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
Amanda Wangwright, "The Golden Key: Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949)" (Brill, 2021)
December 14, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesThe first monograph devoted to women artists of the Republican period, The Golden Key: Women Artists and Gender Negotiations in Republican China (1911-1949) (Brill, 2021) , authored by Amanda Wangwright, recovers the history of a groundbreaking yet forgotten force in China's modern art world. Through its detailed examination of the lives and careers of six female artists—Guan Zilan, Qiu Ti, Pan Yuliang, Fang Junbi, Yu Feng, and Liang Baibo—this book argues that women were central to the emerg...
Is China's Communist Party Threatened by the Protests?
December 12, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesThis week, RBI Director John Torpey talked with William Hurst, Professor of Political Science at Cambridge University, about the origins of the protests in China, how they differ from those in 1989, and the possibilities of regime change. Hurst delves into the mobilization and contentious politics of China and its local-central interplay, where protesters act as rational actors who use different strategies of bargaining and signaling. Moreover, Hurst addresses the implications of Xi Jinping's...
Annika A. Culver, "Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
December 09, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAnnika Culver’s Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology (Bloomsbury Academic 2022) uses a previously unavailable archive of photographs as the jumping off point to follow the careers of Japanese ornithologists in the transwar generation as they navigated the complexities of their swiftly changing political circumstances. Japan’s Empire of Birds brings out the tensions between aristocratic connoisseurship elegance, scientific advancement, and intense per...
David O’Brien and Melissa Shani Brown, "People, Place, Race, and Nation in Xinjiang, China: Territories of Identity" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
December 09, 2022 09:00 - 22 minutesEntitled People, Place, Race, and Nation in Xinjiang, China: Territories of Identity (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), David O’Brien and Melissa Shani Brown’s new book focuses upon the ways in which ethnic difference is writ through the banalities of everyday life: who one trusts, what one eats, where one shops, even what time one's clocks are set to (Xinjiang being perhaps one of the only places where different ethnic groups live by different time-zones). In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talk to...
Max Haiven, "Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2022)
December 08, 2022 09:00 - 54 minutesPalm oil is a commodity like no other. Found in half of supermarket products, from food to cosmetics to plastics, it has shaped the world in which we live. In Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (Pluto Press, 2022), Max Haiven tells a sweeping story that touches on everything from empire to art, from war to food, and from climate change to racial capitalism. By tracing the global history of this ubiquitous elixir we see how capitalism creates surplus populations: people made dependent on capitalis...
Ayelet Zohar, "The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan: (De)Colonialism, Orientalism, and Imagining Asia" (Brill, 2022)
December 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAyelet Zohar’s The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan: (De)Colonialism, Orientalism, and Imagining Asia (Brill, 2022) traces the use of camels in the visual vocabulary of Japan’s definition of itself in the world―especially vis-à-vis “Asia―from the Edo period to the present.” In other words, Zohar uses representations of camels as a lens to view the ways in which Japan has both attempted to leave or conquer Asia on the one hand and to find solidarity in a shared Oriental/Asian identity...
John Delury, "Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China" (Cornell UP, 2022)
December 04, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAgents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Dr. John Delury reconstructs the remarkable story of a botched mission into Manchuria, showing how it fit into a wider CIA campaign against Communist China and highlighting the intensity—and futility—of clandestine operations to overthrow Mao. In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a rem...
Chris McMorran, "Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
December 02, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutesToday I talked to Chris McMorran about his new book Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2022). Amid the decline of many of Japan’s rural communities, the hot springs village resort of Kurokawa Onsen is a rare, bright spot. Its two dozen traditional inns, or ryokan, draw nearly a million tourists a year eager to admire its landscape, experience its hospitality, and soak in its hot springs. As a result, these ryokan have enticed village youth to return home to take ov...
Adam Brookes, "Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City" (Atria Books, 2022)
December 02, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe two parallel Palace Museums in Beijing and Taiwan, and their separate collections of thousands of precious artworks and artifacts from imperial times, reflects a key moment in the 1940s when the Republic of China and the People’s Republic became distinct entities. But the very survival of these vast troves of porcelain, sculpture, jade, paintings, books and many other items up to that moment was far from guaranteed given the epochal events unfolding across East Asia in the early part of t...
