Asian History Research Articles

최근 나당전쟁사 연구의 주요 쟁점

Regarding the start and end of the Silla-Tang War, which occurred in the late 7th century due to the conflict over the postwar process after the fall of Goguryeo and Baekje, the descriptions of Chinese and Korean historical materials are sharply divergent, claiming that each country won the victory. Accordingly, the perspectives of domestic and foreign academic researchers are also sharply divided depending on how they accept and interpret these historical records. In particular, the main issues in the academic world that have been going on so far can be summarized as follows. First, it was a issues related to the timing of the start of the Silla-Tang War and the investigation of its cause. Second, it was a issues related to the location of major battlegrounds such as Maesoseong and the consequent understanding of the development of the war. Third, there was a issues related to the confrontation between the ‘Victory of Silla theory’ and the ‘Tang’s abandoning the Korean peninsula theory’ related to the process of ending the war. And there were also issues related to the discourse on the historical significance of the 'The Unification of Silla' or ‘The establishment of the South and North dynasties'.
 Looking at the previous discussions related to these Silla-Tang war history, the aspect of the completion stage of the so-called 'The Silla’s unification of the three kingdoms' or 'The establishment of the North and South dynasties' was mainly highlighted from the perspective of Korean history. However, in terms of East Asian history or world history, the aspect of the foreign policy of the Tang Empire was mainly highlighted. Therefore, naturally, there was a strong tendency for the absolute majority to constantly converge only on the beginning and end of the war, and various interpretations and discourses surrounding it, and revolve around it.
 As such, the following aspects need to be further considered for the development of research achievements in the field in the future. First, it is necessary to find new historical concepts or terms that can cover the reality of the 7th century’s international war and its long-term aftermath, including the Silla-Tang War, from the perspective of complementing internal and external factors by replacing simple dichotomy. Second, it is necessary to expand interest not only in Tang and Silla, the parties to the war, but also in other tribes and groups, such as the Malgal, Khitan, other northern nomadic forces, and the refugees of Goguryeo and Baekje, who directly or indirectly participated in the war. Third, it is necessary to understand the various internal contexts such as the political structure of each party to the war, such as Tang or Silla, or the changes in institutions, society, and culture, and the periodic influence of the Silla-Tang War more closely.

Through the Sands of Time: A Historical Exploration in The Glass Palace

Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is widely regarded as one of the essential historical novels of the last century. This paper explores the importance of The Glass Palace as a historical novel and why it remains relevant today. The novel allows readers to see imperialism’s devastating effects on individual lives and communities. It captures the cultural and psychological tensions of colonialism in one of the central locations it affected, Burma. Furthermore, The Glass Palace’s significance as a historical novel stem from its detailed portrayal of the social, economic, and political situation of the time. By presenting historical events in an entertaining, engaging way or with fictional characters, Ghosh makes his reader cull information from one of the more enthralling telling of Asian history.

HISTORY AND MEMORY OF THE PARTITION OF THE PUNJAB: A CASE STUDY OF THE DISTRICT RAWALPINDI

This paper is an attempt to investigate the violence and the communal riots followed by the division of India, especially partition of the Punjab. The violence that occurred in Punjab during the division of India (1947) is a tragic episode of South Asian history. Almost seven decades have gone since the partition of the Punjab. At the time of the partition, Rawalpindi, Ambala, Multan, Lahore, and Jullundur had the Muslim majority It was the Rawalpindi wherefrom the riots were begun compare to whole Punjab. In the district of Rawalpindi, riots and violence were sparked by three main factors;1945–1946 elections, Direct Action Day, and Khizar Hayat's resignation. More than two thousand people were killed by mob and major affected areas of Rawalpindi were Kalyan Das Mandar, Raja Bazaar, Mai Veero Di Banni, Lal Kurti, Murree Road, Ghaznavi Road, Taxila, Thoha Khalsa, Chaklala, and Kartarpura. Though the episode of the division and violence caused the hatred among the three major communities of the Punjab (the Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus), unfortunately, the people who were the witness of violence in Rawalpindi are dying, therefore, this paper is an attempt to preserve some migration stories. Keywords: Punjab, violence, riots, partition, 1947 migration.

‘To defend the peace of Asia’: the Chinese Peace Committee and visions of Asian history, 1949–60

ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars have made strides in furthering our understanding of how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) engaged countries in the so-called ‘Third World’. Despite this, little has been said about the ways in which this solidarity was grounded in a shared, regional temporality. Focusing on the activities of the Chinese Peace Committee in the 1950s, this article uses the organisation’s various invocations of sharing an ‘Asian’ history with Japanese and Indian interlocutors to understand how the PRC positioned itself as a leader in the fight to preserve a decolonised Asia in the early Cold War.

Gifts from Amin: Ugandan Asian refugees in Canada, By ShezanMuhammedi, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. 2022. pp. 288. $27.95 (paperback). ISBN: 978‐0887552830

Gifts from Amin: Ugandan Asian refugees in Canada is a poignant exploration of the pluralities of identity in a global world. Shezan Muhammedi traces the history of Asians living in Uganda, their place in Ugandan history, and their subsequent expulsion under the order of President Idi Amin. From his interviews with Ugandan Asian refugees who resettled in Canada, Muhammedi blends together intimate personal narratives with their broader historical contexts. Gifts from Amin provides a model of an alternative historical record, one which demonstrates that people are not powerless recipients of history, but active participants in the construction of their worlds. South Asians had a steady presence in East African society for centuries, primarily through participation in Indian Ocean trade networks. However, under British colonial rule during the 19th century, Asian populations in East Africa increased significantly—as merchants, indentured labourers, or government officials. The British colonial system stratified Ugandan society, favouring Asians over Africans, placing Asians in the center of the “colonial sandwich” (p. 22). This strategy used social divisions as protection against unified resistance between Africans and Asians to colonial rule. After Ugandan independence, Asians were forced to decide between retaining British or Ugandan citizenship, but could not have both. Logistical barriers to acquiring Ugandan citizenship were part of a project by the Ugandan government to portray Asians as outsiders, oppressors, and colonial collaborators. The culmination of this project was the expulsion order issued by Idi Amin in August of 1972, ordering all Asians to leave Uganda within 90 days. The Canadian government agreed to assist Britain in the resettlement of Ugandan Asian expellees. Muhammedi argues that the government's motivation for resettlement was a mix of humanitarianism and national benefit. The idea was that “these people are not destitute refugees, they are the most desirable type of immigrants” (p. 78) for a multicultural Canadian society. By the end of the 90-day expulsion period, 4,624 Ugandan Asians resettled in Canada. Muhammedi also illustrates the ways that identity formation is fluid through the narratives of Ugandan Asian “refugees” (a term Muhammedi chose because all 49 oral history participants self-identified as refugees). While in Uganda, Asians retained their cultural, ethnic, or religious identities. However, many Asians also identified as Ugandan, especially those who had been born and raised in East Africa. After the expulsion order, Ugandan Asians had to learn how to enmesh within the Canadian social fabric. The complexities of social identity are particularly evident among second-generation Ugandan Asians who had been born and raised in Canada. It is a project of forming your own personal identity while existing within a system of contradictory classifications. As one oral history participant aptly says, “I am a Canadian, a Ugandan, an African, an Indian and a Goan. You don't have to choose … I embrace all of them. They are all a part of [my] psyche” (p. 204). Gifts from Amin also shows us the ways in which colonial racial stratification was both reified and challenged by Asians in Uganda. Some used their proximity to the colonizer to gain access to wealth and resources, exploiting Ugandan Africans in the process. However, Muhammedi shows how many others were simply trying to exist under conditions of limited mobility. The process of immigration into Canada also required another kind of stratification, not just for Ugandan Asians expellees, but for all who enter through contemporary immigration policies. The Canadian state uses metrics, ones less explicit than race—points, refugee status, country of origin, etc. While not an identical comparison, the discursive similarities are still important to recognize. Systems to organize people also serve to divide them. Gifts from Amin narrates the impacts of manufacturing otherness across Uganda and Canada, and their long-standing and far-reaching implications. Gifts from Amin sheds light on how history is something that is experienced both personally and politically. The use of oral history is the most moving part of the book. It is a history of a community, a history of a country, and a history of our modern world. With migration as one of the pressing issues of the day, Gifts from Amin asks us both who is the migrant and what is a nation. But most importantly, it asks us to hold the complexities of how these two ideas fit together. Just maybe, they can be more than we ever imagined.

Iberian Sources on the Imjin War: The Relação do fim e remate que teve a guerra da Corea (1599)

Abstract Combining Iberian and East Asian primary source documents can provide a fresh perspective on sixteenth-century East Asian history. This is particularly true of the Imjin War (1592–98), the largest war in the world during the sixteenth century. Involving China, Korea, and Japan, it attracted close observation from Jesuit missionaries, who wrote a number of as yet largely unstudied accounts of the conflict and its implications for the Jesuit mission. We analyze one such manuscript, which is particularly detailed and unique in its scope: the Relação do fim e remate que teve a guerra da Corea, cross-referenced with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean accounts.

