realism whose origins lie not in the bourgeois historicism of the European novel but in the humanism of a protest literature.

The topography of literary production and consumption has been transformed as writers and texts travel, ethnic literature is taught and translated in multiple national venues, and writers’ locations, audiences, and subject matter resist ready alignment. he growing internationalization of ethnic literary production has produced a heterogeneous range of texts, which challenge the established boundaries of ethnic and world literature. Because they focus on minorities, these texts have been slow to win recognition as world literature even though they depict transnational movements and identifications that diverge from those in canonical ethnic narratives. I develop the analytic of minority cosmopolitanism to examine the ways in which these literary narratives of worlding contest contemporary economic and political processes of globalization and Eurocentric accounts of globality. This essay considers how the gendered figure of the diasporic citizen serves as a vehicle for minority cosmopolitanism in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

Between the Volga and the Ganges lies a vast yet little-examined zone of linguistic, religious, ethnoracial, and political contact shaped over many centuries by mobile communities of traders, saints, soldiers, and rebels. This is the space from which Velimir Khlebnikov, modernist poet and philosopher of history, articulates a vision of revolutionary internationalism. Khlebnikov's quasi-fictional journey from Russia's Islamic borderlands to the Indian subcontinent “in search of an idea that will free all oppressed people” transforms Madame Blavatsky's heosophical interpretation of ancient Indian religious philosophy into a cornerstone of political resistance against global imperialism in the twentieth century. The intersectional history of violence through which Khlebnikov imagines a community of minorities, misfits, and mystics wandering between the peripheries of the Russian and British Empires challenges monolithic constructs of the Orient as well as dominant discourses of Russian and Indian national identity.

This article reexamines the role of the folding fan in Mallarmé's poetics by placing the fan in the context of its history as an art form, its evolving significance in European and East Asian culture, and its practical materiality as a writing medium. The fan is uniquely important in Mallarmé's lifelong quest to challenge the standard written and print media and to transfigure the physical form of the book into a work of art fully implicated in its literary content. The fan is a flexible, hybrid medium that resolves Mallarmé's numerous and contradictory criteria for the ideal book. It is also a metaphor and an instrument of thought. The essay attempts, therefore, to think like and with Mallarmé: taking its cue from the fan, it unfolds the fan's material aspects and tropological incarnations until it reaches the butterfly, Mallarmé's choice symbol of poetic flight and evanescence.

With a catchy theme song and exotic scenery from the South, Kaiketsu Harimao (“Fast Thief Harimao”) made its debut in Japan on 5 April 1960. The first domestically produced television movie broadcast in color and the first to have locations overseas (notably in Angkor Wat), Harimao ran until June 1961, with a total of sixty-five episodes. Harimao opens with a procession of native men—their nativeness marked by their sarongs and painted dark skin—walking warily along the beach. They are vigilantly guarded by British soldiers with guns and whips to enforce the march. The opening scene not only establishes the exotic locale of the south but also accentuates the opposition between master and slave, between white and nonwhite races. As a soldier strikes down with a whip, the camera cuts to the lower torso of a man wearing a gun holster with a tiger-figured buckle and then moves up as the man pulls his gun and ires. Our hero wears a white turban and dark sunglasses. His shots send the soldiers' weapons flying. He mounts his horse as the camera zooms out to show him on a distant cliff, underscoring his extraordinary marksmanship. After the startled soldiers ask, “Who's there, who's that?” in unison with the hopeful natives, they shout, “Harimao, Harimao, it's Harimao!” and the airy and melodious theme song begins. As the credits roll, Harimao and his followers defeat the British soldiers and free the natives. The lead-in ends with the natives waving gratefully as Harimao and his men gallop off in triumph.

“Nothing,” Paul Jay writes in his recent work Global Matters: The transnational turn in literary studies, “has reshaped literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of transnationalism” (1). Certainly the shift toward a transnational model has been useful in mounting a critique of nation-based literary studies and in debunking the “natural” link among national identity, race, and language, challenging both the “hermeneutic preeminence of nations” and the “neutrality of comparison as a method” (Seigel 62–63). Combined with a postcolonial attentiveness to local or peripheral literary production and an expanded notion of agency, transnationalism works to designate “spaces and practices acted upon by border-crossing agents, be they dominant or marginal” (Lionnet and Shih 5) and to diversify the authors and texts available to students of literature, broadening curricula and the scope of literary studies (Jay 22). Those studying and teaching non-Western literatures might well find value in the challenge to the nation as the unquestioned context for the production and interpretation of literary works and in the healthy skepticism toward a supposedly neutral comparative method.

In the aftermath of Britain's Nuptial Extravaganza celebrating the Union of Prince William and Kate Middleton, comparisons between that event and the profile of the monarchy in Thailand have emerged. Occupying a central and highly visible position in the public domain, Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX, r. 1946–present) is widely held in great esteem. Yet the silencing of republican sentiment in the run-up to the royal wedding in London echoes the measures deployed with increasing regularity and rigor in Thailand under article 112 of the country's penal code, a law against lèse-majesté that effectively suppresses all open criticism of the Thai monarchy. In 2009 an all-time high of 164 lèse-majesté cases were tried in Thailand's Court of First Instance (“Article 112”). The Thai historian and public intellectual Somsak Jeamteerasakul, among others, has argued that these measures create a climate of fear around the discussion of the place and role of the monarchy in contemporary Thailand. This climate also has a bearing on the production and study of literature, on literary analysis, and on approaches to literary and cultural theory in Thailand.

