New Books in East Asian Studies
1,316 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★★ - 55 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of East Asia about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Nicholas Walton, "Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency" (Hurst, 2019)
September 27, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourNicholas Walton’s Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency (Hurst, 2019) is far more than a portrait of the rise of a resource-poor nation that has become a model of economic development, governance and management of inter-communal relations. Part travelogue, part history, Walton charts the opportunities and pitfalls confronting small states that have become particularly acute in an era of identity politics and civilizational leadership. Potential threats include not only the Singapor...
Yan Li, “China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination" (Routledge, 2018)
September 27, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourThe warmth of China and Russia’s present-day relationship is sometimes said to reprise 1950s ties between Mao’s PRC and the Soviet Union, even if that remains a poorly understood period in both countries. Still less understood, moreover, is the deep Soviet cultural influence on China which accompanied this era of socialist alliance, and this in part is why Yan Li’s China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination (Routledge, 2018)is such an invaluable book. Presenting a fasc...
Kyle A. Jaros, "China's Urban Champions: The Politics of Spatial Development" (Princeton UP, 2019)
September 23, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourDiscussions of China’s 21st-century ‘rise’ often focus on the country’s dazzling megacities and the dizzying pace of urbanization which has propelled their development over the past 30 years. But how and why all these cities have grown in the ways and the places that they have is not always an easy question to answer in a place as large and diverse as China. This is why Kyle Jaros’ China's Urban Champions: The Politics of Spatial Development (Princeton University Press, 2019), a book which ex...
Shayne Legassie, "The Medieval Invention of Travel" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
September 06, 2019 08:00 - 40 minutesShayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages played in creating modern conceptions of travel and travel writing. Legassie is an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Medieval Invention of Travel (University of Chicago, 2017). Over the course of the Mi...
Amy Olberding, "The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2019)
September 03, 2019 08:00 - 56 minutesAmy Olberding’s The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2019) is a joy to read, both entertaining and rich in ideas. The Wrong of Rudeness asks a key question for our times how do we interact with each other, especially in politically contentious situations? Olberding addresses this and related issues by bringing our moderns challenges into dialogue with thinkers from early China. Weaving together modern cultural references with innovative r...
Jenny Huangfu Day, "Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
August 29, 2019 08:00 - 54 minutesHistorians in the English-speaking world have long studied how European and American travelers and diplomats conceptualized China, but, especially in recent years, few scholars have attempted to thoroughly understand the reverse—how Qing envoys conceptualized the West. This is the starting point for Dr. Jenny Huangfu Day (Associate Professor of History at Skidmore College) in her new book, Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China. By studying ...
Levi McLaughlin, "Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution: The Rise of A Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2018)
August 26, 2019 08:00 - 48 minutesBeing Japan’s largest and most influential new religious organization, Soka Gakkai (Society for the Creation of Value) and Soka Gakkai International (SGI) claims to have 12 million members in 192 countries around the world. Founded in the 1930s by a group of teachers focused on educational reform, Soka Gakkai has since evolved from its grassroot origins as a movement inspired by Nichiren Buddhism to a highly significant source of influence in contemporary Japanese education and politics. In S...
Max Oidtmann, "Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet" (Columbia UP, 2018)
August 19, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected the technology of the “Golden Urn,” a Qing-era tool which involves the identification of the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks by drawing lots from a golden vessel. Why would the Chinese Communist Party revive this former ritual? What powers lie in the symbolism of the “Golden Urn”? Why was this tradition invented? Using both archival sources in the Manchu language and chronicles of Tibetan elites, Max Oidtmann answers these...
Martin T. Fromm, "Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
August 16, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourWith China’s northwestern and southern edges justifiably being sources of global attention at present, Martin Fromm’s Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China (Cambridge University Press, 2019) has much light to shed on how the country’s ruling Communist Party refashioned its relationship with its frontiers at an earlier point in history. Examining a trove of documents produced mostly in the 1980s in the country’s far northeastern Heilongjiang province, Fromm r...
Sabine Frühstück, "Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan" (U California Press, 2017)
August 14, 2019 08:00 - 45 minutesIn Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan (University of California Press, 2017), Sabine Frühstück shows how children and childhood have been used in twentieth century Japan as technologies to moralize war, and later, in the twenty-first century, to sentimentalize peace. Through examining Japanese children’s war games both in the field and on paper, Fruhstuck explores in the first half of the book how “children’s little wars” are connected and interacted with th...
