By Aden Knaap, Harvard University The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer has a thing for squid. (Think less calamari, more American Pie.) The bastard son of a Vietnamese maid and a French priest, he discovers at the age of thirteen that he has a peculiar fetish for masturbating into gutted squid, […]
Asia
Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia, By Douglas Northrup (2003)
By Natalie Cincotta When the Soviets launched their campaign, known as the hujum, against the veil in Uzbekistan in 1927, their goal was not just to liberate women. Without a class framework or a working class to build socialism in Uzbekistan, Soviet activists instead attempted to transform society through the liberation of women. Northrop argues that a woman’s behavior […]
Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, by Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2012)
by David Rahimi Starting with the encounter with European colonialism and modernity in the eighteenth century, Muslims increasingly began to worry that Islam was beset by existential crises as Muslim countries slowly fell under colonial domination. Some thought Islam had stagnated and made Muslims weak; others said true Islam already had the answers to modernity. […]
Great Books on Women’s History: Asia
Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Here are some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in East Asia and South Asia
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter (2011)
Seventy-two ordinary women, living in four different villages in central and southern Shaanxi Province, mostly born during the 1920s or 1930s, witnessed the rise of the new Communist regime in 1949 and experienced dramatic life transformations as a result.
Must Read Books on the Vietnam War
Must must-read books on the Vietnam War by Mark A. Lawrence Christian Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015). The latest in a long line of studies focused on the legacies of the war in the United States, Appy’s book covers everything from film and literature to foreign and military policy. […]
Asian American Immigration: Read More
Madeline Hsu recommends more to read on Asian American immigration and the myth of the model majority.
Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, by Hajimu Masuda (2015)
Few topics in history have produced a larger literature than the origins of the Cold War. Since its onset, historians, rightists or leftists, have hotly debated whether the United States or the Soviet Union initiated the mutual antagonism, culminating in the Korean War.
Five Books on the End of Empire, by Wm. Roger Louis
It is a pleasure to read a full account of the British side of the American Revolution. In Andrew O’Shaughnessy’s “The Men Who Lost America,” we see the beginning of the story through the eyes of George III, who was still physically strong and mentally robust.
Genghis Khan and the Making of The Modern World, by Jack Weatherford (2004)
Genghis Khan and the Mongols are generally portrayed as ruthless butchers who slaughtered entire cities and left behind great piles of human bones as memorials to their conquests.