- Table View
- List View
Staging Rebellion in the Musical, Hair: Marginalised Voices in Musical Theatre (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Sarah Elisabeth BrowneThis volume provides a comprehensive survey of the musical Hair and will offer critical analysis which focuses on giving voice to those who are historically considered to be on the margins of musical theatre history. Sarah Browne interrogates key scenes from the musical which will seek to identify the relationship between performance and the cultural moment. Whilst it is widely acknowledged that Hair is a product of the sixties counter-culture, this study will place the analysis in its socio-historical context to specifically reveal American values towards race, gender, and adolescence. In arguing that Hair is a rebellion against the established normative values of both American society and the art form of the musical itself, this book will suggest ways in which Hair can be considered utopian: not only as a utopian ‘text’ but in the practices and values it embodies, and the emotions it generates in its audiences. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of music, musical theatre, popular music, American studies, film studies, gender studies, or African American studies.
Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre (Transdisciplinary Souths)
by Amina ElHalawaniThe book explores how theatre, with its performative capacity, has the power to engage with and affect the politics of its day. It sets the stage for the reader to discover the revolutionary traditions of Egyptian and Irish theatre, very distinct in their histories and cultures, and understand their enduring relevance in today’s world. The volume takes Ireland as a case study of the interplay between cultural nationalism and politically engaged theatre and compares it to the role of the theatre in Egypt during its Golden era in the 1960s.Through a selection of Egyptian plays by Tawfiq al-Hakim, Mikhail Roman, Yusuf Idris, and Salah Abdul-Saboor, alongside Irish plays by Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Christina Reid, and Samuel Beckett, it maps the political aesthetics of unsteady times and seemingly disparate places to reflect on the dynamics of revolt as a staged act in and of itself. Further, the book examines how playwrights from both nations have engaged with theatre as a medium, focusing on how their contemplations, hesitations, frustrations, and protest have been translated onto the stage in their various plays, and comprehends the transformative role the theatre has always played in politics in shaping history across time and space.Bridging together discussions on transnational modernisms with nuanced cultural histories of protest, this critical work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary studies, identity politics, cultural studies, theatre and performance studies, and political studies.
Staging Slavery: Performances of Colonial Slavery and Race from International Perspectives, 1770-1850 (Routledge Studies in Cultural History)
by Sarah J. Adams Jenna M. Gibbs Wendy SutherlandThis international analysis of theatrical case studies illustrates the ways that theater was an arena both of protest and, simultaneously, racist and imperialist exploitations of the colonized and enslaved body. By bringing together performances and discussions of theater culture from various colonial powers and orbits—ranging from Denmark and France to Great Britain and Brazil—this book explores the ways that slavery and hierarchical notions of "race" and "civilization" manifested around the world. At the same time, against the backdrop of colonial violence, the theater was a space that also facilitated reformist protest and served as evidence of the agency of Black people in revolt. Staging Slavery considers the implications of both white-penned productions of race and slavery performed by white actors in blackface makeup and Black counter-theater performances and productions that resisted racist structures, on and off the stage. With unique geographical perspectives, this volume is a useful resource for undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the history of theater, nationalism and imperialism, race and slavery, and literature.
Staging The Slums, Slumming The Stage
by J. Chris WestgateDrawing on traditional archival research, reception theory, cultural histories of slumming, and recent work in critical theory on literary representations of poverty, Westgate argues that the productions of slum plays served as enactments of the emergent definitions of the slum and the corresponding ethical obligations involved therein.
Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself! (Routledge Studies in Affective Societies)
by Doris Kolesch Theresa Schütz Sophie NikoleitAt present, we are witnessing a significant transformation of established forms of spectatorship in theatre, performance art and beyond. In particular, immersive and participatory forms of theatre allow audiences and performers to interact in a shared performance space. Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances discusses forms and concepts of contemporary spectatorship and explores various modes of audience participation in theory as well as in practice. The volume also reflects on what new terms and methods must be developed in order to address the theoretical challenges of contemporary immersive performances. Split into three parts, Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances, respectively, focuses on various strategies for mobilising the audience, methodological questions for research on being a spectator in immersive and participatory forms of theatre, and thematising new modes of partaking and ways of spectating in contemporary art. Poignantly capturing experiences that can be viewed as manifestations of affective relationality in the strongest possible sense, this volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Theatre and Performance Studies, Media Studies and Philosophy.
Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism
by Paige A. McginleySinging was just one element of blues performance in the early twentieth century. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and other classic blues singers also tapped, joked, and flaunted extravagant costumes on tent show and black vaudeville stages. The press even described these women as "actresses" long before they achieved worldwide fame for their musical recordings. In Staging the Blues, Paige A. McGinley shows that even though folklorists, record producers, and festival promoters set the theatricality of early blues aside in favor of notions of authenticity, it remained creatively vibrant throughout the twentieth century. Highlighting performances by Rainey, Smith, Lead Belly, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee in small Mississippi towns, Harlem theaters, and the industrial British North, this pioneering study foregrounds virtuoso blues artists who used the conventions of the theater, including dance, comedy, and costume, to stage black mobility, to challenge narratives of racial authenticity, and to fight for racial and economic justice.
Staging the Past: Themed Environments In Transcultural Perspectives (History In Popular Cultures)
by Judith Schlehe Michiko Uike-Bormann Carolyn Oesterle Wolfgang HochbruckPopular representations of history are taking on new forms and reaching wider audiences. The search for usable pasts is branching out into active appropriations of history such as historical theme parks, housing developments, and live-action role play. Drawing on themed environments across the continents, the articles in this volume focus on how these appropriations bypass, are different from, or even contradict traditional as well as scientific modes of disseminating historical knowledge. Bringing together theorists and practitioners, they provide the basis for an interdisciplinary as well as a transcultural theory of how pasts are staged in various social contexts.
Staging the People
by Elizabeth A. OsborneThe Federal Theatre Project stands alone as the only national theatre in the history of the United States. This study re-imagines this vital moment in American history, considering the Federal Theatre Project on its own terms - as a "federation of theatres" designed to stimulate new audiences and create locally-relevant theatre during the turbulent 1930s. It integrates a wealth of previously undiscovered archival materials with cultural history, delving into regional activities in Chicago, Boston, Portland, Atlanta, and Birmingham, as well as tours of refugee camps and Civilian Conservation Corps Divisions. For a brief, exhilarating moment, the Federal Theatre Project created a democratic theatre that staged the American people.
Staging the Promises: Everyday Future-Making in a Serbian Industrial Town
by Deana JovanovićStaging the Promises reveals how inhabitants of Bor, a Serbian copper-processing and mining town that lived through prosperous Yugoslav times and a post-socialist decline, were the audience theatrically performed promises of aspirational futures. Deana Jovanović chronicles the efforts of the copper-processing company and the town's authorities to theatrically perform promises of better economic, urban, environmental, infrastructural and post-industrial futures. Her book asks: What impact did the staging of promises have on the residents? What temporal, material, and political effects did these performances generate? How did they shape the citizens' futures and their present?Jovanović offers many ethnographic examples of ambivalence in people's orientation to their futures, while residents balanced hope with despair, disillusionment, and dismay. Staging the Promises highlights how the performances shaped the present, and how, in a Gramscian twist, they sustained hope alongside power dynamics that residents often criticized.Staging the Promises assesses the performative ways through which contemporary capitalist futures are remade. For Jovanović, Bor represents a site that reflects a current global trend: staging the promises of enhanced futures today play a significant role in contemporary populist politics. Through them, she argues, distant futures become gradually withdrawn from people's horizons.
Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness
by Dale BarlebenIn Staging the Trials of Modernism, Dale Barleben explores the interactions among literature, cultural studies, and the law through detailed analyses of select British modern writers including Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce. By tracing the relationships between the literature, authors, media, and judicial procedure of the time, Barleben illuminates the somewhat macabre element of modern British trial process, which still enacts and re-enacts itself throughout contemporary judicial systems of the British Commonwealth. Using little seen legal documents, like Ford's contempt trial decision, Staging the Trials of Modernism uncovers the conversations between the interior style of British Modern authors and the ways in which law began rethinking concepts like intent and the subconscious. Barleben’s fresh insights offer a nuanced look into the ways in which law influences literary production.
Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China's New Cosmopolitan Heritage
by Lanlan KuangStaging Tianxia explores the ancient Chinese vision of world order known as tianxia (all under heaven) by focusing on the historical, performative, and rhetorical processes of expressive arts and cultural heritages that inform a vision of China as a historically multiethnic and cosmopolitan nation.Author Lanlan Kuang unites multimedia ethnographic research and theoretical insights from ethnomusicology, philosophy, religious studies, performance studies, and cognitive science, with a focus on Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a modern interpretation inserted into the Chinese classical dance and theatrical arts tradition. Staging Tianxia thus aims to redefine Silk Road studies and Dunhuangology, a transdisciplinary field dedicated to studying the texts and art of Dunhuang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that connected China via the Silk Road with Central Asia, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.Staging Tianxia is a careful ethnographic study that looks at the importance of performance tradition and poetics in the arts and aesthetic theory of China.
Staging Violence: Gender and Social Control in Jácaras and Entremeses
by Tania de Miguel MagroStaging Violence explores gender violence in Spanish early modern short theater. This book deals with domestic violence against women, extortion of prostitutes, and violence against men who display non-conventional forms of masculinity. The author argues that many "jácaras" and "entremeses" stage subversive discourses that repudiate or complicate official narratives of gender and the use of violence as a tool for achieving gender compliance. Short comic pieces are read against comedias. Each section of the book is expertly contextualized through an overview of the legal and moral contexts and the analysis of a variety of primary sources (law codes, manuals of conduct, church rulings, transcripts of civil and religious trials, and medical manuals) as well as statistical information. Staging Violence invites the reader to consider the transgressive potential of performance. As the first monograph entirely dedicated to the study of gender in this genre, this book is a vital resource for students and scholars interested in gender studies and theatre.
Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England
by Sarah E. JohnsonThough the gender-coded soul-body dynamic lies at the root of many negative and disempowering depictions of women, Sarah Johnson here argues that it also functions as an effective tool for redefining gender expectations. Building on past criticism that has concentrated on the debilitating cultural association of women with the body, she investigates dramatic uses of the soul-body dynamic that challenge the patriarchal subordination of women. Focusing on two tragedies, two comedies, and a small selection of masques, from approximately 1592-1614, Johnson develops a case for the importance of drama to scholarly considerations of the soul-body dynamic, which habitually turn to devotional works, sermons, and philosophical and religious treatises to elucidate this relationship. Johnson structures her discussion around four theatrical relationships, each of which is a gendered relationship analogous to the central soul-body dynamic: puppeteer and puppet, tamer and tamed, ghost and haunted, and observer and spectacle. Through its thorough and nuanced readings, this study redefines one of the period’s most pervasive analogies for conceptualizing women and their relations to men as more complex and shifting than criticism has previously assumed. It also opens a new interpretive framework for reading representations of women, adding to the ongoing feminist re-evaluation of the kinds of power women might actually wield despite the patriarchal strictures of their culture.
Staging Women's Lives in Academia: Gendered Life Stages in Language and Literature Workplaces (SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory)
by Michelle A. Massé; Nan Bauer-MaglinStaging Women's Lives in Academia demonstrates how ostensibly personal decisions are shaped by institutions and advocates for ways that workplaces, not women, must be changed. Addressing life stages ranging from graduate school through retirement, these essays represent a gamut of institutions and women who draw upon both personal experience and scholarly expertise. The contributors contemplate the slipperiness of the very categories we construct to explain the stages of life and ask key questions, such as what does it mean to be a graduate student at fifty? Or a full professor at thirty-five? The book explores the ways women in all stages of academia feel that they are always too young or too old, too attentive to work or too overly focused on family. By including the voices of those who leave, as well as those who stay, this collection signals the need to rebuild the house of academia so that women can have not only classrooms of their own but also lives of their own.
