The Myth of Self Help

This volume platforms scholars working in cultural studies in Asia and responds to the recentering of cultural studies along the diaspora axis. Drawing together numerous authors, The Soul of Asia participates in cultural politics at a local level, but with an international agenda. As a collective, the authors aim to construct a “critical inter-Asian subjectivity,” drawing on local critical intellectual traditions while forging global links with other cultural studies networks. In this way, the collection problematizes “Asia” as a concept in the context of the continent’s postwar economic and cultural resurgence layered over its troubled history between colonized and colonizer.

Threads of the East traces the relationships among aesthetic, anthropological, and political-economic aspects of cultural production and reproduction. Cultural studies scholars and practitioners often begin their inquiries by questioning the common understandings, beliefs, and histories that shape our world. This approach helps explain the complexity of day-to-day life and the practice, habits, text, objects, rituals, and beliefs woven in the social matrix and laden with values and meaning. Culture is an umbrella covering many elements and conveying many meanings. In Asian societies, culture connotes value and respect as a religious duty; moreover, in Asian culture respect is centered around the family and formally demonstrated through language and gestures. The Asian concept of respect influences feelings of responsibility within the family and the ways in which Asian parents and children may set about making decisions.  Knowing Asia is only possible from a multidimensional approach, where problems can arise from misunderstandings, especially because we live in a multicultural world. By learning and understanding different cultures, one can understand why people do things the way they do.

“Wokeism” and, before it, “Political Correctness” are attempts to replace traditional privilege with a new privileged class of special interest groups that have supposedly been discriminated against. In Three Pillars of Wisdom, Dr. Michael Arnheim argues that that there are and always have been only two forms of government: monarchy and oligarchy, regardless of the labels placed on them, and that politics, religion, and law are all fields of contention between “in” and “out” groups.

The England We Know: Russian Voices Abroad is based on a series of interviews, recorded between 2019 and 2021, with twelve Russophone immigrants—those who have achieved success and those who haven’t, the well-educated and the blue-collar—interpolated with the author’s memoir. Each story invites the reader into the intimate world of these men and women who have built their lives in England, the destination and dreamland for those who have arrived here from various corners of the former Soviet Union: Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Whereas, for others, the UK has become their third or even fourth home, these stories take readers on a journey to Canada, Italy, France, and New Zealand. These vividly reconstructed stories give voice to the so-often voiceless revealing family secrets and the trauma of generations. They are the stories of lives transformed. In The England We Know: Russian Voices Abroad Olga Kenton provides readers with a deep and empathetic understanding of the immigrant experience. These deeply personal stories—filled with moments of joy, sorrow, struggle, and triumph—explore themes of identity, belonging and the search for a new home.