Contested Selves

Investigates the field of German life writing, from Rahel Levin Varnhagen around 1800 to Carmen Sylva a century later, from Döblin, Becher, women's WWII diaries, German-Jewish memoirs, and East German women's interview literatureto the autofiction of Lena Gorelik.

This text is an ethnographic examination of young women migrants in rural and urban Thailand. The author focuses on the hundreds of thousands of young women who fill the factories and sweatshops of the Bangkok metropolis, following them as they travel from the village of Baan Naa Sakae.

Examines how intersexed individuals negotiate identity in a dual gendered culture.

Anthropologist Sandya Hewamanne spent time in a Sri Lankan free trade zone (FTZ) working and living among the workers to learn about their lives. "They were poor women from rural areas," Hewamanne writes, "who migrated to do garment work in transnational factories of a global assembly line. Their difficult work routines and sad living conditions have been examined in detail. When I was with them I often wondered whether anyone noticed the smiles, winks, smirks, gestures, tones of voice, the movies they saw, or the songs they sang." Hewamanne deftly weaves theories of identity, globalization, and cultural politics throughout her detailed accounts of the workers' efforts to negotiate ever shifting roles and expectations of gender, class, and sexuality. By analyzing how these workers claim political subjectivity, Hewamanne's Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone challenges conventional notions about women at the bottom of the global economy. The book offers a fascinating journey through the vibrant subaltern universe of Sri Lankan female migrant workers, from the FTZ factory shop floor to boarding houses, from urban movie theaters to temples and beaches and back to their native rural villages. Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone captures the spirit with which women confront power and violence through everyday poetics and politics, exploring how female workers construct themselves as different while investigating this difference as the space where deep anxieties and ambivalences over notions of nation, modernity, and globalization get played out.

In 1986, Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) put into effect it's New Economic Mechanism (NEM) in its bid for modernization and development. With this national policy came the conversion of a predominantly agricultural and subsistence-based economy into one focused on commodity-driven production. The country's integration into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its signing of the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) made official its integration into the regional and internationnal economy. The once state-planned, socialist economy was restructured into an open, liberalized one. One sector that has experienced marked growth is manufacturing, specifically the garment industry, Domestic and foregin-owned garment factories established beginning in the earyl 1990s now have Laos exporting 80% of its garment products to European Union (EU) nations.

The revised edition of Southeast Asia provides a grounded account of how people in the region are responding to - and being affected by - the changes sweeping through the region.

Exploring how English masculinity - that was so contingent on the relative health of the British imperial project - negotiated the decline and ultimate dissolution of the empire by the middle of the twentieth century, this book argues that by defining itself in relation to indigenous masculinity, English masculinity began to share a common idiom with its colonial other. The rhetoric of indigenous masculinity, therefore, both mimicked and departed from its metropolitan counterpart. The study combines an interdisciplinary approach with a focus that is not limited to a single colonial society but ranges from colonial Bengal, Burma, Borneo and finally to colonial Australia.

This volume offers a comprehensive and empirically rich analysis of regional maritime disputes in the South China Sea (SCS). By discussing important aspects of the rise of China’s maritime power, such as territorial disputes, altered perceptions of geo-politics and challenges to the US-led regional order, the authors demonstrate that a regional power shift is taking place in Asia-Pacific. The volume also provides in-depth discussions of the responses to Chinese actions by SCS claimants as well as by important non-claimant actors.