Harvard University Press Blog

The Lecture: Bringing to India the Best and Brightest on Ideas and Issues That Matter

 

HarperCollins and Harvard University Press have a new collaboration– The Lecture, a series of talks by writers and thinkers from around the world brought to Indian audiences. 

  The inaugural lecture –‘Vivekananda, Guru to the World’– by Professor Ruth Harris will take place at Delhi’s iconic India Habitat Centre's Stein Auditorium, on Friday January 27, 2023, 7.00 p.m.  The lecture will be based on Professor Harris’s definitive biography of Vivekananda, the Indian monk who shaped the intellectual and spiritual history of both East and West. Professor Harris is Senior Research Fellow at All Soul’s College, University of Oxford; Fellow of the British Academy; and Professor of European History at the University of Oxford. 

In her book, published by Harvard University Press, Professor Harris offers an arresting biography, showing how Vivekananda’s thought spawned a global anticolonial movement and became a touchstone of Hindu nationalist politics a century after his death. The iconic monk emerges as a counterargument to Orientalist critiques, which interpret East–West interactions as primarily instances of Western borrowing. As Vivekananda demonstrates, we must not underestimate Eastern agency in the global circulation of ideas. 

  George Andreou, Director, Harvard University Press, remarked, ‘We are thrilled at the opportunity to bring Ruth Harris’s important book to a wider audience in India and to expand our critical partnership with HarperCollins.’ 

Speaking on the initiative, Ananth Padmanabhan, Chief Executive Officer, HarperCollins, said, ‘At HarperCollins we believe in the transformative power of words and as a publisher, through our books, we have endeavored to create a platform for ideas that spark conversations. We are delighted to partner with Harvard University Press, and begin this new series where we will host talks by some of the world’s brightest minds writing about people, ideas and issues that matter.’ 

Marking the 75th Anniversary of Independence from British Rule

August 14 and August 15 mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of independence from British rule for Pakistan and India, respectively. Inextricably linked to the birth of these two South Asian nations is the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent that tragically accompanied the end of British colonialism.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, described the moment of independence as a tryst with destiny. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance…” he said in his famous speech on August 15, 1947.

The world-renowned Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote in “Subh-e-Azadi” (“Dawn of Freedom”):

These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light —
This is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom,
we had set out in sheer longing.
(Translated from Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)

The volumes below illuminate the lives of individuals, the politics, and the literary traditions that shape the rich histories of both nations. They are in the spirit of Nehru’s midnight and Faiz’s dawn alike.

Pakistan

Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan
Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea
Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics
Ammara Maqsood, The New Pakistani Middle Class
Bullhe Shah, translated by Christopher Shackle, Sufi Lyrics: Selections from a World Classic

India

Manan Ahmed Asif, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India
Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire
Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence
William Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Andy Rotman, Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation
Edited by Ramachandra Guha, Makers of Modern India 
Ruth Harris, Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
Ramin Jahanbegloo, The Gandhian Moment
Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History
Madhav Khosla, India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy
Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India
Dinyar Patel, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism
Mircea Raianu, Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism
Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, The Essential Tagore
Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India
Steven I. Wilkinson, Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence

Celebrating University Press Week

In celebration of the tenth annual University Press Week, we are sharing the “famous last words” from ten of our most noteworthy books of the last ten years. This listicle represents the depth and breadth, not to mention the surprising variety, of titles we’ve published. Whether in the fields of philosophy, history, economics, art, education, or social science, the words of these authors are the final statement from their critically acclaimed works.

Sianne Ngai / Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) 

“By paying closer attention to the aesthetic categories that speak to the most significant objects and socially binding activities of late capitalist life—our affectively complicated relation to commodities, information, and performing, the ways in which we labor, exchange, and consume—one can at least make a start at closing the gulf between aesthetic theory and practice that began to open in the twentieth century, reenergizing the former by ensuring its continued relevance to the making, dissemination, and reception of culture in the present.”

Sunil S. Amrith / Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013)

“Oceanic history is itself a kind of cartography. By foregrounding the Bay of Bengal—linked by journeys, memories, and the sinews of power—we can see beyond the borders of today’s nation- states, beyond the borders imposed by imperial mapmakers and immigration officials, to a more fluid, more uncertain world: a world that resembles our own. As the furies of nature grow clamorous, the fortunes of migrants are ever fickle.”

Thomas Piketty / Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)

“To be sure, the principle of specialization is sound and surely makes it legitimate for some scholars to do research that does not depend on statistical series. There are a thousand and one ways to do social science, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.”

Pat Shipman / The Invaders (2015)

“We may be more successful at preserving biological diversity and truly wild places as we see more clearly the factors that diminish them. We may be able to envision more accurately humans’ place in nature, for the good of all. I think it is time we recognized ourselves for what we are: the invaders. If one day we can meet the enemy of the earth and he is not us, it will be a triumph. But a big change in our behavior must happen first.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen / Nothing Ever Dies (2016)

“I think back to my father’s father and what happened to his remains. The Vietnamese believe a person should be buried twice. The first time, in a field removed from home and village, the earth eats the flesh. The second time, the survivors must disinter what remains. If they have timed it correctly, there will only be bones. If they have timed it wrong, there will still be flesh. Regardless of what they find, they must wash the bones with their own hands. Then they bury the bones once more, this time closer to the living.”

Mehrsa Baradaran / The Color of Money (2017)

“Modernity will inevitably bring us closer together, which can lead to either greater resentment or greater cooperation. Perhaps more people will realize that what benefits a minority will also benefit the majority. Full racial integration will eventually remove pockets of blight, crime, and deprivation across the country. This will advance the entire American population. Integrated schools will improve education for all students, and increased equality will spur economic growth. We must shed the destructive myths that separate can equal, that a segregated economy will reach prosperity on its own, or that black banks can lead to black prosperity without fundamental economic changes. We cannot deflect the responsibility of economic equality onto black communities alone. W. E. B. Du Bois declared in 1948 that the problem of American democracy was that ‘we have not tried it.’ Perhaps it’s time to try.”

Donna Zuckerberg / Not All Dead White Men (2018)

“Feminists deserve a better internet. And future generations of readers deserve a better kind of discourse about the ancient world: one that is free of elitism and neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissive.”

 

 

Anthony Abraham Jack / The Privileged Poor (2019)

“My work at Midtown College and Renowned University provides strong evidence that the differences I have observed between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged has to do with their disparate precollege experiences rather than with differences between them before high school. This work points out the shortcomings of treating lower-income undergraduates as a homogenous group of at-risk students. Studies that do so cannot properly measure the effects of inequality and poverty on college experiences, and as a result, they lead to biased understandings of how class and culture reproduce inequality in college. I have documented large differences between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly disadvantaged, and both groups are represented in increasing numbers at elite colleges and universities. It is important for scholars to fully explore and document their experiences and recognize their distinctiveness.”

Nicole R. Fleetwood / Marking Time (2020)

“Smith and other artists whose work interrogates incarceration are involved in relational practices that put them in conversation, in connection, in community with Ojore Lutalo, the Fariton collective, Tyra Patterson, Deal Gillispe, Lisette Oblitas, Eddie Kates, Tameca Cole, fathers and mothers, siblings and cousins, friends and activists, and others held in captivity, excluded from civil society, public life, family structures. The works of these artists and activists extend radical imaginaries and relational practices beyond the regulatory and isolating structures of imprisonment to envision and help create a world without human caging.”

Marie Favereau / The Horde (2021)

“There was as much a Jochid way of empire as there was a Roman way, an Ottoman way, and a British way. When we think about the legacy of empires, we of course recognize the cosmopolitan effects of the Mediterranean, European, and Ottoman powers that made the world smaller through practices of tolerance, coercion, exploitation, protection, investment, and conquest. These empires are credited with driving global history. But nomads drove global history, too, and none more so than the people of the Horde.”

What would you add to the list? Visit our website to explore many more extraordinary books published by Harvard University Press over the last decade. Sign up to see what's around the corner. 

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Part II

In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’re showcasing titles that document the Asian American experience. Our second excerpt comes from Beth Lew-Williams’s prize-winning book The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, which historian Richard White describes as “a powerful argument about racial violence that could not be more timely.”

Monday night, Gong was asleep in his tent when the vigilantes returned without warning in the darkness. “So many shot fired it sounded all same [as] China New Year,” he told a coroner’s jury a few days later. As bullets blew holes through the workers’ tents, all was chaos. Gong ran for the forest, hunkered down at a safe distance, and watched as the tents burned. He returned to the camp to find the bodies of men he had labored beside only hours before. There was thirty-five-year-old Fung Wai, shot in the chest, and thirty-two-year-old Mong Goat, shot in the belly. Beside the bodies was a gravely wounded man, Yung Son. “Yung Son was shot through left arm, through both thighs and through ankle,” testified Gong. After Yung passed the next morning, the Chinese packed up their remaining possessions and took the road out of Squak Valley.

Gong stayed behind, minding the bodies of the three who died, bringing shell casings to the local sheriff as evidence, and serving as a witness in the coroner’s inquest and criminal trial. He had been defenseless against the mob, but now he could fight for retribution. In emotional testimony, Gong tried to convey the anguish of Yung’s death. He told the jury that “[Yung] was sorry to die. Got a son [at] home, too young, no one to send him money. [Yung] did not talk much, but hollered through the night.” Even in the courtroom, Gong proved powerless. He knew the men who had died, but nothing of the shooters. All he could say was, “Monday night white men come to kill Chinamen.” Who were these “white men”? Why did they kill the “Chinamen”? Gong did not know.

For the Chinese, this is how the violence began, with shock, fear, and lingering questions. Histories of violence, however, rarely start this way. It is difficult to begin the history of anti-Chinese violence with its victims because the story of racial violence is, inevitably, a narrative of action and reaction, perpetrator and prey. Searching for cause and effect, history favors stories of people who instigate events over those who suffer the aftermath. The Chinese make unnatural protagonists because they did not set these violent episodes in motion, nor did they hold the power to stop them. They also make problematic narrators because, like Gong, they often could not name their attackers or pinpoint their motivations.

Racial violence against the Chinese relied on the power of surprise. The Chinese did not know when threats would turn to violence, what form the violence would take, or when it would end. While vigilantes sometimes depended on bullets to rid their community of Chinese, they often expelled them through threats alone. To fully understand the potency of this psychological violence, we must start our exploration of racial violence with the Chinese, adopt their vulnerable state of ignorance, and attempt to understand what it means to live in terror.

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’re showcasing titles that document the Asian American experience. This week we have an excerpt from Duncan Ryūken Williams’s Los Angeles Times bestseller, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. George Takei called it “A must-read for anyone interested in the implacable quest for civil liberties, social and racial justice, religious freedom, and American belonging.”

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, FBI agents showed up at the Kimura family’s farmhouse to question her father. Nobuichi Kimura, Masumi’s father, was carrying a shotgun when he answered the door and, seeing the gun, the agents wrestled him to the floor. Minutes later, Masumi arrived home from school, only to find her father pinned down by one agent and another pointing a gun at her mother’s head. Her parents, who had immigrated from Wakayama Prefecture in Japan some years earlier, were trying in their broken English to explain the gun to the agents. Though terrified, Masumi’s English was better than that of her parents. She translated the agent’s questions to her father, who explained he had been preparing to shoot rabbits in the garden when they had arrived. Temporarily satisfied, the agents left. But in subsequent weeks they returned to the Kimura home to conduct further interrogations concerning Mr. Kimura’s leadership at the Buddhist association, which was seen as aligned too closely with Japan and potentially a threat to national security.

It was in this climate of growing suspicion and hostility that Masumi’s father decided to take steps to prove the family’s loyalty to America. One day shortly after that first FBI visit, Masumi was performing her daily chore of lighting the furnace next to their Japanese-style bathtub when her father entered the room. He was carrying items he had found throughout the house that had Japanese language inscriptions or “Made in Japan” written on them. Among them were Masumi’s precious Hinamatsuri dolls, which had been given to her on Girl’s Day. As tears rolled down her cheeks, she watched him throw the dolls and all the other Japanese artifacts into the fire.

Her father did not burn everything, however. He could not bring himself to destroy the bound edition of Buddhist sutras that had been handed down through generations of the family. Instead, he asked his wife to find boxes and some Japanese kimono cloth while he went outside and dug a hole behind their garage with a backhoe. After wrapping the Buddhist scriptures and the minutes of board meetings from the Madera Buddhist Association in the kimono cloth, he placed them in tin rice-cracker boxes, carefully lowered them into the hole, and covered them with dirt. By burying them next to the garage, he hoped to be able to find and recover them at some later date.

Shortly thereafter, in April 1942, the Kimuras were ordered to report to the Fresno Assembly Center, which had been set up at the local county fairgrounds. They ended up having to sell their farm to their neighbors for less than one-twentieth of its market value, and, after depositing a single suitcase of their most valued remaining possessions at the Fresno Buddhist Temple for safekeeping, they arrived at the center, where they were quartered in a horse stable designated Barrack E-17-2. They were however more fortunate than the majority of Japanese Americans. Instead of being transferred to one of the more permanent WRA incarceration camps, the Kimuras were among the handful of families approved to join work programs east of the military zone, so they ended up in Utah, where they worked as cheap farm labor for the duration of the war.

After the war ended, the Kimura family returned to Madera in the hopes that they would be able to buy their farm back and recover their home. But the new owners demanded a sum ten times greater than what the Kimuras had accepted for the farm three years earlier. They had also torn down the garage, making it impossible for the Kimuras to find the precious belongings they had buried near it. Their single suitcase of valuables, which had been stored away for safekeeping, had been lost as well when vandals ransacked the Fresno Buddhist Temple during the war. Unable to raise the money to buy back the farm, the Kimuras went to live with relatives in Los Angeles.

This story, told to me in the gardens of my advisor’s widow, has stayed with me over the years. Though just one among tens of thousands of stories of Japanese American Buddhist families during World War II, it encapsulates both the loss and the hope that made possible the birth of an American form of Buddhism. Though the Kimuras were willing to let go of their Japanese national identity by burning objects symbolically linked to Japan, the one thing they refused to erase was their Buddhist faith. Indeed, they ended up quite literally placing Buddhism into the soil of America for safekeeping. Like Senzaki and many others, their actions demonstrated their firm conviction that their adopted homeland would one day be a place where their faith could grow and flourish.

Q&A with Sarah Kovner, author of Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps

For the 75^th anniversary of V-J Day, we spoke with Sarah Kovner about her new book, Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps, which goes beyond the horrific accounts of captivity to actually explain why inmates were neglected and abused, and contributes to ongoing debates over POW treatment across myriad war zones, even to the present day.

Where were the Japanese POW camps and who were the POWs?

There were hundreds of POW camps, from Burma to Japan, from Manchuria to the South Pacific. Allied POWs came from what are now more than a dozen different countries, including Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, the U.S., and New Zealand. They included Indians, Filipinos, Chinese, and more rarely, Asian-Americans. And then there were Asian laborers, the treatment of which was appalling. 

If there was no “official” imperial government policy for running the camps, under what rules were the camps run?

