Current Issue
The next issue of the International Journal of Asian Studies (RIEA) offers, from various analytical perspectives and historical moments, the presence of Asian universes operating in very dissimilar realities but linked by actors and social phenomena that generate new realities.
These pages contain interpretive insights that reflect on the academic fields specializing in studies of Asian societies and their links to other social and cultural realities. On this occasion, the pages of this new issue of RIEA offer a substantial ten articles (from the peer-reviewed section), as well as five book reviews that confirm the current boom in academic production in the Spanish language, both in texts written in this language and in translations into it.
The issue begins with an article that analyzes how Mexican foreign policy has been permeated by the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, especially since October 7, 2023, and how it has addressed its position on the genocide being perpetrated there. The next article delves into the Portuguese conquest of the city of Malacca, which began at the dawn of the 16th century, to explain how the port landscape was transformed by colonial action, thus also changing the perception of the city in India, which was beginning to see a European presence. Subsequently, the issue offers a work that analyses the therapeutic dimension of Indian philosophy from an analytical approach based on authors such as Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault, and Martha Nussbaum. This allows, as the text points out, to gauge the position of the therapeutic conditions of the philosophy that emerged from India in order to understand a search for a return to the self that is explained in its pages.
Following these articles, the rest of the issue consists of three articles focused on to Korea and four connected to historical experiences of Chinese communities in various historical, geographical, and cultural settings. With regard to the articles related to Korea, two of them are related to the construction of Korean identity from outside its socio-political and cultural environment, and another to the insertion of South Korean companies into the world of technological advances. Of those related to the first aspect, one analyzes the Korean migrant population to China, which took place voluntarily in the 19th century, these immigrated people are known as Chaoxianzu. The text draws on the work of Jin Xuetie (Kim Hak-chul), a Korean-Chinese novelist from the post-Maoist era, who explores the cultural changes that this population has undergone. The other article, meanwhile, delves into the way in which non-Korean cinema has represented and reconstructed the identity of Koreans in other cultural spheres. Nearly 200,000 Korean children have been adopted by people from Western countries, and the text cites 27 film productions that have addressed this phenomenon and the cultural challenges it has posed for these children and their cultural identities. The latest one on Korea, particularly South Korea, aims to explain the strategies and innovations undertaken by the country’s capital to achieve the highest standards in investment and development (I & D). In this way, based on the creation of patents in this country by companies, universities, and research institutes between 2000 and 2021, it explores how South Korea has generated all the innovation development that characterizes it today.
The other four articles in the refereed section are devoted to phenomena related to Chinese communities in different historical contexts. One of them analyzes the text written by the Dominican Domingo Fernández de Navarrete in 1676, in which he describes Chinese culture at the time. The book was a bedside companion for Catholic missions in China, and the article delves into its contents. The next one analyzes a complex phenomenon related to Chinese workers in Cuba in the second half of the 19th century (the so-called coolies) and their condition as slaves until their transition to free workers. The following work analyzes the dynamics of informal Chinese trade between 2020 and 2024 in Mexico City and its ecological consequences in the Mexican capital, pointing out the processes of environmental deregulation that have allowed it to flourish. Finally, the section of peer-reviewed articles concludes with a work that compiles and analyzes the works of artists of Chinese origin in Costa Rica, based on the intrinsic relationship between society, history, and culture in their works. The article emphasizes the lack of research on these artists in the country and, therefore, the need to open up more academic spaces for analysis of their creations. Finally, the issue offers reviews of five works that address a series of topics relevant to the realities of Asian societies and that will become essential references in each of the fields from which they were formulated. These works are: El libro del campamento by Zafer Al-Katheeb, on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon; Las relaciones de Costa Rica con el Medio Oriente y el Norte de África: pasado y presente de una relación que se transforma, by Carlos Humberto Cascante Segura and Sergio Iván Moya Mena, a meticulous and well-documented study of the history of Costa Rica’s diplomatic ties in those regions of the world; Subjetividades orientalistas, tres volúmenes: Tomo I. Imaginarios, Tomo II. Cultura política, y Tomo III. Religiosidades, edited by Ricardo Martínez Esquiveland Francisco Rodríguez Cascante, which contributes to the discussion on Orientalism in and from Latin America; China’s Strategic Opportunity: Change and Revisionism in Chinese Foreign Policy, by Yong Deng, a book that dissects the concept of strategic opportunity in 21st-centuryChina led by Xi Jinping; and finally Financial Euphoria, Consumer Culture, and Literature of 1980s Japan, by Ikuho Amano, which explores the phenomenon of the Japanese economic bubble of the 1980sand the products that emerged from it in literature and the mass media.
Esteban Sánchez Solano
Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica
