New Books in East Asian Studies
1,316 episodes - English - Latest episode: 17 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
Julia C. Schneider, "Nation and Ethnicity: Chinese Discourses on History, Historiography, and Nationalism (1900s-1920s)" (Brill, 2017)
September 15, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesJulia Schneider’s Nation & Ethnicity: Chinese Discourses on History, Historiography, and Nationalism (1900s-1920s), published with Brill in 2017, is an erudite study of early twentieth century theories of Chinese nationalism. In the book, Schneider considers the writings of Qing reformers Liang Qichao, complicates received narratives about anti-Manchu revolutionaries Zhang Taiyan and Liu Shipei, and traces the afterlives of their earlier writings in Republican era (1911-1949) theories of nati...
Development and Migration in Contemporary Asia
September 15, 2023 08:00 - 27 minutesIs migration good or bad for development? How does migration affect those who leave and those who stay behind? How are rural and urban livelihoods interconnected in Asian cities? What are the likely main migration trends in Asia the coming decade? And what can you learn from studying the same village for decades? To discuss these diverse questions, we are joined by two leading experts on development and migration in Asia, Jonathan Rigg and Marta Bivand Erdal. Drawing on extensive experience w...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Tiantian Zheng, "Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
September 10, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesBased on ethnographic research with victims of intimate partner violence since 2014, Tiantian Zheng's Violent Intimacy: Family Harmony, State Stability, and Intimate Partner Violence in Post-Socialist China (Bloomsbury, 2022) brings to the forefront women's experiences of, negotiations about, and contestations against violence, and men's narratives about the reasons for their violence. Using an innovative methodology - online chat groups, it foregrounds the role of history, structural inequal...
Tom Culham and Jing Lin, "Daoist Cultivation of Qi and Virtue for Life, Wisdom, and Learning" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
September 10, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDaoist Cultivation of Qi and Virtue for Life, Wisdom, and Learning (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) explores Daoist philosophies of qi and virtue through inquiry into their potential as technologies for cultivating good among individuals and society within educational settings, as well as in the modern world. The first part of the book, authored by Jing Lin, examines Daoist cosmology, axiology, and epistemology. She illuminates qi cultivation’s reliance on the accumulation of virtues, leading to tr...
Tingting Hu, "Victims, Perpetrators and Professionals: The Representation of Women in Chinese Crime Films" (Liverpool UP, 2021)
September 09, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesHow are women represented in Chinese crime films? In what ways do the representation reflect traditional Chinese values and contemporary Chinese social-cultural norms? How did boys’ love culture emerge in China? What is the role of the Chinese state in queer media production and queer culture in China? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, and an affiliated PhD student at NIAS, Tingting Hu talked about her book Victims, Perpetrators and Professional...
Situating Religion and Medicine (with Michael Stanley-Baker)
September 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday I sit down for an in-depth conversation with my good friend, Michael Stanley-Baker, a scholar of Chinese religion and medicine. We talk about Mike’s international childhood and how his family history influenced his intellectual life, his training as a Chinese medical practitioner, and his book co-edited with Vivienne Lo, the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2022), which is groundbreaking... and open access! We also talk about Mike’s new book with Manchester University ...
Altman Yuzhu Peng, "A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere" (Palgrave Pivot, 2020)
September 06, 2023 08:00 - 27 minutesIn A Feminist Reading of China’s Digital Public Sphere (Palgrave Pivot, 2020), Altman Yuzhu Peng articulates how feminism and pseudo-feminism become confused in contemporary Chinese society, and how this confusion is invoked by misogynist voices to boycott feminist movements in China’s digital public sphere. Peng examines how Western women politicians are stereotyped from a gendered lens in China’s digital public sphere, and how this gendered stereotyping reflects the continuous exclusion of ...
Gennifer Weisenfeld, "Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
September 05, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesAirplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons. Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan (U Chicago Press, 2023) explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japa...
Suzy Kim, "Among Women Across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2023)
September 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2023), Suzy Kim follows Korean women’s engagement in a broader international women’s movement from the beginnings of the Korean War in the 1940s until International Women’s Year in 1975. Obscured by layers of “cascading erasures,” the communist women of North Korea have been overlooked in traditional narratives of Asian and feminist history. By tracing their participation in global networks like the Wo...
Beth Tsai, "Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
August 28, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesTaiwan New Cinema (first wave, 1982–1989; second wave, 1990 onward) has a unique history regarding film festivals, particularly in the way these films are circulated at major European film festivals. It shares a common formalist concern about cinematic modernism with its Western counterparts, departing from previous modes of filmmaking that were preoccupied with nostalgically romanticizing China’s image. Through utilising in-depth case studies of films by Taiwan-based directors: Tsai Ming-lia...
Chuyun Oh, "K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media" (Routledge, 2022)
August 28, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesK-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media (Routledge, 2022) is about K-pop dance and the evolution and presence of its dance fandom on social media. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, choreography, and participation-observation with 40 amateur and professional K-pop dancers in New York, California, and Seoul, the book traces the evolution of K-pop dance from the 1980s to the 2020s and explains its distinctive feature called ‘gestural point choreography’ – front-d...
Don J. Wyatt, "Slavery in East Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 17, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesToday I talked to Don J. Wyatt about his book Slavery in East Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022). In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly a...
Paratroopers in the Pacific: A Conversation with James Fenelon
August 15, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesIn the final episode of Season 3, Annika sits down with James Fenelon, a veteran-turned-historian, who served in the Army for over a decade and is a graduate of the US Army’s Airborne, Jumpmaster and Pathfinder schools. They about his latest book, Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts, Grit, and Brotherhood (Regnery, 2023), which chronicles the 11th Airborne Division, nicknamed "The Angels," and their campaign. A bit about the book: The Pacific theater of World War II pitted American...
David Humphrey, "The Time of Laughter: Comedy and the Media Cultures of Japan" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
August 15, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDavid Humphrey’s The Time of Laughter: Comedy and the Media Cultures of Japan (U Michigan Press, 2023) examines the roles of mediated laughter in the media and cultural history of postwar Japan, with a strong focus on the temporality of laughter. As the book shows, comedy has been central to Japanese entertainment from the age of television to the age of social media, identifying the 1980s as a transformative decade. Humphrey’s narrative is particularly attentive to the ambivalent functions o...
Yiwen Li, "Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
August 13, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesIn her book, Networks of Faith and Profit: Monks, Merchants, and Exchanges Between China and Japan, 839-1403 CE (Cambridge UP, 2023), associate professor of history at City University of Hong Kong Yiwen Li studies the period when the tribute relationship between China and Japan was suspended. Although this official, diplomatic relationship ceased, Li reveals the related development of a vibrant religio-commercial network of Buddhist monks and merchants, who greatly facilitated both trade and ...
Book Chat: Literature in the Age of the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Study of the Taiwanese Writer Wu Ming-yi
August 13, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesIn this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited Dr Gwennaël Gaffric, a French literary translator and a specialist in Taiwanese eco-literature to talk about his academic publication, The Literature in the Age of Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Study of the Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi《人類世的文學: 臺灣作家吳明益的生態批評研究》. We talked about what inspired Gaffric to research Taiwanese eco-literature at the beginning of his academic career as well as why he chose to focus on Wu Ming-yi’s literary works. Gaffric also to...
Satsuki Takahashi, "Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape" (U Washington Press, 2023)
August 12, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesBoth before and after the 2011 "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, anthropologist Satsuki Takahashi visited nearby communities, collecting accounts of life and livelihoods along the industrialized seascape. The resulting environmental ethnography examines the complex relationship between commercial fishing families and the Joban Sea--once known for premium-quality fish and now notorious as the location of the world...
Vaudine England, "Fortune's Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong" (Scribner, 2023)
August 10, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesThe legacy of the businessmen who built Hong Kong are all over the city. Bankers work in Chater House—named after Paul Chater, the Armenian businessman behind much of the city’s land reclamation (among many other things). The Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel sits along Mody Road, named after Hormusjee Naorojee Mody, a Parsi immigrant who helped found the University of Hong Kong. And that’s not including figures like Robert Hotung, the half-British, half-Chinese magnate who found more power in his Chi...
Robert Hellyer and Harald Fuess, "The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Global Nation" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
August 09, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesIn world history, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 ranks as a revolutionary watershed, on a par with the American and French Revolutions. In this volume, leading historians from North America, Europe, and Japan employ global history in novel ways to offer fresh economic, social, political, cultural, and military perspectives on the Meiji Restoration and the subsequent creation of the modern Japanese nation-state. Seamlessly mixing meta- and micro-history, The Meiji Restoration: Japan as a Globa...
Stevan Harrell, "An Ecological History of Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2023)
August 08, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesIs environmental degradation an inevitable result of economic development? Can ecosystems be restored once government officials and the public are committed to doing so? These questions are at the heart of Stevan Harrell's An Ecological History of Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2023), a comprehensive account of China's transformation since the founding of the People's Republic from the perspective not of the economy but of the biophysical world. Examples throughout illustrate h...
Olga Fedorenko, "Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
August 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAn ethnography of advertising in postmillennial South Korea, Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads (U Hawaii Press, 2022) details contests over advertising freedoms and obligations among divergent vested interests while positing far-reaching questions about the social contract that governs advertising in late-capitalist societies. The term "flower of capitalism" is a clichéd metaphor for advertising in South Korea, bringing resolutely positive connotations, which down...
Ruth Yun-Ju Chen, "Good Formulas: Empirical Evidence in Mid-Imperial Chinese Medical Texts" (U Washington Press, 2023)
August 02, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesRuth Yun-Ju Chen is a historian of mid-imperial China (600–1400). Her research interests lie in the histories of medicine, publishing, and material cultures during this period. Her first book, Good Formulas: Empirical Evidence in Mid-Imperial Chinese Medical Texts, will come out from the University of Washington Press in 2023. This book charts how early print culture reshaped strategies for presenting medical knowledge in Song China (960–1279). Her current project explores the transregional c...
Jae DiBello Takeuchi, "Language Ideologies and L2 Speaker Legitimacy: Native Speaker Bias in Japan" (Mulitlingual Matters, 2023)
August 01, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesJae DiBello Takeuchi's Language Ideologies and L2 Speaker Legitimacy: Native Speaker Bias in Japan (Mulitlingual Matters, 2023) examines dilemmas faced by second language (L2) Japanese speakers as a result of persistent challenges to their legitimacy as speakers of Japanese. Based on an ethnographic interview study with L2-Japanese speakers and their L1-Japanese-speaking friends, co-workers and significant others, the book examines ideologies linked to three core speech styles of Japanese – k...
Film Chat: Hsin-Chien Huang on VR Film in Taiwan
July 30, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesThe host was Adina Zemanek, in conversation with Hsin-Chien Huang, a new media creator with a background in art, design and digital entertainment, whose works have been exhibited and won awards at many renowned international venues. We talked about his experience in creating immersive films, major themes his works have addressed, the role of immersive film in expanding our field of vision and its particularities in terms of storytelling strategies, as well as Taiwan as an environment for prod...
Daisy Cheung and Michael Dunn, "Advance Directives Across Asia: A Comparative Socio-legal Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
July 28, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesAdvance Directives in Asia: A Socio-Legal Analysis (Cambridge UP, 2023) , edited by Daisy Cheung and Michael Dunn is the first book to consider the concept of advance directives in Asia. It is unique in its depth and breadth as it brings together an extensive number of Asian jurisdictions to draw out the ways that advance directives are regulated in law and practice across the region. In their analysis Cheung and Dunn provide overall observations towards a concept of "generative accomodation"...
Miya Qiong Xie, "Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)
July 28, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesXiao Hong, Yom Sang-sop, Abe Kobo, and Zhong Lihe—these iconic literary figures from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all described Manchuria extensively in their literary works. Now China’s Northeast—but a contested frontier in the first half of the twentieth century—Manchuria has inspired writers from all over East Asia to claim it as their own, employing novel themes and forms for engaging nation and empire in modern literature. Many of these works have been canonized as quintessential exam...
Michael J. Seth, "Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World" (Tuttle Publishing, 2023)
July 27, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesThe Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there. Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the Korean Peninsula in the five decades since, changing development in both North and South Korea a...
Po-Shek Fu, "Hong Kong Media and Asia's Cold War" (Oxford UP, 2023)
July 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBritish Hong Kong was a historical anomaly in the Cold War. It experienced no "hot war" or organized movement for independence, and yet it was a key battlefield of Asia's cultural Cold War thanks largely to its unique location right next to Mao's China. The large influx of filmmakers, writers, and intellectuals from the mainland after 1948-1949 made the colony a hub of mass entertainment and popular publications in the region. Po-Shek Fu’s book Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War (Oxford Uni...
Sheila Miyoshi Jager, "The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia" (Harvard UP, 2023)
July 23, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesDr. Sheila Miyoshi Jager presents dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars in her new book The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023). In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized b...
