Olomouc Asian Studies

Ideas on the (human) body, gender, and identity lie at the core of many socio-political issues and cultural trends in Asia today, while also inspiring innovative research on artistic expression from Asia's past. By focusing on socio-political as well as cultural issues from diverse geographical and historical contexts, this book highlights complex links and interactions that bind these three interpretative axes. How do bodies become conduits for the expression and negotiation of gender and other identities? What do the lived experiences of women and LGBTQ+ people in Asia reveal about biopolitics, normative expectations, and value systems in different societies? How does art reflect the representation and fashioning of gendered bodies and ambiguous identities? Cutting across the quotidian and the avant-garde, activism and art, violence and pleasure, as well as the intimate and the political, this book sheds new light on Asian cultures and societies, spanning India, Indonesia, Japan, mainland China, Taiwan, and Thailand, affirming thus the region's significance in broader debates on biopolitics, gender, and human dignity.

The theme of ‘continuity and change’ is generally acknowledged as an important and a highly complex problem. Asia is considered as one of the most dynamically changing parts of the worlds. The quick economic, political and socio-cultural changes are generating interesting topics in those scholarly fields such as anthropology, ethnography, linguistics and literary studies, or in other fields of social, political and economic science. Especially after the years of anti-Covid 19, measures it is important to understand what remains stable or what had been changed and may be lost forever.

This volume consists of 19 chapters that reflect the titular theme – Voiced and Voiceless in Asia – from a variety of angles, making use of diverse scholarly approaches and disciplines, while focusing specifically on China, India, Japan, and Taiwan. The chapters are broadly divided into two parts: (1) Politics and Society, and (2) Arts and Literature, although the texts included in the second part also deal with social themes. In addition to historical topics, such as Japanese colonialism or Chinese agricultural reforms in the 1950s, the volume also addresses current issues, including restrictive Chinese policies in Xinjiang, Japanese activist movements against gender-based violence and discrimination, or the problems of migrant laborers in India and performing arts in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic. Likewise, it provides insight into satirical woodblock prints from the Boshin War period or works of literature produced in Japanese leprosariums in the first half of the 20th century, as well as into selected topics in contemporary Chinese, Japanese, and Sinophone Tibetan literature. Collectively, the chapters comprised in this volume narrate the multifaceted relationship between ‘voice’ and ‘power,’ thus highlighting the fact that the question of ‘voice’ is closely intertwined with a variety of social, political, and cultural issues.