South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

A Man Ahead Of His Time: Lee Kuan Yew’S Iron First Beneath The Velvet Glove, Yi Chen Zhai

Master's Projects and Capstones

This study examines the role of Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, in the country's development from a third-world nation to a first-world economic powerhouse. Lee Kuan Yew was the Prime Minister of Singapore for over three decades and was responsible for implementing policies that transformed Singapore's economy, infrastructure, education, and social systems. This paper analyzes the various policies and strategies, as well as personal values and ideologies, adopted and implemented by Lee Kuan Yew that were instrumental in Singapore's growth. Additionally, the paper discusses the challenges faced by Lee Kuan Yew during his leadership in his public …

Trịnh Công Sơn And Bob Dylan: Essays On War, Love, Songwriting,And Religion, John C. Schafer

Trade & Scholarly Monographs

In this accessible deep-dive into the careers of Trịnh Công Sơn and Bob Dylan, Schafer retells countless colorful stories from the two artists’ lives drawn from a wide range of Vietnamese and English-language sources. Trịnh Công Sơn and Bob Dylan evaluates the relationship between two of the 20th century’s most beloved and essential songwriters, in the process illuminating Vietnamese and American views on spirituality, romance, philosophy, identity, and conflict.

Readers will find English translations of Trịnh Công Sơn’s essays and lyrics by Cao Thị Như Quỳnh, many here in translation for the very first time.

Schafer critically examines the singers’ …

The Theology Of The Liturgical Seasons In The Syro-Malabar Church, Ann Mary Madavanakadu Cmc

Journal of Global Catholicism

This paper focuses on the theology of the liturgical seasons in the Syro-Malabar Church. The liturgical year with its liturgical cycles and seasons, is more than just a mere structural framework for the prayer life of the Church. It is a true locus of rich theology. The liturgical year is defined as the yearly plan of spiritual life by the Church, for her children, arranged in different seasons or periods to celebrate the mysteries of Christ in life together with feasts, fasts, and abstinence in order to make Christian life a successful pilgrimage to heaven for attaining salvation. This article …

Palliyogam: A Vibrant Legacy Of The Syro-Malabar Archiepiscopal Church, Dery Davis

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article explores the historic inheritance of the Palliyogam of the sui iuris Syro-Malabar Major Archiepiscopal Church, focusing on its role in maintaining synodality in ecclesial life. Palliyogam, a parish assembly, has been the cornerstone of ecclesial communion among Malabar Christians for centuries. As Pope Francis inaugurates the three-year synod on synodality, this study examines how Palliyogam aligns with this synodal vision. The article delves into both the ancient form of Palliyogam and its present-day manifestation, shedding light on their theology and role in governance and decision-making within the Syro-Malabar tradition. The article emphasizes that synodality is already inherent …

Moving On Fluvial Land: Human Migration And Liquid Identities In Shiv K. Kumar’S A River With Three Banks, Muhammad Ali, Saira Fatima Dogar

The Goose

This article argues that any territory’s geological knowledge is essential to the understanding of how and why its inhabitants move on it the way they do. Taking Shiv K Kumar’s novel A River with Three Banks as its primary text, the article focuses on the protagonist, Gautam, whose frequent migrations within his country seem to emerge from his childhood attachment with the rivers of his land, the Indian Subcontinent, the fluvial quality of which is not an unknown phenomenon to geographers around the world. Gautam’s profound knowledge of what flows under his land is thus what shapes his personality, one …

In Search Of Middle Paths: Buddhism, Fiction, And The Secular In Twentieth-Century South Asia, Crystal Baines

Doctoral Dissertations

This study analyzes the centrality of South Asian Buddhist heritages in the articulation of multiple iterations of “the secular” in post-independent Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan. As contradictory as such a proposition might seem, this project demonstrates that literature was a forum where the category and language of Buddhism were reoriented to fashion new ideas of “the secular” for modern South Asian polities. With this in mind, I turn to the quintessential genres of secularity in South Asia: the twentieth-century novel and short story. These genres reveal how the category of Buddhism, Buddhist ethics and literature were received and used …

The Uninvited Host: Goa And The Parties Not Meant For Its People, R. Benedito Ferrão, Angela Ferrão, Maria Vanessa De Sa

