After violent protests across the country had forced President Suharto to step down in 1998, Indonesia successfully made the transition from an authoritarian state to a democracy. For the first time in forty years Islamic parties and organizations - including some inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood - were free to propagate their ways of thinking. The new government also succeeded in negotiating an end to a separatist rebellion in Aceh, making the province the only region in Indonesia...

The task of ending famine in India was taken up by many at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only decades earlier, famine in India had been believed to be a necessary evil. Now it was the reason for the increasing activities of doctors, nutritionists, social reformers, agricultural experts, missionaries, anti-colonial activists and colonial administrators, all involved in temporary relief and finding permanent solutions to famine.

'Bodies beyond Binaries' advances the historiographical debate around the body in colonial and postcolonial Asia. Opening new research avenues that go beyond the binaries that have sometimes permeated previous scholarly contributions, this book explores not just the direct colonial encounter, but also wider global interconnections and flows involved in the making of knowledge, cultural constructions, and ‘techniques’ of the body.

Throughout the volume, critical concepts such as gender, s...

In 1860, seventeen-year-old samurai Tateishi Onojirō, nicknamed “Tommy,” made headlines across America for his real and imagined adventures as part of the 1860 Japanese Embassy, the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States. The perception of Tateishi’s interracial romantic encounters with American women opened up to controversy and questioning the hierarchies of race and culture fundamental to many antebellum American concepts of civilization. This book reveals how Tateis...