한국고대사 연구에서 동아시아론과 동부유라시아

Under the Cold War system, studies were conducted that positioned Korea in Asia, and the United States constructed an ancient East Asian world centered on China in the framework of tributary relations(조공). Korean researchers created new concepts such as tribute-investiture relations(조공·책봉) with a critical mindset to solve the problem of China-centrism. The collapse of the Cold War generated interest in new historical worlds, leading to a review of marine history, maritime history, and East Asian history.
 The pluralism and multilayeredness of “Korea” will be discussed, along with broader regional theories such as East Eurasia(동부유라시아). At that time, the discourse of the region created through the nation-state, such as the Korean narrative, becomes an issue to be kept in mind. Therefore, an analysis of multilayered narratives in space and time is necessary.

‘East Punjab must not lag behind’: Partition, museums, and identity in independent India

AbstractThis article foregrounds the postcolonial museum as a new source, and site, from which to write South Asian histories of partition and its aftermath. It focuses on collecting practices in India within East Punjab, following the partition of the British-era Punjab province in 1947 between India and Pakistan. Tapping hitherto-unused archival sources, it reveals the considerable financial investment and drive to collect at this time, belying the idea of museums being ‘dead’ colonial assets, and demonstrates their centrality to how citizenship and belonging were articulated (or withheld) in independent India. Some discoveries have far-reaching implications for both historians and museum professionals. The article also shines a light upon a new range of actors—both named and nameless, professional and citizen—who have been marginal to historical enquiry thus far. Moving beyond the familiar colonial templates within which museums in the region have until now been studied, it asks critical questions of thepostcolonialmuseum in South Asia by interrogating the relationship between collections, and the Indian nation-state and its subsidiaries.

Perilous Pacific: Thanatic Archive and Vietnamese Refugees

While deadly scenes of air raids and land battles have dominated the historical archive of the war in Vietnam, commonly assumed to last from 1955 to 1975, not much systematic attention has been paid to the thanatic aspects of refugees’ oceanic exodus, which can help revise the temporal and spatial frames of the Asian conflict. As an attempt to address this critical lacuna, this essay examines fatalities at sea in refugee narratives pertaining to what some Americans designate the Vietnam War or what some Vietnamese call the American War. Specifically, through a comparative exegesis of two English short stories by Nam Le and Viet Thanh Nguyen, namely “The Boat” and “Black-Eyed Women,” this essay illustrates how both Vietnamese refugee authors construe the Pacific Ocean as a lethal material space–time traversed by Vietnamese boat people. If Le’s story rhetorically enlivens the ocean in order to accentuate its mortal impacts on refugees during their voyage, Nguyen’s story stylistically revitalizes the ocean as a spectral force that continues to unsettle resettled refugees. Taken together, this essay argues for the centrality of the perilous Pacific in constituting an alternative archive of the Vietnam crisis that recognizes departed and disavowed refugees as historical agents. In so doing, it contends that an oceanic view of the Vietnamese warfare is key to enacting postcolonial critiques of both imperial (American) and national (Vietnamese) regimes of exclusion. By demonstrating how Vietnamese refugee writers thematically and formally animate treacherous oceanic routes of escape, this essay redirects critical attention to the hitherto neglected maritime spaces as conflict spaces. This literary rearticulation of the sea as thanatic history allows us to supplement both aerial and terrestrial modes of knowing the debacle in Vietnam, as it radically expands the temporality and spatiality of the tragic episode in Asian history.

Strands of Modernization: The Circulation of Technology and Business Practices in East Asia, 1850–1920 ed. by David B. Sicilia and David G. Wittner