Arts & Sciences Articles

Despite its history as a favored destination for hippies from the West in the 1960s and 1970s, present-day party tourism in Goa largely attracts Indian travelers. This is a product of the post-1990s liberalization of the Indian economy, coupled with the exoticization of Goa, which has rendered it a pleasure periphery to the subcontinent. Such difference, and attraction, occurs because, unlike most of the rest of the India that annexed Goa, the region was a Portuguese colony until 1961. Goa’s Lusitanization suggests a more liberal milieu, social gatherings with music and dancing being commonplace culturally, for example. While tourism has …

11 Days In August And The “Ghosts In The Machine”, Mae U. Caralde

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This essay will put forward a case of political mimesis in the film, 11 Days in August (1983), which contributed to the buildup of social movements in the Philippines that ended the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. By describing the processes ‘imaging back’ and ‘bodying back’ Gaines (1999), the documentary film experience is freed from the rigidity and confinement with the visible, opening it up to affective faculties to acquire meanings into our lived realities. Explored in these two aspects of the mimetic faculty is the notion of orchestrating the film’s body and that of the spectator into the filmmaker’s filmic …

Pag-Igpaw Sa Inip At Inis Ng Pagkakapiit: Tulambuhay Sa Anyo Ng Talinghaga’T Taludturan (Overcoming Ennui And Ire Amidst Incarceration: Narratives In Metaphors And Verses), Kevin P. Armingol

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Kabilang sa itinuturing na “Emergent Literature” sa Pilipinas ang panitikan sa bilangguan. Hindi ito kataka-taka sa bansang may malalim at mahabang kasaysayan ng pagpipiit sa mga tumutunggali sa panlipunang kaayusan, kabilang na ang mga intelektwal, partikular ang mga artista at manunulat. Dahil sa kanilang taglay na progresibo at radikal na katangian, malimit silang maging puntirya ng establisyimento, bukod pa sa kanilang likhang-sining at akdang-pampanitikan, at maging bahagi ng dumadami pang bilang ng mga bilanggong pulitikal sa bansa. Sa loob ng piitan, may pangangailangan na maisadokumento at magawaan ng pag-aaral ang mayaman at masining na karanasan at likha ng mga bilanggong …

“Nararampag Nga Mga Takna . . . Nangangaliding Nga Mga Higayon”: Memory, Nostalgia, Love, And Loss In Victor Sugbo’S Taburos Han Dagat, Jessa A. Amarille

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This paper explores how the concepts of memory, nostalgia, love, and loss are depicted in the poems 1) “Ha Akon Paglinakaton,” (In My Travels[1]), 2) “May Ada Panahon” (There Comes a Time), 3) “Parada Han mga Sinya” (The Parade of Zinnias), 4) “An Pagdumdum” (On Recalling), 5) “Kawarayan” (Emptiness), 6) “Agurang Mundo” (Old Mundo), 7) “Taburos Han Dagat” (Sea Spray), 8) “La Madonna Alegro,” and 9) “Cadena de Amor” from Victor N. Sugbo’s Taburos Han Dagat (2014) using an ecocritical lens. Published in a post-Haiyan context, the poems may be classified as belonging to the ecopoetry genre with …

Contact Zones, Discursive Spaces: The Case Of The Silliman University National Writers Workshop, Alana Leilani C. Narciso

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

The Silliman University National Writers Workshop’s (SUNWW) historical circumstance has been implicated in the Cold War. As such it is accused of perpetuating colonial ideas on language and literary production. Its use of New Criticism is said to be detrimental to nation-building as this critical pedagogy is seen to be ahistorical and apolitical. This paper investigates the Workshop space and critiques the actual workshop discussions in the years 2019 and 2021. The explorations reveal that the Workshop is a discursive space, a “contact zone” where its participants are always engaged in the act of negotiating ideas about craft, literature and …

The Philippine Economy During The Japanese Occupation, Jasper Lem

Asian Studies: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

The economy of the Philippines was derailed by the Japanese occupation during World War II. As an American colony before World War II, the Philippines had close amicable ties with the United States highlighted by promises of independence on July 4th, 1946. The Philippines also maintained a beneficial economic relationship with the States at this time through extensive foreign trade. However, because of the Japanese invasion, the Philippine economy was robbed of this profitable foreign trade and the promise of independence, severely crippling the island nation and her morale. The first policies implemented by Japan were designed to control the …

