New Books in East Asian Studies
1,236 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 months ago - ★★★★★ - 55 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of East Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
Hongwei Bao, “Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China” (NIAS Press, 2018)
December 31, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesHongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which means “comrade” and in more recent decades has been a popular term to refer to gay people and sexual minorities more broadly. Based on ethnographic research and a solid theoretical base, Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China (NIAS Press, 2018) explores queer identity, activism, and governmentality in China, whe...
Denise Y. Ho, “Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
December 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao's China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how to take part in revolution,” and it develops that argument in a series of case studies that take readers into the local context of museums, revolutionary m...
Grammar, Identity, and Ideology in Early 20th-Century Japan
December 29, 2023 09:00 - 22 minutesHave you ever felt that the grammar of Asian languages does not fit with the framework that we use to describe them? In the late 19th century, Asian grammarians began adapting the European-based grammatical frameworks describing their languages, but this application was not straightforward. In Japan, the question of grammar eventually became entangled with larger debates about cultural identity, heritage, and nationalism. In this episode, Jonathan Puntervold unfolds the story of conservative ...
Matthieu Felt, "Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan" (Harvard UP, 2023)
December 29, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesMeanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scale of the world explain...
Kristian Petersen, “Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab” (Oxford UP, 2017)
December 28, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesIn his monumental new book, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017), Kristian Petersen takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the layers and complexities of Sino-Muslim intellectual and social history. On the way readers meet the major scholars and texts that played a formative role in the development of the Han Kitab tradition, and revel in navigating the terms and stakes of their discourses and debates ...
Scott D. Seligman, "Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
December 28, 2023 09:00 - 43 minutesOn an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria–Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted after a night out. Suspicion falls on the city’s fervently anti-semitic Russian fascists. Yet despite pressure from the French consulate, the Japanese police slow-walk the investigation—and three months later, Semyon is found dead. The abduction, murder and trial catch the world’s attention right as Japan is trying to win international supp...
Alyssa M. Park, “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)
December 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourEven in states where borders and sovereignty are supposedly well established, large movements of transnational migrants are seen to present problems, as today’s crises show the world over. But as Alyssa Park’s book Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) shows, when both peoples and whole political paradigms are on the move simultaneously, we are able to look in very new ways at how governance works and...
Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)
December 26, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourJeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. T...
Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki, "Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire" (Routledge, 2023)
December 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAnalysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building. Although many feminist critics have articulated women's active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated narratives of empire-building have been largely supported and rectified. In contrast, the roles of marginalized women, such as sex workers, women e...
Jie Li, "Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China" (Columbia UP, 2023)
December 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWelcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwa...
James Cummings, "The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan: Sociality, Space and Time" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
December 23, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesThe Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan: Sociality, Space and Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) by Dr. James Cummings explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Taking an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men construct and experience ways of ‘sexual being’ – as gay, homosexual, tongzhi and/or in the scene – and what these mean for the ways of living they see as possible within a socio-cultural, political an...
Thomas Kelly, "The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2023)
December 23, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhy would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse composit...
Philip Snow, "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord" (Yale UP, 2023)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesRussia and China, the largest and most populous countries in the world, respectively, have maintained a delicate relationship for four centuries. In addition to a four-thousand-kilometer border, they have periodically shared a common outlook on political and economic affairs. But they are, in essence, profoundly different polities and cultures, and their intermittent alliances have proven difficult and at times even volatile. In China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale U...
Olga V. Solovieva, "The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, Or the Art of Speaking Differently" (Oxford UP. 2023)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 33 minutesOlga V. Solovieva's book The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, Or the Art of Speaking Differently (Oxford UP. 2023) offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian...
Elise Hu, "Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital" (Dutton, 2023)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutesIn August, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to complain about how U.S. regulations are holding local sunscreens back compared to the rest of the world. And while she didn’t name any specific country, the video featured headlines that did name one nation: South Korea. On social media, Korean cosmetics are now viewed as the world’s best. But where did this success come from—and, perhaps, what does it say about South Korea? Elise Hu, during her time in South Korea, tried t...