Meredith Oda, "The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
August 14, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Meredith Oda shows how city leaders and local residents in San Francisco fashioned a postwar municipal identity through their promotion of what Oda calls transpacific urbanism. Though the Japanese American presence in prewar San Francisco had been minor, it boomed as Japan came into vogue during the early Cold War. The Japanese Cultural and Trade Center was the apotheosis o...
Jessica Starling, "Guardians of the Buddha’s Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
August 05, 2019 08:00 - 59 minutesIn her recent ethnography, Guardians of the Buddha’s Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), Prof. Jessica Starling invites us into the daily lives of the bōmori, the spouses of priests in the Japanese Jōdo Shinshū, or True Pure Land, tradition. Focusing on domestic religion, Prof. Starling shows us how the bōmori create community by cleaning the temple altar, how they express gratitude for their salvation by carefully managing temple donation...
Daniel Vukovich, "Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China" (Palgrave, 2018)
July 22, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourIlliberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People's Republic of China (Palgrave, 2018) by Daniel Vukovich analyzes the 'intellectual political culture' of post-Tiananmen China in comparison to and in conflict with liberalism inside and outside the P.R.C. It questions how mainland politics and discourses challenge ‘our’ own, chiefly liberal and anti-‘statist’ political frameworks and how can one understand its general refusal of liberalism? Daniel argues that the Party-state poses a cha...
Danny Orbach, "Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan" (Cornell UP, 2017)
July 18, 2019 08:00 - 55 minutesDanny Orbach’s Curse on This Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan (Cornell University Press, 2017) provides new insights into the origins of the insubordination that plagued and characterized the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1930s. Orbach identifies the causes of insubordination in both the political culture of the military dating back to the Meiji Restoration itself and a series of systemic “bugs” that infected the modern political system but that were in themselves the result of ...
Betsy Perabo, "Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War" (Bloomsbury, 2017)
July 18, 2019 08:00 - 49 minutesAs Russian militarism becomes increasingly intertwined with Russian Orthodoxy theology in the 21st century, the history of the Church’s relationship to war and its justification becomes particularly relevant. Betsy Perabo’s book Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) is a unique and important contribution to this area of inquiry, representing a rare contemporary academic exploration of just war theory within Russian Orthodoxy in the context of the Russo-Japan...
Melissa McCormick, "The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion" (Princeton UP, 2018)
July 17, 2019 08:00 - 56 minutesThe Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums is the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In The Tale of Genji. A Visual Companion, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, Melissa McCormick discusses all of the fifty-four paintings by Tosa Mitsunobu and calligraphies in the album, thus providing a unique companion to Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh century masterpiece of prose and poetry, The Tale of Genji. Ricarda Brosch is an Assistant Curator at the V&A’s Asian ...
Nancy S. Steinhardt, "Chinese Architecture: A History" (Princeton UP, 2019)
July 16, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourIf there’s one thing that conjures up the – rightly contested – idea of a ‘civilisation’, it is grand palatial or religious buildings, and many such structures are foremost in how China is imagined throughout the world. But as Nancy S. Steinhardt notes in Chinese Architecture: A History (Princeton University Press, 2019), many iconic edifices such Beijing’s Forbidden City or Shanxi’s temples share features in common with the humblest ordinary dwellings which people in what we now call China h...
Chika Watanabe, "Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
July 15, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourChika Watanabe’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich ethnographic study of the work of a Japanese NGO called the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement. Watanabe’s deep dive into the daily workings of OISCA explores the “moral imagination” of constructing unity based on a distinctly Japanese-marked set of ideals and practices within the confines of an unusual Japanese NGO w...
Kate Harris, "Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road" (Dey Street Books, 2019)
July 12, 2019 08:00 - 32 minutesKate Harris — writer, scientist, and extreme cyclist – talks about the trip she made with her friend Mel, tracing Marco Polo’s route across Central Asia and Tibet. The journey is the subject of Harris’s book, Lands of Lost Borders: a Journey on the Silk Road (Dey Street Books, 2019). Lands of Lost Borders, winner of the 2018 Banff Adventure Travel Award and a 2018 Nautilus Award, is the chronicle of Harris’s odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set oursel...
Jeremy Friedman, "Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World" (UNC Press, 2018)
July 12, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourIf today’s geopolitical fragmentation and the complexities of a ‘multipolar’ world order have led some to reminisce about the apparent stability of the Cold War era’s two ‘camps’, it should be remembered that things were of course never so straightforward. As Jeremy Friedman shows in Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, the 1960s-1980s Sino-Soviet Split(UNC Press, 2018) generated a much more fractious and divided global situation than today’s nostalgia would imply...
