From CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, a special issue on Asian culture(s) and globalization. Claudio Sopranzetti (Harvard): The Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok (Dissertation). Lorenzo Pellegrini and Luca Tasciotti (Erasmus): Bhutan: Between Happiness and Horror. The AIDS granny in exile: In the ’90s, a gynecologist named Gao Yaojie exposed the horrifying cause of an AIDS epidemic in rural China — and the ensuing cover-up — and became an enemy of the state. “Once the villages are gone, the culture is gone”: As village life in China disappears and its traditions fade, some fight to maintain the country’s rural cultural heritage. China's Dan Brown is a subtle subversive: Jiayang Fan on how the writer who goes by the pen name Mai Jia is the most popular author in the world you’ve never heard of. Chinese atheists?: Ian Johnson on what the Pew survey gets wrong. Pearl Sydenstricker on the Disneyfication of Tibet: How tourism has become a tool of occupation. The introduction to Regionalizing Culture: The Political Economy of Japanese Popular Culture in Asia by Nissim Kadosh Otmazgin. Emily Shire on what Orgasm Wars reveals about Japan's sexual culture. Racy men’s magazine in South Korea enflames nationalist anger. Alicia Izharuddin on the geography of urban intellectual culture in the Malay archipelago. Ulises Moreno-Tabarez reviews Popular Culture in Asia: Memory, City, Celebrity by Lorna Fitzsimmons and John A. Lent. The Asian Century may have arrived, but many Asians — disproportionately entrepreneurial, well-educated and familial — are heading elsewhere. Why are we so reluctant, even in this age of globalization, to adopt Asian key terminologies?
