SOUTHEAST ASIA'S COLD WAR: AN INTERPRETIVE HISTORY This timely book, published in 2018, corrects a significant imbalance in the historical literature on the Cold War that had long been dominated by American motivations and concerns, while confining Southeast Asian perspectives largely to the Indochina wars and Indonesia under Sukarno. In Southeast Asia’s Cold War, Ang Cheng Guan rectifies the one-sidedness by examining the international politics of the region from within. It provides an up-to-date narrative of the Cold War as it played out in Southeast Asia against a backdrop of superpower rivalry. In these excerpts, Ang demonstrates that when viewed through a Southeast Asian lens, the Cold War can be traced back to the interwar years and antagonisms between indigenous communists and their opponents, the colonial governments and their later successors.

This article revises and reframes the nearly thirty-year-old idea of the historian of China, Arif Dirlik, who explained that China had entered a period of “postsocialism” at the beginning of the rule of Deng Xiaoping, and that same era of “postsocialism” is still continuing. It presents a new conceptual framework for two reasons of historical accuracy. First, postsocialism began not with Deng, but it started when the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong translated and adapted Marxism to Chinese conditions and used it from the 1930s to the 1970s. The theory crossed over from the original Marxism and reappeared in hybrid Sinicized form. When Mao experimented with Chinese variants of socialism, the stage of postsocialism was—at once—reached because Mao’s policies became less and less like Marx, and fell into a postsocialist mould.

India is carrying out major infrastructure projects in Myanmar to facilitate both the Act East Policy and speedier development of the North East Region. Whether these projects will be catalyst for change or not depends entirely on the main players in this process. In order for such catalysts to emerge, the problem areas highlighted in this article must be resolved on the highest priority and the positive features improved upon further.

The concept of Karl Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production is central to the study of Asiatic societies. The core of the discussion on this concept has largely so far focussed on its economic technicalities. This article examines a new dimension within this concept to highlight its concern with China and how Chinese intellectuals viewed it in line with their revolutionary activities during the May Fourth Movement that started on May 4, 1919, and beyond. The term Asiatic is considered in positive light as it has brought Asia to an equal theoretical standing with Europe at the time of its introduction. Chinese intellectuals sought benefit in this term as one of the passages to self-examination, and thereby following revolutionary methods that were applicable within Chinese conditions.

This article traces the impetus for inter-cultural collaboration in dance and its impact on society in Canada. As several world dance forms converge in Canada’s multi-cultural society, the need for understanding the notion of inter-culturalism in artistic practice as a tool for understanding the ‘other’ is central. Understanding ‘interculturalism’ in dance has to be investigated through the lens of Canada’s official government policy of multi-culturalism which has formed the basis for working in and through different cultures. Embracing and accommodating diversity and ‘difference’ is one of the tenets of this policy and while this policy has promoted the celebration of a smorgasbord display of cultures, it has also unwittingly led to the ghettoisation of culturally specific artistic practises.