The Future of Xi and China: A Discussion with Sue Lin Wong
November 30, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesWhat will a Chinese-dominated world look like? And since Xi Jin Ping will probably rule China for life, what does he want to do; what does he believe in and what does he mean for China and the world? Sue Lin Wong has made an excellent podcast series on him called "The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping" and discussed the Chinese leader with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign corresp...
Wei Yu Wayne Tan, "Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
November 29, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWhile the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain trades. Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity (U Michigan Press, 2022) illustrates the breadth and depth of those occupations, ...
Viren Murthy, "The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future" (Routledge, 2022)
November 29, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesDrawing on a wide range of texts and using an interdisciplinary approach, The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future (Routledge, 2022) by Viren Murthy shows how Chinese and Japanese intellectuals mobilized the past to create a better future. It is especially significant today given a world where, amidst tensions within Asia and the rise of China, East Asian intellectuals and governments constantly find new political meanings in their traditions. The essays illuminate how thro...
The Assassination and Legacy of Shinzo Abe
November 25, 2022 09:00 - 23 minutesThe brutal assassination of Prime Minister Abe in July this year shocked Japan and has produced large and unexpected consequences for the nation´s politics. In this episode, we examine the fallout of the assassination on Abe’s legacy, and on Japan: What are the consequences of Abe's association with the Unification Church for the role of religion in politics more generally? How much of Abe's political legacy will survive his assassination? And, how has current Prime Minister Kishida and the L...
Paul D. Barclay, "Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's 'Savage Border,' 1874-1945" (U California Press, 2018)
November 24, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourOutcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874-1945 (University of California Press, 2018) by Paul D. Barclay unveils the causes and consequences of capitalism’s failure to “batter down all Chinese walls” in modern Taiwan. Adopting micro- and macrohistorical perspectives, Barclay argues that the interpreters, chiefs, and trading-post operators who mediated state-society relations on Taiwan’s “savage border” during successive Qing and Japanese regimes rose to prominence and...
Aynne Kokas, "Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty" (Oxford UP, 2022)
November 22, 2022 09:00 - 54 minutesOn August 6, 2020, the Trump Administration issued a ban on TikTok in the United States, requiring that the owner, Beijing-based Bytedance, sell the company to American investors or shut it down. Legions of TikTokers were devastated at the possible loss of their beloved platform, and for what: a political grudge with China? American suitors like Walmart and Oracle tried to make a deal with Bytedance to keep the platform operating in the US. But then something curious happened. The Chinese gov...
Alexander Des Forges, "Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China" (Harvard UP, 2021)
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesThe eight-legged essay (bagu wen) was the one genre of writing that dominated in late imperial China. As the primary mode of expression in which men were schooled, writing and reading shiwen (modern or contemporary prose) epitomized literary production in Ming-Qing China, and it was vitally important for every student, examination candidate, and examiner to master and know the genre intimately — but this genre hasn't yet been approached from a literary perspective. Alexander Des Forges' new...
Lynette H. Ong, "Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesHow do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford UP, 2020), Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019--the years ...
Sarah Dauncey, "Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2022), Sarah Dauncey offers the first comprehensive exploration of disability and citizenship in Chinese society and culture from 1949 to the present. Through the analysis of a wide variety of Chinese sources, from film and documentary to literature and life writing, media and state documents, she sheds important new light on the ways in which disability and disabled identities have been represented and nego...
Towards a Green China
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 38 minutesWhat does the concept of ecological civilisation mean in practice? And how can we understand the relationship between grand visions, legal systems, green politics and development processes on the ground in contemporary China? In this episode we focus on China’s environmental ambitions and its increasingly central role in efforts towards global sustainability, as well as the importance placed upon sustainable development by the Chinese Communist Party, and by Xi Jinping himself. To unpack thes...
Eric Tagliocozzo, "In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama" (Princeton UP, 2022)
November 17, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutesIn the nineteenth century, one group of American merchants reported an odd request from the Vietnamese emperor. An envoy asked if the traders could help procure a commodity brought by a previous delegation: a precious good that turned out to be a bottle of Best Durham bottled mustard. That’s one small anecdote in Eric Tagliocozzo’s latest book, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama (Princeton University Press: 2022), which charts hundreds of years of history across Asia’s wat...
