Book reviews

Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus 1954–1959 by Robert Holland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 347, bibliography, index, illustrations. £48.00 (cloth).

The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times. Volume I: The Dynastic Periods: From Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 372, bibliography for volumes I and II, notes on the contributors, index. $49.95 (cloth).

The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times. Volume II: Foreign Domination to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 493, bibliography for volumes I and II, notes on the contributors, index. $49.95 (cloth).

A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century by Roger Owen and Sevket Pamuk. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998. Pp. xviii + 310, bibliography, index. £35.00 (cloth); £12.95 (paper).

Managing the Oil Wealth: OPEC's Windfalls and Pitfalls by Jahangir Amuzegar. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999. Pp.282, bibliography, index. £35.00 (cloth).

Curzon and British Imperialism in the Middle East 1916–19 by John Fisher. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999. Pp.xvi + 342, bibliography, index. £42.50/$59.50 (cloth); £18.50/$26.50 (paper).

Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power by Cyrus Ghani. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998. Pp. xiv + 434. £29.50.

Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq by Kanan Makiya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989 (updated edition 1998). Pp. xxxxv + 323, a new introduction, tables, index, chronology. £14.95 (paper).

Najib Mahfuz – The Novelist‐Philosopher of Cairo by Menahem Milson. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1998. Pp. 304.     

The South in Sudanese politics, 1946–1956

Islam and Democracy by John L. Esposito and John O. Voll. New York Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp.232, index and bibliography. £16.99 (paper).

The Merchant Republic of Lebanon: Rise of an Open Economy by Carolyn L. Gates. London: I.B. Tauris, 1998. Pp. xvi + 248, bibliography, index. £39.50.

The Political Economy of Market Reform in Jordan by Timothy J. Piro. Lanham, Maryland and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Pp. xvi + 131, bibliography, index. $54.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries. History and Culture in the Modern Era by Harvey E. Goldberg (ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xv + 346. £31.50 (cloth); £14.99 (paper).

Memoirs of Baghdad, Kurdistan and Turkish Arabia, 1857: Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, No.XLIII. — New Series by Cdr. James Felix Jones, I.N. Slough: Archive Editions, 1998. Pp.xlvii + 504. £595.

Secularization of Iran: a Doomed Failure? by Azadi Kian‐Thiébaut. Paris: Peeters, 1998. Pp. 296, bibliography, index.

Partner to Partition: The Jewish Agency's Partition Plan in the Mandate Era by Yossi Katz. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998. Pp. xii + 209, bibliography, index. £35.00 (cloth); £17.50 (paper).

Between Jerusalem and Hebron: Jewish Settlement in the Pre‐State Period by Yossi Katz. Ramat‐Gan: Bar‐Ilan University Press, 1998. Pp. 295, bibliography, index.

Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus by R. Hirschon. Oxford: Berghan, 1998 (first published 1989). £14.95 (paper).     

Sisterhood is local: The rise of feminist journals in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Whether as central members in their own households, as workers in the formal or informal economy, as political figures or as performers and artists, Southeast Asian women have contributed and continue to contribute to the economic, social, and artistic development of their societies. Yet it is only recently that we have begun to look at their lives separately from—yet vital to our understanding of—those societies and their histories. Over the past twenty years publications about Southeast Asian women have grown both in number and scope. Since 1991, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has added some six hundred new titles about Southeast Asian women to its collection—double the number it acquired in the years 1981 to 1985 and thirty percent more than in the previous five-year period (1986–1990). More impressive than the sheer number of publications is the scope of issues being addressed. Many topics such as prostitution, domestic abuse, or women factory workers were inconceivable just ten years ago. But the most notable and positive change over the past twenty years has been the growth of publishing by the women of Southeast Asia. Women's publishing, especially feminist publishing, is best illustrated by the rise of feminist periodicals and newsletters that serve to unite women. The myriad of voices found in these periodicals are those of women who speak different languages and who come from vastly different economic backgrounds. We talk about the emerging global village, but these periodicals demonstrate that sisterhood may indeed be more local than global.     

The prostitute

Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in — let alone organize — public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf States. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong — mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women — have become highly active, organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied the opportunity of becoming legal citizens or permanent residents. Increasingly, these workers, their grassroots activist organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations with which they are affiliated frame their concerns in terms of global, transnational, and human rights, not merely local migrant worker rights. This article takes the “Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards” event — part of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong in 2005 — as an ethnographic example of domestic worker protest and as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers — whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization — that literally permits public protests and shapes their form and content. The article illustrates how migrant workers’ protests and activism have been shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the sociohistorical context of Hong Kong as a post-colonial “global city” and a “neoliberal space of exception.”     

Reviews

Lands of the Thunderbolt. By the Earl of Ronaldshay, P.C., G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E. Constable and Co.

Patiala and the Great War. Printed by the India Society, London, 1923.

The Adventures of Hajji Baba. By James Morier. (New Edition.) Humphrey Milford. Oxford University Press. World's Classics Series.

Adventures in the Near East, 1918–1922. By A. Bawlinson, C.M.G., C.B.E., D.S.O. (late Lieut.‐Colonel R.G.A. and Commander R.N.V.R.). Melrose. 25s. net.     

Socialist development: The political economy of agrarian reform in Vietnam

Abstract

Since reunification in 1976, Vietnam's faltering economy has produced a crisis of grave proportions, the causes of which are not yet fully understood. The drawn-out consequences of 45 years of war and international isolation are obviously important elements affecting the Vietnamese economy, but the crisis has continued—if not worsened since the end of the war. Grain production—16.2 million tons in 1983—has not kept pace with consumption needs. Official figures indicate that during 1983 per capita food production was 296 kg., up from a 1978 low of 243 kg., but still well below war-time levels.     

Migrant Workers in the Pearl River Delta: Discourse and Narratives about Work as Sites of Struggle

ABSTRACT

With the introduction of capitalist labor relations into China certain attitudes, competencies, and values associated with global capitalism seem to be increasingly valorized. This article analyzes the values and principles ascribed to migrant workers as part of practices linked to modes of government. The author confronts the dominant form of cultural construction of migrant workers through the Shenzhen official press with migrant workers' own narratives about their experience of work (dagong) in the city as the narratives are mediated through two different sites, namely, participant observation, interviews with rural migrants, and a body of unpublished letters to the editor acquired from several magazines dedicated to migrant workers. The article sheds light on the ways in which migrant workers' narratives confirm or, on the contrary, contest the pivotal elements of the hegemonic construction. Three different narratives that migrant workers produce about their own lives and about Shenzhen are examined. These narratives range from affirmations of dominant discourses about migrant workers and expressions of disillusionment about such discourses, to strategic uses of dominant discourses to justify the claims made by migrant workers.     

Book reviews

Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace edited by Hussein A. Amery and Aaron T. Wolf. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2000. Pp.xv + 282, glossary, notes on the contributors, index. $45.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper). ISBN 0–292–70494–1; 0–292–70495–X.

The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success by Geoffrey Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp.x + 168, bibliography, indices. £35.00/$60.00 (cloth). ISBN 0–19–823856–8.

Women and War in Lebanon edited by Lamia Rustum Shehadeh. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Pp.xvi + 334, bibliography, contributors, index. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 0–8130–1707–6.

French Military Rule in Morocco: Colonialism and its Consequences by Moshe Gershovich. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000. Pp.xvii + 238, maps, bibliography, index. £35.00/$57.50 (cloth). ISBN 0–7146–4949–X.

Women in Islam and the Middle East:A Reader edited by Ruth Roded. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999. Pp.288. $59.50. ISBN 1 8606 4308 6.

Women, Work and Islamism: Ideology and Resistance in Iran by Maryam Poya. London: Zed Books, 1999. Pp.208. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). ISBN 1 8564 9681 3; 18564 9682 1.

Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ (Second Revised Edition) by Efraim Karsh. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2000. Pp.xliv + 280, index. £39.50/$54.50 (cloth); £16.50/524.50 (paper). ISBN 0–7146–5011–0; 0–7146–8063–X.

