Frog Under a Coconut Shell

Frog Under a Coconut Shell
Author: Josephine Chia
Publisher:
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2002
Genre: Chinese
ISBN: 9789812323989

This book is based on the true story of the author, of how her own mother struggled for her right to educate her daughters despite her own parochial experience in a small kampong. This highly nostalgic and evocative book pays tribute to her mother's courageous journey from the bloom of youth to her affliction with Alzheimer's disease in old age.

Beyond Belief

Beyond Belief
Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Total Pages: 579
Release: 2018-08-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0307401456

Beyond Belief is a book about one of the more important and unsettling issues of our time: the effects of the Islamic conversion of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. It is not a book of opinion. It is - in the Naipaul way - a very rich and human book, full of people and stories. Islam is an Arab religion, and it makes imperial Arabizing demands on its converts. In this way it is more than a private faith, and it can become a neurosis. What has this Arab Islam done to the histories of these converted countries? How do the converted peoples, non-Arabs, view their past - and their future? In a follow-up to Among the Believers, his classic account of his travels through these countries, V. S. Naipaul returns after seventeen years to find out how and what the converted preach. In Indonesia he finds a pastoral people who have lost their history through a confluence of Islam and technology. In Iran he discovers a religious tyranny as oppressive as the secular one of the Shah, and he meets people weary of the religious rules that govern every aspect of their lives. Pakistan - in a tragic realization of a Muslim re-creation fantasy - inherited blood feuds, rotting palaces, antique cruelty; then President Zia installed religious terror with $100 million of Saudi money. In Malaysia, the Muslim Youth organization is alive and growing, and the people are mentally, physically, and geographically torn between two worlds, struggling to live the impossible dream of a true faith born out of a spiritual vacancy. A startling and revelatory addition to the Naipaul canon, Beyond Belief confirms the author's reputation as a masterly observer, a "finder-out" of stories, as well as a magnificent teller of them.

A Life Beyond Boundaries

A Life Beyond Boundaries
Author: Benedict Anderson
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2018-08-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 178663015X

An intellectual memoir by the author of the acclaimed Imagined Communities Born in China, Benedict Anderson spent his childhood in California and Ireland, was educated in England and finally found a home at Cornell University, where he immersed himself in the growing field of Southeast Asian studies. He was expelled from Suharto’s Indonesia after revealing the military to be behind the attempted coup of 1965, an event which prompted reprisals that killed up to a million communists and their supporters. Banned from the country for thirty-five years, he continued his research in Thailand and the Philippines, producing a very fine study of the Filipino novelist and patriot José Rizal in The Age of Globalization. In A Life Beyond Boundaries, Anderson recounts a life spent open to the world. Here he reveals the joys of learning languages, the importance of fieldwork, the pleasures of translation, the influence of the New Left on global thinking, the satisfactions of teaching, and a love of world literature. He discusses the ideas and inspirations behind his best-known work, Imagined Communities (1983), whose complexities changed the study of nationalism. Benedict Anderson died in Java in December 2015, soon after he had finished correcting the proofs of this book. The tributes that poured in from Asia alone suggest that his work will continue to inspire and stimulate minds young and old.

The Edge of Bali and Other Writings

The Edge of Bali and Other Writings
Author: Inez Baranay
Publisher: Transit Lounge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1921924381

Three people travel to Bali for very different reasons. Marla is well read in Bali’s culture; she distrusts false ideologies, orientalism and tourism. To her surprise she finds the echoes of a golden age and a passionate lover. Nelson, a young woman from Sydney returns in the hope of reuniting with her Balinese boyfriend, but encounters the unexpected. Tyler, a New Yorker searching for a lost friend, enters a world of mystery and intrigue. All three are on the edge, unsure of whether they should stay in Bali any longer, but are increasingly drawn into the heart of this complex and alluring island. Through subtle storytelling and compelling characters, Inez Baranay unravels the exotic, ways of knowing and the culture of tourism, in one of the world’s favourite destinations.

Life's Like That

Life's Like That
Author: Lydia Teh
Publisher: MPH Group Publishing Sdn Bhd
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre:
ISBN: 9674154663

In this collection of amusing meditations on Malaysian life and its complexities and contradictions, Lydia Teh dives into the depths of Malaysian life: family, pregnancies, babies, motherhood, hobbies, festivities, daily ablutions, pets and other calamities. Not only has she imbued her stories of homespun ordinariness and nostalgia with a luminous sheen, she also captures the essence of being Malaysian with wit and bracing honesty.

Melayu

Melayu
Author: Maznah Mohamad
Publisher: Flipside Digital Content Company Inc.
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9971697300

People within the Malay world hold strong but diverse opinions about the meaning of the word Melayu, which can be loosely translated as Malayness. Questions of whether the Filipinos are properly called "e;Malay"e;, or the Mon-Khmer speaking Orang Asli in Malaysia, can generate heated debates. So too can the question of whether it is appropriate to speak of a kebangsaan Melayu (Malay as nationality) as the basis of membership within an aspiring postcolonial nation-state, a political rather than a cultural community embracing all residents of the Malay states, including the immigrant Chinese and Indian population.In Melayu: The Politics, Poetics and Paradoxes of Malayness, the contributors examine the checkered, wavering and changeable understanding of the word Melayu by considering hitherto unexplored case studies dealing with use of the term in connection with origins, nations, minority-majority politics, Filipino Malays, Riau Malays, Orang Asli, Straits Chinese literature, women's veiling, vernacular television, social dissent, literary women, and modern Sufism. Taken as a whole, this volume offers a creative approach to the study of Malayness while providing new perspectives to the studies of identity formation and politics of ethnicity that have wider implications beyond the Southeast Asian region.