Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society

Until the recent rise of the People’s Republic of China as an economic superpower, the Asia-Pacific region has been marginalized as an economic and military appendage of postwar American national interest. This perspective has produced a prolonged indifference to the culture and politics of Asia-Pacific societies that has mediated and shaped their economies at least as much within their own context as in relation to U. S. hegemony. The consequence, in U. S. scholarship, has been the ghettoizing of Asia-Pacific societies and the trivializing of their everyday performances. Asia-Pacific intends to challenge this trend and to bring the Asia-Pacific region into the space of global politics and metropolitan intellectual studies. Its objective is to resituate the study of the region in the framework of newer interpretive strategies and to enable those who dare to question existing paradigms to create new intellectual habitats. Seeking out and encouraging studies that fuse politics and economics into the observation and analysis of broad cultural developments, the series hopes to bring about a generation of students and scholars who, in their lifetime, will live the reality of what many are calling the Asia-Pacific century.