Islam and Society in Turkey by David Shankland. Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire: The Eothen Press, 1999. Pp.x + 240, bibliography, index. $55.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper). ISBN 0–906719–27–5; 0–906719–26–7.

Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa: A Comparative Study edited by Miura Toru and John Edward Philips. London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 2000. Pp.xii + 243, index. £65.00/$100.00 (cloth). ISBN 071306601.     

Remembering the family home: emotions,belonging, and migrant men in multicultural Australia

Abstract

The article opens a space in which to discuss migrant men's emotions and their engagement with family life. It focuses on Australia's Goan community to explore the fluidity of ethnic identity and its relation to remembered family and childhood. The article suggests a “family” that is not only a domestic home but is constituted across both time and space. The men's memories of their childhood and family life prior to arrival in Australia are central to their constitution of self within Australia. These memories provide the men with the emotional means to contest their positioning in Australia's multicultural framework. The men's memories of childhood are experienced beyond domestic and multicultural spaces, making remembered families an important part of their work lives and sense of success in Australia.     

RETHINKING ASIAN MOBILITIES

ABSTRACT

Vietnam's economic reforms have generated much praise for the country's rapid “opening” of its markets, as if the Vietnamese nation had previously existed in a state of isolation, closed to broader global influences and exchanges. Such discourses overlook the importance of transnational circulations of people, goods, technologies, and expertise during the socialist era that were vital to Vietnam's postwar national reconstruction and continue to play a role in post-socialist economic transformation today. This article traces the socialist pathways of labor migration between Vietnam and the former Soviet Bloc (specifically, East Germany) in the 1980s, mobilities that are generally absent in studies of contemporary export labor industries. Based on multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, the author follows Vietnamese workers first to the East German factories where they labored as “contract workers,” and then through their subsequent return and reintegration into Vietnamese society after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These mobilities bespeak of an alternative history and formation of diasporic communities that are little acknowledged or addressed in literature on labor migrations, and yet are important to understanding emerging forms of stratification today in Vietnam. Moreover, an analysis of early non-capitalist experiences with overseas labor regimes in the 1980s provides insights into contemporary Vietnamese governance practices that promote—rather uncritically, similar to other “emerging countries” —export labor as a nation-building strategy to reduce endemic poverty and develop a late socialist country.     

Political suicide among Korean youth

Abstract

A striking aspect of the South Korean political protest movement of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s was the frequent self-immolation of young Korean activists. This trend toward political suicide—politically motivated voluntary death—began with the laborer Chun Tae-il's suicide in 1970 and increased dramatically in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is estimated that in the 1980s alone nearly one hundred young Koreans put an end to their lives as a form of antigovernment protest! This article explores why so many young people in Korea have chosen to take their own lives in this way.     

The “Rights Awakening” of Chinese Migrant Workers: Beyond the Generational Perspective

ABSTRACT

?In the spring of 2010, the strike of the Honda workers in Nanhai instigated an on-going discourse on the “rights awakening” of the “new generation of migrant workers.” Since then, much has been written about these young workers, generally described as more pro-active and ready to stand up against their employers than the older and more subservient generation. Drawing from statistical findings from two factory-gate surveys in the metal mechanics and garment sectors in Shenzhen, this paper tests two hypotheses: (a) that workers of the younger generation are more cognizant of their legal rights than older workers; (b) that the younger generation wants to work fewer hours and to enjoy life more. We argue that this popular image of the younger generation of migrant workers is one-dimensional and reductive, as it focuses only on generational differences as an explanatory factor for worker activism, while ignoring other issues such as types of industries and payment systems. In this paper, we purport that these elements play important roles in shaping the attitude of this younger generation toward their work and rights.     

