Asian Literature - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Power Plays

Sun, 31 Oct 2004

Power Plays (2004)
Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java

By Andrew N. Weintraub

Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning twenty years, Power Plays is the first scholarly book in English on wayang golek, the Sundanese rod-puppet theater of West Java. It is a detailed and lively account of the ways in which performers of this major Asian theatrical form have engaged with political discourses in Indonesia. Wayang golek has shaped, as well, the technological and commercial conditions of art and performance in a modernizing society.

Using interviews with performers, musical transcriptions, translations of narrative and song texts, and archival materials, author Andrew N. Weintraub analyzes the shifting and flexible nature of a set of performance practices called Padalangan, the art of the puppeteer. He focuses on "superstar" performers and the musical troupes that dominated wayang golek during the New Order political regime of former president Suharto (1966-98) and the ensuing three years of the post-Suharto period. Studies of actual performances illuminate stylistic and formal elements and situate wayang golek as a social process in Sundanese culture and society. Power Plays includes an interactive multimedia CD-ROM of wayang golek.

Power Plays shows how meanings about identity, citizenship, and community are produced through theater, music, language, and discourse. While based in ethnographic theory and methods, this book is at the center of a new synthesis emerging among ethnomusicology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Its cross-disciplinary approach will inspire researchers studying similar struggles over cultural authority and popular representation in culture and the performing arts.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Power+Plays.
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Secrets Need Words

Sat, 30 Jun 2001

Secrets Need Words (2001)
Indonesian Poetry, 1966-1998

Edited by Harry Aveling

The period from 1966 to 1999 represents a distinct era in Indonesian history. Throughout the "New Order" regime of President Suharto, the policies of economic development and political stability were dominant. However, the public opinion of personal expression was consistently under suspicion, and indeed dissent was severely punished.

Secrets Need Words traces the development of Indonesian poetry throughout this entire period. Texts are presented both in the original Indonesian and in careful, stylistically sensitive English translations.

In this anthology of contemporary work by Indonesian poets, the renowned translator and editor Harry Aveling presents a series of ongoing analyses detailing the political and social shifts that have influenced the work of particular poets.

Professor Aveling's analyses, along with the poems themselves, demonstrate how the poets responded to the power of the state in a variety of ways ranging from direct confrontation to withdrawal into personal and private realms characterized by fantasy and the use of heavily rhythmic language.

Secrets Need Words will be of interest to scholars of Indonesia and comparative literature, and will be for many years to come a basic text for scholarship and teaching. But it also offers all readers of poetry an opportunity to explore a new, complex, and exciting body of literature from one of the world's largest nations.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Secrets+Need+Words.
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Language, Power, and Ideology in Brunei Darussalam

Sun, 01 Sep 1996

Language, Power, and Ideology in Brunei Darussalam (1996)

By Geoffrey C. Gunn

Contrary to modern theories of developing nations, Brunei Darussalam, which has a very high rate of literacy, is also one of the few countries where the traditional elite retains absolute political power. Professor Gunn's comprehensive study, which assesses the state's efforts to implement national language policies, explores the aspects of the complex relationship between language and power including the oral tradition, the rise of Islamic literacy, print culture and mass literacy, and the electronic media and its effects.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Language%2C+Power%2C+and+Ideology+in+Brunei+Darussalam.
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Language Use and Language Change in Brunei Darussalam

Sat, 01 Jun 1996

Language Use and Language Change in Brunei Darussalam (1996)

Edited by Peter W. Martin, Conrad Ozóg and Gloria Poedjosoedarmo

The oil-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam is located on the northern coast of Borneo between the two Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah. Though the country is small in size and in population, the variety of language use there provides a veritable laboratory for linguists in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, bilingual studies, and sociolinguistic studies, particularly those dealing with language shift.

This useful reference is divided into three sections: one on varieties of the Malay language used in the country, one on other indigenous languages, and one on the role and form of the English used there. Contributors to the collection include Bruneian scholars as well as established experts in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, sociolinguistics studies, and the description of new varieties of English.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Language+Use+and+Language+Change+in+Brunei+Darussalam.
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Beyond the Archipelago

Sat, 01 Apr 1995

Beyond the Archipelago (1995)
Selected Poems

By Muhammad Haji Salleh

A collections of 70 poems from one of Malaya’s leading poets, that depict longing, loneliness, modernization, and insights in Malaysian culture.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Beyond+the+Archipelago.
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Dictionary of Indonesian Islam

Sat, 01 Apr 1995

Dictionary of Indonesian Islam (1995)

By Howard M. Federspiel

Drawing from an extensive list of writings about Indonesian Islam that have appeared over the past fifteen years, Federspiel defines approximately 1,800 terms, phrases, historical figures, religious books, and place names that relate to Islam and gives their Arabic sources.