From Nothing To No-Thing-Ness To Emptiness: The Buddhist Recycling Of An Old Jain Saying, Dhivan Thomas Jones

The Indian International Journal of Buddhist Studies

In this article I investigate a difficult saying of the Buddha, preserved in three places in Pāli canonical discourses: n’ āhaṃ kvacani kassaci kiñcanatasmiṃ, na ca mama kvacani kismiñci kiñcanat’ atthi (‘There is no I anywhere in anyone’s property, and neither is there anywhere in anything property which is mine’). At A 3: 70, this saying is attributed to the Jains, while at A 4: 185, the Buddha teaches it as a ‘brahman truth’ acceptable to paribbājakas, and at M 106, the Buddha teaches it as a means of attaining the experiential dimension of no-thing-ness (ākiñcaññāyatana). I …

Sac Newsletter 2023, South Asia Center

Newsletters from the South Asia Center

No abstract provided.

The Invisible Plant Technology Of Prehistoric Southeast Asia: Indirect Evidence For Basket And Rope Making At Tabon Cave, Philippines, 39-33,000 Years Ago., Hermine Xhauflaira, Sheldon Jago-On, Timothy James Vitales, Dante Manipon, Noel Amano, John Rey Callado, Danilo Tandang, Celine Kerfant, Omar Choa, Alfred Pawlik

Sociology & Anthropology Department Faculty Publications

A large part of our material culture is made of organic materials, and this was likely the case also during prehistory. Amongst this prehistoric organic material culture are textiles and cordages, taking advantage of the flexibility and resistance of plant fibres. While in very exceptional cases and under very favourable circumstances, fragments of baskets and cords have survived and were discovered in late Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sites, these objects are generally not preserved, especially in tropical regions. We report here indirect evidence of basket/tying material making found on stone tools dating to 39–33,000 BP from Tabon Cave, Palawan Philippines. …

From Aura To Awra: Toward A Tropical Queer Decolonial Performativity In The Philippines, John Paolo Sarce

English Faculty Publications

If datíng is to literary texts, awra is to queer decolonial performances. From the works of Bienvenido Lumbera and Walter Benjamin, this paper discusses the queering of the term aura and how it operates in tropical performances and discourses, through beki (gay language), as awra. The sign “awra” is resuscitated from the imperial lexis and queered by the topical imagination in the Philippine media. Three media texts expound these claims: Awra Briguela’s song “Clap, Clap, Clap, Awra”; Maymay Entrata’s dance “Amakabogera”; and the noontime TV game show “Beklaban,” a portmanteau of Beki (gay) …

The Malay Nobat: A History Of Power, Acculturation, And Sovereignty, Abdul Haque Chang

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Raja Iskandar Bin Raja Halid's The Malay Nobat: A History of Power, Acculturation, and Sovereignty, The Lexington Series in Historical Ethnomusicology: Deep Soundings (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022).

Tracking The Harmonium From Christian Missionary Hymns To Sikh Kirtan, Gurminder Kaur Bhogal

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The harmonium is prominent in Sikh practices of devotional music known as kirtan and yet its significance has barely been addressed in Euro-American scholarship. Following on the heels of a recent ban against using the instrument at the holiest temple of the Sikhs, Harmandir Sahib (popularly known as the Golden Temple), this article explores how the ban seeks to discard this colonial instrument and return to playing traditional string instruments (tanti saz) associated with the courts (darbar) of the Sikh Gurus. This study is the first to examine primary missionary sources from the nineteenth and early …

The Fall And Rise Of Bengali Muslim Conciousness: Conceptualising The Identity Of The Bangla Universal, Habib Khan

Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of modern-nation states saw the end of the empirical era of exploitation and exercise of inherent racist tendencies towards the 'other'. However, the effect of that colonial system is still ever-present in the creation and governance of these newly independent states. While every new state aims to be 'modern', they adopt the international legal framework of the West as their own - a system they had initially wanted to escape. The concept of Muslim universality in the form of the ummah should have freed Pakistan from the shackles of its former colonial masters. Instead, this phenomenon was replaced …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …