China Books

'In a sweeping overview of four centuries of Mongolian history that draws on previously untapped sources, Johan Elverskog opens up totally new perspectives on some of the most urgent questions historians have recently raised about the role of Buddhism in the constitution of the Qing empire. Theoretically informed and strongly comparative in approach, Elverskog’s work tells a fascinating and important story that will interest all scholars working at the intersection of religion and politics' - Mark Elliott, Harvard University Although it is generally believed that the Manchus controlled the Mongols through their patronage of Tibetan Buddhism, scant attention has been paid to the Mongol view of the Qing imperial project. In contrast to other accounts of Manchu rule, Our Great Qing focuses not only on what images the metropole wished to project into Mongolia, but also on what images the Mongols acknowledged themselves. Rather than accepting the Manchu’s use of Buddhism, Johan Elverskog begins by questioning the static, unhistorical, and hegemonic view of political life implicit in the Buddhist explanation. By stressing instead the fluidity of identity and Buddhist practice as processes continually developing in relation to state formations, this work explores how Qing policies were understood by Mongols and how they came to see themselves as Qing subjects. In his investigation of Mongol society on the eve of the Manchu conquest, Elverskog reveals the distinctive political theory of decentralisation that fostered the civil war among the Mongols. He explains how it was that the Manchu Great Enterprise was not to win over 'Mongolia' but was instead to create a unified Mongol community of which the disparate preexisting communities would merely be component parts. A key element fostering this change was the Qing court's promotion of Gelukpa orthodoxy, which not only transformed Mongol historical narratives and rituals but also displaced the earlier vernacular Mongolian Buddhism. Finally, Elverskog demonstrates how this 18th-century conception of a Mongol community, ruled by an aristocracy and nourished by a Buddhist emperor, gave way to a pan-Qing solidarity of all Buddhist peoples against Muslims and Christians and to local identities that united for the first time aristocrats with commoners in a new Mongol Buddhist identity on the eve of the 20th century. Johan Elverskog is assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University. (ISBN:0824830210) (For this item please quote stock ID 26818) ISBN: 0824830210

More than two dozen contemporary novelists, essayists, and poets are collected in this remarkable collection of work from Australia, a complex country with a multilayered history. Among these outstanding writers is a growing number of Indigenous authors, whose voices are included here. Their stories--many of them previously untold in literature--deepen and expand our understanding of the experiences that comprise Australia's past, present, and future. Both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors in Where the Rivers Meet address their country's struggle to create a shared citizenship and sense of belonging. Some seek the key to this shared belonging in the creation of a more just relationship to the land and in issues of ownership. Others find clarity and rejuvenation in the country's harsh and beautiful wildness. Still others emphasize, in the words of Melissa Lucashenko, that we need to hear "the small, quiet stories in a human mouth" in order to truly know this land and its people. (For this item please quote stock ID 28203) ISBN: 9780824831783

During the post-abolition period a trade in cheap and often cost- neutral labor flourished in the western Pacific. For more than forty years, it supplied tens of thousands of indentured laborers to the sugar industry of northeastern Australia. This book tells the story of its impact on the people who were traded. (For this item please quote stock ID 28513) ISBN: 9780824830250

From feminist philosophy to genetic science, scholarship in recent years has succeeded in challenging many entrenched assumptions about the material and biological status of human bodies. Likewise in the study of Chinese cultures, accelerating globalisation and the resultant hybridity have called into question previous assumptions about the boundaries of Chinese national and ethnic identity. The problem of identifying a single or definitive referent for the 'Chinese body' is thornier than ever. By facilitating fresh dialogue between fields as diverse as the history of science, literary studies, diaspora studies, cultural anthropology, and contemporary Chinese film and cultural studies, Embodied Modernities addresses contemporary Chinese embodiments as they are represented textually and as part of everyday life practices. The book is divided into two sections, each with a dedicated introduction by the editors. The first examines 'Thresholds of Modernity' in chapters on Chinese body cultures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ? a period of intensive cultural, political, and social modernisation that led to a series of radical transformations in how bodies were understood and represented. The second section on 'Contemporary Embodiments' explores body representations across the People?s Republic of China,Taiwan, and Hong Kong today. Contributors: Chris Berry, Louise Edwards, Maram Epstein, Larissa Heinrich, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Jami Proctor-Xu, Tze-lan D. Sang, Teri Silvio, Mark Stevenson, Cuncun Wu, Angela Zito, John Zou. Fran Martin is lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. Larissa Heinrich is lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of New South Wales. (For this item please quote stock ID 27262) ISBN: 9780824829636