Reviewed by: Strands of Modernization: The Circulation of Technology and Business Practices in East Asia, 1850–1920 ed. by David B. Sicilia and David G. Wittner Mila Davids (bio) Strands of Modernization: The Circulation of Technology and Business Practices in East Asia, 1850–1920 Edited by David B. Sicilia and David G. Wittner. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. Pp. 208. This collection of essays aims to highlight the circulation of technology and business practices within East Asia and the central role that Japan played in this process in the 1850–1920 period. Hybridization in the transfer of technology and business methods is a recurring theme in several chapters, with an important role for the agency of local actors. In doing so, the book contributes to the increasing number of studies [End Page 641] that consider the regions beyond the West not only as passive recipients of "advanced" Western technology but also pay attention to their active role as customizers, initiators, and also intraregional sharers. In the general introduction, the reader is introduced to the late nineteenth-century Japanese, Chinese, and Korean context by financial historians David Sicilia and David Wittner, who specialize in East Asian history. As they and many of their likely readers work largely outside the circle of historians of technology, they extensively explain the broad view of technology with which readers of this journal are quite familiar. Although modernization is central to the volume's title, the concept is not discussed extensively or problematized. An exception is the chapter by William Steele, in which he nuances the dominant narrative of Asian modernization as Westernization. The development of the rickshaw in Japan and its spread across Asia illustrate how local initiatives also contributed to modernization, underscoring the idea that modernity and modernization are neither uniform nor monolithic processes. The discussion about modernization in Asia as cited by Steele, however, does not resonate as such in the introduction. It is not connected with the active role of actors in Asia itself. The editors clearly use the concept to refer to the desire of governments to acquire Western technologies, practices, institutions, ideas, attitudes, etc. Wittner—who also published about the Tomioka Silk Filature and the Osaka Cotton Spinning Mill in T&C's April 2022 volume—illustrates how technology transfer in the Meiji period was largely determined by the wish to "modernize" and how the symbolic value of selected and imported technology was of greater importance than its contribution to technological and business functioning. For the Meiji government, the Tomioka silk mill was first and foremost a showcase of "modernity." The choices for the factory setup (brick and iron) and machines (imported from "advanced" France) underlined the "modernity" and "progress" of Japan. Sketching the role of Shibusawa Eiichi—a prominent businessman who for a short period was also involved in the Meiji government—who stressed the value of indigenous technological knowledge and expertise, Wittner shows that what is considered "truly modern" changes over time. Some other chapters, especially Kimura Masato's, highlight the role of Shibusawa as a driver of the transfer of Western technology and business practices to Japan and of the modification of those practices. The role of individuals in the transfer of ideas and business practices is also illustrated in Chen Yu's chapter about the Chinese entrepreneur and businessman Zhan Jian, who was inspired by what he saw as the successful Westernization of Japan and what he wanted to achieve in his own province, Jiangsu. A new aspect to the studies on international expositions is added by Jeffer Daykin—who illustrates how Japan deliberately chose to take over a setup for international exhibitions in which direct comparisons between artifacts were central, an approach that had been abandoned in the West at that time. [End Page 642] Unfortunately, only a few chapters provide a good overview of the promised intra-East Asian technology transfer from Japan. Apart from Steele's chapter on the rickshaw, Japan's role is also evident in the story of the spread of printing in China. Hon Tze-ki illustrates how the partnership with a major Japanese textbook publisher gave the Chinese company Commercial Press the opportunity to enter the market and...

The Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) in the poetry of Chinese authors (on organizing extracurricular activities in History)

The article describes the attitude of the Chinese intelligentsia to the events of 1937-1945 in China, which is reflected in specific activities and creative works. A number of works by Chinese authors are cited in the translations of Russian orientalists. The authors show that in the process of mastering the discipline "Recent History of Asian and African Countries", it seems useful that fourth-year History students of the Petrozavodsk State University in the undergraduate program "Pedagogical Education" (profiles "Education in Subject Areas" and "History and Social Studies") should develop a plan for extracurricular activities on the topic "Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) in the poetry of Chinese authors" in order to develop the ability to critically select educational material and creatively implement educational tasks. The material of the article can be used to organize extracurricular activities in educational institutions on this topic.

Afghans return to power in India The reign of Sultan Shirshah Surya and his successors (947-952 AH / 1540-1545 AD) Study (political, military, administrative, economic)

The study of Asian history is one of the prominent historical studies in the process of clarifying and understanding the nature of human societies on the Asian side, as well as the urgent need to identify the nature of the historical roots of these societies in that part of the world, in addition to the fact that Arab-Asian relations extend into the depths of distant time through many centuries In addition to the geographical, historical and cultural link that unites the Islamic and Arab peoples, and from here our study came to elucidate Indian history in the late Middle Ages in a country described as one of the countries of wonders and legends.