Stagnant Dreamers: How the Inner City Shapes the Integration of the Second Generation
by Maria G. RendonA quarter of young adults in the U.S. today are the children of immigrants, and Latinos are the largest minority group. In Stagnant Dreamers, sociologist and social policy expert María Rendón follows 42 young men from two high-poverty Los Angeles neighborhoods as they transition into adulthood. Based on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations with them and their immigrant parents, Stagnant Dreamers describes the challenges they face coming of age in the inner city and accessing higher education and good jobs, and demonstrates how family-based social ties and community institutions can serve as buffers against neighborhood violence, chronic poverty, incarceration, and other negative outcomes. Neighborhoods in East and South Central Los Angeles were sites of acute gang violence that peaked in the 1990s, shattering any romantic notions of American life held by the immigrant parents. Yet, Rendón finds that their children are generally optimistic about their life chances and determined to make good on their parents’ sacrifices. Most are strongly oriented towards work. But despite high rates of employment, most earn modest wages and rely on kinship networks for labor market connections. Those who made social connections outside of their family and neighborhood contexts, more often found higher quality jobs. However, a middle-class lifestyle remains elusive for most, even for college graduates. Rendón debunks fears of downward assimilation among second-generation Latinos, noting that most of her subjects were employed and many had gone on to college. She questions the ability of institutions of higher education to fully integrate low-income students of color. She shares the story of one Ivy League college graduate who finds himself working in the same low-wage jobs as his parents and peers who did not attend college. Ironically, students who leave their neighborhoods to pursue higher education are often the most exposed to racism, discrimination, and classism. Rendón demonstrates the importance of social supports in helping second-generation immigrant youth succeed. To further the integration of second-generation Latinos, she suggests investing in community organizations, combating criminalization of Latino youth, and fully integrating them into higher education institutions. Stagnant Dreamers presents a realistic yet hopeful account of how the Latino second generation is attempting to realize its vision of the American dream.
Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power
by Lisa Weaver SwartzStained Glass Ceilings speaks to the intersection of gender and power within American evangelicalism by examining the formation of evangelical leaders in two seminary communities.Southern Baptist Theological Seminary inspires a vision of human flourishing through gender differentiation and male headship. Men practice “Godly Manhood," and are taught to act as the "head" of a family, while their wives are socialized into codes of “Godly Womanhood" that prioritize prescribed gender roles. This power structure privileges men yet offers agency to their wives in women-centered spaces and through marital relationships. Meanwhile, Asbury Theological Seminary promises freedom from gendered hierarchies. Appealing to a story of gender-blind equality, Asbury welcomes women into classrooms, administrative offices, and pulpits. But the institution’s construction of egalitarianism obscures the fact that women are rewarded for adapting to an existing male-centered status quo rather than for developing their own voices as women. Featuring high-profile evangelicals such as Al Mohler and Owen Strachan, along with young seminarians poised to lead the movement in the coming decades, Stained Glass Ceilings illustrates the liabilities of white evangelical toolkits and argues that evangelical culture upholds male-centered structures of power even as it facilitates meaning and identity.
The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
by David Levering Lewis&“At once narrative history, family chronicle and personal memoir… [a] luminous work of investigation and introspection.&” -Wall Street Journal National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis&’s own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American storySitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story.There is no singular American story. Yet the Lewis family contains many defining ones. David Levering Lewis&’s lineage leads him to the Kings and Belvinses, two white slaveholding families in Georgia; to the Bells, a free persons of color slaveholding family in South Carolina; and to the Lewises, an up-from-slavery black family in Georgia.Lewis&’s father, John Henry Lewis Sr., set Lewis on the path he pursues, introducing him to W. E. B. Du Bois and living by example as Thurgood Marshall&’s collaborator in a key civil rights case in Little Rock. In The Stained Glass Window, Lewis reckons with his legacy in full, facing his ancestors and all that was lost, all the doors that were closed to them.In this country, the bonds of kinship and the horrific fetters of slavery are bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum period in our present, and narratives of exceptionalism are ever with us; in these pages, so, too, are the voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John. They shaped this nation, and their heir David Levering Lewis's chronicle of the antebellum project and the subsequent era of marginalization and resistance will transform our understanding of it.
The Stains of Imprisonment: Moral Communication and Men Convicted of Sex Offenses (Gender and Justice #10)
by Alice IevinsA free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Recent decades have seen a widespread effort to imprison more people for sexual violence. The Stains of Imprisonment offers an ethnographic account of one of the worlds that this push has created: an English prison for men convicted of sex offenses. This book examines the ways in which prisons are morally communicative institutions, instilling in prisoners particular ideas about the offenses they have committed—ideas that carry implications for prisoners' moral character. Investigating the moral messages contained in the prosaic yet power-imbued processes that make up daily life in custody, Ievins finds that the prison she studied communicated a pervasive sense of disgust and shame, marking the men it held as permanently stained. Rather than promoting accountability, this message discouraged prisoners from engaging in serious moral reflection on the harms they had caused. Analyzing these effects, Ievins explores the role that imprisonment plays as a response to sexual harm, and the extent to which it takes us closer to and further from justice.
The Stairway
by Alice Chown Diana ChownRadical feminist and pacifist Alice Chown was born in Kingston, Ontario, in 1866. Until the age of forty she cared for her devoutly religious mother and acted as matriarch of the family household. When her mother died in 1906, Alice was at last free to live as she chose, travelling widely and exploring a number of avenues of social reform. The diaries she kept for the next thirteen years were the basis from which she wrote The Stairway. First published in 1921, and for many years out of print, The Stairway is one of Canada's early feminist classics.It tells of an extraordinary life: suffragist, settlement worker, peace activist, journalist, labour activist, college teacher, and itinerant catalyst for social change. During the First World War her pacifist stance brought about a bitter split with the mainstream women's movement in Canada, and in 1917 she moved to the United States. She lived there for the next ten years, during which time The Stairway was published in Boston. In 1927 she returned to Canada. where she continued to live until her death in 1949. Inspired by a belief in a new age of humanism which gained significant popularity in Victorian Canada, Alice Chown was in many ways a woman very much of her time. She was also far ahead of it: to feminist and pacifist ears today, the voice in The Stairway rings true.
Stakeholder Perspectives on World Heritage and Development in Africa
by Pascall TaruvingaStakeholder Perspectives on World Heritage and Development in Africa argues that World Heritage Sites (WHS) across the African continent should adopt practical, innovative, creative, and alternative management approaches that bring greater socio-economic benefits to society, whilst protecting their Outstanding Universal Value. Drawing on empirical evidence gathered in conversation with stakeholders at WHS across Africa, the book explores the challenges involved in implementing conservation and socio-economic development as a stakeholder-driven process. Demonstrating that heritage can no longer be viewed as totally separate from its socio-economic context, Pascall argues that decisions about the management of heritage need to make sense at the local level if they are to be supported by stakeholders. As the book shows, heritage is still viewed and managed through systems, approaches, and strategies inherited from the colonial period, despite the increasing availability of inclusive governance systems. Stakeholders offer alternative, creative, and innovative approaches that capitalize on the potential of World Heritage to contribute to socio-economic development, whilst ensuring that its credibility and integrity are maintained. Stakeholder Perspectives on World Heritage and Development in Africa offers unique insights into local perspectives on World Heritage and development in Africa. The book will be essential reading for academics, students, development partners, and practitioners around the world who are interested in museums and heritage, conservation, development, and the African continent. Also, the book will be useful in the preparation of nomination dossiers, management plans, development plans, and in disaster risk management at WHS.
