The Journal of Transcultural Studies

The Jewish Mahallah of Singapore as a Site of Transcultural Memory

Jay Prosser — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100

The Jewish quarter in Singapore, from the 1870s until the 1960s, was known by its residents
as the mahallah. From the Arabic for “stopping place,” the term and many of the cultural
practices of its residents were transported to Singapore from the Middle East, mostly from the
Ottoman Empire, specifically Iraq, as Jews migrated from this region to Singapore. Drawing
predominantly on oral histories of Singapore Jews, this essay establishes how the Singapore
mahallah was shaped by transcultural memory. Never appearing on a map, the mahallah did
not conform to the racial divisions expressed by British imperialist Singapore in the Jackson
(or Raffles Town) Plan. However, I show how the mahallah disintegrated, as the Singapore
Jewish community divided along the lines of class and racial identification informed by
British imperialism. The mahallah is now wholly memorialized, in the oral histories, in
memoirs, a novel, and the Jews of Singapore Museum, rather than a vital Jewish quarter.

The Transformations of a Deity: Tracing the Impact of Transcultural Exchanges on Enoshima Island in Japan through the Prism of the Deity Benzaiten

Alexander Vesey — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Travel guides, web blogs, and other forms of modern media often praise the buildings, gardens, and artwork of Japanese Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines as exemplars of traditional Japanese cultural practices and values. This interpretation situates these sites within a Japanese cultural milieu, but aside from references to Buddhism’s Indian origins or the Chinese abbots of a particular monastery, less attention is given to defining their identities within global cultural exchanges and negotiations. This paper applies insights from transcultural studies to the history of Japan’s Enoshima Island and Benzaiten, a water-culture deity long venerated at the island’s shrines, in order to analyze the impact of inbound cultural flows on the creation and subsequent evolution of the Benzaiten cult and the island’s economic development. This study also examines how the product of these exchanges (new interpretations of Benzaiten and Enoshima) are interjected back into global cultural flows via tourism and mass media.

Imagined Civilization: Identity and Nation Building in Modern China

Ori Sela — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100

This paper analyzes the journey of the modern concept of “civilization” from the West into
China, via Japan. It traces how Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century used the
term and the consequences thereof, through the prism of the proclaimed need to construct a
modern nation, state, and society while negotiating the tensions between “old” and “new.” I
argue that their ideas and imaginaries of civilization were highly significant in shaping national
identity, theories, and practices and were consequential at the individual level as well. The essay
also follows the ways in which civilization, as a term and concept, traveled from the 1920s to the
contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC). It shows how the concept lost its appeal in the
Maoist era but bounced back in the post-Mao years, particularly over the past decade. I discuss
the current uses and understandings of civilization under the leadership of Xi Jinping, and
examine how century-old notions have been transformed. More specifically, the essay argues
that the relationship between “civilization” and the “nation” changed dramatically and that these
terms acquired new meanings with the changing global context, therefore serving different ends
internally and externally. Presentist accounts often ignore the rich conceptual base on which
newer ideas develop, therefore overlooking not only alternative ways of understanding but also
the deeper context of current developments; the article aims to serve as a corrective to such
accounts by highlighting the historical trajectory and links of the past usage of a concept to its
present.

Postcolonial Theory of Science and Other Knowledge Forms: The Engagement with Cognitive and Epistemic Justice

Dhruv Raina — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100

The essay addresses concerns about the history and philosophy of science that emanate from the current discussions on the ideas of epistemic justice, cognitive justice, and epistemologies of the Global South. These discussions are salient for the raging debate on the decolonization of minds, knowledge, and the university. We therefore need to address their consequences for the history and philosophy of science, seen here not as distinct formations but as a unitary whole customarily referred to by the acronym HPS. This paper is a preliminary step in that direction. In the first two sections, the essay provides a sketch of Eurocentric diffusionist models in the history of sciences and critiques of histories of science in the non-West based on such models that emanated from India. The latter half of the paper an exegetic effort to tease out the meanings associated with cognitive justice, and deliberates upon the philosophical consequences resulting from diverse readings of epistemologies of the Global South for the pursuit of the history and philosophy of science. Can these concepts be woven into a more just account of the global history and philosophy of the sciences?

Cover and Front Matter

Sophie Florence — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Editorial Note

Monica Juneja, Joachim Kurtz, Michael Radich — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100