Anne Anlin Cheng grew up in Taiwan and moved to Savannah, Georgia with her parents and brother as a school-aged girl. Having learned English as her second language, she majored in English literature in college (“to my parents’ horror”), earned a PhD, published books on race and gender, and worked her way up the ladder of the professoriate at Princeton University. Then one day, she lost herself.
Category Archive: Non-Fiction
Those who have come of age since the 1973 oil embargo should have no great difficulty accepting the outsized importance of the Persian Gulf and the surrounding region. From oil and gas to, more recently, airlines, finance, media and football teams, the countries of the Gulf have influence that far exceeds traditional measurements of power such as population or military capacity. In Center of the World, Allen James Fromherz argues that this importance dates to the dawn of history.
For much of his life, Jay Prosser was uncertain of where he belonged. He was “Jewish and not, British and Asian, Iraqi, English, Welsh, Chinese”. With a military father, his family moved often. At a boarding school, he was dubbed a “half-caste”. At synagogue, he felt like an imposter. Prosser’s memoir, Loving Strangers, tells the story of how he forged a sense of belonging, and a deep appreciation of his multicultural heritage and Jewish faith, through the excavation of a camphorwood chest.
When thinking about the most important World War II generals on the Allied side, the name Hastings Ismay does not come immediately to mind. But it should. Throughout the war, he was Winston Churchill’s right arm, serving as his chief staff officer in the Defense Ministry, Deputy Secretary of the War Cabinet, and as a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. General Ismay accompanied Churchill on his trips to France early in the war, and later accompanied Churchill on summit meetings with other Allied leaders. And he was “instrumental”, writes John Kiszely, a forty-year veteran of the British Army and a visiting professor at King’s College and visiting research fellow at Oxford, in his magnificent new biography of Ismay, “in designing and managing the ‘handling machine’ that converted the Prime Minister’s decisions into action”.
In Indonesia, the colonial past has a conspicuously low profile in public consciousness and political debate, but the national revolution—”Revolusi” in Bahasa Indonesia—that threw off colonial rule once and for all nonetheless remains the single most defining moment in the country’s history. Countless murals, quirky dioramas, annual Independence Day celebrations, place names, monuments, official and unofficial histories celebrate this struggle. Meanwhile, interest in decolonization has grown exponentially, but Indonesia has figured much less in international discussions than cases such as Algeria or India.
Centered on the eastern half of Java and coming to control most of what would later become Indonesia, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and parts of Thailand during the 14th and 15th centuries, Majapahit may be the most significant empire that most people have never heard of. There are physical remains, but not as well-preserved or grand as those of Borobudur or Prambanan from an earlier period. And insofar as one might have heard of someone from Majapahit, it’s more likely to be the formidable prime minister Gajah Mada than one of the kings. Majapahit was calling out for an accessible history.
Gerda Philipsborn, Jewish and a part of the 1920s Berlin arts scene, developed a close friendship with a trio of Muslim Indian students. A decade later, she would move to India to join her friends at Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in Aligarh that was established in 1920 to boycott the colonial government’s educational institutions. Margrit Pernau’s captivating biography shows how Philipsborn ended up in India just before Hitler came to power in Germany. However unlikely the story may seem, Pernau provides a comprehensive narrative of the political movements and openness of 1920s Berlin that explains just how Philipsborn came to spend her final years at Jamia Millia Islamia.
The influence of China on Japanese arts, culture and thought has been enormous. Yet, it varied widely across time. Periods of intense exposure and assimilation, as when the archipelago adopted Buddhism in the 6th century along with the logographic script that made its transmission possible, were often followed by decades, if not centuries, of distancing and assimilation. Today, anxiety about the growing power of China pervades sentiment, but until the late 19th century, admiration was widespread. The Middle Kingdom inspired fascination rather than fear.
Pity the poor archaeologists who lie on their bellies in sand or mud and painstakingly dust off bits of fossilized wood or bone, ceramics or metal scraps. It is, however, from their patient work that scientific truth progresses. Our understanding of the natural history of the horse has galloped ahead in the 21st century. As late as 1996, a scholarly book on Arabian horses could claim Saudi Arabia as the birthplace of this animal.
The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Johnson dismissed the group as a collection of moral poseurs “adept at words, but not much else”. Andrea Benvenuti, an associate professor of international relations at the University of South Wales, is not as dismissive about Bandung and its organizers as Johnson was, but he, too, concludes that Bandung failed to bring about its professed goal of “Afro-Asian solidarity”.