What is the place of realism in Asian art histories? What is the ‘real’? How do reality and realism relate and differ? The six essays in the present volume explore the manifestations of realism in Asian art, relating this art of description to issues of colonialism, world and civil wars, nation building, religion and contemporary culture in Asia.

This study evaluates how the ideology of Socialist Realism, developed by the Soviets in policies and the practices of art, has been influential in the Asia-Pacific region from 1917 until today. Focusing primarily on Russia, then China, Vietnam, Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia, this book demonstrates how each society adopted and adapted the Soviet example to make some of the most important imagery of recent history. Included is an examination of how the practice of Western art history, the nature of art history in Asia and the forces of the Cold War have led to this influence being inadequately acknowledged across Asia and more widely. The book will be relevant to those interested in art history, Asian studies, political history and cultural history.

This comprehensive 2002 book is an overview of security issues in the Asia-Pacific. It is also an argument for a strategy that promises to achieve greater regional stability. It argues that current approaches by policy-makers increase the likelihood of conflict. Instead, it proposes that a strategy of 'convergent security' be adopted to build a more enduring and peaceful regional security framework. A concise survey of key approaches to regional security politics, it presents a vast selection of empirical discussion, both historical and current. Assessing the outlook for the three powers most likely to vie for regional dominance - the United States, China and Japan - the book also reviews the prospects for other secondary powers, including Korea and Taiwan and analyses the role of Australia and the ASEAN nations of Southeast Asia. Unique, accessible, authoritative and broad-ranging survey designed for a wide body of analysts and students of contemporary Asian politics and strategy.

Realism for the Masses is an exploration of how the concept of realism entered mass culture, and from there, how it tried to remake “America.” The literary and artistic creations of American realism are generally associated with the late nineteenth century. But this book argues that the aesthetic actually saturated American culture in the 1930s and 1940s and that the Left social movements of the period were in no small part responsible. The book examines the prose of Carlos Bulosan and H. T. Tsiang; the photo essays of Margaret Bourke-White in Life magazine; the bestsellers of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell; the boxing narratives of Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren; and the Hollywood boxing film, radio soap operas, and the domestic dramas of Lillian Hellman and Shirley Graham, and more. These writers and artists infused realist aesthetics into American mass culture to an unprecedented degree and also built on a tradition of realism in order to inject influential definitions of “the people” into American popular entertainment. Central to this book is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent notions of pluralism. Significantly, Vials identifies three nascent pluralisms of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal pluralism of “We're the People” in The Grapes of Wrath; the racially inclusive pluralism of Vice President Henry Wallace's “The People's Century”; and the proto-Cold War pluralism of Henry Luce's “The American Century.”

The new, fully updated second edition of The New Global Politics of the Asia Pacific builds on its coherent framework for understanding the complex international and global politics of the Asia Pacific. The textbook provides an introductory guide for the main frameworks needed to understand the region (realism, liberalism, critical theory), which is reader-friendly while still offering sophisticated competing interpretations. Key content includes: the US in the Asia Pacific; China and Japan in the Asia Pacific; Southeast Asia in the Asia Pacific; India in the Asia Pacific; Russia in the Asia Pacific; Australia in the Asia Pacific; Europe in the Asia Pacific; globalization, regionalism and political economy; Asian values, democracy and human rights; transnational actors; region security order and the impact of terrorism on the region. A highly topical account, which provides an overview of the main actors, institutions and contemporary issues such as security, terrorism and transnational actors, the book is required reading for undergraduate students of Asian studies, international politics, and anyone interested in the region.

Michael Leifer, who died in 2001, was one of the leading scholars of Southeast Asian international relations. He was hugely influential through his extensive writings and his contacts with people in government and business in the region. In this book, many of Leifer’s students, colleagues and friends come together to explore the key themes of his work on Southeast Asia, including the notion of ‘order’, security, maritime law and foreign policy. The book concludes with an overall assessment of Leifer’s background, worldview and impact on his field. A scholarly and personal volume devoted to Leifer's vast contributions to the discipline of international relations, this text is a must-read for students and scholars specializing in the region.

Using a case study based approach, Weissmann analyses the post-Cold War East Asian security setting to demonstrate why there is a paradoxical inter-state peace. He points out processes that have been important for the creation of a continuing relative peace in East Asia, as well as conflict prevention and peacebuilding mechanisms.

After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act loosened discriminatory restrictions, people from Northeast Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and eventually China immigrated to the United States in large numbers. Highly skilled Asian immigrants flocked to professional-managerial occupations, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math. Asian American literature is now overwhelmingly defined by this generation’s children, who often struggled with parental and social expectations that they would pursue lucrative careers on their way to becoming writers. Christopher T. Fan offers a new way to understand Asian American fiction through the lens of the class and race formations that shaped its authors both in the United States and in Northeast Asia. In readings of writers including Ted Chiang, Chang-rae Lee, Ken Liu, Ling Ma, Ruth Ozeki, Kathy Wang, and Charles Yu, he examines how Asian American fiction maps the immigrant narrative of intergenerational conflict onto the “two cultures” conflict between the arts and sciences. Fan argues that the self-consciousness found in these writers’ works is a legacy of Japanese and American modernization projects that emphasized technical and scientific skills in service of rapid industrialization. He considers Asian American writers’ attraction to science fiction, the figure of the engineer and notions of the “postracial,” modernization theory and time travel, and what happens when the dream of a stable professional identity encounters the realities of deprofessionalization and proletarianization. Through a transnational and historical-materialist approach, this groundbreaking book illuminates what makes texts and authors “Asian American.”

This book contains the most comprehensive and critical account available of the evolution of The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) norms and the viability of the ASEAN way of conflict management.