Yi-Tang Lin, "Statistics and the Language of Global Health: Institutions and Experts in China, Taiwan, and the World, 1917-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
July 21, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesYi-Tang Lin received her BA in sociology at National Taiwan University and MA in MA Interdisciplinary Practices of Humanities and Social Sciences, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and École Normale Supériorie (ENS), France. She completed her PhD at the University of Lausanne. After spending several years at the University of Geneva for her postdoc research on "Rockefeller Fellows as Heralds of Globalization (1917-1970), she is now PRIMA Professor at University of Zurich, S...
Scott E. Simon, "Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
July 20, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesSimilar to countries like the US and Canada, Taiwan also has indigenous peoples who've existed before the arrival of colonizers, and continue to grapple with the legacy of colonialism to this day. Scott Simon's Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa (U Toronto Press, 2023) explores lifeworlds, traditions, and political relationships in two of Taiwan's indigenous communities—the Sediq and Truku. Simon is a Professor of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the Uni...
Xiaoning Lu, "Moulding the Socialist Subject: Cinema and Chinese Modernity (1949-1966)" (Brill, 2020)
July 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourXiaoning Lu received her BA and MA in Chinese Literature and Language from Nanjing University and Fudan University respectively. She then earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Prior to joining SOAS in 2010, she had taught cinema and cultural studies, modern Chinese literature and popular culture at Stony Brook University and Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. Xiaoning’s research focuses on the complex relationship between cultural ...
Lin Zhang, "The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the Chinese Digital Economy" (Columbia UP, 2023)
July 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Jing Wang discusses the book The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia UP, 2023) by Lin Zhang. You’ll hear about: A history of the book and Zhang’s entry into the fieldwork through family stories; How to understand entrepreneurialism as a dominant ideology in the global neoliberal labor economy and China’s positionality in the world; Why and how the...
Victoria Lee, "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
July 16, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesVictoria Lee’s The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an in-depth exploration of the social history of microbial science in modern Japan. Lee shows that Japanese scientists and artisans in food, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries harnessed a combination of premodern and modern understandings of the microbial world to create a productive approach positing microbes “as living workers” in important industries. With case s...
Victor Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo, "Korea: A New History of South and North" (Yale UP, 2023)
July 13, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesAs a member of the U.S. National Security Council, Victor Cha flew over the DMZ separating North and South Korea in 2007, following negotiations with Pyongyang. He writes in Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale University Press, 2023)—his latest book with co-author, and previous podcast guest, Ramon Pacheco Pardo—about how he was struck by the environment on both sides of the border. The north had barren fields, no cars, and windowless homes; the south, gleaming skyscrapers in the gl...
Anne Giblin Gedacht, "Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan" (Brill, 2022)
July 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAnne Giblin Gedacht’s Tōhoku Unbounded: Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan (Brill, 2022) centers cross-border mobility in its narrative of the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book is a challenge to the stereotypical image of the Northeast as static and isolated. Focusing on Pacific migration―to Asia, North America, and the Philippines―Gedacht pieces together an account of how mobility and movement were instrument...
Yi-Lin Chiang, "Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
July 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWe understand very little about how elite individuals and families operate in everyday life to maintain their privileged statuses, as many of these status-maintaining activities are conducted out of the sight of the public, in private family settings, exclusive schools, and through privileged services. Yi-Lin Chiang’s new book, Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition (Princeton University Press, 2022), offers a rare look into this issue in the context of contempo...
Nile Green, "How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding" (Yale UP, 2023)
July 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe nineteenth century saw European empires build vast transport networks to maximize their profits from trade, and it saw Christian missionaries spread printing across Asia to bring Bibles to the colonized. The unintended consequence was an Asian communications revolution: the maritime public sphere expanded from Istanbul to Yokohama. From all corners of the Asian continent, curious individuals confronted the challenges of studying each other’s cultures by using the infrastructure of empire ...
Rotem Kowner, "Tsushima" (Oxford UP, 2022)
July 07, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesToday I talked to Rotem Kowner about Tsushima (Oxford UP, 2022), which is part of the great battle series in Oxford University press. The Battle of Tsushima, in which the Japanese Imperial Navy defeated the Russian Imperial Navy, was unprecedented in many ways. It marks the first naval victory of an Asian power over a major European power; the most devastating defeat suffered by the Imperial Russian Navy in its entire history; and the only truly decisive engagement between two battleship flee...