Stakeholder Politics: Social Capital, Sustainable Development, and the Corporation
by Robert BoutilierThe war is over. The largest corporations in the world are now committed to sustainability. But, behind the public relations gloss, corporate executives and managers are perplexed. The majority of them have a genuine desire to work in an ethical and sustainable manner. Yet, when they engage with their stakeholders for that purpose, they unexpectedly encounter a world of hardball politics full of hostile activists, self-interested elites and unpredictable attacks. Unfortunately, corporate management is too often unskilled in this rough-and-tumble world. While managers rely on facts and rational analysis, their self-appointed critics have mastered the arts of political discourse, issue framing and media manipulation. At the same time, as corporations extend their global reach, their third-world stakeholder communities are beset with a variety of poverty-maintaining and sustainability-thwarting conditions. In many parts of the world, communities suffer from entrenched divisions, exclusion from power, unpredictable violence and economic dependency. In order to both reduce reputational risk and to contribute to sustainable development, companies need the equivalent of roadmaps of the socio-political terrain in their stakeholder networks.This book moves on to next challenge of giving companies what they need now: namely, "how to" guides addressing the twin problems of firstly maintaining political legitimacy (talking the talk), and, secondly, promoting sustainable development (walking the walk). They need to learn how to both play stakeholder politics and collaborate with stakeholders towards sustainability goals. Most companies have already encountered or anticipated the barriers that this book addresses, and managers will recognize the dilemmas described.Stakeholder Politics is the first book to offer a method for classifying and dealing with these socio-political problems.The book presents a typology of stakeholder networks that will help managers and community leaders identify and improve the social capital patterns in their own networks. Once they know what patterns they have, they can move their networks towards those that foster sustainable community development. The author describes vivid cases in which managers and community stakeholders have already used the approach successfully. At the same time, managers get handy tools for predicting and avoiding community-level socio-political risk around stakeholder issues: most notably, the Stakeholder 360 which has been successfully used in Canada and Australia with large groups of managers learning about stakeholder engagement.The book has been written for an audience of both managers and academics. Those working in developing countries with difficult stakeholder issues will find it indispensable.
Stakeholder Relationships And Sustainability: The Case Of Health Aid To The Kyrgyz Republic (Global Dynamics of Social Policy)
by Gulnaz IsabekovaThis open-access book analyses how stakeholder relationships impact the sustainability of health aid. It does this by providing an overarching analytical framework, which allows for a systematic analysis of sustainability, relationships, and a possible causal link between these phenomena. The book goes beyond universal paradigms and detailed single-case studies by offering a thorough analysis of development projects to identify the factors that are also applicable to similar initiatives in comparable contexts.Empirically, it focuses on two health initiatives, both implemented in the Kyrgyz Republic, a country pursuing a sector-wide approach to health aid. Unique primary material provides insights into a geographic region that is mostly neglected, and will be of interest to students and researchers of social policy, development studies, international health and those focusing on the post-Soviet region and Central Asia.
The Stakes: Univ Of Md Edition
by Shibley TelhamiThis book presents an intriguing analysis of American stakes in the Middle East and a thoughtful argument for the compassionate and measured use of force. It explains Arab and Muslim attitudes towards the United States and shows why there is much reason for concern.
Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
by Mychal Denzel SmithBrave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future.The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Mychal Denzel Smith confronts the shortcomings of these stories -- and with the American Dream itself -- and calls on us to live up to the principles we profess but fail to realize.In a series of incisive essays, Smith exposes the stark contradictions at the heart of American life, holding all of us, individually and as a nation, to account. We've gotten used to looking away, but the fissures and casual violence of institutional oppression are ever-present.There is a future that is not as grim as our past. In this profound work, Smith helps us envision it with care, honesty, and imagination.
The Stakes of Democracy in South-East Asia (Routledge Library Editions: Modern East and South East Asia #7)
by H. Van MookWill national independence bring to the peoples of South East Asia liberty and democracy? Or will it mean corrupt government, factional strife and insolvency? Or will it mean eventual absorption by totalitarian communism? In this book, first published in 1950, the author analyses these questions, using the case history of Indonesia since 1940, in which he played a leading role, to illustrate his points. He gives an outline of the history of South East Asia, its domination by the West and its convulsion by war and nationalism. The seven nations of South East Asia – Ceylon, Burma, Siam, Indo-China, Malaya, Indonesia and the Philippines – have a great deal in common: except for Siam, they are all struggling through the formative years of nationhood; except for Ceylon, they were all occupied and pillaged by Japan during the War. They are of great value to other nations as a source of raw materials and foodstuffs. Their political and economic structure is of vital importance, both to themselves and to us and unless their new nationalism can be strengthened, the free world may lose a valuable asset to its economy and an ally against totalitarianism in Asia.