Bøger i Welten Sud- und Zentralasiens / Worlds of South and Inner Asia / Mondes de l'Asie du Sud et de l'Asie Centrale serien

This volume addresses new theoretical approaches in visual and memory studies that prompted to rethink of the photography of Russian Turkestan of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Attempts to relate the visual unknown documentations to postcolonial criticism also opened up new interpretive arenas, helping to decentralize the analysis of the history of photography. The aim of this volume is to interpret photography as a specific tool that reifies reality, subjectively frames it, and fits it into various political, ideological, commercial, scientific, and artistic contexts. Without reducing the entire argument to the binary of 'photography and power', the authors reveal the different modes of seeing that involve distinct cultural norms, social practices, power relations, levels of technology, and networks for circulating photography, and that determined the manner of its (re)use in constructing various images of Central Asia. The volume demonstrates that photography was the cornerstone of imperial media governance and discourse construction in colonial Turkestan of the tsarist and early Soviet periods. The various cases show the complex mechanisms by which images of Turkestan were created, remembered, or forgotten from the nineteenth until the twenty-first century. The book should appeal to scholars of the Russian Empire and Central Asia; of history of photography and visual culture; of memory studies. It should be appropriate for use in upper-level undergraduate courses, and even a broader public.

How does a writer discuss her creative process and her views on a writer's role in society? How do her comments on writing relate to her works? The Hindi writer Krishna Sobti (1925-2019) is known primarily as a novelist. However, she also extensively wrote about her views on the creative process, the figure of the writer, historical writing, and the position of writers within the public sphere. This study is the first to examine in detail the relationship between Sobti's views on poetics as exposed in her non-fictional texts and her own literary practice. The writer's self-representation is analysed through her use of metaphors to explain her creative process. Sobti's construction of the figure of the writer is then put in parallel with her idiosyncratic use of language as a representation of the heterogeneous voices of her characters and with her conception of literature as a space where time and memory can be "held." At the same time, by delving into Sobti's position in the debate around "women's writing" (especially through the creation of a male double, the failed writer Hashmat), and into her views on literature and politics, this book also reflects on the literary debates of the post-Independence Hindi literary sphere.

Dieser Band betrachtet die Verflechtung von Infrastruktur und Mobilitatstechnologien mit dem Alltag tibetischer Nomaden. Anhand von detailreichen ethnografischem Material beschreibt die Autorin, in welcher Weise Nomaden des tibetischen Hochlands mobile Technologien wie Motorrader, Autos und Mobiltelefone nutzen. Alltagspraktiken der Mobilkommunikation und der motorisierten Mobilitat fuhren zu einer Translokalitat, welche nomadische Akteure in Urbanisierungsprozesse Chinas implizieren, die seit der Jahrtausendwende auch Ost- und Nordosttibet verandern. Das Buch beleuchtet damit bislang kaum untersuchte Aspekte des Wandels in einer tibetischen Region und schlagt eine Brucke zu gesellschaftspolitischen Fragen der Urbanisierung und Technisierung der Gesellschaft. Eine fundierte Auseinandersetzung mit aktuellen theoretischen und methodischen Konzepten zu mobilen Technologien und Mobilitat macht das Buch uber die Asienwissenschaft hinaus auch fur die vergleichenden Sozial- u. Kommunikationswissenschaften interessant.

The volume analyses the encounter between Buddhist and Muslim communities in South and Central Asia during the medieval period. The articles by historians, epigraphists, philologists, art historians and archaeologists provoke a fresh look at relevant sources, focusing on the areas: deconstructing scholarship on Buddhist/Muslim interactions, cultural and religious exchanges, perceptions of the other, transmission of knowledge, trade and economics.