Marco Caboara, "Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735" (Brill, 2022)
July 06, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesRegnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 (Brill, 2022) does something that no one has ever done before: collect just about every Western printed map of China, from 1584 up until Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map in 1735. Marco Caboara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to catalog and track down these many different documents, and tells the stories behind each one: “stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacit...
Suk-Young Kim, "Surviving Squid Game: A Guide to K-Drama, Netflix, and Global Streaming Wars" (Applause Books, 2023)
July 04, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesIn Surviving Squid Game: A Guide to K-Drama, Netflix, and Global Streaming Wars (Applause Books, 2023), scholar Suk-Young Kim reflects on Netflix's most-viewed series and one of the most influential Korean dramas, Squid Game. The series premiered in September 2021, when the pandemic cloud still hung heavy over viewers and seemed to mirror the societal ills COVID-19 brought to the surface. Kim explores the drama's intricate imagery, discussion of free will, and other components that made Squid...
Xin Zhang, "The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China" (Harvard UP, 2023)
June 30, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesIn The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China (Harvard UP, 2023), Dr. Xin Zhang tells the story of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang. On July 21, 1842, numerous women in the southeastern Chinese city of Zhenjiang chose to end their lives rather than succumb to invading British soldiers. These events, occurring during the First Opium War (1839-42), exemplify th...
Fiona Sze-Lorrain, "Dear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories" (Scribner, 2023)
June 29, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesDear Chrysanthemums: A Novel in Stories (Scribner: 2023) jumps from character to character, location to location, time period to time period. Two cooks working for Madame Chiang-Kai Shek. A dancer, exiled to Shanghai’s Wukang Mansion. Three women, gathering in a French cathedral, finding strength in each other decades after the protests in Tiananmen. These six interconnected stories make up this debut novel from accomplished poet and translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who joins us today, sharing o...
Lena Henningsen, "Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021)
June 25, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesLena Henningsen’s Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) is a study of shouchaoben, or hand-written fiction, that entertained Chinese readers throughout the “long 1970s,” a period spanning the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath in the late 70s and early 1980s. These manuscripts, copies of otherwise unavailable, often foreign, fiction and poetry, as well as original novels and poems, were “texts in motion.” The...
Academic Chat: "Detention" and Other Horror Videogames: Avatars, Memory and Trauma
June 24, 2023 04:00 - 35 minutesThe host of this episode, Adina Zemanek, interviewed Chee-Hann Wu, who obtained her PhD in Drama and Theatre from the University of California, Irvine and UC San Diego. They talked about the following themes: horror videogames in Taiwan and historical trauma; the potential roles of such games for local and international audiences, and thus for Taiwan's cultural diplomacy; traditional puppetry and avatars; and recent state support for local game production. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...
Yue Du, "State and Family in China" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
June 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Imperial China, the idea of filial piety not only shaped family relations but was also the official ideology by which Qing China was governed. In State and Family in China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Yue Du examines the relationship between politics and intergenerational family relations in China from the Qing period to 1949, focusing on changes in family law, parent-child relationships, and the changing nature of the Chinese state during this period. This book highlights how the Qing dynasty t...
Lin Poyer, "War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
June 17, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesEighty years on, Lin Poyer's book War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II (U Hawaii Press, 2022) offers a global and comparative view of the impact of World War II on Indigenous societies. Indigenous peoples, Poyer shows, had a distinct experience of WWII, as those on the margins of Allied and Axis empires and nation-states were drawn in as soldiers, scouts, guides, laborers, and victims. Using historical and ethnographic sources, Poyer examines how Indigenous communities e...
Yoshiko Okuyama, "Tōjisha Manga: Japan’s Graphic Memoirs of Brain and Mental Health" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
June 10, 2023 08:00 - 37 minutesYoshiko Okuyama's book Tōjisha Manga: Japan’s Graphic Memoirs of Brain and Mental Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) defines tōjisha manga as Japan’s autobiographical comics in which the author recounts the experience of a mental or neurological condition in a unique medium of text and image. Yoshiko Okuyama argues that tōjisha manga illuminate otherwise “faceless” individuals and humanize their invisible tribulations because the first-person narrative makes their lived experience more authent...
Xin Fan, "World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
June 07, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesNationalism is pervasive in China today. Yet nationalism is not entrenched in China's intellectual tradition. Over the course of the twentieth century, the combined forces of cultural, social, and political transformations nourished its development, but resistance to it has persisted. In World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP, 2021), Xin Fan examines the ways in which historians working on the world beyond China from within China have attempted to ...