Steve Kemper, "Our Man In Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor" (Mariner Books, 2022)
November 17, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesA gripping, behind-the-scenes account of the personalities and contending forces in Tokyo during the volatile decade that led to World War II, as seen through the eyes of the American ambassador who attempted to stop the slide to war. In 1932, Japan was in crisis. Naval officers had assassinated the prime minister and conspiracies flourished. The military had a stranglehold on the government. War with Russia loomed, and propaganda campaigns swept the country, urging schoolchildren to give mo...
Sisi Sung, "The Economics of Gender in China: Women, Work and the Glass Ceiling" (Routledge, 2022)
November 16, 2022 09:00 - 25 minutesAlongside rapid socio-economic development, China has achieved remarkable gains in gender equality on metrics like health, education, and labor force participation. Yet, the glass ceiling phenomenon and the underrepresentation of women in management has worsened. Sisi Sung's The Economics of Gender in China (Routledge, 2022) develops a cross-disciplinary paradigm, with economics at its core, to better understand gender in China and women in management in the Chinese business context. In addi...
Natali Pearson, "Belitung: The Afterlives of a Shipwreck" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
November 15, 2022 09:00 - 34 minutesIn 1998, the Belitung, a ninth-century western Indian Ocean–style vessel, was discovered in Indonesian waters. Onboard was a full cargo load, likely intended for the Middle Eastern market, of over 60,000 Chinese Tang-dynasty ceramics, gold, and other precious objects. It is one of the most significant shipwreck discoveries of recent times, revealing the global scale of ancient commercial endeavors and the centrality of the ocean within the Silk Road story. But this shipwreck also has a modern...
Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, "Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise" (Yale UP, 2022)
November 15, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesMao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a thoroughly researched assessment of how China’s economic success continues to be shaped by the communist ideology of Chairman Mao It was long assumed that as China embraced open markets and private enterprise, its state-controlled economy would fall by the wayside, that free markets would inevitably lead to a more liberal society. Instead, China’s g...
Howard Chiang, "Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific" (Columbia UP, 2021)
November 14, 2022 09:00 - 59 minutesAs a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical conti...
Meredith Schweig, "Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
November 11, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourLike many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their identities. In Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan (U Ch...
Jianglin Li, "When the Iron Bird Flies: China's Secret War in Tibet" (Stanford UP, 2022)
November 09, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesIn When the Iron Bird Flies: China's Secret War in Tibet (Stanford University Press, 2022), Jianglin Li presents an untold story that reshapes our understanding of Chinese and Tibetan history. From 1956 to 1962, devastating military conflicts took place in China's southwestern and northwestern regions. Official records at the time scarcely made mention of the campaign, and in the years since only lukewarm acknowledgment of the violence has surfaced. When the Iron Bird Flies, by Jianglin Li, b...
Morgan Pitelka, "Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 08, 2022 09:00 - 57 minutesThe Japanese provincial city of Ichijōdani was destroyed in the civil wars of the late sixteenth century but never rebuilt. Archaeological excavations have since uncovered the most detailed late medieval urban site in the country. Drawing on analysis of specific excavated objects and decades of archaeological evidence to study daily life in Ichijōdani, Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge UP, 2022) illuminates the city's layout, the possessi...
Ghassan Moazzin, "Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 07, 2022 09:00 - 40 minutesUsing previously unexplored and meticulously analyzed sources from China and to a lesser extent Japan, combined with those of Germany and the UK, Ghassan Moazzin provides a refreshing look at a number of levels: the workings of multinational banks, international networks of bankers, the interactions of Chinese and German empires with other state actors. In Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870-1919 (Cambridge UP, 2022), Moazzin introduces the...
Yuhua Wang, "The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development" (Princeton UP, 2022)
November 01, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesHow social networks shaped the imperial Chinese state China was the world’s leading superpower for almost two millennia, falling behind only in the last two centuries and now rising to dominance again. What factors led to imperial China’s decline? The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development (Princeton UP, 2022) offers a systematic look at the Chinese state from the seventh century through to the twentieth. Focusing on how short-lived emperors often ruled a st...