Japan was a signatory to what we today think of as the first two Geneva Conventions, and they agreed to follow them mutatis mutandis, meaning depending on circumstances. Officially, two agencies were given responsibilities for Allied POWs: the Prisoner of War Information Bureau would gather and transmit information to the International Committee of the Red Cross, such as lists of POWs, and the Prisoner of War Management Office would run logistics and issue guidance to camp commanders. The same bureaucrat was put in charge of both. He was not in the chain of command, and he had few staff to carry out these responsibilities. He could merely advise the War Ministry and set guidelines. Most camps were under the control of field commanders, and run day-to-day by camp commandants. Many of these commandants were near or past retirement age, and the guards were chosen from those also deemed unfit for frontline duty.

Where and why did the Imperial Army use non-Japanese prison guards? Were any outsiders ever allowed in the camps to gauge prisoner treatment (e.g., the Red Cross)?

In 1941, what is now North and South Korea and Taiwan were part of the Japanese Empire. The Japanese Imperial Army used Korean and Taiwanese auxiliary employees to guard POWs. ICRC delegates were allowed into many POW camps in Japan, Korea, and China for inspection visits—visits closely supervised by members of the Japanese Imperial Army. But they were denied access to newly conquered territories, like the Philippines and Malaya.

 What would most surprise readers in this story of the POW camps?

First, some historians like to attribute Japan's treatment of POWs to Japanese culture, sometimes called “the way of the samurai.” In fact, the military's treatment of POWs had changed dramatically by the 1930s. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, Japan had been world-famous for its generous treatment of prisoners—they taught illiterate peasants how to read, and provided Russian officers with access to hot springs and even servants. 

Second, officials in Washington were initially unaware of the harsh treatment meted out to Allied POWs, but when they learned what was happening, they knew it was partly in retaliation for how the U.S. was treating Japanese American internees. Tokyo was very concerned about their fate, but cared little about Japanese POWs held by the Allies. Since negotiations were based on the principle of reciprocity, efforts to exchange internees broke down and the two sides instead exchanged recriminations and threats.

Third, more than half of all POW deaths came about because of friendly fire. The Allies bombed and torpedoed Japanese ships, despite knowing POWs were abroad.

Finally, many POWs endured violent treatment, but this was never a matter of policy. In fact, the Japanese Imperial Army carried out court-martials (gunpō kaigi) of some eighty guards who were accused of mistreating Allied captives. For many guards, on the other hand, using corporal punishment—such as slapping the face of a POW—seemed more charitable than a formal sanction, which could result in severe consequences.

Unlike the Germans, the Japanese have been accused of not fully coming to terms with the war. How do the Japanese today see the history of the POW camps?

That’s one reason why I got interested in this story—precisely because it is so seldom mentioned in Japan even while it looms large in Australian, British, and American memories of the war. While there have been some academic studies by Japanese scholars, the history of Allied POW camps is not a major focus of discussion. In a way it’s not surprising that national memories of the war experience center on their dead—especially civilians who were firebombed. When you do encounter the stories of guards, they are primarily in local histories. But if you interview them, as I have, you find that some of these guards feel that they too were victims. Korean and Taiwanese civilian employees say they had little choice but to serve. That’s why I titled my book Prisoners of the Empire, because I wanted to capture all sides of this epic history. 

Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy

Harvard’s Michael Sandel is an unusually prominent thinker in North America and Europe, but in China he’s a verifiable celebrity, inspiring what New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos describes as “near religious devotion.” On one recent trip, the border guard checking passports told Sandel that he was one of his heroes. Scalpers around the country make huge profits selling tickets to his talks. He is a regular on state television, and China Newsweek selected him as 2011’s “most influential foreign figure.”

Part of Sandel’s fame in China is surely due to the engaging style of his lectures, which rely heavily on interactions with the audience. Other factors include the rarity of public discussions of morality in China, where market reforms and exponential economic growth have left a “moral vacuum” in their wake, along with a thirst for alternatives to communist and market-based systems of thought. It’s also helpful that Sandel’s ideas, with their communitarian inflections, echo traditional Chinese teachings about private and public ethics.