Wayne Soon, "Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History" (Stanford UP, 2020)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Wayne Soon about his book Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford UP, 2020). In 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented flowering of scientific knowledge in China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Wayne Soon...
June Hee Kwon, "Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers" (Duke UP, 2023)
December 18, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourMigration is a theme intertwined with hopes and dreams. In Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers (Duke UP, 2023), June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursui...
Gary J. Bass, "Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia" (Knopf, 2023)
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutesJudgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf, 2023), a book ten years in the making, is the definitive account of the postwar trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals, and the impact it had on the modern history of Asia. Written by Gary Bass, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, the book shines a much-needed spotlight on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the criminal process historically overshadowed by...
Jean Yen-chun Lin, "A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities" (Columbia UP, 2023)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourEnvironmental organising in Beijing emerged in an unlikely place in the 2000s: new gated residential communities. After rapid population growth and housing construction led to a ballooning trash problem and overflowing landfills, many first-time homeowners found their new neighbourhoods facing an unappetizing prospect—waste incinerator projects slated for their backyards. Delving into the online and offline conversations of communities affected by the proposed incinerators, A Spark in the Smo...
Tristan G. Brown, "Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesWelcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and I am speaking today to Prof. Tristan Brown about his book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton UP, 2023). Brown’s book considers fengshui, that is, the knowledge of orienting structures, such as graves and houses, in accordance with well-established cosmological principles, as an administrative technology and language of power that was intrinsic to governance ...
Humanitarian Issues of Immigration in Japan: From Historical Background to Current Policies
December 08, 2023 09:00 - 27 minutesJapan has historically maintained extended periods of isolationist policies and continues to uphold some of the strictest immigration laws in the world today. The country has also long had a tumultuous relationship with non-ethnic Japanese residents, including Taiwanese and Korean nationals who were first forced to become Japanese citizens under imperialist rule, only to be deprived of their statuses after Japan formally lost its colonies. More recently, foreign nationals seeking employment a...
Susan Blumberg-Kason, "Bernardine's Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China" (Post Hill Press, 2023)
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesIn 1929, Bernardine Szold Fritz left Paris on a train bound for China. She was on her way to her fourth wedding, and her fourth husband: An American investment banker named Chester Fritz, who’d proposed after a whirlwind meeting earlier in Shanghai. Bernardine is then forced to find herself things to do in interwar China–and her husband isn’t helping much. That’s how Susan Blumberg-Kason’s newest book, Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China (Post Hill Press: 2023)...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 2: What Is Modernity?
December 06, 2023 11:00 - 36 minutesWe often think of modernity as a distinct time period in history – one that is said to start at different places, but which always includes us. Yet people have been claiming to be modern since at least the third century BC. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back to ancient China, when a series of emperors laid claim to modernity in order to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity is best understood not as a period on a timeline but as a claim to freedom from the past. By reco...
Lawrence Zhang, "Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China" (Harvard UP, 2023)
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesThe Qing dynasty's office purchase system (juanna) allowed men to legally and openly pay for appointments in the civil service — enabling them to skip the much-lauded civil service examination entirely. Thoroughly forgotten by historians and often dismissed as "corruption," Lawrence Zhang's meticulous book, Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), unpacks this system. Through a thorough analysis of archival and other print ...
Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation
December 02, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesThe “barbarian” nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. Their deeds still resonate today. Indeed, these nomads built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description th...
Book Chat: Eco-translation from Taiwan and Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle 單車失竊記, with Darryl Sterk
December 02, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesIn this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited Dr Darryl Sterk, a Canadian eco-translator who is now based in Lingnan University in Hong Kong and dedicated his work in Taiwanese eco-literature and translation. In our conversation, Darryl told us how he ends up choosing a career path for eco-translation and how he defines “eco-translation” in his own way. He also shared with us his translation experience more in details by drawing reference to Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle. Furthermore, facing c...
Shuchen Xiang, "Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2023)
November 29, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference. Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton UP, 2023), Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings ...
Henrietta Harrison, "The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire" (Princeton UP, 2021)
November 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton UP, 2021) is a fascinating history of China's relations with the West--told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators. The 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney's fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East's lack of interest in the West. In The Perils of Interpreti...
