This month's cover illustration—a collage of images associated with song and dance—highlights the fact that three pieces we are publishing in this issue have a connection to music. This was not due to planning on our part, but merely to agreeable happenstance. Still, we thought it worth celebrating this conjuncture of authorial interests, in pieces that deal with Central Asia, Northeast Asia, and South Asian contexts, respectively, on the front as well as inside of the issue. All of the images are from figures inside these pages, except for the photo “Rabindranath Tagore at his painting desk, Government School of Art, Calcutta 1932.” That figure is open source from Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rabindranath_Tagore_at_his_painting_desk,_Government_School_of_Art,_Calcutta_1932.jpg).

We begin with two essays that focus on disturbing events in different periods and different parts of Southeast Asia. In the first, which takes the form of a “Trends” essay, University of British Columbia historian J...

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