Jakobina Arch, "Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan" (U Washington Press, 2018)
July 11, 2019 08:00 - 57 minutesBringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan (University of Washington Press, 2018) is more than a history of whaling in Japan. Jakobina K. Arch weaves together a wealth of diverse materials to demonstrate and explore the social, cultural, economic, intellectual, and religious impacts of whales on the world of Tokugawa Japan. In doing so, Arch argues powerfully for a historical vision that locates Japan within a larger global environment and also understands the fu...
Dean Anthony Brink, “Japanese Poetry and its Publics: From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima” (Routledge, 2018)
July 09, 2019 08:00 - 39 minutesIs classical Japanese poetry something to be enjoyed in private, an object of study for scholars, or an item of public life teeming with hints about how to understand and deal with our past and our future? In Japanese Poetry and its Publics: From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima (Routledge, 2018), Dean Anthony Brink, Associate Professor at the National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, argues that certain forms of Japanese classical poetry (especially tanka and senryū) have remained centr...
Lorenzo Andolfatto, "Hundred Days’ Literature: Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910" (Brill, 2019)
July 08, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourIn Hundred Days’ Literature, Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910 (Brill, 2019), Lorenzo Andolfatto explores the landscape of early modern Chinese fiction through the lens of the utopian novel, casting new light on some of its most peculiar yet often overshadowed literary specimens. The wutuobang or lixiang xiaoshuo, by virtue of its ideally totalizing perspective, provides a one-of-a-kind critical tool for the understanding of late imperial China’s fragmented Zeitgeist. Bu...
T. Brook, M. van Walt van Praag, M. Boltjes, "Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
July 03, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourWith thorny topics in Asian international relations, sovereignty, territory and borders in the news more or less daily, understanding what is at stake in this vitally important region, and why there are so many disagreements here, has never been more important. But while it is widely known that ‘modern’ bounded sovereign statehood is a pretty new and a historically contingent phenomenon in much of the world, the afterlives of the political orders that came before this are usually less appreci...
Yuen Yuen Ang, "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap" (Cornell UP, 2016)
July 02, 2019 08:00 - 41 minutesI spoke with Dr Yuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She published in 2016 a great new book How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell University Press, 2016). This is a very original and non-conformist book on China. It is also an important contribution to political economy and to development economics. We started with the origin of her book and a brief definition of ‘poverty trap’. Her book explains what went right in China and h...
Christopher Rea, "China's Chaplin: Comic Stories and Farces by Xu Zhuodai" (Cornell UP, 2019)
July 01, 2019 08:00 - 40 minutesHoaxes! Jokes! Farces and fun! Cristopher Rea's China’s Chaplin (Cornell University Press, 2019) introduces the imagination of Xu Zhuodai (1880–1958), a comic dynamo who made Shanghai laugh through the tumultuous decades of the pre-Mao era. Xu was a popular and prolific literary humorist who styled himself variously as Master of the Broken Chamberpot Studio, Dr. Split-Crotch Pants, Dr. Hairy Li, and Old Man Soy Sauce. He was also an entrepreneur who founded gymnastics academies, theater troup...
Jonathan D. T. Ward, "China's Vision of Victory" (Atlas Publishing, 2019)
June 28, 2019 08:00 - 52 minutesSomeday we may say that we never saw it coming. After seventy-five years of peace in the Pacific, a new challenger to American power has emerged, on a scale not seen since the Soviet Union at its height. With a deep if partially contrived sense of national destiny, the Chinese Communist Party is guiding a country of 1.4 billion people towards what it calls "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," and, with it, the end of an American-led world. The order which since 1945, has insured th...
Hye-Kyung Lee, "Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State" (Routledge, 2018)
June 25, 2019 08:00 - 42 minutesWhy does Korean cultural policy matter? In Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State (Routledge, 2018), Hye-Kyung Lee, a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings College, London, demonstrates the importance of South Korea is both an example in comparative cultural policy, and as a fascinating case study in its own right. The book offers historical analysis, as well as a major theoretical contribution in the form of the ‘new patron state’. The book charts th...
Jennifer Hubbert, "China in the World: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Power, and Globalization" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
June 24, 2019 08:00 - 59 minutesIn recent years, Confucius Institutes—cultural and language programs funded by the Chinese government—have garnered attention in the United States due to a debate over whether they threaten free speech and academic freedom. In addition to this, much of the scholarly work on Confucius Institutes analyzes policy documents. Anthropologist Jennifer Hubbert seeks to ask more complex questions and in-depth research in her new book China in the World: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Po...