Imperialism and Asia: A brief introduction to the literature

Abstract

From 1910 (formally, de facto earlier) until 1945 Korea was under extremely harsh occupation by Japan. During this period, when every component of Korean culture was cruelly suppressed, Korean women suffered specific oppression. Very large numbers of Korean women were forcibly driven into prostitution, both in Korea itself and throughout the Japanese empire. Many were forced into prostitution for Japanese troops in appalling conditions, often in the front lines, and many were killed in the trenches. Within general Japanese sexism, there was a specificity to the attempt to degrade and exploit Korean women. Certain aspects of contemporary Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) official culture must be understood as attempts to combat the legacy of this colonial past. The emphasis on “purity”—for women—which is articulated by both men and women in the DPRK is justified officially by reference to both the Japanese colonial past and the contemporary degradation of women in South Korea, which is usually attributed mainly to US and Japanese influences, such as sex tourism.     

On Jon Halliday's Contribution to Understanding Japan

Abstract

The smashing of the Gang of Four and resurrection of Deng Xiaoping produced a sense of euphoria and gave rise to unrealistic expectations in many areas of Chinese life. In the economic realm, visionary planners drew up blueprints based upon resources that simply were not there. In the political realm, young men and women dared to act upon the conviction that the Gang's downfall would open the way to an overall democratization of Chinese politics.     

Politics and knowledge: An unorthodox history of modern China studies

Abstract

In the investigation of social phenomena — and the social organization of intellect is no exception — consideration of context is the crucial starting point for analysis. Professor Fairbank's comment on the CCAS Report, which he has duplicated for private circulation, and which is reprinted at his request in this journal, is not merely the expression of an intellectual position, but a political act.     

The Prisoner Dilemma: Britain,Germany, and the Repatriation of Indian Prisoners of War

Abstract

Between October 1914 and December 1915, nearly 135,000 Indian riflemen—known as sepoys—fought in the trenches of France and Belgium at the battles of Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy, Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres and Loos, suffering some 34,252 casualties. At a prisoner of war camp outside Berlin, Indian revolutionaries and emissaries from the Ottoman Empire attempted to convert the allegiances of the sepoys in their custody with a combination of pan-Islamic and nationalist appeals. Although this campaign ultimately failed, it profoundly shaped British repatriation policy at the end of the war when, cautioned Secretary of State for India Austen Chamberlain, the British could not allow men who had been exposed to ‘strongly hostile influences’ to return home unmonitored. The 1918 armistice and British repatriation policy therefore presented a host of new challenges to Britain’s colonial subjects from South Asia as they navigated the post-war imperial landscape and secured what was most important to them—safe transportation home.     

Appendix B: Koreans in Japan and the DPRK

Abstract

It is not often that an entire group of people change their minds on a foreign policy issue, at least within a short space of time. On Kampuchea, this did occur around 1978, when most of those who had previously sympathized with the Khmer Rouge declared their disillusionment. It meant admitting that there was much truth to the militant anti-communists' well-publicized case against the Khmer Rouge, who were indeed one of history's most brutal regimes. In the same period, however, as Michael Vickery has shown in “Democratic Kampuchea—CIA to the Rescue,” many of the same anti-communists suddenly dropped their opposition to the Khmer Rouge, whom they now saw as a useful opponent of Vietnamese communism.     

Barukoku bararage: A prayer for rain a play about Miyazawa Kenji by Hatayama Hiroshi

Abstract

Barukoku bararage—words created by Japanese agronomist, poet, and writer of tales, Miyazawa Kenji (1896—1933), this alliterative phrase dances across the tongue, playing the role of a mantra, bringing us closer to an understanding of Kenji's thought and its relevance to contemporary society. The play Barukoku bararage draws us into Kenji's mind and classroom as they are evoked by novelist and critic Hatayama Hiroshi (b. 1935).     

New light on the origins of the Vietnam-Kampuchea conflict

Abstract

“Don't make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.”

—Security regulation no. 8 for inmates at the Pol Pot regime's Tuol Sleng prison, Phnom Penh, 1977–8.     

Review: India's political economy

Abstract

Though this is an extremely important study from one of the most perceptive of U.S. scholars of India, it is not, despite its title, a study of India's “political economy.” That would require a much fuller analysis of Indian relations of production and their contradictions-including those of class, caste, gender, and nationality—within the framework of the world capitalist system. Instead, it is basically a detailed analysis of Indian government economic policy since independence, with a discussion of economic dilemmas and rural class-caste contradictions as a backdrop.