Bringing Asian German Film Studies into Focus

Bringing Asian German Film Studies into Focus Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick (bio) My dissertation project Shifting Focus: Asian German Film Representation since 1910 constitutes the first full-length critical history of Asia and Asians within German cinema. Chunjie Zhang maintains that the new sub-field of Asian German studies "diversifies the paradigm of German national literature in a meaningful way," by challenging Eurocentrism, by expanding beyond canonical writers and thinkers, and by laying bare transnational and transcultural links between Germany and Asia.1 For this project, it was my intention to use an Asian German studies lens to do the same for German film studies. One common way of polemically formulating the state of representation for Asians in Western film is to describe them as invisible or unsichtbar, but I insist on a different perspective inspired by film's formal category of camera focus.2 Instead of being wholly invisible, Asians on German screens are figuratively blurry and out of focus, in a depth of field beyond our line of sight. What happens when we bring those Asian people, characters, and elements, which are seemingly unimportant, marginal, and decorative within the German film frame, into sharp [End Page 134] focus? Recalibrating our focal plane and attuning our ears enables us to trace the visual and aural construction of these Asian German Others, over the last century of film. The main criterion of my selection process for films to analyze was the presence of South, Southeast, and/or East Asian topoi; that is, Asian settings, filming locations, characters, credited actors, coded props, and/or film titles referencing Asia. Through strategic essentialism, the rubric of Asianness helped to bring over 300 films from a variety of different time periods, styles, genres, and contexts into conversation with one another in ways not previously considered. Rather than implying that all of these films signify in the same way, the diversity inherent within my use of Asianness ensures that differences can also be discussed in a productive way. My dissertation begins with a chronological overview that writes Asian representation (back) into all of the typical periodizations of German film history. From the Wilhelmine era to the 2020s, I demonstrate how Asian presences have existed throughout all major periods of German film history, in a variety of styles and genres. Filling in these collective glaring omissions within German film and cultural studies offers new perspectives on the canon, as well as a greater understanding of how Germany has framed and continues to frame Asian racialization. Most notably, Germany's interest in Asianness adapts over time, as illustrated by the number of German films related to China, India, and Japan during the silent and early sound eras, to Hong Kong and Thailand in the 1960s, or to Vietnam during the German Democratic Republic, as well as in post-unification Germany. With this chronological overview as our foundation, the next chapter systematically explores recurring tropes in German cinema's vast archive of Asian racial images, tracing how certain filmic stereotypes employed a century ago reappear throughout history and may still even be present today. As exemplified in productions from the 1910s to the twenty-first century, German cinema has amassed a broad arsenal of enduring strategies for projecting Asian inscrutability and alterity. For example, the Madame Butterfly trope of the beautiful East Asian woman who tragically dies is something seen from the 1910s to the 2010s. I end this chapter with a small selection of brief case studies of films warranting a more thorough and holistic analysis of how a single work can egregiously represent a variety of Asian tropes, thematically and formally. Subsequently, I outline a selection of subversive and empowering moments in film history that complicate the aforementioned representational stereotypes. Films can surprise us when they exceed perceived representational constraints of the times and run counter to the prejudice we attribute to the past. For example, despite cinema's villainization and/or emasculation of Asian men for much of the twentieth century, occasional pictures from as early as the 1920s depict Asian men as heroes and desirable romantic partners. There is an affirming potential for film viewers of the present to learn about lesser-known milestones and...

Steven B. Miles, Chinese Diasporas. A Social History of Global Migration. (New Approaches to Asian History.) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2020

Article Steven B. Miles, Chinese Diasporas. A Social History of Global Migration. (New Approaches to Asian History.) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2020 was published on February 1, 2023 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 316, issue 1).

Al-Ghazali and his Interpreters: The Case of the Emperor Aurangzeb

The integration of South Asia into a Persianate world or “Persianate cosmopolis” has proven to be a particularly popular framing of the study of South Asian history. In Venture of Islam, Marshall Hodgson describes the Persianate as follows: The rise of Persian had more than purely literary consequences: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom. Henceforth, while Arabic held its own as the primary language of the religious disciplines and even, largely, of natural science and philosophy, Persian became, in an increasingly large part of Islamdom, the language of polite culture; it even invaded the realm of scholarship with increasing effect. It was to form the chief model for the rise of still other languages to the literary level … Most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims likewise depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration. We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, “Persianate” by extension.Much of the subsequent theorization and conceptualization of the “Persianate” owes a significant debt to Hodgson's framing. Scholars have emphasized different aspects of the “Persianate,” with some choosing to frame it as a cultural milieu and others as a linguistically connected region. Here, “Persianate cosmopolis” refers to a geographical area whose major cultural foundation are the stories, ideas, and motifs expressed in New Persian literature. The circulation of such New Persian texts has supplied the primary content of the “Persianate cosmopolis.”

Wen-Qing Ngoei. Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia.

Wen-Qing Ngoei’s excellent book, Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia, traces Malaya and Singapore’s twisting paths of decolonization from the British Empire to their integration into the American Southeast Asian Cold War following the Second World War. While the interconnections of empire, decolonization, and the Cold War in the extremely heterogeneous region of Southeast Asia are extremely complex, Wen-Qing Ngoei’s argument is both simple and a novel: despite America’s failure to prevent the advancement of communism in Vietnam, its larger Southeast Asian containment strategy was a success. It hinges on the creation of Malaysia in 1963, cementing what Roger Hilsman, John F. Kennedy’s director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, referred to as a “wide anticommunist arc” that stretched from Thailand to the Philippines to encircle China and Vietnam (3). This “pro-US trajectory,” Wen-Qing Ngoei concludes, “was more characteristic of Southeast Asian history after World War II” than “the embrace of communism” (5).

Hindu: A History

AbstractThis article provides a textured history of the multivalent term “hindu” over 2,500 years, with the goal of productively unsettling what we think we know. “Hindu” is a ubiquitous word in modern times, used by scholars and practitioners in dozens of languages to denote members of a religious tradition. But the religious meaning of “hindu” and its common use are quite new. Here I trace the layered history of “hindu,” part of an array of shifting identities in early and medieval India. In so doing, I draw upon an archive of primary sources—in Old Persian, New Persian, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and more—that offers the kind of multilingual story needed to understand a term that has long cut across languages in South Asia. Also, I do not treat premodernity as a prelude but rather recognize it as the heart of this tale. So much of South Asian history—including over two thousand years of using the term “hindu”—has been misconstrued by those who focus only on British colonialism and later. We need a deeper consideration of South Asian pasts if we are to think more fruitfully about the terms and concepts that order our knowledge. Here, I offer one such contribution that marshals historical material on the multiform and fluid word “hindu” that can help us think more critically and precisely about this discursive category.

The Remains of the Day: Re-tracing Archival Art through Dayanita Singh and Ali Kazim

The history of modern South Asian art has been fast-moving, but art that is about modern South Asian history is still in its infancy. While the art of the post-Independence era continues to wrest with the legacies of colonisation, fractured nationhood, majoritarian politics, and weakening secular legacies, there is a strain of this art preoccupied with the historical gaze. In relation to works of art by Dayanita Singh and Ali Kazim, the aesthetics of representing archives and archiving can be examined in order to explore the politics of nationalism and historical change, as well as the global neoliberal economies of institutional archiving practices. The tendency to look back constantly over the region's past raises questions about whom these artistic interventions address and the archival logics at work within this distinctive field of contemporary art.

Oriental Studies at the Institute of International Relations and World History of Nizhny Novgorod University: Achievements, Problems and Prospects (2013—2021)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the current level of development of oriental studies in a regional university on the example of the Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod. The expansion of the international relations of the Russian Federation with the countries of the East in various fields in the context of globalization, the development of the tourism business has significantly increased the demand for specialists with knowledge of oriental languages, history and culture of Asian and African countries in the labor market. In this regard, in recent years, the interest of applicants to those universities that can offer relevant and promising areas of study has sharply increased. The area of training orientalists is expanding significantly at the expense of regional universities that respond to the challenges of the time, actively participating in the process of training specialists in the field of oriental studies. The purpose of this study is the formation and development of oriental studies at UNN, identifying the features of teaching and scientific work, problems and prospects facing university teachers. The methods of scientific research were general philosophical — analysis, synthesis, as well as comparative historical and comparative genetic methods. As a result of the study, the authors note that theoretical and practical oriental studies at the Institute of International Relations have now achieved certain success, which finds expression in the preparation of generalized collective works and monographs, scientific articles in domestic and foreign publications, collections of articles and conference proceedings by the staff of the UNN; the release of educational and methodological literature that provides the educational process; regular defense of candidate and doctoral dissertations on oriental studies; initiating and holding international and all-Russian scientific conferences. Special attention is paid to the linguistic training of orientalists, which includes the possibility of studying Chinese, Arabic, Turkish, Armenian and Korean languages. Teaching is carried out using a variety of formats and teaching methods, taking into account the characteristics of the modern generation of students, which allows to achieve high quality training of specialists, develop creative and communication skills, and form the originality of thinking of graduates. An important means of popularizing and deepening knowledge about the East are student clubs that are successfully functioning at IMOMI. UNN has created all the necessary conditions for the training of graduates-orientalists who are competitive in the labor market.

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary