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
Book Chat: Oceanic Writing
March 09, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the ecowriter, Liao Hung-chi about his oceanic and cetacean writings. The interview covers the writer's view on the oceanic narrative formation in Taiwan, his perspective on non-human agency and Hokkien (Hoklo) language employment in literary writing, as well as his dedication in Pacific ocean conservation. The interviewed is conducted in Chinese and translated by Zhan Fe-fei in English, hence tailored to both English a...
H. Yumi Kim, "Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTo fend off American and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, Japan strove to strengthen itself by drawing on the most updated ideas and practices from around the world. By the 1880s, this included the introduction of Western-derived psychiatry and its ideas about mental illness. The first Japanese psychiatrists claimed that mental illnesses required medical treatment in specialized institutions rather than confinement at home, as had been common practice. Yet the state implemented...
Film Chat: "Whale Island" (2020)
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesIn this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the film director, Huang Chia-chu about his making of the eco-film, Whale Island (2020). The interview covers the Director's engagement with this amazing project to tell a "sea story" of Taiwan, his encountering with the writer, Liao Hung-chi and the photographer, Jin Lai, his choice of film translated title as well as movie soundtracks. The interviewed is conducted in Chinese and translated by Zhan Fe-fei in English, h...
Timothy O. Benedict, "Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan" (U California Press, 2022)
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTimothy Benedict’s Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan (U California Press, 2023) is an exploration of spiritual care in the context of the Japanese hospice. The book is rooted in Benedict’s experience as a hospice chaplain in Japan and his extensive fieldwork and interviews with patients, medical personnel, and other chaplains. The author thoughtfully problematizes the application of ideas about spiritual care in end-of-life care that are not necessarily well rooted in t...
Martin K. Dimitrov, "Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesFear pervades dictatorial regimes. Citizens fear leaders, the regime's agents fear superiors, and leaders fear the masses. The ubiquity of fear in such regimes gives rise to the "dictator's dilemma," where autocrats do not know the level of opposition they face and cannot effectively neutralize domestic threats to their rule. The dilemma has led scholars to believe that autocracies are likely to be short-lived. Yet, some autocracies have found ways to mitigate the dictator's dilemma. As Marti...
Book Chat: "Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan" (Routledge, 2021)
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesIn this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Beatrice Zani, author of the book Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan. Mobilities, Digital Economies and Emotions, published by Routledge in 2021. The two scholars chat about novel ethnographic methods, such as itinerant ethnography and digital ethnography, solidarity between migrant women, the role of emotions in research. This episode can’t be missed by those interested in understanding globalisation from the perspective of cont...
Book Chat : "The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Dominic Meng-hsuan Yang, author of the book The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. The two scholars chat about important turning points in the production of the book, the author’s positions. Most importantly, how the author proposes solutions to decolonise trauma and find reconciliation in Taiwan. This episode can’t be missed by those interested in histor...
Aram Hur, "Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia" (Cornell UP, 2022)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesEspecially within the last decade, the word "nationalism" often evokes images of bombastic demagogues and democratic backsliding. But does nationalism always hurt liberal democracy? In Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia (Cornell UP, 2022), Aram Hur argues that the answer might be "no". Instead, under specific circumstances, national attachments can actually strengthen democracies. Hur—an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Uni...
The Iko-Project: A Japanese Project on Intercultural Understanding Education
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 18 minutesWhat can a classroom experiment teach us about how and when we start shaping our ideas of ‘the other’? Can the results from such an experiment help us challenge the ideas and preconceptions that we have on our own as well as other cultures? In this episode, Tyra Orton speaks to Marie Roesgaard about an ongoing project that she is the participant of, titled; “Programme development for intercultural understanding education for the understanding and coexistence of ‘Iko’”. Born out of discussions...
Nuclear Ghosts: Ryo Morimoto (EF, JP)
March 02, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesJohn and Elizabeth, in this special Centennial episode of Recall this Book, explore spectral radiation with Ryo Morimoto, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His new book Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Grey Zone (University of California Press, 2023) is based on several years of fieldwork in coastal Fukushima after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. Ryo's book shows how residents of the region live with and through the ...
Seiji Shirane, "Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945" (Cornell UP, 2022)
February 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourSeiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895-1945 (Cornell UP, 2022) demonstrates that colonial Taiwan was an imperial center in its own right, a political, social, and economic hub for the southern expansion of Japan’s empire led by officials with agendas that did not always match those of the government in Tokyo. In addition to this contribution to the study of Japanese empire, Imperial Gateway highlights two aspects of the ...
Joshua Kurlantzick, "Beijing's Global Media Offensive: China's Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 24, 2023 09:00 - 29 minutesHow is China trying to influence media across Asia and indeed globally? Why has this ambitious project achieved rather mixed results so far? And how should the rest of the world respond? In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, CFR's Josh Kurlantzick talks to NIAS Director Duncan McCargo about his important new book, Beijing's Global Media Offensive (Oxford UP, 2022). His book is a major analysis of how China is attempting to become a media and information superpower around the world, see...
Nathan Vedal, "The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge" (Columbia UP, 2022)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhat is the nature of language? This is the question that Nathan Vedal’s book, The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge (Columbia University Press; 2022), explores. And ‘explore’ is indeed the best word to describe what this beautifully rich book does, for it looks at how language was conceived, discussed, and debated in a wide range of little-known texts from the Ming and Qing, including works of philosophy, philology, literature, ...
Pete Millwood, "Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1971, Americans made two historic visits to China that would transform relations between the two countries. One was by US official Henry Kissinger; the other, earlier, visit was by the US table tennis team. Historians have mulled over the transcripts of Kissinger's negotiations with Chinese leaders. However, they have overlooked how, alongside these diplomatic talks, a rich program of travel and exchange had begun with ping-pong diplomacy. Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musi...
Pei-yin Lin and Wen-chi Li, "Taiwanese Literature as World Literature" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOwing to Taiwan’s multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout ...
Michael Schiltz, "Accounting for the Fall of Silver: Hedging Currency Risk in Long-Distance Trade with Asia, 1870-1913" (Oxford UP, 2020)
February 20, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutesThe second half of the nineteenth century is correctly known to have culminated in the emergence of the gold standard as the first truly international monetary regime. The processes leading up to this remarkable feat are, however, far less documented or understood. Economic historians have only recently started digging into the causes behind the 'fall of silver' that preceded the scramble for gold. It is nowadays clear that its effects were felt worldwide. Not in the least, silver depreciatio...
Ying Zhu, "Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market" (New Press, 2022)
February 18, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesWith her book Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market (New Press, 2022), media scholar Ying Zhu explores the 100+ year relationship between what are now the world's two largest movie markets: China and the United States. Zhu is a Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University's Academy of Film, and the founder/chief editor of Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images. Hollywood in China (July 2022, The New Press) is her fourth book, and it offers ...
Kevin Blackburn, "The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory" (National U of Singapore Press, 2022)
February 17, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutes"Comfort women" or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in the Second World War. The role of comfort women in history remains a topic of importance — and emotion — around the world. It is well-known that an elaborate series of comfort stations, or comfort houses, were organised by the Japanese administration across Singapore during the Occupation from 1942 to 1945. So why did no local former comfort women come forward and tell their ...
Brian Lander, "The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire" (Yale UP, 2022)
February 15, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesThe King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire (Yale UP, 2021) is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China's early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China's agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability t...
Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho, "Material Contradictions in Mao's China" (U Washington Press, 2022)
February 13, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesI'm joined today by Profs. Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Ho to talk about their new edited volume, Material Contradictions in Mao’s China, published in December 2022 by the University of Washington Press. Our editors have brought together ten chapters or “case studies” by scholars in various disciplines, as well as a theoretical and methodological reflection on materiality, contradiction, and "the socialist uncanny" (by Jonathan Bach) that ends the book. The book moves through various types...
Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock, "The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia" (Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022)
February 11, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesAndrea Acri and Peter Sharrock's The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia (2 volumes; Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022) examines the creative contribution of Maritime Asia towards shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and isl...
Ruth Rogaski, "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesAmong all the world’s most storied and legend-filled regions, the place known to some over time as ‘Manchuria’ has had an especially wide range of ideas projected onto it. Everyone from Manchu emperors to Chinese exiles, European missionaries, Korean poets, indigenous shamans, Russian botanists, Japanese colonists and socialist planners have sought to know and understand this region, framing its vast forests, mountains, plains and earth according their own political, spiritual or scientific p...
A New Hope? Japanese Retirement Migration to Malaysia
February 09, 2023 09:00 - 23 minutesIn post-growth Japan, some people are looking to Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, as a source of new hope. A notable change in the recent pattern of global migration is the movement of people within Asia. Previous studies on Asian migration have mostly considered the movement of people from Asia to Europe and North America. Yet in recent years, countries in Asia have emerged as major receiving sites of intra-regional migration. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Shiori Shakuto...
Richard Overy, "Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945" (Viking, 2022)
February 04, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesRichard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945 (Viking, 2022) to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain's most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the "last imperial war," with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending int...
Iza Ding, "The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China" (Cornell UP, 2022)
February 03, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesWhat does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell, 2022) shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance. Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in China through ethnographic participation, in-depth interviews, and public opinion ...
Robert O'Mochain and Yuki Ueno, "Sexual Abuse and Education in Japan: In the (Inter)National Shadows" (Routledge, 2022)
February 01, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesBringing together two voices, practice and theory, in a collaboration that emerges from lived experience and structured reflection upon that experience, O'Mochain and Ueno show how entrenched discursive forces exert immense influence in Japanese society and how they might be most effectively challenged. With a psychosocial framework that draws insights from feminism, sociology, international studies, and political psychology, the authors pinpoint the motivations of the nativist right and refl...
Matthew Galway, "The Emergence of Global Maoism: China's Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949-1979" (Cornell UP, 2022)
January 30, 2023 05:00 - 1 hourHow do ideas manifest outside of their place of origin, and how do they change once they do? The Emergence of Global Maoism: China’s Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949–1979 (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Matthew Galway examines how ideological systems become localized, both in the indigenization of Marxism-Leninism by Mao Zedong and, more significantly, the indigenization of Maoism by the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Galway carefully investigates how Maoism was re...
Benedict Rogers, "The China Nexus: Thirty Years in and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny" (Optimum Publishing, 2022)
January 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party's Tyranny (Optimum Publishing, 2022) brings together Benedict Rogers' 30 years of advocacy, research and work in and around China. Opening with his rollicking adventures as an 18 year old teaching English in Qingdao in 1992, the human element of this monograph, the real people and their lives are foregrounded. Rogers takes the reader through a nexus of the CCP's tyranny; from China's crackdown on its own citizens; through...
Shaping Civilisations: The Sea in Asian History
January 26, 2023 09:00 - 24 minutesThe ocean is more connective device than barrier, bringing together diverse topics, time-periods and geographies. It has linked and connected the various littorals of Asia into a segmented, yet at the same time, a unitary circuit over roughly the past 500 years since the so-called age of contact initiated a quickening of patterns and engagements that already existed. But despite the centrality of the maritime domain, there hasn’t really been a single study looking at Asia’s seas through a bro...
South Korea, Technology, and Globalization
January 16, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourPatrick Chung, assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland, talks about his research on the rise of shipping and manufacturing in South Korea with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Along the way, Chung provides fascinating insights into the role that both the US Department of Defense and local South Korean actors played in globalization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.suppor...
Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
January 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was originally written and published in Chinese. The English translation has just come out with Palgrave Macmillan. Self as Method provides a manifesto of intellectual activism that counsels China’s young people to think by themselves and for themselves. Consisting of three conversations between Xiang Biao, a social anthropologist, and Wu Qi, a rising journa...
Hung-Yok Ip, "Grassroots Activism of Ancient China: Mohism and Nonviolence" ( Lexington Books, 2022)
January 09, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesHung-Yok Ip's Grassroots Activism of Ancient China: Mohism and Nonviolence ( Lexington Books, 2022) examines Mohism as a movement in early China, focusing on the Mohists’ pursuit of power. Fashioning themselves as grassroots activists, the Mohists hoped to impact the elite by gaining entry in its community and influencing it from within. To create a less violent world, they deployed strategies of persuasion and negotiation but did not discard counterviolence in their dealings with the ruling ...
Daniel White, "Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety" (Stanford UP, 2022)
January 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn Administering Affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the Politics of Anxiety (Stanford UP, 2022), Daniel White draws on extensive fieldwork in government ministries and government-adjacent organizations to explore Japan’s current “politics of anxiety,” the ways in which state administrators have transformed anxieties about Japan’s global geopolitical status into future-oriented programs of national branding and revitalization based on a narrowly defined vision of pop-culture as synecdoche and savio...
Between the Streets and the Assembly: South Korean Social Movements before and after Democratization
January 06, 2023 09:00 - 29 minutesWelcome to the third NIAS-Korea episode! In this episode, we invite Prof. Yoonkyung Lee to discuss social movements in South Korea. Since its founding, South Korea has had a longstanding social movement history. One cannot fully understand the country’s democratic history without discussing the dynamics of social movements. Yoonkyung explains the main actors of social movements and social movement organizations (SMOs) before and after democratization in the country. She also discusses labor m...
Ronald H. Spector, "A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955" (Norton, 2023)
January 05, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesOn September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperial powers on the decline and new groups calling for independence on the rise. That unsteady situation sparked a decade of conflict: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in China and in Korea, as esteemed military historian Professor Ronald Spector writes about in his latest book, A Continent Erupts: Decolon...
Magnus Fiskesjö, "Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture" (Berghahn Books, 2021)
January 01, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade the Wa, an upland people living predominantly on what is today the Burma-China frontier, still needed to be introduced to other scholars of the region. Magnus Fiskesjö, the article’s author, began with the caveat that it was by no means complete and was intended only by way of brief introduction. But the article held out the promise of more, and now its ...
Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi, "Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 29, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesWhat does it mean to be a meritocracy? Ask an ordinary person, and they would likely say it means promoting the best and brightest in today’s society based on merit. But that simple explanation belies many thorny questions. What is merit? How do we measure talent? How does equality come into play? And how do we ensure that meritocracies don’t degenerate into the same old privileged systems they strived to replace? Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi write in their edited volume Making Meritocracy...
Daniel Barish, "Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861-1912" (Columbia UP, 2022)
December 27, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe late Qing was a time of great turmoil and upheaval but also a time of great possibility, as scholars, officials, the press, and revolutionaries all sought to find ways to shape China’s future. For many, as explored in Daniel Barish’s new book, Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861-1912 (Columbia UP, 2022), the solution lay not outside the Qing but within it — with the emperor himself. Learning to Rule explores the education of the final three Qing empe...
Lucy Fraser, "The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of "The Little Mermaid"" (Wayne State UP, 2017)
December 25, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutes“The Little Mermaid” has become popular around the world since the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen published it almost two centuries ago. Lucy Fraser’s The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of “The Little Mermaid” (Wayne State University Press, 2017) uses Japanese and American transformations of “The Little Mermaid” to think through the pleasures that the text provides for consumers. Building on Mayako Murai’s From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: C...
Jonathan Dil, "Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy: Stories from the Second Basement" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
December 24, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutesHaruki Murakami, a global literary phenomenon, has said that he started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy. What he has not discussed as much is what he needed self-therapy for. This book argues that by understanding more about why Murakami writes, and by linking this with the question of how he writes, readers can better understand what he writes. Murakami's fiction, in other words, can be read as a search for self-therapy. In five chapters which explore Murakami's fourteen novels t...
Stevie Suan, "Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
December 23, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesA formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question--what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how can this help us rethink notions of cultural production? In Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Stevie Suan examines how anime's recognizable media-form--no matter where...
Wendi L. Adamek, "Practicescapes and the Buddhists of Baoshan" (Hamburg Buddhist Studies, 2021)
December 23, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourHow should one dwell in endtime? In this SPIDER-spun web of a book, Wendi Adamek guides readers to the visual and textual traces left by Buddhist nuns, monks, and devotees on mountainsides in Baoshan, north central China, and through them, the soteriology of Buddhism in the medieval world. The convents have vanished and the stones weathered, but the skillful work in maintaining co-constitutive relations is as palpable as ever. Thoroughly researched and artfully written, Practicescapes and the...
John D. Wong, "Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s-1998" (Harvard UP, 2022)
December 22, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesOn July 6, 1998, the last flight took off from Kai Tak International Airport, marking the end of an era for Hong Kong aviation. For decades, international flights flew over the roofs of Kowloon apartments, before landing on Kai Tak’s runway, extending out into the harbor. Kai Tak–frankly, a terrible place for one of the world’s busiest international airports–is a good symbol of the story of Hong Kong’s aviation, as told in Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global...
The Future of Global Trade: A Discussion with Shannon K. O'Neil
December 22, 2022 09:00 - 45 minutesCritics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A f...
Kathe Geist, "Ozu: A Closer Look" (Hong Kong UP, 2022)
December 21, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourBased on a close reading of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s extant films, this book provides insights into the ways the director created narrative structures and used symbolism to construct meaning in his films. Against critics’ insistence that Ozu was indifferent to plot and unlikely to use symbols, Geist reveals the director’s subtle iconographic paradigms. Her incisive understanding of the historical and cultural context in which the films were conceived amplifies her analysis of the film...
Dan Slater and Joseph Wong, "From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia" (Princeton UP, 2022)
December 17, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesWhy some of Asia’s authoritarian regimes have democratized as they have grown richer—and why others haven’t Over the past century, Asia has been transformed by rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization—a spectacular record of development that has turned one of the world’s poorest regions into one of its richest. Yet Asia’s record of democratization has been much more uneven, despite the global correlation between development and democracy. Why have some Asian countries become...
Elaine Pearson, "Chasing Wrongs and Rights: My Experience Defending Human Rights Around the World" (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
December 16, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourChasing Wrongs and Rights: My Experience Defending Human Rights Around the World (Simon & Schuster, 2022) by Elaine Pearson, the Asia Director at Human Rights Watch, is an intimate account of her journey fighting for human rights across the world. Part personal journey, part insider’s peek into the work of international human rights organizations, Chasing Wrongs and Rights is also a primer on advocacy with governments, an indictment of Australia’s human rights record and foreign policy, a car...
Ying-Chen Peng, "Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi's Image Making" (Yale UP, 2023)
December 15, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourYing-chen Peng’s Artful Subversion: Empress Dowager Cixi’s Image Making is a beautiful new volume on late Qing imperial art practice from Yale University Press (forthcoming in 2023). Peng’s book, rigorously researched and richly illustrated, presents a revisionist biography of the Empress Dowager through an analysis of her patronage and participation in making art. Each chapter follows Cixi’s her “artfully subversive” command of various media forms, from photography and portraiture, to archit...
Michael X. Wang, "Lost in the Long March" (Overlook Press, 2022)
December 15, 2022 09:00 - 43 minutesIn 1934, tens of thousands of Communist guerillas fled Jiangxi, in an extended retreat through hazardous terrain to Shaanxi in the north, while under fire from their Nationalist enemies. The Long March, as it became to be known, helped build the legend of the Chinese Communist Party, and of its leader Mao. While on the Long March, Mao had a daughter, who was left behind to live with a local family due to the trek’s dangers That event inspired Michael X. Wang’s debut novel Lost in the Long Mar...
Nicholas de Villiers, "Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
December 14, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesA critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queernes...