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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
120842
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In 2011, after thirty-four years in power, the Communist Party of IndiaMarxist-led Left Front in West Bengal was voted out of power. The Left Front was the world's longest running communist government to be elected to office. The Left Front governed a population larger than most European, African, and Latin American democracies. This essay examines the rise and decline of the parliamentary communist movement in Bengal. The authors argue that the prominence of the communist movement can be traced to a social imaginaire and a notion of "social citizenship" that the (undivided) communists developed through their participation in grassroots-level workers, peasants, and refugee movements, and equally crucially, through hegemonic interventions in "culture" since the 1940s. This social imaginaire became the basis of a "commonsensical idiom" in Bengal through the political practice of the communists, parliamentary and otherwise. The decline of the parliamentary communist influence started when their core constituency of peasants and workers perceived them to be violating this basis of social citizenship in the wake of their adoption of neoliberal policies of development beginning in the 1990s. The regional noncommunist opposition in West Bengal in 2011 captured the imagination of the electorate by appropriating and translating this long developed notion of social citizenship against the Left government.
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| 2 |
ID:
120844
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores the narratives of Filipino medical workers on their encounters with other Asians during their migrant journeys to Singapore. Migrants speak of their encounters with regional cultural diversity and the everyday manifestations of regional political-economic power configurations and inequalities. The narratives show that beyond merely responding to state discourses on how migrants ought to represent the nation-state abroad, migrants attempt, on their own terms, to understand their place in Asia, and the world. Their journeys take place at a moment of social and demographic change as many Filipino medical workers travel across borders to care for aging populations in other Asian countries. The field of care raises complex moral dilemmas for Asians of different ethnic and national backgrounds, and this complicates any simple notion of Asian values. Moments of pan-Asian solidarity, in which friendships are cultivated across national boundaries, are often overridden by experiences of racial and cultural prejudice. Among diverse Asians in Singapore, divisive and hierarchical notions of first world and third world, modern and backward, caring and uncaring are prevalent in everyday judgments of others. Filipino migrants assert their global aspirations and their moral reflections on how to live and care for others; simultaneously they create distance from those who they believe do not share such aspirations and moral views. This article illuminates the transformations in migrant subjectivities as migrants experience and evaluate a range of cultural encounters as medical carers in the region.
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| 3 |
ID:
120845
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores the changing ways in which Australians and Vietnamese remember and memorialize their involvement in the Vietnam War and how these processes intersect with notions of reconciliation and historical justice in postwar contexts. It uses the Battle of Long Tan of August 1966 as an entrée into these considerations and questions whether heritage-making and memorialization processes can facilitate the achievement of reconciliation between parties formerly in conflict. Not surprisingly, the Australian and Vietnamese veterans of the battle and the two states, the Commonwealth of Australia and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, have different motivations for wanting to remember Long Tan. On the Australian side, a sense that reconciliation and atonement are needed is often reflected in official government and veterans' statements about the war and Australia-Vietnam relations, in the memorialization process at Long Tan and in the involvement of Australian veterans groups in local economic development and community building in Vietnam. On the Vietnamese side, where the Vietnam War played out as a civil as well as an international war, efforts by those who actively supported the former Republic of Vietnam based in Saigon and among the overseas Vietnamese (Viet kieu) to memorialize their engagement in the conflict have been frustrated. The usefulness of the notion of seeking historical justice is therefore questioned in post-civil war situations where people are locked into fixed histories and are unprepared or unable to revisit and retell personal and collective memories and histories.
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| 4 |
ID:
120846
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this essay-an earlier version of which was delivered as a lecture at a session cosponsored by Critical Asian Studies and the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (ASCK) at the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego, California, on 23 March 2013-the author argues the need to go beyond the current state of perilous confrontation and volatility on the Korean Peninsula and examine how and why the current division of the peninsula into North and South has evolved into a "division system." The author contends that "civic participation" (broadly defined to include business entrepreneurs, corporations, NGOs, and private citizens) is necessary to deal with the durable enormity of the division system. He calls this body of nonstate actors the "third party" (the first two parties being those of North and South Korea). Going beyond strictly Korean affairs, this third party, the author concludes, can play a crucial role in creating a larger framework of East Asian cooperation and solidary.
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| 5 |
ID:
120843
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the variable powers, positions, and legitimacy of informal authorities in Lombok, Indonesia, most notably tuan guru (Muslim clerics) and their affiliate pamswakarsa (vigilante forces). It argues that recent accounts of tuan guru as peacemakers downplay the complex structural factors that enable outbreaks of ethno-religious violence in the first place. By analyzing successive permutations of disorder, traceable back to the colonial era, this article helps locate and give context to the current policing and political dilemmas surrounding vigilantism in Indonesia. It then demonstrates how, in the era of decentralization, local and provincial authorities endeavor to domesticate pamswakarsa groups and their charismatic leaders. Finally, this article concludes that renewed spiritual expansionism, such as the renovation of Hindu temple sanctuaries in Lombok, elicits extreme responses from tuan guru. These responses provide renewed impetus for vigilante violence, strain interisland relations, and, at times, stifle economic development.
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