As diplomats across the world gathered in Paris in spring 1919 to discuss the peace process, observers asked “Whither India?” Critics wondered how the British government could enact emergency laws such as the Rowlatt Acts at the same time as it introduced the Government of India Act of 1919, which was intended to expand Indian involvement in governing the British dominions on the Indian subcontinent. Because Britain presented itself as a liberal form of empire on the international stage, its willingness to suspend rule of law over its subjects appeared contradictory. India's support of the Allied powers allowed Indian moderates to represent India in Paris; during the war, Indian subjects had contributed over one million soldiers and suffered influenza, plague, and famine. The possibility of a new relationship between those governing and those being governed led many Indians to demand an adherence to the rule of law, a guarantee of civil liberties, and the foundations of a government that was for and by the Indian people. In a time of revolution in Russia, and assassinations by anarchists in Italy and France, it seemed foolhardy to repress radicals by censoring the press, preventing the right of individuals to assemble, or detaining suspects before they had committed any crimes. Lala Lajpat Rai, an Indian political activist who had been part of the progressive wing of the Indian National Congress, wrote from the United States, “India is a part of the world and revolution is in the air all the world over. The effort to kill it by repression and suppression is futile, unwise, and stupid.”

During the Cold War, when South Korea was under a military dictatorship, the term “collaborator” (ch'inilp'a) often functioned as a kind of prohibition, indicating that a person or certain texts were not worthy of serious scholarly attention. Collaboration was also a politically taboo topic since many of the South Korean political and military elites, including President Park Chung Hee, were former collaborators. Criticism of collaborators could be seen as questioning the legitimacy of the regime. Though some important studies were published during this period, such as Im Chongguk's courageous Ch'inil munhaknon [On literature by collaborator writers] in 1966, it was not until after the victory of the democracy movement and the end of the Cold War that research on collaboration became active. During the past two decades, a variety of approaches to the issue have emerged. There have been, as one would expect, nationalist denunciations, but also attempts, influenced by cultural studies, to reconceptualize collaboration in ways that can produce new readings of their times. John Treat's article is an effort to contribute to this growing literature, and it offers an approach that has some similarities and important differences with recent studies on the topic. Similar to some of the work of younger South Korean scholars, he conceives of collaboration as “a structural feature of modernity” and situates the issue in a broader, more international context through his examination of texts by Jean-Paul Sartre and Henry James. Significantly, he also focuses on understanding the basic morality of collaboration. It is an attempt to return scholarly discussion to the basic question, one that has proven to be difficult and painful to face—why did Korean intellectuals collaborate with the Japanese empire?

Naiza Khan's The Manora Archive (2007–), the product of her long-term engagement with a small island in Karachi's harbor, is exemplary of both Pakistan's vibrant contemporary art and its burgeoning discourse of urban space. Dominated by a naval base and port rejuvenation project, nearly all of Manora's civilian population was bought out by investors in 2006 for a now-abandoned real estate development. Khan has recorded the island's abandoned architecture in photographs and video, documenting its descent into ruins. Her visual archive, which also includes drawings, prints, and paintings based on the photographs, presents Manora's ruins as metonymic of Karachi's colonial and postcolonial histories. This article makes two interlocking claims: first, that Khan's artistic work supplements scholarship on the relationship between violence and urban development by highlighting issues of temporality and bodily experience, and, second, that her work productively exploits the tension between the documentary mode and more traditional artistic media.

How do we think about migration? This question was the topic of the first installment of the 2019 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, given by the exiled Russian journalist Masha Gessen, at Harvard University. Gessen, who had reported on immigrants, began with a story of a Montenegro man whose family fled to the United States when he was five. Then they told a second story, then a third, followed by fifty-four more stories of individuals’ sorrows, despair, and dreams. Gessen's intent was to bring to life individual migrants, underscoring their diverse experiences. Individuality and complexity matter, because too often, people on the move are reduced to numbers in the news and in the eyes of governments.

I appreciate being here in this role, remembering those, including my teachers, who have stood here before me, and remembering the role of the AAS in providing the commonality from which all Asianists benefit, the freemasonry of shared learning. Most of us prefer to work individually as scholars, but none of us really works or writes alone. We are sustained by our links, in print and in person, with generations of fellow scholars. That vital nexus is greatly enhanced through our common enterprise in the Association, and we owe it and its dedicated staff a profound debt. This is our fortieth annual meeting, and we have much to celebrate: our sound organizational and financial position and—the object of all our collective efforts—a vigorous community of scholars of Asia.

In Derk Bodde's review of Lev Tolstoi i Vostok on page 363 of Vol. XXI, Number 3 (May, 1962), Lev was mistakenly altered twice to Leo; Lao Shih should also have been printed as Lao Shê. The Journal regrets both of these errors.