Jeffrey Angles, ed., "Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again: The Original Novellas by Shigeru Kayama" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
November 23, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutesEarlier this month, Toho Studios released “Godzilla Minus One”—the 37th film in the now almost seven-decade-old franchise. Godzilla has gone through many phases over the past 70 years: symbol of Japan’s nuclear fears, cuddly defender of humanity, Japanese cultural icon and, now, the centerpiece of another Hollywood cinematic universe. But it was 1954’s Godzilla that launched the whole thing, with a story written by Japanese author Shigeru Kayama. He also wrote a novelization for the movie and...
Andrew Monaghan and Richard Connolly. "The Sea in Russian Strategy" (Manchester UP, 2023)
November 22, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe common perception of Russia's status as a great power is often portrayed as being based largely on land power. Being the largest country in the world and fielding massively large field armies, there is some considerable truth to this perception. By contrast, when concerning Russian capabilities as a naval power, the picture is different. Common references to the Battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), the Kursk submarine incident of 2000, and more recently the sinking ...
Harry Harootunian, "Archaism and Actuality: Japan and the Global Fascist Imaginary" (Duke UP, 2023)
November 19, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesIn Archaism and Actuality: Japan and the Global Fascist Imaginary (Duke UP, 2023) eminent Marxist historian Harry Harootunian explores the formation of capitalism and fascism in Japan as a prime example of the uneven development of capitalism. He applies his theorization of subsumption to examine how capitalism integrates and redirects preexisting social, cultural, and economic practices to guide the present. This subsumption leads to a global condition in which states and societies all exist...
Sauna Culture in Japan
November 17, 2023 09:00 - 26 minutesIn 2020, Finland’s sauna culture was added to the List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Sauna culture is an integral part of the lives of the majority of the Finnish population. Interestingly, the Finnish style of sauna-going has inspired quite a few individuals in Japan to travel to Finland to learn more about sauna as a lifestyle. It seems that there is active interest in investigating foreign ...
Kimberley Ens Manning, "The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China" (Cornell UP, 2023)
November 16, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourKimberley Ens Manning's book The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China (Cornell UP, 2023) explores the formation and consolidation of the state in revolutionary China through the crucial role that social ties—specifically family ties—played in the state's capacity to respond to crisis before and after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. Central to these ties, Kimberley Ens Manning finds, were women as both the subjects and leade...
Kai Jun Chen, "Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technocracy in Qing China" (U Washington Press, 2023)
November 13, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourPorcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technology in Qing China (University of Washington Press; 2023) looks at the history of court-sponsored porcelain production in Qing China through the work and career of the Manchu polymath Tang Ying (1682-1756). Viewing him as a technocrat — an official who combined technological specialization and managerial expertise — Kai Jun Chen uses Tang to explore how porcelain manufacture was carried out in the Qing, how technological innovations were create...
Emily H. C. Chua, "The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
November 13, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourChina’s news sector is a place where newsmakers, advertising executives, company bosses, and Party officials engage one another in contingent and evolving arrangements that run from cooperation and collaboration to manipulation and betrayal. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with journalists, editors, and executives at a newspaper in Guangzhou, China, The Currency of Truth: Newsmaking and the Late-Socialist Imaginaries of China's Digital Era (U Michigan Press, 2023) brings its reade...
A Chinese-American Buddhist Healer (Pierce Salguero and Kin Cheung)
November 11, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesDr. Pierce Salguero sits down with Kin Cheung, a scholar of contemporary Buddhism at Moravian University. We talk about his research on a Chinese-American community healer who happens to be his father. We discuss how his father’s practice raises challenging questions for scholars, and reveals gaping holes in current academic approaches to Buddhism. Along the way, we talk about how code-switching between different ontologies is a feature of life for Asian Americans, and hear Kin’s father condu...
Huwy-min Lucia Liu, "Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death" (Cornell UP, 2023)
November 10, 2023 09:00 - 2 hoursGoverning Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funer...
