“Myanmar is telling Asia ‘we are coming back!’ This is the time. Watch out! We are coming back. After the SEA Games, we will host ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations]. Big things are happening in our country.” “Kyaw,” an amiable rig coordinator in his early thirties, was relaxing on the ground drinking beer with his wife, passing the time prior to Myanmar's opening men's football match of the 2013 Southeast Asian or SEA Games. Fifteen days later—after a glorious opening ceremony, a slew of gold medals, and a celebratory closing ceremony—his assessment seemed prescient. The government newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, boasted: “With the honor of hosting the Games that returned to the country after a 44-year long wait, Myanmar successfully hosted the biggest regional sporting event.” Thailand's Nation concurred: “The country failed to overhaul Thailand as overall winners, but its symbolic triumph as host was far more important.” “Myanmar has basked in its host status and a rare moment in the international limelight after years in isolation under military rule,” declared Agence France-Presse in a widely syndicated article. “Some local and international observers thought Myanmar could not host the SEA Games. They were wrong,” boasted triumphant presidential spokesman U Ye Htut.

That American academic publishers within a short time have put out three monographs this substantial on Lu Xun (1881–1936), often referred to as the founder of modern Chinese literature, is indicative of a new enthusiasm for Lu Xun in the United States and elsewhere in the West. In Japan, South Korea, and of course the People's Republic of China, the study of Lu Xun has been an academic enterprise of considerable standing for some time already. Not that American scholars have failed to make substantial contributions to Lu Xun studies in the past, but such contributions have been relatively far between. Fortunately, there is little overlap between these three exciting new studies.

The February 2014 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies opened with a section made up of two brief “Reflections” on partition—the traumatic South Asian developments of the late 1940s that accompanied the end of British rule over the subcontinent and led to the founding of India and Pakistan as separate nation-states. The first of this pair of short pieces was an introductory look at partition by Gerald James Larson, which I asked this prominent scholar of religion to write. I suggested that it take the form of an at-most lightly footnoted overview of the topic, which would provide basic information of a sort that would help nonspecialists understand the historical background of the partition and would serve to frame the main commentary to follow. That second piece, a meditation on memory and loss by historian Manan Ahmed Asif, was experimental in form for an academic article (a hallmark of the Journal's one-year-old “Reflections” genre) and accompanied by photographs. The trio of essays that follow here, titled “Further Reflections on Partition,” are part of a two-stage effort to respond to and carry forward discussion of issues raised in the earlier pieces. This sort of sequel to previously published work is unusual for the JAS, and is not something I expect to run with any regularity as editor, so some further remarks are in order.

By way of framing Manan Ahmed Asif's intriguing personal (and poetic) reflection entitled “Idol in the Archive” in this current issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, it must always be remembered that in August 1947, the old British Raj gave birth to not one but two independent nation-states, namely India and Pakistan. India became a “Sovereign Democratic Republic” when its Constitution came into effect on January 26, 1950, following adoption of its draft Constitution by its Constituent Assembly on November 26, 1949. Pakistan took a bit longer, becoming the “Islamic Republic of Pakistan” when its first Constitution came into effect on March 23, 1956. Furthermore, of course, Pakistan underwent secession of its Eastern Province with the founding of the “People's Republic of Bangladesh” in 1971. It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that partition is the defining event of modern independent India and Pakistan, and, more than that, continues to be the defining event of India and Pakistan even after more than fifty years of independence.

My left eyebrow has a scar. It is jagged, and usually the droop of the eyebrow hides it from view. I see it sometimes when I look in the mirror. When I see it, I am reminded instantly of my father. He was sitting, reading a newspaper, on the lawn of our Lahore house. It was near to 6:00 p.m.—late evening to dusk. I had recently conquered the art of biking and I was eager to show him how well I rode. I kept going past him on the bike, but he was engrossed in the paper. Finally I decided that to really get his attention, I would need to go really, really fast. I went a ways, and began to pedal furiously. Right as I gathered full speed and came up to him, I looked at him to see if he was watching me. He wasn't. That split second, however, was enough for me to lose control of the bike, which swerved radically to the left, and I went face-first into a column of bricks. He looked up as I stumbled up, my eye covered in blood. I have no memory of this, except for when I “see” my scar.

Let me begin with a conversation I had with the late David Wyatt of Cornell University, a prominent historian of Thailand and the 1993 president of the AAS, at one of the AAS meetings in Boston. I asked Professor Wyatt, what was the question about Thai history he got most often from Thai colleagues? His answer was:

1. 1) Was the execution of the king in 1782 by the founder of the current dynasty legitimate? If not, why did he do it?

