Publication updates from APSI faculty (and our former postdoc)

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An edited volume of sixteen papers focused on Monsoon Asia has been accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press. Editor Prasenjit Duara's introduction situates the collection of essays within a paradigm foregrounding humanity's entanglement with the hydrosphere. Duara argues that while the terrestrial has long dominated humanist inquiry, the hydrological cycle fundamentally shapes human life, politics, and culture, and is now itself being reshaped by human activity through climate change, industrialization, and the Anthropocene. The volume, co-edited by Professor James Wescoat, focuses on Monsoon Asia, the world’s most populous and hydrologically dynamic region, which ranges from the Indian subcontinent to Japan. The Asian monsoon, Earth’s largest weather system, is both a connector and destabilizer—historically fostering maritime trade networks and civilizational exchange. The essays in the book explore the coupled human-natural systems relationships by considering the watery nature of human (and all) life and action from arid river basins to tropical coasts, and the ways local communities, states, and ecosystems negotiate water’s power. What do local or human historical and physiological contexts of the consumption and management of water tell us about the mutual relationship between the hydrological cycle and human activity? Where and when do these interactions and interventions contribute to planetary change? Responding to these questions, the contributing authors to this volume are historians, anthropologists, and geographers who study South, East and Southeast Asia. They include Ruth Mostern, Raorao Su, Christopher Coggins, David Gilmartin, Nadin Heé, Rohan D'Souza, Jonas Rüegg, Jerome Whitington, Clark Alejandrino, Sunil Amrith, Christopher Courtney, Martha Kaplan, Arunabh Ghosh, Matthew Kondolf, Chandana Anusha, and James Wescoat. The publication date is pending confirmation; the volume will likely be released in 2027.

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The cover for Professor Anna Storti's forthcoming book, Torn: Asian/white Life and the Intimacy of Violence has been unveiled. The book searches for the ordinary and obscured impressions of the US empire, theorizing the pervasiveness of its violence through the language and patterns of intimacy. Reading for the intimacy of violence, Storti compiles an inventory of quotidian, psychic, and affective tensions that arise within the bodies of empire’s historical subjects. She raises Asian/white life as the representative case study to examine a familiar narrative of inner strife—that being of two distinct racial histories is to be rendered a body in tension, torn between ancestral lineages. Rather than refute this stance, Storti tracks the duress of fragmentation as a sign of war’s permanent mark on racial and sexual subjection. Traversing an archive of aesthetic, literary, and cultural portrayals of Asian/white racial mixture, Storti observes how Asian Americans refuse, rework, or reify the logics of progress and disavowal that have long fueled the US war machine. Tending to tension, she argues for a sustained confrontation with empire’s ordinary life, a prerequisite for anti-imperial solidarity. Torn will be published by Duke University Press on March 31, 2026.

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An article by Jieun Cho, our 2023–2025 postdoctoral associate who is now an assistant professor at CUHK, was published in the latest edition of Anthropological Quarterly (Vol. 98, No. 3). Her article examines the enduring impact of temporary housing on mother-child evacuees from Fukushima following the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan. To manage the uncertainties of the radioactive fallout, many mothers “voluntarily” evacuated with their children from irradiated yet officially “safe” areas. Focusing on six evacuee mothers, this paper highlights how their efforts to rebuild an “ordinary life” are variously challenged by the administration of temporary housing. It analyzes how gender-specific harms are created by both pre-disaster gendering of the family and post-disaster dynamic of return-focused “hometown” recovery. It also highlights homemaking as a political act by demonstrating how the mothers contend with the dissonances of family-home while navigating prolonged displacement. What emerges here is a tension that signifies what Cho calls a politics of “home” in post-3.11 Japan. Ultimately, the study contributes to investigating the intersectional impact of emergency response, gendered precarity, and societal norms, calling for a critical engagement with “home” in disaster recovery, especially when uncertainty is the norm, as with a nuclear disaster.