New Books in East Asian Studies
1,316 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 55 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of East Asia about their New Books
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Episodes
Xiaomei Chen, "Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture" (Columbia UP, 2023)
June 05, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesXiaomei Chen's book Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture (Columbia UP, 2023) looks at three "founding fathers" of Chinese spoken drama: Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian. Dr. Chen argues that these three theatre artists laid the groundwork for Mao-era Chinese drama during the earlier Republic period, and that there is more continuity between the two periods than has typically been supposed. She also argues that these artists were not mere victims of hea...
Brantly Womack, "Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
June 02, 2023 08:00 - 21 minutesThe Pacific Rim of Asia – Pacific Asia – is now the world's largest and most cohesive economic region, and China has returned to its center. In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Brantly Womack from the University of Virginia about his new book Recentering Pacific Asia: Regional China and World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2023). China's global outlook is shaped by its regional experience, first as a pre-modern...
Book Chat: "The Suspended Island: Taiwan and the Balance of the World" (LUISS UP, 2022)
June 02, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesIn this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Stefano Pelaggi, Adjunct Professor at Sapienza University in Rome. The two discuss Dr Pelaggi’s most recent book, L’Isola Sospesa. Taiwan e Gli Equilibri del Mondo (The Suspended Island: Taiwan and the Balance of the World) published by LUISS University Press in 2022. In this engaging chat, Dr Pelaggi shares with the audience how he decided to write a book on Taiwan in Italian language, how we selected the main themes of the chapters, and...
Sarah Mellors Rodriguez, "Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
May 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911-2021 (Cambridge UP, 2022), assistant professor of history at Missouri State University, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez explores the longue durée history of birth control and abortion in China from the Republican period to the present day. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, oral histories, posters, films, novels, and other media, she delves into the diverse attitudes, policies, and practices of birth control and...
Thomas Chen, "Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film" (Columbia UP, 2022)
May 22, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesHello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Ignatius Suglo discusses the book Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2022) by Thomas Chen. You’ll hear about: Author’s intellectual and professional trajectory that led him to the book; How to study Tiananmen Movement as a media event through a careful selection of literature and film materials; How to think of the productivity ...
Sagang Sechen, "The Precious Summary: A History of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to the Qing Dynasty" (Columbia UP, 2023)
May 22, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesBuddhist cosmological history of the universe, history of Chinggis Khan, history of China, and history of the Mongols — The Precious Summary, written in 1662 by Sagang Sechen, is many things. As a whole, it is the most important work of Mongolian history on the period before the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty. The Precious Summary: A History of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to the Qing Dynasty (Columbia University Press 2023), translated by Johan Elverskog, is not only a fluid and lucid tra...
Philip Snow, "China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord" (Yale UP, 2023)
May 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIf there’s a starting point to the relationship between Russia and China, it’s likely the 1650s—when Manchu and Cossack forces clash near Khabarovsk, and when Russia sends its first, and unsuccessful, embassy to China. It’s an inopportune start to four centuries of trade, diplomacy, imperialism, ideology–and a lot of personal griping between different Russian and Chinese leaders, as charted by Philip Snow’s China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale University Press, 2023)...
Daniel A. Bell, "The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University" (Princeton UP, 2023)
May 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourI am not now nor at any time have ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet I serve as dean of a large faculty of political science in a Chinese university that trains students and provincial cadres to serve the country as Communist Party officials: It’s typically a post reserved for members of the CCP, given the political sensitivity of the work. That’s part of the surprise. The other part is that I’m a Canadian citizen, born and bred in Montreal, without any Chinese ances...
Garrett L. Washington, "Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
May 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourGarrett Washington’s Church Space and the Capital in Prewar Japan (Hawai’i 2022) brings a fresh perspective to the question of Protestant Christianity’s outsized influence in modernizing Japan from almost the moment the centuries-long ban was lifted in the 1870s. Washington roots his research in the physical space of Protestant houses of worship in Tokyo, exploring the ways that the churches became distinctively Japanese spaces and institutions that nurtured discourses and practices that affe...
