Discussions of sexuality in Asia and the Pacific have long been tinged with conceptions of the exotic Orient. Examining a world of erotic encounter between European, Asian, and Pacific people, these essays explore how sexual practices and sexual meanings have been constructed across cultural borders in Thailand, the Philippines, Burma/Myanmar, Japan, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Polynesian islands. Considering sexuality as embedded in a complex social and political world structured and saturated by gender, race, and class relations, these scholars challenge the categories with which sex and gender have been named and studied. They examine these sites of desire through specific historic and cultural circumstances, from the first explorations of Europeans, through colonial power, to the contemporary issues of sexual tourism, prostitution, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

A unique and important contribution to the study of sexuality, this book also suggests that the history of sexuality in the West was shaped by myths of the legendary Orient and the exotic "Other."

Personal testimonies are the life force of human rights work, and rights claims have brought profound power to the practice of life writing. This volume explores the connections and conversations between human rights and life writing through a dazzling, international collection of essays by survivor-writers, scholars, and human rights advocates.
            In We Shall Bear Witness, editors Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly assemble moving personal accounts from those who have endured persecution, imprisonment, and torture; meditations on experiences of injustice and protest by creative writers and filmmakers; and innovative research on ways that digital media, commodification, and geopolitics are shaping what is possible to hear and say. The book’s primary sections—testimony, recognition, representation, and justice—evoke the key stages in turning experience into a human rights life story and attend to such diverse and varied arts as autobiography, documentary film, report, oral history, blog, and verbatim theater. The result is a groundbreaking book that sensitively examines how life and rights narratives have become so powerfully entwined. Also included is an innovative guide to teaching human rights and life narrative in the classroom.