Ksenia Chizhova, "Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday" (Columbia UP, 2021)
November 01, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesIn the face of a Korean cultural world preoccupied with newness, literary output from the more measured and regulated Choson period (1392-1910) can seem difficult to engage with for readers both inside and outside the country. But as Ksenia Chizhova’s Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday (Columbia UP, 2021) shows, a particular genre of late-Chsoson lineage novels reflect not only the staid norms of Confucian patriarchy and heredity, but als...
Brian A. Wong, "The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That Is Changing the World" (PublicAffairs, 2022)
November 01, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThis podcast features Brian A. Wong, discussing his new book, The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That is Changing the World (Public Affairs, 2022). Brian joined Alibaba early, as its 52nd employee and first American employee, and worked for them for nearly twenty years. His book provides both insider insights and an analytical perspective on how Alibaba grew to become one of the most important companies in the global digital economy. This well-written and engaging book expla...
Kathleen Burkinshaw, "The Last Cherry Blossom" (Sky Pony, 2020)
October 28, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesYuriko was happy growing up in Hiroshima when it was just her and Papa. But her aunt Kimiko and her cousin Genji are living with them now, and the family is only getting bigger with talk of a double marriage! And while things are changing at home, the world beyond their doors is even more unpredictable. World War II is coming to an end, and since the Japanese newspapers don’t report lost battles, the Japanese people are not entirely certain of where Japan stands. Yuriko is used to the sirens ...
Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, "The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China" (U Washington Press, 2022)
October 27, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesIn the strategy game Civilization VI, where players choose world leaders to be their avatar, Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor of China, has one goal in mind: building wonders (like the Great Wall of China). His workers can build wonders faster and more cheaply, and he hates leaders that build more wonders than he does. That largely corresponds to how people in the West think of the First Emperor: powerful, responsible for unifying China, despotic–and focused on building great works like the Gr...
Hongwei Bao, "Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism" (Routledge, 2020)
October 26, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesIn Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism (Routledge, 2020), associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Nottingham Hongwei Bao returns with a theory-driven, methodologically-diverse, empathetic, and insightful analysis of LGBTQ literature and visual culture in postsocialist China. A thorough introduction positions Bao as a participant observer and explores key concepts including “postsocialist metamorphosis,” defined as “the ...
A. Carly Buxton, "Un-Thinking Collaboration: American Nisei in Transwar Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
October 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday I will be talking to Carly Buxton about her book Unthinking collaboration: American Nisei in transwar Japan, which came out this year [2022] with the University of Hawaiʹi Press. Unthinking Collaboration uncovers the little-known history of Japanese Americans who spent World War II in Japan. Japanese Americans who found themselves in Japan during the war, could not leave but also, unlike their compatriots, were not interned. But, to survive many had to serve the Japanese state and act ...
Yoshiko Okuyama, "Reframing Disability in Manga" (U Hawaii Press, 2020)
October 24, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesReframing Disability in Manga (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) analyzes popular Japanese manga published from the 1990s to the present that portray the everyday lives of adults and children with disabilities in an ableist society. It focuses on five representative conditions currently classified as shōgai (disabilities) in Japan―deafness, blindness, paraplegia, autism, and gender identity disorder―and explores the complexities and sociocultural issues surrounding each. Author Yoshiko Okuyam...
Reflections on Chinese Sexuality: A Conversation with Weiyi Hu
October 21, 2022 08:00 - 21 minutesHow is sexuality experienced in contemporary China? What are the connections and tensions between China and the West in producing knowledges of sexuality? Dr Weiyi Hu notes that most of the seminal writings on sexuality are produced in the West, and that the definition of sexuality is largely theorised by Western scholars. In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and an affiliated PhD student at NIAS, Dr. Weiyi Hu sketches an alternative approach that q...
Michael Keevak, "On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation" (Hong Kong UP, 2022)
October 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation (Hong Kong UP, 2022), Michael Keevak traces the Western reception of the Chinese concept of “face” during the past two hundred years, arguing that it has always been linked to nineteenth-century colonialism. “Lose face” and “save face” have become so normalized in modern European languages that most users do not even realize that they are of Chinese origin. “Face” is an extremely complex and varied notion in all East Asian cultures. ...