Wu Jieh-min, "Rival Partners: How Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and Guangdong Officials Forged the China Development Model" (Harvard UP, 2022)
November 09, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTaiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People’s Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China? In Rival Partners: How Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and Guangdong Officials Forged the China Development Model (Harvard UP, 2022), Wu Jieh-min follows the development of Taiwanese enterprises in China over twenty-five years and provides fresh insights. The geopolitical shift in Asia ...
Fuchsia Dunlop, "Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food" (Norton, 2023)
November 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourChinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese labourers began to sojourn and settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese food has the curious distinction of being both one of the world's best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication - but today that is begin...
David Veevers, "The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire" (Ebury Press, 2023)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe story of the British Empire is a familiar one: Britain came, it saw, it conquered, forging a glorious world empire upon which the sun never set. In fact, far from being the tale of a single nation imposing its will upon the world, the expanding British Empire frequently found itself frustrated by the power and tenacious resistance of the Indigenous and non-European people it encountered. From gruelling wars in Ireland to the failure to curtail North African Corsair states, all the way to ...
Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi, "The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan" (NIAS, 2022)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesThe Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan (NIAS Press, 2022) is an edited volume of ethnographic research organized around a cluster of key themes such as affective labor and the commodified performance of gender in contemporary Japan. Refreshingly, the chapters consist exclusively of the work of early-career scholars, tied together with an introductory chapter and epilogue by the book’s editors, Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi. The authors are attentive ...
Timothy Brook, "The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China" (Princeton UP, 2023)
November 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China, but the truth is far more profound. The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China (Princeton UP, 2023) provides an entirely new approach to the economic and social history of China, exploring how global climate crisis spelled the end of Ming rule. The mid-seventeenth century witnessed the deadlies...
Akiko Takeyama, "Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry" (Stanford UP, 2023)
November 02, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesIn a world dominated by the notion of autonomy, free choice, and consent, Akiko Takeyama takes us on a thought-provoking journey into the heart of Japan's adult video industry in her groundbreaking book, Involuntary Consent The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry. With an ethereal blend of ethnography and critical analysis, Takeyama challenges the pervasive idea that participation in the adult entertainment industry is always a matter of free will. Instead, she introduces us to...
Mingwei Song, "Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction" (Columbia UP, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourI am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song’s account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublim...
David C. Atherton, "Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature" (Columbia UP, 2023)
October 23, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesEdo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life into literary tradition. But how to understand the politics of this body of literature remains contested, in part because the defining characteristics of much early modern fiction—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic and intertextual play, and heavy allusion to ...
Ji Li, "At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China" (Oxford UP, 2023)
October 22, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesTo a lively cast of international players that shaped Manchuria during the early twentieth century, At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China (Oxford UP, 2023) adds the remarkable story of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948). A French Catholic missionary, Caubrière arrived in Manchuria on the eve of the Boxer Uprising in 1899 and was murdered on the eve of the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1948. Living with ordinary Chinese people for half a century, Ca...
Shellen Xiao Wu, "Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China" (Stanford UP, 2023)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesFrom the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world engaged with new interpretations of empire and the deployment of science and technology to aid frontier development in extreme environments. Through a century of pol...
Chris Fraser, "Late Classical Chinese Thought" (Oxford UP, 2023)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourLate Classical Chinese Thought (Oxford University Press, 2023) is Chris Fraser's topically organized study of the Warring States period of Chinese philosophy, the third century BCE. In addition to well-known texts like the Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Mencius, Fraser's book introduces readers to Lu's Annals, the Guanzi, the Hanfeizi, the Shangjun Shu, and excerpts from the Mawangdui silk manuscripts. Beginning with a chapter on "The Way," or the dao, Late Classical Chinese Thought explores topics in ...
Margaret Hillenbrand, "On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China" (Columbia UP, 2023)
October 14, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesMargaret Hillenbrand’s On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China’s exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China’s economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displace...
Parks M. Coble, "The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek Lost China's Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
October 14, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesParks M. Coble's book The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek Lost China's Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2023) revisits one of the most stunning political collapses of the twentieth century. When Japan surrendered in September 1945, Chiang Kai-shek seemed triumphant—one of the Big Four Allied leaders of the war and head of a government firmly allied with the United States. Yet less than four years later he would be forced into a humiliating exile in Taiwan. It has long been recogniz...