When I was young, it seemed that most Americans had never heard of Burma. Since communication with Burma was constrained, I was curious about its culture, which my family carried so near to their hearts. My first memory of seeing “Burma” involved watching The King and I (1956) on television. I was captivated by Rita Moreno playing Tuptim, a Burmese girl who is given to the king of Siam by the prince of Burma and is secretly having an affair with her escort. The new British governess gives Tuptim Uncle Tom's Cabin to improve her English. The Burmese concubine articulates her frustration by staging an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel for the king and some European visitors. During the performance, Tuptim attempts an escape with her Burmese lover.

“East Asia” was one of the regions produced by cold war regimes of knowledge and incorporated into the post-1945 formation of multidisciplinary area studies in the United States. While the study of China and Japan has a much longer, pre-1945 history in the United States and Europe, other than an occasional book (often by a missionary or professional traveler), Korea was largely elided from the imaginings that were patched together to form the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discourse on what used to be called the Orient. This lack of a scholarly tradition may explain, in part, why the study of Korean literature (and history) was marginalized in academic departments through the early 1990s, even though the peninsula served as site of the Cold War turned hot during the Korean War (1950–53) and in many ways remains the linchpin organizing the East Asian geopolitical order and the United States military deployments that stretch from CONUS (the contiguous United States) across the Pacific to the DMZ. If Korean literature is belatedly becoming a discipline considered worthy of scholarly inquiry in United States universities, where East Asia until recently meant China and Japan, it is something of an irony that the recognition is taking place at a time when discipline-bound work has begun to reveal its limitations and the area of area studies finds itself in crisis, being interrogated as part of the post-1945 formation of the national security state and confronted by the turn to the transnational.

When the Japanese Nobel Laureate in literature KenzaburŌ Ōe visited Taiwan for a symposium held in his honor in December 2009, he hardly anticipated the political controversies into which he was thrown. Even before the conference, politicians accused the Academia Sinica, the organizing institution, of kowtowing to China by reducing a trilateral symposium involving Japan, Taiwan, and China to a “cross-strait event” and by replacing the Taiwanese novelist who was to act as Ōe's interlocutor with one more acceptable to China. Aside from the China factor, the underhanded politics tapped into ethnic tensions in Taiwan and the problematic national identity of Taiwan. While the original interlocutor, Li Ang, and her substitute, Zhu Tienwen, are critically acclaimed women novelists just a few years apart in age, Li is of Minnan ancestry and Zhu a second-generation Chinese mainlander whose father fled with the Chinese Nationalist or Kuomintang (KMT) government to Taiwan in 1949 after losing China to the communists. More important, Li is a postcolonial writer, whereas Zhu deploys postmodernism to resist decolonization.

Whoever goes down to Bà Ria and happens by the cemetery in the sand at the village of Phu'ó'c Lě, I beg you to go in that cemetery and look for the grave with a cross painted half black, half white, by the side of the Church of Martyrs–to visit that grave lest it become pitiful. Because it has been two years since anyone visited or cast as much as a glance.

—Nguyễn Trong Quan

SO opens nguyễn trọng quản's thẩy lazaro phiển (“lazaro phiển” 22). The narrative begins at an obscure gravesite evokes the life of a man as both victim of state violence and perpetrator of private deaths. Lazaro Phiển is a ictional work written in the romanized script and was published in Saigon in 1887 in a novelistic format almost forty years before Hoàng Ngọc Phách's Tố Tâm. Yet the latter, published in Hanoi in 1925, is oten touted in official literary history as the first modern Vietnamese novel. Although Nguyễn Trọng Qu.n's narrative revolves around the recovery of an elided story, the author could not have anticipated the elision of his work from a nationalist literary genealogy that locates the origin of modern Vietnamese literature in the North. he elision was part of a general omission of works from the South in the last decades of the nineteenth century and irst two decades of the twentieth. his genealogy was by no means limited to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North but was also perpetuated in the Republic of Vietnam in the South ater independence and the partitioning of the country into North and South in 1954

In 1909 Wu Zhihui, a proponent of esperanto and well-known anarchist of Twentieth-Century China, predicted the future of global languages. Though the nationalization of the Chinese language was still pending, Wu expressed concern not for its imminent standardization but for its eventual global viability. The outlook was not rosy:

Adding-Phone to the name of a National Language Entails an Expansion of Geographic and Historical Perspective. This expansion of perspective in the national-literature departments of the West was initially made possible by decolonization and the collapse of the European empires, when scholars in francophone studies and anglophone studies rethought the relation between language and culture in the postcolonial moment. While the move to -phone studies brings with it some potential to reinstate the national-literature paradigm in a different form, it can just as easily mean a departure into questions of transnationalism, transcoloniality, translation, and old and new creolizations. To study literature in terms of -phone is to assume no longer that language and literature follow the tidy dictates of national sovereignty, national identity, and realpolitik, as these were articulated during the age of high imperialism.

The spectacular rise of China as a superpower perhaps only now compels us to recalibrate existing discourses of empire and postcoloniality, but China has been an empire in the modern sense since the mid–eighteenth century, when it conquered vast lands north and west of “China proper.” This history has been largely hidden from view because of two unacknowledged obsessions: the fetishization of Western empires over other empires and the prevailing discourse of Chinese victimhood at the hands of Western empires. The rise of China would not have caught so many by surprise if our vision had not been persistently clouded by our privileging of the oceanic (i.e., Western) mode of colonial expansion, which paradoxically centered the West as the most deserving object of critical attention and intellectual labor. It also would not have been a surprise if we had looked back at the Manchu conquests of inner Asia, which present-day China largely inherited and consolidated in a continuous colonial project. Postcolonial theory as we know it, particularly its critiques of orientalism, may prove irrelevant or even complicit when we consider how the positions of Chinese intellectuals critical of Western imperialism and orientalism easily slip into an unreflective nationalism, whose flip side may be a new imperialism.