Coming soon

Browse the range of exciting titles ANU Press is currently working on. If you wish to receive an alert when a new title is published, click the ‘Notify me’ button next to the relevant title and register your details.

Defying Beijing »

Societal Resistance to the Belt and Road in Myanmar

Authored by: Debby Chan
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims to construct a Sino-centric transcontinental infrastructure network in Asia, Europe, Africa, and beyond. Within this initiative, the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) is a vital strategic component. The shortcut to the Indian Ocean seeks to improve China’s energy security and facilitate trade. Defying Beijing: Societal Resistance to the Belt and Road in Myanmar shows how Myanmar was able to capitalise on Chinese BRI ambitions to achieve its own desired outcomes during the country’s political liberalisation in the 2010s. Belying the asymmetrical relationship between these two nations, the Myitsone hydropower dam was suspended, the Letpadaung copper mine’s contract was renegotiated, and the Kyaukphyu deep seaport project was downsized. China offered concessions to Myanmar instead of pressuring it to honour those signed agreements. Contrasting a common proposition that US-Myanmar rapprochement disrupted the BRI projects in Myanmar, Defying Beijing argues that the rise of new foreign policy actors – citizens – made project continuation costlier for Naypyidaw in the course of political liberalisation in the 2010s. Naypyidaw was pressured to renegotiate terms with Beijing in the wake of social outcry in the country. Defying Beijing advances our understanding of Chinese–Myanmar BRI relations and demonstrates how citizens can change the course of events of BRI cooperation despite oppressive political environments and an imbalanced bargaining structure. In post-coup Myanmar, Naypyidaw’s policy options were not conditioned by public opinion or protests; nonetheless, armed resistance has posed new domestic constraints in the CMEC’s implementation. Clearly, bilateral economic agreements without citizens’ endorsement are fraught with legitimacy problems and instabilities.

Coming soon

Notify me

Ginkgo Village »

Trauma and Transformation in Rural China

Authored by: Tamara Jacka
Ginkgo Village provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a mountainous region of central-eastern China known as Eyuwan. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, villagers in this region experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socio‑economic and political change. In the civil war (1927–1949), they were slaughtered in fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), they suffered appalling famine. Since the 1990s, mass labour outmigration has lifted local villagers out of poverty and fuelled major transformations in their circumstances and practices, social and family relationships, and values and aspirations. At the heart of this book are eight tales that recreate Ginkgo Village life and the interactions between villagers and the researchers who visit them. These tales use storytelling to engender an empathetic understanding of Ginkgo Villagers’ often traumatic life-experiences; to present concrete details about transformations in everyday village life in an engaging manner; and to explore the challenges and rewards of fieldwork research that attempts empathetic understanding across cultures.

Coming soon

Notify me

Forty Years in the South Seas »

Archaeological Perspectives on the Human History of Papua New Guinea and the Western Pacific Region

“This edited volume of invited chapters honours the four decades of fundamental research by archaeologist Glenn Summerhayes into the human prehistory of the islands of the western Pacific, especially New Guinea and its offshore islands. This area helped to shape and direct many ancient dispersal events associated with Homo sapiens, initially from Africa more than 50,000 years ago, through the lower latitudes of Asia, into Australia, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and possibly the Solomon Islands. Around 3000 years ago, coastal regions of northern and eastern New Guinea, and the islands of Melanesia beyond, played a major role in the Oceanic migrations of Austronesian-speaking peoples from southern China and Southeast Asia, migrations that have recently attained new levels of genetic complexity through the analysis of ancient DNA from human remains. For the first time, humans of both Southeast Asian and New Guinea/Bismarck genetic origin reached the islands of Remote Oceania, beyond the Solomons. Many of the chapters in this book deal with archaeological aspects of this Austronesian maritime expansion (which never seriously impacted the populations of the New Guinea Highlands), especially as revealed through the analysis of Lapita pottery and associated artefacts. Other chapters offer archaeological perspectives on trade and exchange, and on related topics that extend into the ethnographic era. The research of Glenn Summerhayes stands centrally amongst all these offerings, ranging from the discovery of some of the oldest traces of Pleistocene human settlement in Papua New Guinea to documentation of the remarkable phenomenon of Lapita expansion through Melanesia into western Polynesia around 3000 years ago. This volume is a fitting celebration of a remarkable career in western Pacific archaeology and population history.” ­— Emeritus Professor Peter Bellwood, The Australian National University

Coming soon

Notify me

Salish Archipelago »