Chia-rong Wu and Ming-ju Fan, "Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader" (Springer, 2023)
May 16, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesTaiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023) is an anthology of research co-edited by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (University of Canterbury) and Professor Ming-ju Fan (National Chengchi University). This collection of original essays integrates and expands research on Taiwan literature because it includes both established and young writers. It not only engages with the evolving trends of literary Taiwan, but also promotes the translocal consciousness and cultural diversity o...
Peter Thilly, "The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China" (Stanford UP, 2022)
May 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the opium trade — but not through the relatively well-trodden history of the ‘Opium Wars.’ Instead, in this wonderfully rich book Peter Thilly investigates the little known social history of the opium trade in coastal southern Fujian province. The Opium Business focuses on the relationship between the state and local businesses, charting how it changed as opium went from contraband to tax stap...
Peter Thilly, "The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China" (Stanford UP, 2022)
May 14, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the opium trade — but not through the relatively well-trodden history of the ‘Opium Wars.’ Instead, in this wonderfully rich book Peter Thilly investigates the little known social history of the opium trade in coastal southern Fujian province. The Opium Business focuses on the relationship between the state and local businesses, charting how it changed as opium went from contraband to tax stap...
China's Green Consensus: A Discussion with Virginie Arantes
May 12, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesHow has China’s one-party system dealt with the country’s growing environmental issues? And what implications does its green turn have on people’s everyday realities? Virginie Arantes joins Petra Alderman, associate researcher at NIAS and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham, to talk about her book China’s Green Consensus: Participation, Co-optation, and Legitimation that was published by Routledge in 2022. Virginie Arantes is a Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral fellow at th...
James M. Zimmerman, "The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China" (PublicAffairs, 2023)
May 11, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesLucy Aldrich, sister-in-law to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and daughter of Rhode Island Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, joked in a letter to her sister that she had an easy out for any boring conversation: For the rest of my life, when I am ‘stalled’ conversationally, it would be a wonderful thing to fall back on: ‘Oh, I must tell you about the time I was captured by Chinese bandits.’ Aldrich was one of many foreign grandees traveling on a 1923 Beijing-bound train from Shanghai, captured by the Shando...
Andrew Small, "No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West" (Melville House, 2022)
May 04, 2023 08:00 - 27 minutesToday I talked to Andrew Small about his book No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West (Melville House, 2022). Winston Churchill famously described Russia in 1939 as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But as Andrew Small correctly argues here, China’s path forward has often been laid out quite explicitly by its authoritarian leader Xi Jinping in speeches to the Community Party and elsewhere. The totality of those proclamations is that a real battle lies ahead,...
Jan Ke-Schutte, "Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations" (U California Press, 2023)
May 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing's aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, a...
What Can China's Identity Politics Tell Us About Affirmative Action?
May 01, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesIn this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Yan Sun, Professor of Chinese politics at Queens College and the Graduate Center, to discuss the origins of the ethnic divisions in China and their contemporary effects. Yan addresses the imperial administrative system and the historical incorporation of non-core peoples into it. Furthermore, she discusses the complexities of the Uighur, Tibetan, and Mongol claims to autonomy and the role of ethnic elites in their ...
Maura Dykstra, "Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State" (Harvard UP, 2022)
April 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourUncertainty about the way a state should be working is not necessarily produced by having multiple voices offering competing ideas about it. As Maura Dykstra’s Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State (Harvard UP, 2022) shows, one relatively uncontested pole of political power is perfectly capable of generating uncertainty on its own including, paradoxically, through the very act of seeking surety. As Dykstra documents in a fa...
Aspired Communities, Contested Futures: Long-Term Recovery after the 3.11 Disaster in Japan
April 28, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesOn March 11, 2011, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of northeastern Japan triggering a massive tsunami and shifting the earth on its axis. Nearly 20,000 residents in the Tōhoku region lost their lives, with many hundreds of thousands more injured, displaced, and left with horrific loss. Dr. Pilvi Posio shares her PhD research based on eight months of fieldwork in the town of Yamamoto in Miyagi prefecture, where 635 residents lost their lives. She began her research on long-term...
