Unsettled Frontiers

Examining turn-of-the-century American women's fiction, the author argues that this writing played a crucial role in the production of a national fantasy of a unified American identity in the face of the racial, regional, ethnic, and sexual divisions of the period. Contributing to New Americanist perspectives of nation formation, the book shows that these writers are central to American literary discourses for reconfiguring the relationship among constituent regions in order to reconfigure the nation itself. Analyzing fiction by Sarah Orne Jewett, Florence Converse, Pauline Hopkins, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Kate Chopin, and Sui Sin Far, the book foregrounds the ways each writer's own location on the grid of American identities shapes her attempt to forge an inclusive narrative of America. This disparate group of writers--Northerners, Southerners, Californios, African Americans, Chinese Americans, Anglo Americans, heterosexuals, and lesbians--reflects the widespread nature of concerns over national identity and the importance of regions to representations of that identity. The author argues that femininity as a politicized cultural construct is basic to each of these author's attempts to recast America, because each understands the link between true womanhood and the longstanding equation of New England with the nation. But such attempts to mobilize the naturalized feminine to stabilize a fractured and exclusionary American identity inevitably reveal the fissures that undermine the universality of both categories. The book thus participates in several larger and ongoing conversations within American studies and feminist literary and genre criticism: the reassessment of regional and minor fiction in relation to national identity, the critique of the politics of genre construction, the uses and limits of identity politics, and the connections among all these issues.

The purpose of this book is to examine the strategies and practices of the Han Chinese Nationalists vis-à-vis post-Qing China’s ethnic minorities, as well as to explore the role they played in the formation of contemporary China’s Central Asian frontier territoriality and border security. The Chinese Revolution of 1911, initiated by Sun Yat-sen, liberated the Han Chinese from the rule of the Manchus and ended the Qing dynastic order that had existed for centuries. With the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the Mongols and the Tibetans, who had been dominated by the Manchus, took advantage of the revolution and declared their independence. Under the leadership of Yuan Shikai, the new Chinese Republican government in Peking in turn proclaimed the similar "five-nationality Republic" proposed by the Revolutionaries as a model with which to sustain the deteriorating Qing territorial order. The shifting politics of the multi-ethnic state during the regime transition and the role those politics played in defining the identity of the modern Chinese state were issues that would haunt the new Chinese Republic from its inception to its downfall. Modern China's Ethnic Frontiers will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese history, Asian history and modern history.

Mobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is lush with opportunity to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. Invention requires casting off many anchors and conventions inherited from the last 50 years of computer science and traditional design and jumping head first into a new and unfamiliar design space.

"A well-conceived and well-argued book that is essential reading for those interested in the study of community building." --Journal of American History "This study is important for both frontier and urban historians. It is well written, thoroughly documented, and illustrated in an informative manner. One may hope that future studies of other nineteenth century American towns will be completed with the competence and style of this excellent volume." --The Old Northwest "For one who has lived in Jacksonville as I have, reading this book stirred fond memories and answered lingering questions about this town. . . . As a capsule study of an unusual Illinois community renowned for its past, Doyle's book makes for fascinating reading." --Civil War History

This book examines India’s Northeast borderland – strategically positioned at the confluence of South Asia, East and Southeast Asia – from the perspective of international relations. The volume interrogates the geopolitics of region-making in both colonial and postcolonial times and traces the transformation of Northeast India from a British strategic frontier into a securitised borderland. It situates the region in transnational interactions both in conflict and cooperation with its immediate neighbouring regions of China, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, especially in the context of India’s Look East/Act East policy. The volume paves the way for a new ‘region-state’ framework borne out of the constructivist worldview and offers answers to many conundrums centring border studies. It further delineates approaches to overcoming the present geopolitical and territorial challenges of India’s Northeast with a critical thrust on regional policymaking. The volume will be of interest to students and researchers in the disciplines of social sciences and humanities in India as well as South and Southeast Asia. It will be especially useful to those in politics and international relations, strategic studies, international political economy, foreign policy, development studies and regional development, besides foreign policy-makers and diplomats, development practitioners, economists and policy analysts.

This book views domesticity through multiple frames and surveys the rhetoric and practices of domestication in contemporary cultures. It also examines the consequences and costs of homemaking in various geographic and textual locations.

Written by scholars from a range of disciplines concerned with the Middle East and Islam (history, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, political science) and covering the Muslim world extensively (from Malaysia, Turkey, Sudan, Egypt, and Israel/Palestine to Muslim communities in Europe and the United States), this important contribution to the debate on globalization sets a standard in dealing with this pervasive force in the field of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies.