Content area
Full text
MARY ELIZABETH BERRY'S presidential address makes a powerful argument for the necessity of teaching about warfare without jingoism, without sentimentality, without creating the romance of the good soldier. As her address argues, the current American war in Iraq makes this kind of "truth telling about war" (to use Berry's phrase) an essential component of scholarship and teaching.
NAMHEE LEE looks at the role of the intellectual in the Korean labor movement of the 1980s, one of the most successful labor movements in recent history. She discusses the ways in which young intellectuals became factory workers, often under assumed identities. The article examines the tensions and contradictions inherent in intellectuals' roles in the labor movement and provides a clear case study of the complexities of the politics of representation.
TAMARA LOOS examines the relations between sex and politics from midnineteenth- to early twentieth-century Siam. She begins by looking at regulations which made it clear that a woman who has sexual relations with the king may have sexual relations with no other person, be that person female or male. She suggests that class (and role) is as important as gender or sex in conceptualizing appropriate sexual behavior.
EVELYN BLACKWOOD argues that despite surface similarities between ritual transvestites in early modern island Southeast Asia and contemporary lesbian and gay movements in Indonesia and elsewhere, the two phenomena are formed in radically different conceptions of the world. Intervening histories have made a difference: Islamicist and Dutch gender discourses transformed prevailing gender mythologies, creating fixed and deeply dichotomous gender distinctions between men and women that could not be legitimately bridged within the terms of these discourses.
MARTIN SOKEFELD examines the particular history of Gilgit in the Northern Areas of Pakistan as a means of exploring the ways in which colonial modes of dominance did not suddenly end with colonialism. He contrasts the Kashmiri and the British modes of domination and ends with a discussion of the complexities of Pakistani rule. He is interested in the processes of dominance, of resistance, of nation building, and of colonialism and the creation of postcolonial states.
I sent all the articles to all the authors and asked them to comment on resonances that they saw among the articles. Lee finds a concern with what...