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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Welcome to the Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA), a peer-reviewed publications program. GAIA is an initiative of the division of International and Area Studies, University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the University of California Press, the California Digital Library, and international research programs across the University of California system. Its aim is to represent the best traditions of regional studies, reconfigured through fresh global, transnational, and thematic perspectives. GAIA volumes are published in both open-access digital and print editions.

Cover page of No Alternative?

No Alternative?

(2013)

No Alternative? examines education in South Korea beyond daytime K-16 schooling—an escalating phenomenon in an increasingly neoliberal and globalizing society. Ethnographic portraits of private after-schooling, alternative schooling, home schooling, and adult distance education reveal that education producers and consumers often reject mainstream education while simultaneously seeking or embracing its symbolic value.

Cover page of A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918-1973

A Problem of Great Importance: Population, Race, and Power in the British Empire, 1918-1973

(2013)

This volume examines the significant role population science played in British colonial policy in the twentieth century as the imperial state attempted to control colonial populations using new agricultural and public health policies, private family planning initiatives, and by imposing limits over migration and settlement.A Problem of Great Importance traces British imperial efforts to engage metropolitan activists who could improve its knowledge of colonial demography and design programs to influence colonial population trends. While imperial population control failed to achieve its goals, British institutions and experts would be central to the development of postcolonial population programs. Researchers, scholars, and historians of British history will gain greater perspective into the effects of demography on imperial governance and colonial and postcolonial British views of their place in the world.

Cover page of Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China

Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China

(2013)

Gossip and anecdote may be “idle talk,” but they also serve to knit together individuals in society and to provide the materials through which literary culture and historical memory are constructed. This groundbreaking book provides a cultural history of gossip and anecdote in traditional China, beginning with the Han dynasty and ending with the Qing. The ten essays, along with the introduction and postface, address the verification, transmission, and interpretation of gossip and anecdote across literary and historical genres.Contributors: Sarah M. Allen, Beverly J. Bossler, Jack W. Chen, Ronald Egan, Dore J. Levy, Stephen Owen, Graham Sanders, David Schaberg, Anna M. Shields, Richard E. Strassberg, Xiaofei Tian

Cover page of Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited

Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited

(2013)

In 221 BCE the state of Qin vanquished its rivals and established the first empire on Chinese soil, starting a millennium-long imperial age in Chinese history. Hailed by some and maligned by many, Qin has long been an enigma. In this pathbreaking study, the authors integrate textual sources with newly available archeological and paleographic materials, providing a boldly novel picture of Qin’s cultural and political trajectory, its evolving institutions and its religion, its place in China’s history, and the reasons for its success and for its ultimate collapse.

Cover page of Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s

Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s

(2013)

This book examines the role of translation—the rendering of texts and ideas from one language to another, as both act and trope—in shaping attitudes toward nationalism and colonialism in Korean and Japanese intellectual discourse between the time of Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and the passing of the colonial generation in the mid-1960s. Drawing on Korean and Japanese texts ranging from critical essays to short stories produced in the colonial and postcolonial periods, it analyzes the ways in which Japanese colonial and Korean nationalist discourse pivoted on such concepts as language, literature, and culture.

Cover page of A Theory of Governance

A Theory of Governance

(2013)

This book explores philosophical, sociological, and democratic approaches to organization. Bevir offers a humanist and historicist perspective, arguing that people creatively make and remake organizations in particular contexts. By highlighting the meaningful and contingent nature of action, he reexamines the concepts of state, nation, network, and market, and he calls for democratic innovations.

Cover page of Pathological Bodies

Pathological Bodies

(2013)

This book explores the important connections between medicine and political culture that often have been overlooked. In response to the French revolution and British radicalism, political propagandists adopted a scientific vocabulary and medical images for their own purposes. New ideas about anatomy and pathology, sexuality and reproduction, cleanliness and contamination, and diet and drink migrated into politics in often startling ways, and to significant effect. These ideas were used to identify individuals as normal or pathological, and as “naturally” suitable or unsuitable for public life. This migration has had profound consequences for how we measure the bodies, practices and abilities of public figures and ourselves.

Cover page of The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art

The Role of Japan in Modern Chinese Art

(2013)

“This ambitious, very important project defines no less than a new field of inquiry, one that scarcely could have been attempted in the past. The essays in this volume add enormously to the documentation of what late-period Chinese art learned from Japan, and begin to formulate conclusions that will enrich future accounts of both Japanese and Chinese art.” James Cahill, University of California, Berkeley

The modern histories of China and Japan are inexorably intertwined. Their relationship is perhaps most obvious in the fields of political, economic, and military history, but it is no less true in cultural and art history. Yet the traffic in artistic practices and practitioners between China and Japan remains an understudied field. In this volume, an international group of scholars investigates Japan’s impact on Chinese art from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s. Individual essays address a range of perspectives, including the work of individual Chinese and Japanese painters, calligraphers, and sculptors, as well as artistic associations, international exhibitions, the collotype production or artwork, and the emergence of a modern canon.

Joshua A. Fogel is Canada Research Chair and a professor of history at York University, Toronto, and a specialist in the history of cultural and political ties between China and Japan in the modern era.

Contributors: Julia F. Andrews | Shana J. Brown | Chen Jie | Lisa Claypool | Walter B. Davis | Zaixin Hong | Yu-chih Lai | Tamaki Maeda | Kuiyi Shen | Richard Vinograd | Cheng-hua Wang | Aida Yuen Wong

New Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society, 3

Cover page of Institutionalizing Unsustainability: The Paradox of Global Climate Governance

Institutionalizing Unsustainability: The Paradox of Global Climate Governance

(2013)

“Presents a compelling and novel argument: that collective efforts to combat climate change have actually contributed to less sustainable modes of industrial growth. Much work has looked at the details of national and international climate change policy, but no one has addressed whether any of this effort is likely to make a real difference, and what the broader factors are that account for policy changes. . . . Will be attractive both for scholars of climate change and for policy makers.” Peter Haas, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Climate change is a global phenomenon that requires a global response, and yet climate change governance depends on the ability of individual states to respond to a long-term, uncertain threat. Although states are routinely criticized for their inability to respond to such threats, the problems that arise from their attempts to respond are frequently overlooked. Focusing on the experiences of India, Spain, and Australia, Hayley Stevenson shows how these countries have struggled to integrate global norms around climate change governance with their own deeply unsustainable domestic systems, leading to profoundly irrational ecological outcomes.

Hayley Stevenson is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sheffield.

Studies in Governance, 1

Cover page of Protesting America

Protesting America

(2012)

When the U.S.-Korea military alliance began to deteriorate in the 2000s, many commentators blamed "anti-Americanism" and nationalism, especially among younger South Koreans. Challenging these assumptions, this book argues that Korean activism around U.S. relations owes more to transformations in domestic politics, including the decentralization of government, the diversification and politics of civil society organizations, and the transnationalization of social movements.