Jonathan E. Abel, "The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)
April 28, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourJonathan Abel’s The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji (U of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a history of our relationships to new media. The book centers on different modalities of mimesis and mediation and more as it explores the important transformation of “new media” into “the new real.” Abel describes this “new real” as the phase when the newer, better, faster, more realistic media of marketing hype becomes absorbed into the fabric of society and daily life. The Ne...
Robert J. Antony, "Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes: Glimpses of China's Hidden Past" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
April 26, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesHistory has many untold stories. In Rats, Cats, Rogues, and Heroes: Glimpses of China's Hidden Past (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), the author Robert J. Antony provides glimpses into China’s hidden past through the native’s point of view. Rather than simply writing about ordinary people, this book is written from the perspective of ordinary people, how they told their own stories about themselves, their communities, and their pasts. The author examines historical consciousness as revealed in pe...
Nicole Constable, "Passport Entanglements: Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations" (U California Press, 2022)
April 23, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesPassport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gendered migration, precarious labor, and bureaucracy. Focusing on the politics and inequalities embedded in passports, anthropologist Nicole Constable considers how these instruments determine legal status and dictate rights. Constable finds that new biometric technologies and surveillance do not lea...
Li-Chun Hsiao, "The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan" (Lexington Books, 2022)
April 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches (Lexington Books, 2022) argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets’ were surrealistically acqui...
Di Luo, "Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945" (Brill, 2022)
April 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBeyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 (Brill, 2022) focuses on the role of literacy in building a modern nation-state by examining the government provision of adult literacy training in early twentieth-century China. Based on untapped archives and diaries, Di Luo uncovers people’s strategic use of literacy and illiteracy in social interactions and explores the impact of daily experiences on the expansion of state power. Highlighting interpersonal and intergr...
Tim Simpson, "Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China's Consumer Revolution" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
April 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA comprehensive look into how Macau’s recent decades of gambling-related growth produced one of the wealthiest territories on the planet. Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China's Consumer Revolution (U Minnesota Press, 2023) delves into the radical transformation of what was formerly the last remaining European territory in Asia, returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 after nearly half a millennium of Portuguese rule. Examining the unprecedented scale of its development and...
Akiko Takeyama, "Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club" (Stanford UP, 2016)
April 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWelcome to Tokyo's Kabuki-chō red-light district, where Professor Akiko Takeyama started her 'affective ethnographic' fieldwork to explore the host clubs in which ambitious young men seek their fortunes by selling love, romance, companionship, and female clients look for self-satisfaction. Her book Staged Seduction: Selling Dreams in a Tokyo Host Club (Stanford UP, 2016) facilitates an intimate look at this mysterious love business, providing an insightful window into the lives of hosts, clie...
Matthew Mewhinney, "Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
April 10, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesMatthew Mewhinney's Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese writers – Yosa Buson (1716–83), Ema Saikō (1787–1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) – experimented with the poetic artifice afforded by the East Asian literati (bunjin) tradition, a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. Their experiments generated a poetics of irony that transformed the lineaments of l...
Mercedes Valmisa, "Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action" (Oxford UP, 2021)
April 08, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesPhilosophy of action in the context of Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative. Classical Chinese philosophers began from the assumption that relations are primary to the constitution of the person, hence acting in the early Chinese context necessarily is interacting and co-acting along with others -human and nonhuman actors. Mercedes Valmisa's Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action (Oxford UP, 2021) is the first monog...
Monica Liu, "Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise" (Stanford UP, 2022)
April 02, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesCommercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes-younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise (Stanford UP, 2022). Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese wo...
Monica Liu, "Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise" (Stanford UP, 2022)
April 02, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesCommercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes-younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise (Stanford UP, 2022). Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese wo...
Ioannis Gaitanidis, "Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion?" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
March 31, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesIoannis Gaitanidis' book Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion? (Bloomsbury, 2022) critically examines the spirituality phenomenon in contemporary Japan by looking at the main actors involved in the discourse: spiritual therapists as practitioners, scholars of spirituality studies, and the people in the publishing industry. Ioannis Gaitanidis challenges the common understanding of spirituality as simply a new emergent form of “religion” by considering alternati...
Gordon Barrett, "China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
March 23, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDuring the early decades of the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China remained far outside mainstream international science — right? Gordon Barrett’s new book, China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2022), counters this straightforward narrative and shows a very different side of China’s engagement with the outside world during this period. Barrett shows how scientists became crucial interlocutors for the early PRC, engaging in international and cross-bloc organiz...
Weijian Shan, "Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China" (Wiley, 2023)
March 23, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesIn 2010, Ping An took over Shenzhen Development Bank, ending an experiment that had never been tried before, and not been tried since: a foreign company owning and managing a Chinese bank. Newbridge Capital, a private equity firm, shocked the financial world when it agreed to take over the bank five years earlier–and successfully made it a pioneer. Weijian Shan, then a partner in Newbridge Capital, writes about the whole escapade in his third book Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Ventur...
Juwen Zhang, "Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation" (Lexington Books, 2022)
March 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation (Lexington Books, 2022) is the newest monograph from Professor Juwen Zhang of Willamette College. Through a historical survey and analyses of oral traditions like fairy tales, proverbs, and ballads, among others, that are still in vigorous practice in China today, this informative and stimulating book proposes a theoretical framework for interpreting how and why traditions continue or discontinue in any culture. Recently winning the pres...
Erin Raffety, "Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
March 21, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesSet in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need: Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care's Resistance in Contemporary China (Rutgers UP, 2022) traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the ...
David Weiss, "The God Susanoo and Korea in Japan’s Cultural Memory: Ancient Myths and Modern Empire" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
March 19, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesThe God Susanoo and Korea in Japan’s Cultural Memory: Ancient Myths and Modern Empire (Bloomsbury, 2022) traces reiterations and reinterpretations of the deity Susanoo regarding his relationship with Korea vis-a-vis Japan. Through careful examination of mythological texts and other primary sources, David Weiss examines Susanoo’s role in the construction of Korea’s image as Japan’s periphery. This book discusses how ancient Japanese mythology was utilized during the colonial period to justify ...
From China's Lost Generation to American Private Equity Professor
March 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHaving lived through both China’s Great Leap Forward during primary school, then the Cultural Revolution and the closing of schools for ten years, Beijing-born Weijian Shan, instead of a secondary school education spent six hard years in the Gobi Desert with the Army Construction Corps. Remarkably, the young Shan made it to a PhD program at UC Berkeley where he met his academic advisor, then Professor Janet Yellen, later U.S. Treasury Secretary. (Somewhat ironically now attending to the insol...
Kate Sylvester, "Women and Martial Art in Japan" (Routledge, 2022)
March 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourKate Sylvester’s Women and Martial Art in Japan (Routledge 2023) examines sport, gender, and society in Japan through the author’s extensive experience and ethnographic research as a kendo practitioner both at elite international levels and in Japan. Sylvester focuses on kendo as a university sport, placing her experiences as a veteran (foreign) competitor working within the hierarchies of that system in the context of the ideologies and lived realities of gender in contemporary Japan. In doi...
Academic Chat: Reflecting on Hu Tai-li’s Indigenous Ethnographic Work in Taiwan
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 11 minutesIn this episode, our host, Niki Alsford, invites Prof Scott Simon, the Chair of Taiwan Studies at the University of Ottawa, to share his thoughts and reflections on Prof Hu Tai-li 胡台麗, who pioneered documentary ethnography in Taiwan. Prof Simon talks about how he considers Hu's contributions and influence in academia, especially on the subject of ethnic relations in Taiwan. He further shares his insights on Hu’s documentary, The Voices of Orchid Island, and he further addresses the nuclear wa...
Ian Rowen, "One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism" (Cornell UP, 2023)
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOne China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People’s Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan’s politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC’s efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the tw...
Book Chat: "Human Glitches" (2020)
March 16, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesIn this episode, our podcast host, Ti-han Chang, invited Ms Lin Hsin-hui, a bourgeoning Taiwanese Sci-fi writer to talk about her award-winning short story collection, Human Glitches. Lin comments on our transforming process as cyborgs. For Lin, sci-fi no longer represents futuristic imagination, but the very reflection of our technologically conditioned hyperreality. We chat about her fascination with the notion of "borders", including borders between humans and machines, men and women, norm...
Book Chat: "Taiwan’s Green Parties. Alternative Politics in Taiwan" (Routledge, 2021)
March 15, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesIn this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Prof Dafydd Fell, Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The two discuss Prof Fell’s most recent book, “Taiwan’s Green Parties. Alternative Politics in Taiwan” published by Routledge in 2021. In this engaging chat, Prof Fell shares with the audience how he decided to write a book on green parties in Taiwan, the relevance that alternative and small parties may have on the overall evol...
Film Chat: Vietnamese Refugee Camps in Penghu
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesIn this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews the Taiwanese movie director Asio Liu on his most recent movie project on the Vietnamese refugee camps in Penghu. Many of us are familiar with the inexorable flow of Vietnamese boat people right after the end of the war in Vietnam. Though, very few know that some of the Vietnamese boat people landed in Penghu, in the Taiwan Strait, just off the west coast of Taiwan and they ended up living there until they were resettled. The Penghu refugee ...
Ke Li, "Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China" (Stanford UP, 2022)
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesIn recent years the authors of a slew of books and articles have debated whether China is moving toward or away from the rule of law. Against this end-of-history approach to legal inquiry, Ke Li advocates for an approach that attends to the circumstances in which state actors select legal methodologies for the purposes of statecraft, and those in which they prefer nonlegal, extralegal and illegal ones. She demonstrates this approach in Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Con...
Book Chat: Comics in Taiwan
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesFor this installment, we had the pleasure of hosting Norbert Danysz, a PhD candidate at Université Lumière Lyon 2. We chatted about recent developments related to comics in Taiwan – the definition of “Taiwan comics”, their typology, and state promotion of this medium with the aim of building Taiwan’s soft power. To find out more about niche and mainstream comics, who reads them, how and for whom they are significant, please listen to this episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...
Book Chat: Queering the Anthropocene in Taiwan Sci-Fi
March 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesIn this episode, we have the pleasure to have Mr Chi Ta-wei, a renowned Taiwanese writer, talk about his acclaimed LGBTQ+ novel, The Membranes. Chi reviews this work which was published in the 90s and provides his reflection on how to re-read the novel in the context of the Anthropocene. We also chat about the influence of Japanese manga and anime on his Sci-fi world-creating and his view on contemporary speculative fiction. Chi further shares with us his thoughts on the next generation of Ta...
Film Chat: Queer, Sci-Fi and the Family
March 11, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutesFor this installment, we had the pleasure of hosting Maja Korbecka, a PhD candidate at Freie Universitat Berlin. We chatted about five East Asian films released between 2016 and 2022, and the topics of queer, sci-fi and the family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Aya Homei, "Science for Governing Japan's Population" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
March 10, 2023 10:00 - 53 minutesAya Homei’s Science for Governing Japan’s Population (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the science and policy of population in Japan, 1860s-1960s. As in other modern nation-states and empires, population has been an index of national strength and a preoccupation of specialists and policymakers alike. Homei tackles the origins and changes of this interest in Japan, and the mutual dependence of the development of population as an object of knowledge and management for both the state and scientific ...
Book Chat: "Puppets, Gods and Brands. Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
March 10, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesFor this instalment, we had the pleasure of hosting Teri Silvio, who works as Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology. We chatted about Teri’s recently published book, Puppets, Gods and Brands. Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan (2019), her previous work and current projects. To find out more about performance and animation, a Taiwan-centered mode of animation (ang-a), cute gods and designer toys, please listen to this episode! Learn more about your ad choices. ...
Xin Wen, "The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 09, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesMany of us–who maybe aren’t historians–have an image of the Silk Road: merchants who carried silk from China to as far as ancient Rome, in one of the first global trading networks. Historians have since challenged the idea that there really was such an organized network, instead seeing it as a nineteenth-century metaphor that obscures as much as it explains. But Xin Wen, the author of The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023), tries to rev...