Emily Wilcox, "Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy" (U California Press, 2018)
June 18, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourWhat is “Chinese dance,” how did it take shape in during China’s socialist period, and how has this socialist form continued to influence Post-Mao expressive cultures in the People’s Republic of China? These are the questions that Emily Wilcox, Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, takes up in Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (University of California Press, 2018). R...
Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace" (Harper, 2018)
June 13, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourPaul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Harper, 2018), Chamberlin reminds us that the Cold War was not at all Cold for hundreds of millions of people. He argues that the Soviet Union and the US competed fiercely over the states and people living in a wide swath of land starting in Manchuria, running ...
Marc Gallicchio and Waldo Heinrich, "Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945" (Oxford UP, 2017)
June 13, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourSerious and casual scholars and readers interested in the Pacific War would do well to commit reading Marc Gallicchio’s and Waldo Heinrich’s massive study of the conflict’s last two years, Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2017). The two authors, both masters in the field, take on the monumental task of offering a civil-military synthesis of the war against Japan that covers both the home front and the campaigns in exacting detail. Along the way, they ...
Tsering Döndrup, "The Handsome Monk and Other Stories" (Columbia UP, 2019)
June 12, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourA series of stories ranging from two-page narrative excerpts to 90+ page novellas, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2019), translated by Columbia PhD student Christopher Peacock, with a contribution from Lauran Hartley, masterfully introduces the work of contemporary Tibetan author Tsering Döndrup. One of the most popular and critically acclaimed figures of Modern Tibetan literature of the post-Mao period, Tsering Döndrup is known for his earthy humor and his un...
Thomas S. Mullaney, “The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China” (Stanford UP, 2019)
June 10, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourThe Chinese landscape is dramatically changing. Modernization has drastically altered Chinese infrastructure, urban zones, waterways, and even rural spaces. These changes have also affected Chinese burial practices and the resting places of the deceased. In The Chinese Deathscape: Grave Reform in Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2019), collaborators explore the various histories of the modern loss of Chinese burial space. The edited project is part of Stanford University Press’ commit...
Jennifer Dixon, "Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan" (Cornell UP, 2018)
June 06, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourJennifer Dixon’s Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), investigates the Japanese and Turkish states’ narratives of their “dark pasts,” the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) and Armenian Genocide (1915-17), respectively. The official version of history initially advocated by both states was similar in its adherence to a strategy of silencing critics and relativizing or denying the massacre, but Dixon shows how the two governments’ narratives of t...
Megan Bryson, “Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China” (Stanford UP, 2016)
June 05, 2019 08:00 - 59 minutesMegan Bryson, Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, centers gender as an analytical framework in the study of Buddhism. The benefit of this approach is vividly demonstrated in Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2016), which uncovers the transformation of the goddess Baijie over several centuries. Bryson’s research explores the various social and historical contexts of the Dali region in Southwest China where th...
Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, "The Chinese Sisters of the Precious Blood and the Evolution of the Catholic Church" (Palgrave, 2016)
June 03, 2019 08:00 - 41 minutesThe history of Christianity in China has been dominated by accounts of men and of male institutions. In this important new work, Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, who is a professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University, opens up an important new archive in Hong Kong to illuminate the complex and challenging story of the only entirely indigenous congregation of Chinese Catholic sisters. Tracing its subject through the difficult history of early 20th-century China, and taking account of Civil War, invasi...
Kerim Yasar, "Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945" (Columbia UP, 2018)
May 28, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourElectrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia UP, 2018) explores the soundscapes of modernity in Japan. In this book, Kerim Yasar argues that modern technologies of sound reproduction and transmission have had profound—and often underappreciated—social, economic, and political effects. Observing that the “materialities of media transform people, institutions, and societies,” Yasar traces the early histories of sound reproduction in moder...
Maren A. Ehlers, "Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan" (Harvard U Asia Center, 2018)
May 24, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourMaren A. Ehlers’s Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) examines the ways in which ordinary subjects—including many so-called outcastes and other marginalized groups—participated in the administration and regulation of society in Tokugawa Japan. Within this context, the book focuses on self-governing occupation-based and other status groups and explore their roles making Tokugawa Japan tick. The title, Give and Take, is part o...
Jinhua Dai (ed. Lisa Rofel), "After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History" (Duke UP, 2018)
May 23, 2019 10:00 - 1 hourAlthough not all that well known to English-speaking audiences, cultural critic and Peking University professor Jinhua Dai’s incisive commentaries and critiques of contemporary Chinese life have elevated her to something akin to ‘rock star’ status in China itself. As Lisa Rofel discusses in this podcast, and in her introduction to After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (Duke University Press, 2018), Dai interrogates the truly historic events unfolding in today’s China to ask w...
Jeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019)
May 22, 2019 08:00 - 51 minutesIn one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian in the Anglo-phone world, if not indeed on the entire planet, explores the forty-one years from the beginning of the Great War in August 1914 to the surrender of Japan in August 1945. This book provides the reader with an innovative global military history that joins three periods—World War I, the interwar years, and World W...
F. Grillo and R. Nanetti, "Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
May 22, 2019 08:00 - 41 minutesToday I spoke with Francesco Grillo (co-authored with Raffaella Nanetti) about his latest book, Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century: The Diverging Cases of China and Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Despite the title, it is not strictly a book on China or Italy. It is a visionary contribution to both economics and political theory that reflects on the crisis of the West and the paradoxical success of China. Is democracy still the best political regime for countries to adapt to economic ...
Anne A. Cheng, "Ornamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2019)
May 22, 2019 08:00 - 36 minutesIn her original and thought-provoking book Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anne A. Cheng illustrates the longstanding relationship between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. So doing, she moves beyond a simple analysis of objectification to reveal the powerful role Ornamentalism plays in constituting modern ideas of personhood, racialized femininity and the figure of the Asian woman. Drawing on examples from the realms of law, popular culture and art from the 19th and 20th ce...
Gregory Smits, "Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650" (U Hawaii Press, 2018)
May 20, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourConventional portrayals of early Ryukyu are based on official histories written between 1650 and 1750. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Gregory Smits makes extensive use of scholarship in archaeology and anthropology and leverages unconventional sources such as the Omoro sōshi(a collection of ancient songs) to present a fundamental rethinking of early Ryukyu. Instead of treating Ryukyu as a natural, self-contained cultural or political community, he examines it as part of a maritime netw...
Kimberly Chong, "Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China" (Duke UP, 2018)
May 20, 2019 08:00 - 46 minutesWhat do management consultants do, and how do they do it? These two deceptively simple questions are at the centre of Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China (Duke University Press, 2018), the new book by Kimberly Chong, a lecturer in anthropology at University College London. The book uses an in depth and immersive ethnography of a global management consulting firm to explore the rise of management consultancy in China, engaging with key issues- finan...
David Woodbridge, "Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: The Brethren in Twentieth-Century China" (Brill, 2019)
May 17, 2019 08:00 - 27 minutesDrawing on new archival resources, and opening up an entirely new research agenda in the field, David Woodbridge has written an outstanding new book. Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: The Brethren in Twentieth-Century China (Brill, 2019) focuses on a small but very significant evangelical community, the so-called Plymouth Brethren, and documents the attempts made by their missionaries in China during the first half of the twentieth century to balance their theological commitment t...
Matthew W. King, "Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire" (Columbia UP, 2019)
May 16, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourAfter the fall of the Qing empire, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Buddhist monks in the Mongolian frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world. In this book, Matthew W. King tells the story of Zawa Damdin, one Mongolian monk’s efforts to defend Buddhist monasticism in revolutionary times, revealing an unexplored landscape of countermodern Buddhisms beyond old imperial formations and the newly invented national subject. Ocean of ...
Jane Caple, "Morality and Monastic Revival in Post-Mao Tibet" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
May 09, 2019 10:00 - 53 minutesIn this podcast, I speak with Prof. Jane Caple about her recently published book, Morality and Monastic Revival in Post-Mao Tibet (University of Hawaii Press, 2019). The revival of mass monasticism in Tibet in the early 1980s is one of the most extraordinary examples of religious resurgence in post-Mao China. Caple argues that in order to understand the shape that this revival has taken, we need to look beyond the Chinese state and take into account the multiple competing moral terrains that ...
Christina Yi, "Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea" (Columbia UP, 2018)
May 02, 2019 10:00 - 1 hourThe fact that Korea’s experience of Japanese imperialism plays a role in present-day Japan-Korea relations is no secret to anyone. Questions of guilt, responsibility and atonement continue to bubble below, and occasionally break through, the surface of ties between two countries which otherwise have much in common culturally and in terms of interests. Addressing many of these complexities, Christina Yi’s Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea ...
Jeremy Black, "Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World" (Encounter Books, 2019)
May 01, 2019 10:00 - 47 minutesAre you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the United Kingdom, AKA the American and the British empires are the source of all the problems in the world, past and present? Do you not regard Sir Winston Churchill and other heroic figures of the recent and not so recent Anglo-American past as villains and racists to boot? If so University of Exeter Professor of History, Jeremy Black, the most prol...