Those echoes and connections are the focus of a new volume of essays on the ways in which the ideas that Sandel offers intersect with, resemble, and differ from Confucian and Daoist thought. Encountering China: Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy collects nearly a dozen original pieces from leading scholars who tease out how the affinities between Sandel’s work and the major Chinese traditions help audiences to confront questions of utmost significance in Chinese public life: What is the role of the individual to the family, and of the family to the community? What is the relationship between the virtue of a social institution and the virtue of those who lead it? What is the significance of individual liberty if the common good is based in shared values? How does one celebrate human diversity while cultivating a strong sense of community?

“China is now in search of a public philosophy beyond GDP,” Sandel writes in his reply to the volume’s contributors. “As in so much else, China’s success or failure in this quest will matter greatly for its own future and for the rest of the world.” Abiding by the pluralist conception of the common good which Sandel has always defended, the contributors to this collection provide access to and encourage participation in the spiritual and moral debates that have begun to permeate life in the world’s newest superpower.

This Friday, February 2nd, Sandel will mark the publication of Encountering China by joining Joseph C. W. Chan, Chaibong Hahm, Tatsuo Inoue, and Hongmei Qu for a roundtable discussion chaired by Elizabeth Perry, Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Organized by the Harvard-Yenching Institute and co-sponsored with the Asia Center, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Korea Institute, the event is open to the public and takes place at 3pm in the Tsai Auditorium at Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies.

“Genius Grants” for Sunil Amrith and Viet Thanh Nguyen

Among the twenty-four members of the 2017 class of MacArthur Fellows—recipients of the so-called “Genius Grant”—are two recent HUP authors: Sunil Amrith, whose Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants we published in 2013, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of 2016’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.

Here’s the MacArthur Foundation’s clip on Amrith, who was recognized for “illustrating the role of centuries of transnational migration in the present-day social and cultural dynamics of South and Southeast Asia”:

And their spot on Nguyen, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, and honored by MacArthur for “challenging popular depictions of the Vietnam War and exploring the myriad ways that war lives on for those it has displaced”:

Crossing the Bay of Bengal and Nothing Ever Dies are emblematic of concerns that’ve become central to our publishing program—migration, displacement, transnationalism, environmental history, climate change, and cultural memory, to name but a few aspects of these capacious works—and we’re thrilled to see this continued recognition for their authors. Congratulations to Amrith, Nguyen, and the rest of the 2017 class.

Liu Xiaobo and the Responsibility of Being Alive

The Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo died today, a few short weeks after the Chinese government revealed that he was suffering from cancer that had progressed beyond treatment during his political imprisonment. The course of his life was forever altered by the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, and, as Perry Link notes at NYR Daily, Liu felt haunted by the “lost souls” of Tiananmen, “the aggrieved ghosts of students and workers alike whose ages would forever be the same as on the night they died.” His widow Liu Xia reports that he dedicated his Nobel Prize to them in 2010, as he’d done in 2003 after receiving an award from the Chinese Democracy Education Foundation. In the following passage from his statement of thanks for that award, excerpted from No Enemies, No Hatred, a volume of Liu’s essays and poems edited by Link, Liu Xia, and Tienchi Martin-Liao, Liu Xiaobo declares his acceptance of the honor “in the names of the souls of the dead,” and speaks of the responsibility of the living.

-----

I receive this award today, May 31, 2003, only four days before the anniversary of that bloody morning in June fourteen years ago. I do not know whether my work has been worthy of the people who died and cannot claim to deserve this award. I can understand the honor only as a tribute to those who continue to speak the truth inside a system built on lies and as an offering to the souls of the dead, delivered through me, of memory that refuses to be erased.