2. 2) Was the death of another king in 1946 an accident, a suicide, or an assassination, and if it was the last one, who did it?

Lu Xun, a lifelong translator dedicated to introducing foreign thought, “searched for new voices from alien lands” to reinvigorate indigenous culture. Yet, his attitude toward cultural exchange was an ambivalent one. Among the questions that preoccupied him: How are foreign discourses, technologies, and knowledge appropriated and disseminated? Do they enable new frameworks for understanding the self and the world and forward an emancipatory agenda? Or legitimize systems of oppression? While Lu Xun's essays and short stories largely affirm the latter, “Mr. Fujino” imagines a paradigm of relationality that goes beyond the limits of nationalist and colonial discourse. The sentimental account mythologizing his friendship with his Japanese anatomy teacher—one that draws on Confucian notions of benevolence and reciprocity—and, in turn, the positive sentiments and cross-cultural encounters the story has generated, reflects, and in a certain sense, enacts, Lu Xun's more sanguine visions of the transformative possibilities of cultural exchange.

The house has stood empty since Partition. Its Muslim family abandoned their Bihari village in India for a new life in West Pakistan, 1,300 kilometers distant. Unlike most other homes left behind by emigrants, this one's doors still open to its owner's keys, since his brothers remained in their homes nearby. One of those brothers follows invitations across north India preaching the Tablighi Islamic revival. In conversation, he demonstrates little interest in the religious traditions of the Hindu majority of his large village. Two decades ago, his son, Farhad, opened one of the first private schools in the area, anticipating the surging demand for education that has overtaken India. Some of the first classrooms built had brick walls pierced by concrete screens decoratively depicting a Quran, crescent moon, and star. Most of the school's students and many of its teachers are Hindu.

Ai Weiwei is famous for crossing boundaries, especially the boundary between art and politics. To appreciate the often contradictory nature of Ai's work, this essay employs multiple narratives: “Ai the Heroic Warrior” who criticizes the Chinese government; “Ai the Court Jester” who plays with the Chinese state and Western media; and “Ai the Middleman” who acts as a broker between China and the West, between young and old people, and between civil society and the state in the PRC. The essay concludes that a fourth narrative can bring together these three stories in a multicoded understanding of Ai's work: “Ai the Citizen Intellectual” who sometimes works with the state, and at other times against it—but always for the good of China. By comparing Ai's work with that of other public intellectuals and placing it in the context of debates about civil society, the conclusion argues that “citizen intellectual” also tells us about a broader movement of activists and public intellectuals who are creating a new form of political space in postsocialist China.

Notwithstanding the considerable body of scholarship on South Asian history that has appeared over the past several decades, we still live with the image of a monolithic and alien Islam colliding with an equally monolithic Hinduism, construed as indigenous, and from the eleventh century on, politically suppressed. Such a cardboard-cutout caricature survives in much of India's tabloid media, as well as in textbooks informed by a revivalist, aggressively political strand of Hinduism, or “Hindutva.” Though useful for stoking primordial identities or mobilizing support for political agendas, this caricature thrives on a pervasive ignorance of South Asia's past. Removing such ignorance is precisely the endeavor to which academic institutions, and scholarship more generally, are properly committed.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of Islam for prewar Japanese pan-Asianists. Yet, by considering Islam solely as a political factor, this strand of scholarship has largely overlooked the religious dimension of Japanese pan-Asianism. The existence of six different complete translations of the Qur'ān into Japanese, however, amply bespeaks a genuinely religious interest in Islam, an impression that is corroborated by a look at the sociopolitical contexts of the translations and the biographical backgrounds of the translators. While explicitly anti-modern, anti-Western, and anti-Christian notions were at work in these broadly pan-Asianist Japanese appropriations of Islam, an analysis of the terminology used in the translations shows that, ironically, Christian precedents were not easily overcome.

Using tombstones as ethnographic sources, this article examines the introduction of writing into the field of death ritual in an Yi community in Yunnan Province, China. Most Tibeto-Burman-speaking peoples in Southwest China abandoned cremation in favor of burial in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following a loss of political autonomy and a massive influx of immigrants from the interior. Inscriptions on stones, erected over buried corpses, shifted textual agency from skilled readers to knowledgeable or powerful writers and created links between state authority and the bodies of the dead. Stones became replacements for corpses, doors to the underworld, narratives of lives, and textual diagrams of kinship relations. Yi used stones to create new ways of conceptualizing and reaffirming social relations among living descendants. And they made much of the connection of writing with state authority, inserting their dead into the national time of revolution as the state's beneficiaries or victims.

