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
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...
On Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji"
October 06, 2022 08:00 - 26 minutesWe don’t even know the real name of the 11th century author Murasaki Shikibu. But we do know that her book, The Tale of Genji, is arguably one of the most influential Japanese texts to date. Genji quickly captured its readers’ imaginations with political intrigue and court drama, but it can also be read as an astute critique of Japanese elite society. Reginald Jackson is an associate professor of Pre-modern Japanese Literature and Performance at the University of Michigan. He is the author of...
4.3 Strange Beasts of Translation: Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang in Conversation
October 06, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesYan Ge and Jeremy Tiang are both writers who accumulate languages. Sitting down with host Emily Hyde, they discuss their work in and across Chinese and English, but you’ll also hear them on Sichuanese, the dialect of Mandarin spoken in Yan Ge’s native Sichuan province, and on the Queen’s English as it operates in Singapore, where Jeremy grew up. Yan is an acclaimed writer in China, where she began publishing at age 17. She now lives in the UK. Her novel Strange Beasts of China came out in Eng...
Carlos Rojas on Translating Yan Lianke
October 05, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesIn this episode, Carlos Rojas shares with us his experience as a translator. He has translated several renowned authors in the Chinese-speaking world, including Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, Jia Pingwa, and Ng Kim Chew, into English. Among the literary translations, Carlos has translated ten books written by Yan Lianke, including novels, short stories, novellas, and essay collections. The books include Lenin’s Kisses (2012), The Four Books (2015), Marrow (2016), The Explosion Chronicles: A Novel (2017)...
Alison Melnick Dyer, "The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön: A Woman of Power and Privilege" (U Washington Press, 2022)
October 04, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesBorn to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindröling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldrön (1699–1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity, including exile during a civil war, to play a central role in the reconstruction of her religious community. In The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldrön: A Woman of Power and Privilege (U Washington Press, 2022), Alison Melnick Dyer employs literary and historical analysis, centered on a biogra...
NBN Classic: Jennifer Hubbert, "China in the World: An Anthropology of Confucius Institutes, Soft Power, and Globalization" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
October 02, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesThis episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. In recent years, Confucius Institutes—cultural and language programs funded by the Chinese government—have garnered attention in the United States due to a debate over whether they threaten free speech and academic freedom. In addition to this, much of the scholarly work on Confucius Institutes analyzes policy documents. Anthropologist Jennifer Hubbert seeks to ask more comp...
Beyond Meat? Dietary Shifts and Meat Contestations in China, India and Vietnam
September 30, 2022 08:00 - 31 minutesWhat explains the uneven meatification of diets in three of Asia’s core ‘emerging economies’? How and why is meat consumption changing today, and what role have American fast-food chains played? To discuss these questions and more, Helene Ramnæs, coordinator for the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies, is joined by Marius Korsnes, Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Arve Hansen. Asian diets include considerably more meat now than in the recent past, but meat is a contested issue. China and Vietnam have ex...
Johanna O. Zulueta, "Okinawan Women's Stories of Migration: From War Brides to Issei" (Routledge, 2022)
September 30, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesThe phenomenon of “war brides” from Japan moving to the West has been quite widely discussed, but this book tells the stories of women whose lives followed a rather different path after they married foreign occupiers. During Okinawa’s Occupation by the Allies from 1945 to 1972, many Okinawan women met and had relationships with non-Western men who were stationed in Okinawa as soldiers and base employees. Most of these men were from the Philippines. In Okinawan Women's Stories of Migration: F...
Juliane Noth, "Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting" (Harvard UP, 2022)
September 30, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourJuliane Noth’s Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Paintings, coming very soon from the Harvard University Asia Center (2022), tracks a relatively short but transformative period in ink painting that coincides with the Nanjing Decade, 1927-1937. In the book, Noth considers how artists negotiated the continuing relevance and development of a form that came to be defined as guohua, or “national painting,” vis a vis the introduction of photography and new (print) technologies. She argues t...
95 Intercultural Buddhism and Philosophy: A Discussion with Jin Y. Park
September 30, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWelcome to the new season of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. After a well-earned and challenging summer filled with drought, war, political strife and ridiculous heat, we’re back in the saddle and raring to go with some intellectual stimulation aimed at the practicing life. Four episodes are lined up with Buddhist scholars, philosophers and practitioners. First off we have Jin Y. Park. She is Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy and Religion at the American University and also served as...
Murasaki Yamada, "Talk to My Back" (Drawn & Quarterly, 2022)
September 27, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutesManga historian Ryan Holmberg introduces the influential alternative manga artist Murasaki Yamada (1948-2009) to English readers through a scholarly translation of Talk to My Back (1981-1984), Yamada’s feminist examination of the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams. The manga is paired with an extensive essay by Dr. Holmberg, in which he positions Yamada’s oeuvre within the history of alternative manga and Yamada’s manga within her life. Alternative manga is primarily associated w...
David Max Moerman, "The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
September 23, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFrom the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries Japanese monks created hundreds of maps to construct and locate their place in a Buddhist world. Expansively illustrated with multiple maps and illustrations, The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021) by D. Max Moerman is the first monograph of its kind to explore the largely unknown archive of Japanese Buddhist world maps and analyze their production, reproduction...
"Riding the Wild Horse in Chinese Literature”: Translation and Research on "Jin Ping Mei"
September 23, 2022 04:00 - 27 minutesWhat is the oral tradition of Chinese storytelling about and what is the connection to the great Chinese novels? How to translate a Chinese classic such as the famed and defamed “Jin Ping Mei”? And how to handle the dilemma of steering one’s boat between enormous amounts of scholarship on the novel without drowning, and keeping up the tempo of translation day after day? NIAS senior researcher Vibeke Børdahl joined NIAS Press Student Assistant, Julia Heinle, to discuss her upcoming publication...
Hannah Kirshner, "Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town" (Penguin, 2022)
September 22, 2022 08:00 - 35 minutesA young sake bar owner, Yusuke Shimoki, arrives on the doorstep of Hannah Kirshner’s Brooklyn apartment “with a suitcase full of Ishikawa sake,” in Hannah’s words. That visit sparked a years-long connection between Hannah and the rural Japanese community of Yamanaka, a home for artisans and artists, hunters and farmers, and other ordinary Japanese trying to live in the countryside. Those visits are the subject of Hannah’s book, Water Wood and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a J...
Andrew Grant, "The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine" (Cornell UP, 2022)
September 21, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesIn The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine (Cornell UP, 2022), Grant examines how China’s urban development policies of frontier cities like Xining (Tib. zi ling) accompanied civilizational projects that deployed various discursive and non-discursive practices aimed at creating ideologically homogeneous and modern places. Xining or Ziling is the capital of Qinghai (Tib. mtsho sngon) province and it is the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau and home to over 200...
John Kieschnick, "Buddhist Historiography in China" (Columbia UP, 2022)
September 16, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesSince the early days of Buddhism in China, monastics and laity alike have expressed a profound concern with the past. In voluminous historical works, they attempted to determine as precisely as possible the dates of events in the Buddha's life, seeking to iron out discrepancies in varying accounts and pinpoint when he delivered which sermons. Buddhist writers chronicled the history of the Dharma in China as well, compiling biographies of eminent monks and nuns and detailing the rise and decli...
Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise
September 16, 2022 08:00 - 27 minutesCan spiritually and religiously inspired environmental movements in Asia help reach the global goal of environmental sustainability? This question lies at the heart of the research project “Transcendence and Sustainability: Asian Visions with Global Promise” that we focus on in this episode. Also known as TRANSSUSTAIN, the project builds on the observation that scholars, activists, and even politicians in many Asian countries have found inspiration in traditional knowledge and in the premoder...
Caleb Swift Carter, "A Path Into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
September 13, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesOften represented as a tradition of ancient origins, Shugendō has retained a quality of mystery and nostalgia in the public imagination and scholars as the “original” champions of mountain asceticism. In his monograph, A Path Into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi (U Hawaii Press, 2022), Caleb Carter challenges this conceptualization by examining historical documents of Mount Togakushi. By focusing on themes of narratives, institution, and ritual, Carter explores how the transmissi...
Chinese Outbound Tourism: Leisure or Political Tool?
