This article attempts to explain the extraordinary popularity of Vietnamese composer and singer Trịnh Công Sơn. Although he attracted attention with love songs composed in the late 1950s, it was his antiwar songs, particularly those collected in Songs of Golden Skin (1966), that created the “Trịnh Công Sơn phenomenon.” Though these songs were banned by the Saigon government, they circulated widely in the South during the war. Though he was distrusted by the new Communist government after the war, Sơn continued to compose until his death in 2001, and his songs are still popular in Vietnam today. Some reasons for his popularity are offered, including the freshness of his early love songs, his evocation of Buddhist themes, his ability to express the mood of Southerners during the war, and a mixture of patience and persistence that enabled him to continue to compose in postwar Vietnam.

“Arirang” is known worldwide as the quintessential Korean folk song. Its iconic status in contemporary Korea derives from its perceived role in strengthening Korean resolve to resist the cultural violence of the Japanese colonial occupation (1905–45). A musical “skeleton” capable of countless improvised variations and interpretations, some “Arirangs” explicitly assailed the Japanese and thus were censored by colonial authorities. However, in the 1930s and 1940s, precisely the time when assimilationist pressures in colonial Korea were intensifying, Japanese songsmiths, singers, and recording companies released “Arirang” renditions in prodigious quantities, sometimes in collaboration with Korean performers. “Arirang” became the most familiar song in the Japanese empire: Its persistent theme of loss spoke to Koreans of their lost sovereignty and to Japanese of the ravaging effects of modernity on traditional lifeways. For both peoples, it served as a mirror for self-contemplation and an “ethnographic lens” for gazing upon the other.

This essay discusses changing images of island Southeast Asia and its Muslim populations in the modern Arabic press during the late colonial period. It commences by surveying the general informational letters sent to the largely pro-Ottoman papers of Beirut and Cairo during the 1890s by increasingly vocal local Arabs who were seeking to redress their situation as second-class colonial citizens. Thereafter, it considers the role played by Malays, Javanese, and other Southeast Asians in the globalizing Arabic media. In doing so, it demonstrates that although many Southeast Asians bought into and actively participated in the often Arabocentric program for Islamic reform in their homelands, they were by no means in agreement that their situations were any worse than those of other Muslims or that they could all be treated under one ethnic rubric.

The engagement of Balinese writers and intellectuals with the modern world began well before the final incorporation of the island into the Dutch colonial state in 1906–8. This essay analyzes three Balinese texts, each belonging to a different traditional Balinese literary genre, that were written around the beginning of the twentieth century. These texts, which deal with world events and geography, are Balinese reworkings of material from printed sources into indigenous forms of textual representation. They represent some of the earliest documented shifts toward modernity by indigenous Balinese writers and embody attempts to engage with modernity as a way of both understanding the West and coming to terms with new technologies. As examples of a localized translation of the foreign and the modern, they provide insights into how elite Balinese understandings of modernity were being constituted at the turn of the century.

Perhaps best known today as a pioneering scholar of Inner Asia and a victim of the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, Owen Lattimore was more basically, like his friend Arnold Toynbee, a major player in the vogue of comparative history that captured wide public attention in the second quarter of the twentieth century. His lifelong intellectual project was to develop a “scientific” model of the way human societies form, evolve, grow, decline, mutate, and interact with one another along “frontiers.” In the process of working out this model, Lattimore appropriated for his own purposes, and often later discarded, some of the analytic devices most popular in his day, including ecological determinism, biological racism, economic geography and location theory, and Marxist modes of production. At every stage in his thinking, he sought to confound complacent teleologies, both those of Western “progress” and those of Chinese “civilization” of its pastoralist neighbors.

Beginning in the late Ming period, China experienced a surge in the production and consumption of books. Printed pages bound into fascicles and housed in cases moved across space and through the social landscape. Their trajectories illuminate larger social, intellectual, economic, and cultural patterns. They also reveal identities under construction—by readers, writers, publishers, and consumers. This article assesses the expanding field of late imperial Chinese book history in the United States and Japan, with some reference to scholarship in China and Taiwan. It looks at the field's move away from its origins in the history of technology and its increasing engagement with social and cultural questions. In particular, the article highlights the field's focus on the “place” of publishing in late imperial China, construed both in terms of regional orientation and the social position of readers and producers of books.