This dictionary will be indispensable to English–speaking students and researchers working in Indonesian or Southeast Asian studies. It will also be useful for scholars working in Bahasa Indonesian, reading texts written about Islam by Indonesian Muslims, as well as for Southeast Asia area scholars generally who are using sources in Western languages.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Dictionary+of+Indonesian+Islam.
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Cage of Fireflies

Fri, 15 Oct 1993

Cage of Fireflies (1993)
Modern Japanese Haiku

By Lucien Stryk

Haiku at its best is an art in which the poet takes a natural, most ordinary event, and without fuss, ornament or inflated words makes of it a rare moment—sparely rendered, crystallized into a microcosm which reveals transcendent unity. Small wonder haiku has a growing audience throughout the world.

In all arts—music, painting, dance, theatre—change has come with that startling moment of dissatisfaction when the artist upends complacency, shocks the old to its foundations, and emerges with clear vision. He has had the courage to rescue his art from dullness. Two of Japan’s “Great Four” of haiku, Basho (1644-94) and Shiki (1862-1902), were such revolutionaries, albeit two hundred years apart. Before Basho, haiku was but a pleasant occupation for the idle. He set about transforming it with such success that experts to this day agree that his were the first true haiku.

Shiki, who lived into the 20th century, was passionate in his attempt to salvage haiku from its past, sending out shock waves by dismissing virtually all earlier work, including most of Basho’s. He saw it as his mission to make a difference—to let nothing, not even the most revered, stand in the way. He proclaimed, “A poem has no meaning. It is feeling alone.” And he practiced what he preached.

Autumn wind:
gods, Buddha—
lies, lies, lies.

These modern Japanese poets, many of whom are translated here into English for the first time, learned as much from Basho as from Shiki, and from Buson (1715-83) and Issa (1763-1827), the “Great Four.” Yet in a sense they are followers of Shiki, in spite of the harshness of his views and the impossibly high standards he demanded. They were forced to reckon with him, became willing participants in a heated dialogue with him. They had to: his spirit dominated the age. Stryk captures that spirit here, in this Cage of Fireflies.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Cage+of+Fireflies.
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Text/Politics in Island Southeast Asia

Tue, 01 Jun 1993

Text/Politics in Island Southeast Asia (1993)
Essays in Interpretation

By David M. E. Roskies

How does the language of poetry conspire with the language of power? This question is at the heart of this volume which deals with Indonesia and the Philippines in the early modern and post-1945 periods. These two nations have been shaped by the forces of nationalism, revolution, and metropolitan hegemony. Whether written in Malay, Tagalog, English, or Dutch the writings coming from them carry the contradictions of their time and place in the milieu of race and class. The contributors examine the literature and politics of Indonesia and Philippines from the point of view of contemporary thinking. Their examinations include the responses of indigenous writers to censorship and to their marginalization and cooption by colonial and neocolonial states. They investigate the rhetoric of spectacle in the Philippines of Ferdinand Marcos, the function of pasyon in Tagalog religious narrative, the writings of Pramoedya Ananta Toer in Indonesia, and the memoirs of a Javanese aristocrat. This book will be of interest to colonial historians and to students and scholars of non-Western and comparative literature.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/0896801756.
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The Tale of Prince Samuttakote

Sat, 01 May 1993

The Tale of Prince Samuttakote (1993)
A Buddhist Epic from Thailand

By Thomas Hudak

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Thai poets produced epics depicting elaborate myths and legends which intermingled the human, natural, and supernatural worlds. One of the most famous of these classical compositions is the Samuttakhoot kham chan, presented here in English for the first time as The Tale of Prince Samuttakote. The work of three poets, it was begun during the reign of King Naray (1656-1688) and was completed in 1849 by the patriarch-prince Paramanuchit Chinorot (1790-1853).

Translated with enchanting poetic imagery, the poem relates the adventures of Prince Samuttakote and his princess as they tour the heavenly realms with a magic sword. The two are separated after the sword is stolen but are reunited after further adventures. Upon ascending the throne, they teach the moral code of precepts and how all life is affected by it. The poem is important for its depiction of the amusements and daily life of seventeenth-century Thailand and for its use of classic Thai poetic devices.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Tale+of+Prince+Samuttakote.
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The Voice of the Night

Fri, 01 Jan 1993

The Voice of the Night (1993)
Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar

By Chairil Anwar

Chairil Anway (1922-1949) was the primary architect of the Indonesian literary revolution in both poetry and prose. In a few intense years he forged almost ingle-handedly a vital, mature literary language in Bahasa Indonesia, a language which formally came to exist in 1928. Anway led the way for the many Indonesian writers who have emerged during the past fifty years.

This volume contains all that has survived of Anwar’s writing. It not longer need the sort of introduction it did soem thirty years ago when Burton Raffel first published English translations of Anwar’s work. Raffel now presents the complete poems and the small amount of surviving prose in new translations with new interpretations.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Voice+of+the+Night.
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