Sabine Frühstück, "Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
October 21, 2022 08:00 - 2 hoursGender and Sexuality in Modern Japan (Cambridge University Press 2022) is a new addition to a list of publications by Sabine Fruhstuck, one of the leading scholars in the world on the topic. Written for both academics and the general public alike, this book introduces and discusses debates about sex, gender, and sexuality in modern and contemporary Japan, spanning from the 1860s to the 2020s. In Fruhstuck’s own words, this book aims to “balance descriptions of individual experience; instituti...
Jennifer S. Prough, "Kyoto Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Contemporary Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
October 21, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesKyoto Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Contemporary Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2022) looks at the uses and effects of heritage in tourism in Kyoto today seen through city policy and advertising, hotel infrastructure and tour guiding, season-based events, tourism to sites connected to the Bakumatsu-period hero Sakamoto Ryoma, and the phenomenon of walking in rental kimono. Emphasizing the ways experience-based tourism has been transforming Kyoto’s tourist landscape, Prough examines how heritage has ...
Leah Kalmanson, "Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
October 20, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesDoes human existence have a meaning? If so, is that meaning found in the world outside of us, or is it something we bring to our experience? In Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought (Bloomsbury, 2020) Leah Kalmanson shows how East Asian philosophies challenge the dichotomy implicit in the way this question is often framed. Her book investigates Korean Buddhist meditation, Confucian ritual practices, and Yijing divination. Along the way she argues t...
Matthew W. King, "In the Forest of the Blind: The Eurasian Journey of Faxian's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms" (Columbia UP, 2022)
October 19, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWhat would an “anti-field history” of Buddhist Studies look like? What does the social history of knowledge look like when it both includes and exceeds the West/Nonwest binary, the ethnonational subject, the secular humanist gaze, and the moral narratives and metaphysical content of modernism? Matt W. King explores these critical questions and models innovative approaches in his second monograph, In the Forest of the Blind (Columbia University Press 2022), which uses Faxian’s Record of Buddhi...
The Future of Cold War: A Discussion with Sergey Radchenko
October 18, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutesAre we in a new cold war? And if so, is the US up against China or Russia? Join Owen Bennett Jones for a discussion with Sergey Radchenko, the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Radchenko is the author of Unwanted Visionaries: The Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War and Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 among other works. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist an...
Maria Adele Carrai and Jennifer Rudolph, "The China Questions 2: Critical Insights Into US-China Relations" (Harvard UP, 2022)
October 14, 2022 08:00 - 21 minutesFor decades Americans have described China as a rising power. That description no longer fits: China has already risen. What does this mean for the U.S.–China relationship? For the global economy and international security? In this conversation, Julie Yu-Wen Chen, Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki discusses with Maria Adele Carrai from New York University Shanghai. Maria Adele Carrai is co-creator of a website called Mapping Global China. She recently co-edited “The C...
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
October 13, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutes“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West. Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and...
Scott Moore, "China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future" (Oxford UP, 2022)
October 13, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutes“We’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” That’s the new China strategy as outlined by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this year. But just exactly how countries should deal with China—including working with it, when the times call for it—is perhaps the thorniest question in international relations right now, at least in the West. Scott Moore gives his framework on the U.S. and China in China's Next Act: How Sustainability and...
Thomas Baudinette, "Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo" (U Michigan Press, 2021)
October 11, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesShinjuku Ni-chome is a nightlife district in central Tokyo filled with bars and clubs targeting the city's gay male community. Typically understood as a "safe space" where same-sex attracted men and women from across Japan's largest city can gather to find support from a relentlessly heteronormative society, Thomas Baudinette's Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo (U Michigan Press, 2021) reveals that the neighborhood may not be as welcoming as previously depicted...
Carles Prado-Fonts, "Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
October 07, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday I spoke with Carles Prado-Fonts on his recently published book Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation (Northwestern UP, 2022). This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. H...
Virtual Reality as Immersive Enclosure, with Paul Roquet (EF, JP)
October 06, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesPaul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the perceptual implications of virtual reality. Paul Elizabeth and John discuss the appeal of leaving actuality aside and how the desire to shut off immediate surroundings shapes VR's rollout in Japan. The discussion covers p...