Editorial Foreword

This issue includes a set of five articles covering a broad range of topics that are specific to different regions within Asia—Korea, China, Japan, and Nepal—but that also highlight common, overarching themes that exemplify new approaches in Asian studies. Most generally these approaches involve questions about how interpretive perspectives on representational practices—rhetoric, curation, memory, theories of history, and public health policy—provide insight on the politics of imagined pasts and possible, alternative futures. In an important way, the issue foregrounds, on the one hand, the dynamic interplay of materialized representations in essays, museum displays, archaeological excavations, novels, and landscapes, and, on the other hand, the creative interpretation of these forms through mediated, multidimensional scholarly reflection. Each article provides critical insight on the textured layers of meaning that stem from representations of self in other that blur time and space to highlight the connections among rhetoric and policy, gender and nationalism, ideology...