It is argued that the technology of alignment is central to the work of modern politics. In the Cold War era, the art of non-alignment also became part of the turbulent political world. The era's politics of non-alignment in the international...

Faced with diminishing returns on his harvest, a poor young farmer in Myanmar pawns his cow for a moped and seeks alternative income as a taxi driver. Among his first fares is a woman who has returned home for her grandfather's funeral and is...

Japan's Meiji era (1868-1912) has been cast and recast in narratives that have focused on change: the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate; the adoption of Western ideas and institutions; high-speed modernization, industrialization, and...

A young woman who believes she's a cyborg hears voices and harms herself while at work making radios. She's hospitalized in a mental institution where she eats nothing and talks to inanimate objects. She's Young-goon, granddaughter of a woman who...

Award-winning journalist Min Zhang (张敏), who holds a master's degree from Beijing Broadcasting Institute (now the Communication University of China), has been with Radio Free Asia for almost two decades. She hosts a popular program called "...

This talk revisits the story of David Ha-Reuveni, an impostor that showed in early 16th century Rome with grandiose plans to defeat Islam, and the Ottoman Empire for the small fee of a large navy and Palestine for the Jews. Against a line of...

Why Did Matteo Ricci of the Society of Jesus lie about the Muslims of China why did he do it? This talk presents and discusses a passage in one of Matteo Ricci's earliest reports on China in which he describes the Muslims of the city of Canton. I...

America's inability to stop North Korea's long march to the attainment of nuclear weapons proves that they were never crucial to its security in the first place. As the regime's own propaganda has made clear for decades, it arms with a view to...

For the secular citizen-artist of our times, is the inheritance of the twentieth century a burden to be overcome, or a gift to be embraced? Iconic Interruptions explores this question with the help of some select works of Indian artist Gigi...

It has become something of an academic fashion in the last decade or so to bring China and India, these two “Asian” giants and fast-growing global economies, into the same comparative framework. These acts of comparison have generally...