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 …

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 …

Beast And Man In India: Undoing John Lockwood Kipling’S Imperial Citation, Oishani Sengupta

Criticism

This article posits that John Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man in India (1891), the illustrated compendium on animals that mixes discussions of colonial cross-species entanglements with personal reflections on transforming local arts and crafts in India in the service of imperial power, is a multiauthored book. Centering the presence of Indian illustrators as central to Beast and Man’s texture, this essay uses the term “imperial citation” to highlight the range of strategies Kipling uses to overtly and covertly appropriate the labor of Indigenous creators within the fabric of this volume. By placing the material text within the context of colonial …

Intersectionality In Canada's 'Caregiver Program': The Impact Of Race, Class, And Gender On Filipina Women In The 'Global Care Chain', Taylor Simsovic

Culture, Society, and Praxis

This paper explores the experiences of migrant Filipina caregivers in Canada under the Live-in Caregiver's Program (LCP) and the subsequent Caregivers Program (CP), focusing on the intersecting factors of race, class, and gender. Through a literature review, the study investigates the distinct and precarious position occupied by Filipina migrant caregivers, who face marginalization by the Canadian government. The framework of the 'global care chain' proposed by Aggarwal and Das Gupta (2013) and the concept of the 'international transfer of caretaking' presented by Parreñas (2000) are employed to illuminate the devaluation of 'women's work,' particularly that performed by migrant Filipina and …

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

Narratives Of Trauma In South Asian Literature, Ryan Wander

Critical Humanities

Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature uses seven geographically-focused clusters of essays to elucidate the ways in which the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies allows for a delineation of the cultural and historical specificity of South Asian narratives of trauma. These essays simultaneously serve as a means for connecting South Asian literary accounts of individual and collective trauma to broader national and transnational dynamics.

Women Parliamentarians In India Since 1991: Challenges And Opportunities, Vatsala Bhusry

Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs

India gained a new economic orientation in 1991 following the policy of economic liberalization. It offered the opportunities to close the gender gap in various fields including the political field as visualized in the original goal of the Indian constitution. However, there is an acute underrepresentation of women at the national political level and there is a lack of evidence-based research studies to analyze this gap. This study maps the political trajectories of 13 elected women leaders holding offices at the national level since 2019. To better understand the challenges and opportunities at both macro and micro levels they came …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

Aspiring To Be A Buddha And Life Before Liberation: The Colophons Of The Siamese Questions Of King Milinda, Eng Jin Ooi

Manuscript Studies

This article presents the colophons of a Buddhist text, the Questions of King Milinda, as seen in manuscripts found mainly in Central Thailand. Through a survey of over seventy Pāli palm-leaf manuscripts and a Thai samut khoi (folding book), the colophons reveal information not only related to textual transmission, but also to the social and soteriological ambitions of the communities that created them. Inspired by the ideology of merit, which promises good karmic returns for presenting and preserving the Dharma in this world, donors and scribes produced various kinds of aspirations (Pāli: patthanā). These aspirations are recorded in colophons. In …

Marginal Voices, Silenced Annotations: Notes On The Life Of Edith L. Tiempo, Cris Barbra N. Pe

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

The popular version of National Artist for Literature Edith L. Tiempo is that she holds a central position as the literary matriarch of the Philippines. However, little is known about her background as a partly tribal (indigenous) woman. This paper proposes that biography can be a form of intervention to recuperate silenced narratives and marginal lives. Drawing from the ideas of the Geneva School of Consciousness, biography can be seen as a form of reading, where latent images in an author’s works can be made manifest and reveal hidden narratives in the author’s life. Edith’s life and works yield images …

Ang Balintuna Ng Pesimismo At Pag-Asa Sa “Ilang Aeta Mula Sa Botolan” Ni Cirilo F. Bautista (The Paradox Of Pessimism And Hope In Cirilo F. Bautista’S “Ilang Aeta Mula Sa Botolan”), Mesándel V. Arguelles

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Sa sanaysay na ito, ginagalugad ang isa sa mga birtud ng panulaan ni Pambansang Alagad ng Sining sa Literatura Cirilo F. Bautista—ang balintuna, sa pangunahin, ang balintuna ng pesimismo at pag-asa kaugnay ng pagpaksa sa mga usapin, suliranin, at penomenong panlipunan ng kanyang panahon hanggang sa kasalukuyan. Pinagninilayan din ang bait at bisa ng kanyang mga tula na nakasalalay sa kabatirang kapwa lubhang mahalaga at di-makasasapat ang wika upang, aniya, ay “ipahayag ang ating isip at damdamin” na nagbunsod sa kanya sa pagbuo ng pormulasyong “sugat ng salita” at “kirot ng kataga”—kapwa ginamit bilang mga susing konsepto ng kanyang dalawang …

Isagani Cruz And His Fiction: A Footnote To The “Deconstructive Effect Of Feminist Materialism On The Newly-Discovered Cordillera Archives”, Isidoro M. Cruz

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

A cursory reading of Isagani R. Cruz’s literary theory and criticism on one hand, and his fiction on the other, suggests a disparity between Cruz as a scholarly literary critic and Cruz as a fictionist of stories “for adults only”; however, a detail in one of his short stories in his book, Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only, arouses a critical suspicion that his fiction is actually cultural criticism masquerading as irreverent or obscene fiction, so that the critic and the fictionist are one. That detail is found in “Once upon a Time Some Years from Now,” …

The Ecocritical Erotic In Marjorie Evasco's "Elemental", Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This brief article explores the critical entanglements of nature, matter, and the human body in Marjorie Evasco’s poem “Elemental.” Through ecocritical erotic writing, the text establishes the “trans-corporeal” relationships between human desire and the natural environment, the language of the erotic and the craft of poetry, and the writer and the task of ecofeminist writing. Ultimately, this essay suggests that the text and the author engage with the ba’i as an indigenous source of femininity, charting a direction toward native Philippine ecofeminism.

Lives Away From Home And Precarious Writing As Life: Reading Bienvenido Santos’S Postscript To Saintly Life, Ivan Emil A. Labayne

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Towards the end of his writing career, Bienvenido Santos published two autobiographies, Memory’s Fictions and Postscript to Saintly Life—a departure in a writing life mostly devoted to penning fictional works. This paper focuses on the last autobiography which mainly looks at Santos’s experiences as a pensionado in America. It pays attention to how Santos writes about his Philippine home while in exile, taking part in a program that is part of the American colonial period. The range of Santos’s emotions—with shame and pride on both ends—while abroad is also examined. How these emotions were manifested in the book served …

Silent Music And Sacred Sounds Of The Hoysaḷas: Visual And Aural Sensory Experiences In Jain And Hindu Temples, Vani Vignesh

Jain Studies

This project examines affective responses to temple spaces and investigates how visual and aural sensory stimulations can amplify people’s experiences in Jain and Hindu temples through ethnographic research and qualitative interviews. It involves the study of the traditional Indian methods of designing and planning temples to understand their place in contemporary South Indian devotion. This project focuses on two twelfth century temples built by the Hoysaḷa dynasty in the South Indian state of Karnāṭaka—the Jain Pārśvanātha basadi (temple) at Haḷēbīḍu and the Hindu Vaiṣṇava Chennakēśava temple at Bēlūru—to show that their location, design, and structure were planned to cater to …

The University Of Wisconsin And The Development Of Librarianship In The Philippines, Bradley Brazzeal

University Libraries Publications and Scholarship

The Spanish-American War of 1898 ushered in an era of American rule over the Philippines that formally ended in 1946. An expansive colonial government developed with Americans filling most professional positions early on. There was a slow transition to Filipinos holding those positions, and this process can be seen in the field of librarianship. By the middle of 1924, library leadership and the teaching of library science was firmly in the hands of Filipinos. The University of Wisconsin and those associated with the institution, both Americans and Filipinos, played leading roles in the development of Philippine librarianship. This article explores …

(Un)Seeing Goa’S Bom Jesus In Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’S This Is Not The Basilica!, R. Benedito Ferrão

Arts & Sciences Articles

This article examines the interrogation of visual history associated with Goan church architectural legacies offered by Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar’s installation series, This is Not the Basilica! (2021). The artist’s subject is the 16th-century Basilica of Bom Jesus, which was built in locally domesticated Baroque style during Goa’s Portuguese colonial era and which houses the remains of the Spanish saint, Francis Xavier. Kandolkar’s work makes viewers intimate with the Basilica’s history, I contend, so as to posit the need for conservation efforts that will save the deteriorating church while also revealing its unseen aesthetic past as a symbol of still-unfolding Goan …

Political Orientation In Ecocriticism: National Allegory In Vietnamese Ecofiction By Trần Duy Phiên, Chi P. Pham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Since the late 1990s, theories and practices of ecocriticism have tended to be more politically engaged than in its earliest phase, considering that “environmental problems cannot be solved without addressing issues of wealth and poverty, overconsumption, underdevelopment, and the notion of resource scarcity” (Heise 251-2). This paper engages with the political orientation in ecocriticism by examining presentations of humans and nature in three Vietnamese short stories – “Kiến và người” (The Ants and the Man, 1990), “Mối và người” (The Termite and the Man, 1992), and “Nhện và người” (The Spider and the Man, 2012) by Trần Duy Phiên (born …

Social Justice In India: A Comparative Study Of Rawls And Ambedkar, Abinash Darnal

Comparative Philosophy

Justice has always been central to political philosophy over a period of time. No doubt, throughout the ages, countless philosophers have understood justice in different ways. Nevertheless, they have consented that a good society is a just society. Moreover, justice is a distributive concept and is concerned with the distribution of wealth, leisure, liberty, friendship, love, etc. Twentieth century justice came to be discussed usually in relation to social life in general, and the distribution of material rewards in particular and usually came to be known as ‘Social Justice’. Social justice as such came to be accepted as the fair …

The Afterlife Of Jennifer Laude: Trans Necropolitics And Trans Utopias, Max D. López Toledano

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

Jennifer Laude is a filipino trans woman who was murdered by a visiting member of the United States army in 2014. Her murder led to several protests in the Philippines and in the United States led by both queer and anti-imperialist movements that urged for the rejection of the 'Visiting Forces Agreement' in the Philippines. This essay explores how Laude's murder is located in a climate of 'trans necropolitics' that allocates death and disposability to unruly trans and brown bodies who fail to comply with cis-normative gender ideals. This essay understands her murder (and her afterlife) beyond her individual body, …