Partition, unquestionably a pivotal event of the South Asian twentieth century, has become a subject of great significance in its own right.1 Studies of partition began with a profound reexamination of why it happened;2 they gathered momentum as scholars looked at the provincial and local roots of the drive to divide India;3 and the subject took a big step forward when oral histories revealed how women and men experienced the traumas of its bloody upheavals, the violence of “the burning plains of the Punjab” becoming a metaphor for partition itself.4

Late eighteenth-century East Asia witnessed similar events with the Qianlong emperor's (r. 1736–96) literary inquisition in China, King Chŏngjo's (r. 1776–1800) fight against heterodoxy in Korea, and Matsudaira Sadanobu's (1759–1829) Ban on Heterodoxy (Igaku no kin, 1790) in Japan. As is well known, Qianlong sought to destroy anti-Manchu writings, whereas Matsudaira sought to impose order by mandating the neo-Confucian orthodoxy of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) in elite education. Chŏngjo's activities are less understood, but equally significant. His own literary inquisition developed around threats Catholicism posed to the centrality of neo-Confucian orthodoxy, but it encompassed wider concerns over heterodox books imported from Qing China (1644–1911). What Matsudaira desired, Chŏngjo took for granted as defining Chosŏn (1392–1910) Korea's historic claim to guard civilization, and his fears over the threats of barbarism intensified as Catholicism and other forms of heterodoxy arrived via Qing China. This study examines Chŏngjo's response to those threats.

William Callahan's conceptualization of Ai Weiwei as a “citizen intellectual” is the latest in a long-standing cottage industry seeking to make sense of and define China's intellectuals. Frederic Wakeman Jr. in 1972 offered “a typology of intellectual species” for Chinese thinkers and writers in late imperial China: statesman, administrator, ethical idealist, aesthete, and emirite or recluse (Wakeman 1972, 35). Hao Zhidong applies a Weberian lens on twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals to identify nested categories of: professional, cultural, and (smallest of all) critical intellectuals (Hao 2003, 393). Tani Barlow traces the identity of China's thinkers and writers from “intellectual class” in 1905 to “enlightened scholars” in the 1920s to “intellectual” (zhishifenzi) ever since. Barlow identifies a tension between the social power of these knowledge specialists and their dangerous dance with the state in which they succumbed under both Nationalist and Communist regimes to a service role to power, a “category of the state” (Barlow 1991, 216). Merle Goldman has focused on critical intellectuals under the Chinese Communist Party, what most people think of as critics and dissidents. Carol Hamrin and I sought to go beyond Goldman's focus on dissidents to study “establishment intellectuals” by looking at “the motives and means for collaboration, as well as the sources of tension and conflict between leading intellectuals and the top Communist Party leadership” (Hamrin and Cheek 1986, 3). “Establishment intellectual” proved a useful category for opening up our understanding of intellectual participation at the elite level under Mao and during the 1980s. The 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and the June 4th massacre and crackdown changed everything. Merle Goldman usefully picked up on these changes by identifying the rise of “disestablished intellectuals” in the post-Tiananmen period, particularly intellectuals who had been active in the reformist administration of the CCP in the 1980s associated with disgraced General Secretary Hu Yaobang (Goldman 2007, 15ff, 86ff). These fallen establishment intellectuals populated the academic posts, publishing ventures, and new business opportunities that exploded after Deng Xiaoping's famous certification of economic reform in his 1992 “Southern Tour.”

The expeditions of foreign explorers and archaeologists along China's borderlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long been a lightning rod for debates over cultural sovereignty, imperialism, and nationalism. This study attempts to move beyond such cultural and moral glosses by placing the expeditions of Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin to the northwestern province of Xinjiang back into the domestic geopolitical context of the Nanjing Decade (1927–37). Newly available archival material demonstrates how the discourse of cultural sovereignty, far from sabotaging such expeditions, instead became the handmaiden of domestic geopolitical competitors who attempted to turn Stein and Hedin into exploitable resources for their own agendas. The logistical pragmatism revealed in these sources relegates principled nationalist intellectuals and their imperialist targets to the background, and shows how a new approach to a familiar topic can help paint a fuller portrait of some of the most contested episodes of transnational cultural interactions throughout Eurasia.