I feel that those who perished that day are looking down on me from above. They look down on a person privileged still to be alive. They have been looking down for fourteen years now. I was a participant in the 1989 movement and observed how, in that dark night and early dawn, it was sliced by bayonets, pierced by bullets, and crushed by tanks. The glinting tips of the bayonets still stab in the recesses of my memory. As one of the survivors, I see before my eyes two things—the souls of those who died for a free China and the violence, the lies, and the bribery of the killers—and I am haunted by the grave responsibility of being still alive. I do my best to make every word from my pen a cry from the heart for the souls of the dead. I use my memory of their graves to combat the Chinese government’s pressure to erase memory; my searing desire to atone for having survived helps me resist the temptations to join the world of lies.

We may feel contempt for a regime that kills people and disgust when it lies to explain its killing, but we can feel only despair if a nation makes allowances for such a regime and forgets the people who were killed. How much more is this the case when the killings were on open display to the world and when the physical deaths of the victims have so well proven the moral deaths of the killers?

The crimes of the Communist dictatorship are many, and the victims whom we do not know about are far, far too numerous—both the souls of the dead from killings and the prisoners of conscience who remain behind bars. One way to compensate for their suffering is to be sure that we reflect upon it scrupulously in memory, and one of the moral preconditions of honest memory is that we utterly refuse the regime’s indoctrination and refuse as individuals to repeat its lies. We fortunate survivors, and anyone who lives outside the regime’s metal bars, must, each of us as an independent person, hold fast to memory of the victims and refuse to sell out to the material comforts that participation in the official lies can bring. To do anything less is to surrender the meaning of life, to sell one’s personal dignity, and to lose sight of what it means to be a human being. Nothing can substitute for individual responsibility.

Japan’s Popular Song Era

Since the 1980s, popular culture has been one of Japan’s most important and most visible exports, from video games and film to fashion and J-pop. But where did Japanese cool come from? What did it mean for Japan to have a “popular” culture? What was “Japanese culture” before the pop? And did popular just mean “Westernized?”

In Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents, historian Hiromu Nagahara faces all of these questions by tracing the rise of Japan’s pop music industry. As can often be the case with stories of mass culture, Nagahara’s exploration of how and why popular songs came to occupy a central position within twentieth-century Japanese cultural politics centers on concerns for hierarchy and democracy in the production, consumption, and critique of art, media, and culture. Indeed, the book demonstrates how the emergence of a highly capitalized culture industry threatened to upend existing hierarchies of culture and taste, provoking vigorous backlash from the political, cultural, and educational elites of Japan. In doing so, Tokyo Boogie-Woogie offers a new understanding of twentieth-century Japan by connecting the cultural history of mass entertainment with the social and political history of the transformation of the nation into a mass middle class society.

But don’t forget about the songs themselves. Here, courtesy of Nagahara, a playlist of tracks considered in Tokyo Boogie-Woogie:

And here’s a bit from the book:

Between the late 1920s and 1960s, an impressive array of musicians, intellectuals, government officials and other members of Japan’s cultural elite not only debated the merits, or lack thereof, of popular songs, but also made attempts at managing and countering the broader set of societal problems that were associated with the songs. This was true from the very outset of the genre’s emergence in the late 1920s. Produced by record companies that were largely funded by Western capital and disseminated through channels such as cinema, radio, and cafés, popular songs quickly came to be recognized as the audible symbols of what contemporaries called modan (modern)—a term that gained currency in the late 1920s as an adjective to denote all that was seen to be part of Japan’s mass-oriented, speed-driven urban modernity. As such, the popular song genre was immediately associated with contemporary trends such as the perceived Americanization and eroticization of Japanese culture—trends that found critics across the political spectrum and were captured by another, more sensational, contemporary phrase, ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense). In this way, numerous songs came to be identified, with varying degrees of plausibility, with countless contemporary cultural, social, and political phenomena, be it mass consumption, war time nationalism, occupation-era poverty, or—as is perhaps true even today—the allegedly ever-degenerating juvenile mores.