Tanamera


Book Description

Opulence. Invasion. Terror. And forbidden passion in 1930s Singapore. 'They were the golden days, when Singapore was as rich as its climate was steamy, its future as assured as it was busy. And those days were made even better when, as was inevitable, I fell in love with the Chinese beauty of Julie Soong and, against all unwritten canons of Singapore life, we became lovers.'




Management of Shari’ah Compliant Businesses


Book Description

Muslim consumers represent an untapped and viable market segment, but to date there has been very little research on catering to their needs or running and managing Islamic businesses. Innovations in Islamic business, interest in the use of Sukuk (Islamic bonds) to finance major projects, pressures on Islamic banks to reduce the financing gap in society, and the need to understand Muslim consumers, require a deeper grasp of the issues and opportunities involved, which are quite unique. In similar vein, acquiring expertise on topics specific to Shari'ah-compliant businesses requires a thorough knowledge of matters ranging from financing to branding and, in a broader sense, creating an entrepreneurial framework suitable to the market. This book fills this gap by presenting high-quality and original case studies on Islamic finance, marketing and management from around the world. Equally valuable in business school classrooms and for c-suite strategists, it will help readers shape business strategies to tap into a billion-strong market.




The Panorama


Book Description




Contours of Culture


Book Description

This volume discusses the urban history and cultural landscape of Singapore in relation to theories of textual dialogics, multiculturalism and the cultural and political unconscious. Multidisciplinary in approach, it takes as its data not only government policy and official discourses, and the more quantitative elements of population census information on religion, income, race and nationality, but also a wide range of related cultural discourses in film, literature, media texts, social behaviour and other interventions and interpretations of the city. The main parameters of Singapore’s socio-national construction—public housing, social elitism, racial and linguistic plurality and their management, colonial remnants and their transformation—are explained and analysed in terms of Singapore’s colonial past, its rapid modernization, and its current push to compete as a global city and tourist destination. This multidisciplinary book should be of interest to a correspondingly wide readership, including architects and urban planners, political scientists, cultural analysts and theorists, colonial discourse scholars, urban geographers and sociologists, Asian studies specialists, graduate and undergraduate students in the above areas, and a general readership interested in cities and cultures. “This is a remarkable book. By taking a series of readings of Singapore’s urban culture, it chronicles the emergence of a new city form which, through the coming together of quite particular narratives of modernity, nationhood and identity may well be providing a much more general spatial model for Asian cities. Simultaneously, it provides a gripping account of how to read the possibilities and tensions that this model throws up.” —Nigel J. Thrift, Oxford University “Goh’s theoretically sophisticated and creative analysis of Singapore’s society, space and culture and his brilliant critique of the city’s official policies of self-representation is a marvellous tour de force. An astute urban semiotician and interpreter of cultural signs, Goh draws on films, figures and fiction to provide a fascinating reading of a city preparing for global competition. Questions of ethnicity, class, sexuality, national identity, architecture and space are brought together in an imaginative—as well as provocative—exercise of symbolic explication and analysis. Essential for studies of Asian urbanism and a model for students of the (so-called) ‘global city’.” —Anthony King, State University of New York at Binghamton “In Contours of Culture Robbie Goh has achieved what many specialists in cultural studies have attempted only metaphorically, by successfully fusing the materiality of spatiality with the symbolic realm of cultural processes. The result is an absorbing and nuanced interpretation of the meaning of the landscapes of Singapore, where space serves as a text that reflects and reproduces the political cultures of a global city in a state of constant re-invention.” —David Ley, University of British Columbia, Canada







Memory and Nation-Building


Book Description

Nations are built by narrating their past. Threads of common memories weave the fabric of the national culture, integrating the heterogenous communities into the idea of a single nation. In multicultural societies, the process is a messy one. Different communities remember the past from perspectives that often clash with each other. Multiple memories of a multicultural nation challenge the idea of a singular national identity and call for multiple forms of belonging. Memory and Nation-Building explores the contemporary images of World War II in Malaysian literature and the continuing significance of the conflict in the collective memory and nation-building in Malaysia. Given the multicultural nature of the nation, the War memories of Malaysia are multiple and often contradictory. In the contemporary Malaysian literature, these memories embody the search for a historical narrative that would accommodate the cultural and ethnic diversity of the country.




Pacific Islands ...


Book Description




H.O. Pub


Book Description







An Island Called Home


Book Description

Yiddish-speaking Jews thought Cuba was supposed to be a mere layover on the journey to the United States when they arrived in the island country in the 1920s. They even called it “Hotel Cuba.” But then the years passed, and the many Jews who came there from Turkey, Poland, and war-torn Europe stayed in Cuba. The beloved island ceased to be a hotel, and Cuba eventually became “home.” But after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, the majority of the Jews opposed his communist regime and left in a mass exodus. Though they remade their lives in the United States, they mourned the loss of the Jewish community they had built on the island. As a child of five, Ruth Behar was caught up in the Jewish exodus from Cuba. Growing up in the United States, she wondered about the Jews who stayed behind. Who were they and why had they stayed? What traces were left of the Jewish presence, of the cemeteries, synagogues, and Torahs? Who was taking care of this legacy? What Jewish memories had managed to survive the years of revolutionary atheism? An Island Called Home is the story of Behar’s journey back to the island to find answers to these questions. Unlike the exotic image projected by the American media, Behar uncovers a side of Cuban Jews that is poignant and personal. Her moving vignettes of the individuals she meets are coupled with the sensitive photographs of Havana-based photographer Humberto Mayol, who traveled with her. Together, Behar’s poetic and compassionate prose and Mayol’s shadowy and riveting photographs create an unforgettable portrait of a community that many have seen though few have understood. This book is the first to show both the vitality and the heartbreak that lie behind the project of keeping alive the flame of Jewish memory in Cuba.