Environment and Society in the Islands Within and Adjacent to the Salish Sea

Edited by: Moshe Rapaport
The Salish Archipelago includes more than 400 islands in the Salish Sea, an amalgamation of Canada’s Georgia Strait, the US’s Puget Sound, and the shared Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Salish Sea and Islands are named for the Coast Salish Indigenous Peoples whose homelands extend across the region. Holiday homes and services have in many places displaced pristine ecosystems, Indigenous communities, and historic farms. Will age-old island environments and communities withstand the forces of commodity-driven economies? This new, major scholarly undertaking provides the geographical and historical background for exploring such questions. Salish Archipelago features sections on environment, history, society, and management, accompanied by numerous maps and other illustrations. This diverse collection offers an overview of an embattled, but resilient, region, providing knowledge and perspectives of interest to residents, educators, and policy makers.

Coming soon

Notify me

The Chinese in Papua New Guinea »

Past, Present and Future

Papua New Guinean, Chinese and Australian people have long been entangled in the creation of complex histories and political debates concerning the similarities and differences of each group. These debates are fundamental to understandings of how a sense of national unity in Papua New Guinea is formed, as well as within analyses of the wider world of strategic power dynamics and influence. The Chinese in Papua New Guinea offers a comprehensive and nuanced examination of the Chinese in Papua New Guinea. Chinese, Papua New Guinean and Australian interactions are analysed in the context of ongoing shifts in colonial power, increased regional engagement with China, and current political instabilities across the Indo-Pacific region. The many ways the Chinese have been defined as actors in PNG’s history and politics are analysed against the backdrop of a rapidly changing global order. The complexity of Chinese experiences within Papua New Guinea is given expression, here, with chapters that stress political and historical heterogeneity, the importance of language for understanding Chinese social relations, and that articulate rich personal experiences of race relations.

Coming soon

Notify me

Dick Watkins »

Reshaping Art and Life

Authored by: Mary Eagle
Dick Watkins belongs to the generation of artists whose careers were launched at the high-flying end of American-based Abstraction. Almost immediately he faced up to the abrupt end of the Modern era. Culture was no longer to be framed by ‘progress’. In 1970, taking stock of the situation, he announced that he was a copyist, there being no such thing as a new creation in art, shaped as it was by visual languages. Nor did he intend to limit his curiosity about the relation of art to life by restricting himself to a ‘personal’ style. There followed a long and passionately adventurous exploration into many subjects and styles, during which Watkins was often the first to signal changes taking place in Western culture. The result is that for half a century he has been a major, if controversial figure in Australian art.

Coming soon

Notify me

China’s New Era »

Edited by: Annie Luman Ren, Ben Hillman
According to Communist Party discourse, China’s ‘New Era’ began when Xi Jinping was anointed Party boss in 2012. The shape of this New Era became eminently clear in 2023 when Xi commenced his third five-year term as General Secretary of the Party, a fortification of one-man authoritarian rule unprecedented in post-Mao China. Under Xi, the Party has expanded its influence over government, the economy and society. The Party-State is now more Party than State. The year 2023 saw other ‘new eras’ for China as well. Despite initial optimism sparked by the end of COVID-19 restrictions in late 2022, the Chinese economy in 2023 was buffeted by continuing property sector woes, record unemployment, and an unfolding local government debt crisis. Globally, China adopted a series of new and ambitious diplomatic initiatives to woo the Global South and amplify its voice on the world stage. The China Story Yearbook 2023: China’s New Era provides informed perspectives on these and other important stories that will resonate for years to come.

Coming soon

Notify me

Quaternary Palaeontology and Archaeology of Sumatra »

“The Indonesian island of Sumatra is part of a chain of islands making up Sunda and the Malay Archipelago. Sumatra is one of the largest islands in the world, housing unique and globally important tropical rainforests, a diverse array of rare plants and magnificent animals, and a population of 60 million who speak a range of Austronesian languages. As beautifully exemplified in this volume, Sumatra is a place which preserves a distinct and long-term human history, studies of which began in earnest with Eugene Dubois’s explorations in the 1880s to find our ancestral ‘missing link’. Archaeological investigation of megaliths and historic empires carry on to this day. A range of topics are explored here, including palaeontological study of fossil mammals and their environments, the routes that Homo erectus took during their wanderings across Indonesia, and the growth and development of societies and empires in more recent periods. This exemplary volume presents a revised view of the history of palaeontological and archaeological research as well as new ground-breaking field research, laying the foundation for future research on the biological and cultural evolution of one of the most majestic islands of the world.” ­— Professor Michael Petraglia, Director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University

