'Discourses of Disruption in Asia: Creating and Contesting Meaning in the Time of COVID-19' makes a unique contribution to research on meaning making in times of crisis. Using diverse analytical approaches to the study of languages in societies from the Asia-Pacific region, this volume explores the struggles over national identity and manifestations of socio-political issues in the context of disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Each chapter interrogates how social actors in diverse c...

Since before the American Civil War, African American and Japanese encounters produced relationships and discourses of knowledge that transcended Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and hierarchies of personhood. 'Black Transnationalism and Japan' introduces the diverse activity and intellectual movements created, shaped, and led by Japanese and African American people. While some Pan-Asianisms and Pan-Africanisms urged a uniting of colonized spaces against the colonizer, and were often e...

This book contains five legends from the German Middle Ages, presented in the Middle High German source language, with a modern English translation. These include the narratives of Veronica, Vespasian, Theophilus, Mary Magdalene and the miraculous history of the True Cross. Thisoutstanding and timely translation of these Middle High German texts will make them more accessible to an English speaking academic community.

The introduction provides an overview of Germanic legend research, discusses...

For the first time more than seventy South African women’s voices, from 1652 until today, are collected and published in one volume. Initially we hear their voices in Dutch, then in different varieties of Afrikaans, bearing witness to the fascinating development of a new language. We share the joys and sorrows of these women; their entertaining, sometimes gruesome stories.

The printing press arrived late at the Cape, and when it finally did, it took another century before the first publica...

'Far Right and Islamist Populism: How They Disrupt the Hegemonic Order' undertakes the challenging task of bringing dialectical logic together with the empirical study of discursive and ideological antagonisms. Examining the European far right, as represented by Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and Hizb ut-Tahrir as the Islamic interlocutor, the book demonstrates the inner logic by which two opposing political ideologies create a single populist front. In their shar...

'The Making of Buddhism in Indonesia' focuses on the transnational networks that mediated the (re)introduction of Buddhism that started in late colonial Indonesia and traces them past Independence and into the 1950s. The book argues that the global rise of Buddhism, particularly in Sri Lanka, Burma, and Singapore, also caused the introduction of Buddhism in colonial Indonesia as well. In this respect, the book looks at the connections that Indonesian Buddhists established with Buddhist networ...

‘China Under Xi Jinping: A New Assessment’ is one of the first scholarly books on Xi’s China during the Pandemic, which contains several features that are unmatched by existing scholarship. First, all the authors have studied and taught Chinese and American history or politics in both China and the United States for decades. They accordingly are quite familiar with and possess deep understandings of the history, politics, ideology, and society in both countries and therefore their resea...

Centuries of intense and involuntary migrations deeply impacted the development of the creolised cultures on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. This volume describes various forms of cultural heritage produced on these islands over time and whether these heritages are part of their ‘national’ identifications. What forms of heritage express the idea of a shared “we” (nation-building) and what images are presented to the outside world (nation-branding)? What cu...

Every society has an energy profile, that is, an array of energy sources, ranging in complexity from human power to nuclear fusion, that can be ranked according to their relative importance to that society. From about 4000 BE onward, animal muscle power becomes integrated into the energy profiles of many societies. The forms this integration takes include riding, carrying burdens, pulling wheeled vehicles and sleighs, operating mills and irrigation devices, and pulling plows, threshing sleds,...