Coming soon

Notify me

Dreaming Ecology »

Nomadics and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, Victoria River, Northern Australia

Edited by: Darrell Lewis, Margaret Jolly
Authored by: Deborah Bird Rose
In the author’s own words, Dreaming Ecology ‘explores a holistic understanding of the interconnections of people, country, kinship, creation and the living world within a context of mobility. Implicitly it asks how people lived so sustainably for so long’. It offers a telling critique of the loss of Indigenous life, human and non-human, in the wake of white settler colonialism and this becoming ‘cattle country’. It offers a fresh perspective on nomadics grounded in ‘footwalk epistemology’ and ‘an ethics of return sustained across different species, events, practices and scales’ ‘This is the final and most substantial of Debbie’s love letters to the Aboriginal people of the Victoria River Downs. I say this because there is a such a sense of reverence, wonder and respect throughout the book. The introduction of concepts of double-death, footwalk epistemology, wild country, … are not only organising ideas but characterisations arising from what Debbie hears, sees and feels of herself and Aboriginal others … I think of it in terms of love, if love is care, reciprocal respect, deep connectivity and a strong desire to never make less of the people she chose to commit herself to.’ —Richard Davis ‘This book was a pleasure to read, filled with careful description of people, places, and various plants and animals, and insightful analysis of the patterns and commitments that hold them together in the world.’ —Thom van Dooren

Coming soon

Notify me

Uneven Connections »

A Partial History of the Mobile Phone in Papua New Guinea

Authored by: Robert J. Foster
In the first years of the 21st century, economic liberalisation began to transform telecommunications services throughout the Pacific Islands. Government regulators, corporate executives and everyday consumers hopefully imagined that opening mobile phone markets to competition would result in greater access, lower costs and accelerated development. Uneven Connections examines the ways in which liberalisation took hold in Papua New Guinea (PNG) when a unit of the Caribbean-based mobile network operator Digicel Group Ltd. seized the opportunity to compete with the state-sponsored incumbent. The book highlights how mobile phones entered the lives of urban and rural Papua New Guineans after Digicel’s arrival in 2007. In so doing, it describes a moral economy in which companies, consumers and state agents continually negotiate who owes what to whom. In what ways have these various actors invented and negotiated new forms of both freedom and constraint? Uneven Connections advances understanding of how a so-called digital revolution in PNG unfolded, resulting in outcomes that often confounded the expectations of policy makers and ordinary citizens alike. It assesses the extent to which some of the promises of this revolution have been redeemed and identifies the challenges faced by companies, consumers and state agents in establishing and experiencing novel forms of uneven connectivity. The book provides a short and selective history of mobile phones in PNG, ending with the sale of Digicel’s Pacific operations to the Australian company Telstra in 2022.

Coming soon

Notify me

Political and Social Control in China »

The Consolidation of Single-Party Rule

During the past decade Xi Jinping has reasserted the Chinese Communist Party’s dominance of state and society, tightening political and social controls to consolidate the Party’s monopoly on political power in China. This volume brings leading China experts together to examine the changing mechanics of authoritarian rule in China, and the Party’s systematic efforts to neutralise potential threats. The book examines critical but little understood changes to the architecture of state, which enables more effective top-down rule and the efficient operation of an increasingly professional bureaucracy. It also explores the policies and mechanisms the Party has used to squash dissent and prevent criticisms. This volume will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand how the CCP has consolidated its rule at home and how it relates to the Party’s global ambitions for China’s great national rejuvenation.

Coming soon

Notify me

Humanities Research: Volume XX, Number 1, 2024 »

Public Humanities of the Future: Museums, Archives, Universities and Beyond

Edited by: Kylie Message, Robert Wellington, Frank Bongiorno
‘Public Humanities of the Future: Museums, Archives, Universities and Beyond’ explores the roles, responsibilities and challenges of the humanities in 2024 and beyond. It examines if and how our public cultural institutions and disciplines engage ethically and meaningfully with the challenges of contemporary life, and sheds light on how the conception and practice of humanities research is developing institutionally as well as through collaboration with partners and communities beyond the university context. This high-profile publication marks a number of historic moments, including the increasing urgency of the humanities in contemporary life, as well as the rapid development of interdisciplinary, digital and public humanities over the last decade, and the opportunities for international collaboration reflected in the post-COVID 19 resumption of international travel. It also marks the 50th-year anniversary of the Humanities Research Centre at The Australian National University, and the re-launch of Humanities Research.

Coming soon

Notify me