September 09, 2022 08:00 - 24 minutesHow did Chinese tourism grow from almost non-existent to being the largest outbound travel source market in the world over a couple of decades? Is the word “weaponization” a fair description of how Beijing uses tourism strategically in their foreign policy? And will the Chinese tourists ever travel internationally again after several years of pandemic? In this episode, Philip Kyhl is joined by Dr. Matias Thuen Jørgensen to discuss his and co-author Anders Ellemann Kristensen’s contribution to...
Josh Chin and Liza Lin, "Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)
September 09, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesAs we build the AI-powered digital economy, how far do we want to go? Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control (St. Martin's Press, 2022) explores how China’s Communist Party is harnessing new technologies in an effort to achieve an unprecedented level of social control. The authors outline the most brutal and extreme applications of these technologies to the Uighur people of western China. They contrast this with the relatively benign-seeming application...
Jini Kim Watson, "Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization" (Fordham UP, 2021)
September 08, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHow did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021) tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form ...
Joseph Torigian, "Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China After Stalin and Mao" (Yale UP, 2022)
September 07, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourUnfortunately, one takeaway for readers of this book should be the difficulty that not only outside analysts but even party insiders face when trying to understand elite politics in Leninist regimes. Sinologists have always struggled to see inside the “black box,” and the track record is not strong. Yet getting history right is immensely important, as the past is one of the few places that allow us to understand structural features that might persist. – Joseph Torigian, Prestige, Manipulation...
Morgan Pitelka and Reiko Tanimura, "Letters from Japan's Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" (IEAS, 2021)
September 07, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesCultural historians Morgan Pitelka and Reiko Tanimura partner with one of Japan’s premier experts in calligraphy and letter writing, Takashi Masuda, to translate and annotate twenty-three unique letters alongside images of the hand-brushed originals. Each letter is presented first in its original format as a brushed piece of calligraphy. The authors provide a transcription of the letter into Japanese, followed by an English translation. Next is a commentary with the biography of the letter’s ...
Charo B. D'Etcheverry, "Celebrating Sorrow: Medieval Tributes to the Tale of Sagoromo" (Cornell UP, 2022)
September 06, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesCelebrating Sorrow: Medieval Tributes to the Tale of Sagoromo (Cornell UP, 2022) explores the medieval Japanese fascination with grief in tributes to The Tale of Sagoromo, the classic story of a young man whose unrequited love for his foster sister leads him into a succession of romantic tragedies as he rises to the imperial throne. Charo B. D'Etcheverry translates a selection of Sagoromo-themed works, highlighting the diversity of medieval Japanese creative practice and the persistent and va...
Jerry C. Zee, "Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System" (U California Press, 2022)
September 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday Julia Keblinska and I had the pleasure of talking to Assistant Professor Jerry Zee about his book, Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System, published by University of California Press in 2022. Continent in Dust offers a political anthropological account of strange weather. It is an ethnography of China’s meteorological contemporary - the transformed weather patterns whose formations and fallouts have accompanied decades of breakneck economic development. Focusing on i...
Vietnam and China: Strange Bedfellows in the Era of Strategic Competition
September 01, 2022 08:00 - 29 minutesAs the Asia-Pacific becomes the central stage of the US-China rivalry, Vietnam has emerged as one of the key countries to watch. While Vietnam has positioned itself as a critical player in the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy, and Hanoi’s distrust of China has grown in response to Beijing’s increasingly aggressive stance in the South China Sea, the Vietnam-China relationship transcends mere geopolitical binaries. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Nguyen Khac Giang discusses Viet...
Thomas Donald Conlan, "Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan, 471-1877: A Sourcebook" (Hackett, 2022)
August 30, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesIn addition to providing excerpts from classic tales of Japan’s warrior past, Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan, 471-1877: A Sourcebook (Hackett, 2022) draws on a wide range of lesser-known but revealing sources—including sword inscriptions, edicts, orders, petitions, and letters—to expand and deepen our understanding of the samurai, from the order’s origins in the fifth century to its abolition in the nineteenth. Taken together with Thomas Donald Conlan's contextualizing introductions...
Brian DeMare, "Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution from New China" (Stanford UP, 2022)
August 30, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesUsing rare grassroots archives, Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution from New China (Stanford UP, 2022) dives deep into four true criminal cases during the political campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1953. The first casefile recounted a story of a Confucian scholar who found himself allied with bandits and secret society members. The second casefile was on an assassination of a Communist cadre by a farmer, who...
Bert Becker, "France and Germany in the South China Sea, c. 1840-1930: Maritime Competition and Imperial Power" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
August 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFrance and Germany in the South China Sea, c. 1840-1930 Maritime Competition and Imperial Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) explores imperial power and the transnational encounters of shipowners and merchants in the South China Sea from 1840 to 1930. With British Hong Kong and French Indochina on its northern and western shores, the ‘Asian Mediterranean’ was for almost a century a crucible of power and an axis of economic struggle for coastal shipping companies from various nations. Merchant s...
Michael Ackland, "The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami" (Cambria Press, 2022)
August 29, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesHaruki Murakami has often been accused of being a feckless, merely popular writer, but in The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami (Cambria Press, 2022) Michael Ackland demonstrates that this is not the case, arguing that Murakami has not only assimilated the existentialist heritage but innovatively changed and revitalized it, thereby placing exciting personal possibilities within the reach of his worldwide readership. Ackland’s study begins by tracing the troubled introduction of such al...
Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere, "Global China as Method" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 26, 2022 04:00 - 22 minutesIs China part of the world? Based on much of the political, media, and popular discourse in the West the answer is seemingly no. Even after four decades of integration into the global socioeconomic system, discussions of China continue to be underpinned by a core assumption: that the country represents a fundamentally different 'other' that somehow exists outside the 'real' world. Either implicitly or explicitly, China is generally depicted as an external force with the potential to impact on...
James Welker, "Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
August 25, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourQueer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022), edited by James Welker, brings together twenty-one scholars exploring BL media, its fans, and its sociocultural impacts in a dozen countries in East, Southeast, and South Asia—and beyond. Contributors draw on their expertise in an array of disciplines and fields, including anthropology, fan studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, political science, and sociology to shed ligh...
On Inazō Nitobe's "Bushido: The Soul of Japan"
August 25, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesNitobe Inazō wanted to explain Japan to Westerners, particularly morality as it is taught in Japanese society. He was born a Samurai in 1862. In his book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Inazō Nitobe explains the moral foundations of traditional Japanese society to a Western audience through “the way of the warrior,” Bushido. Harvard Professor David Howell is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History and Professor of History at Harvard University and the Chair of the Department...
Annah Lake Zhu, "Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China" (Harvard UP, 2022)
August 18, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutesMoney does strange things to people, as Annah Lake Zhu notes in her latest book Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China (Harvard University Press: 2022) In Madagascar, loggers, flush with cash from the rosewood trade, don’t quite know how to react to their newfound largesse, sometimes demanding less money for their wares out of confusion. Rumors abound of how loggers make their money. There’s no way that simple wood could garner so much profit, people say, so ob...
Fiona Moore, "Global Taiwanese: Asian Skilled Labour Migrants in a Changing World" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
August 17, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Global Taiwanese: Asian Skilled Labour Migrants in a Changing World (U Toronto Press, 2021), Fiona Moore explores the different ways in which Taiwanese expatriates in London and Toronto, along with professionals living in Taipei, use their shared Taiwanese identities to construct and maintain global and local networks. Based on a three-year-long ethnographic study that incorporates interviews with people from diverse backgrounds, generations, and histories, this book explores what their di...
Angela Ki Che Leung et al., "Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
August 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe twelve chapters of Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia (U Hawai’i Press, 2020) are divided into three sections: Good Foods, Bad Foods, and Moral Foods. Using case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia, these chapters investigate the moralization of food in modern Asia. These studies on moral food regimes are highly specific, but their implications, especially about the malleability of food as an ...
William Matthews, "Cosmic Coherence: A Cognitive Anthropology Through Chinese Divination" (Berghahn Books, 2021)
August 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday I spoke to anthropologist William Matthews about his new book, Cosmic Coherence: A Cognitive Anthropology Through Chinese Divination (Berghahn Books, 2021). This book explores how humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. Mathews explains the role that cognition plays in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China. Diviners explain the co...
Anoma Van Der Veere et al., "Public Health in Asia During the Covid-19 Pandemic" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
August 15, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesEvery nation in Asia has dealt with COVID-19 differently and with varying levels of success in the absence of clear and effective leadership from the WHO. As a result, the WHO’s role in Asia as a global health organization is coming under increasing pressure. As its credibility is slowly being eroded by public displays of incompetence and negligence, it has also become an arena of contestation. Moreover, while the pandemic continues to undermine the future of global health governance as a who...
Roselyn Hsueh, "Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 12, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesRoselyn Hsueh’s Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism (Cambridge, 2022) presents a new framework for understanding how developing countries integrate into the global economy. Examining the labor-intensive textile sector and the capital-intensive telecommunications sector in China, India, and Russia, Hsueh shows how differences in the way elites perceive the strategic value of a sector can lead to dramatically different patterns of governance. Author Roselyn Hsueh is an Associate Profe...
On "The Great Learning"
August 11, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutesSometimes the oldest texts are the most influential. The Great Learning likely first appeared in the Confucian Book of Rites around 2,000 years ago, and its impact can still be seen in the Chinese education system today. Harvard professor Peter Bol discusses this short text’s long history. Peter Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He is the author of Neo-Confucianism in History and "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Trans...
Steven B. Miles, "Opportunity in Crisis: Cantonese Migrants and the State in Late Qing China" (Harvard UP, 2021)
August 09, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesOpportunity in Crisis: Cantonese Migrants and the State in Late Qing China (Harvard UP, 2021) explores the history of late Qing Cantonese migration along the West River basin during war and reconstruction and the impact of those developments on the relationship between state and local elites on the Guangxi frontier. By situating Cantonese upriver and overseas migration within the same framework, Steven Miles re-conceives the late Qing as an age of Cantonese diasporic expansion rather than one...
David R. Stroup, "Pure and True: The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China's Hui Muslims" (U Washington Press, 2022)
August 09, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourCompared to their Uyghur and Kazakh co-religionists in Xinjiang, China’s largest single Muslim group – the Hui – has received less media and scholarly attention lately, perhaps understandably so since the former groups have borne the brunt of the campaigns of ethnic enclosure and erasure launched in recent years by the Chinese Communist Party. But as a near-ubiquitous presence across China and thus a community deeply involved in the waves of migration and urbanisation affecting many PRC citiz...
Ariane Knüsel, "China's European Headquarters: Switzerland and China During the Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
August 08, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesDuring the Cold War, the People's Republic of China used Switzerland as headquarters for its economic, political, intelligence, and cultural networks in Europe. Based on extensive research in Western and Chinese archives, China's European Headquarters: Switzerland and China during the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Ariane Knüsel charts not only how Switzerland came to play this role, but also how Chinese networks were built in practice, often beyond the public face of offi...
Michael J. Hathaway, "What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make" (Princeton UP, 2022)
August 08, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWhat a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Dr. Michael Hathaway pushes today’s mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life. The boo...
Christopher Craig, "Middlemen of Modernity: Local Elites and Agricultural Development in Meiji Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
August 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourChristopher Craig’s Middlemen of Modernity: Local Elites and Agricultural Development in Meiji Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2022) is a thoroughly research and engaging study of the role of local elites in the modernization of the Japanese countryside in the prewar era. “Agriculture,” Craig’s writes, “is given short shrift in the story of Japanese modernity. Farming and modernization seem to exist at opposite ends of a spectrum.” This is true for both contemporary historians, who tend to neglect agr...
China’s Role in the Future of Green Energy
August 05, 2022 08:00 - 22 minutesHow green is green energy really? And what role does Asia, more specifically China play in the transition to green energy? On the 7th of July, International Energy Agency came out with a press release warning the world to diversify the solar panel supply chain, which as of now is dominated by China. In this episode, Saskia Lilli Lehtsalu, an intern at University of Tartu Asia Center will take a look at the current energy green energy dilemma and discuss the future scenarios with energy expert...
On "The Story of the Stone"
August 04, 2022 08:00 - 26 minutesThe 1750s are remembered as a high point of China's Qing Dynasty: a time of power, prestige, and social harmony. But The Story of the Stone paints a different picture: one of harmful traditions, political corruption, and inter-generational conflict. Over 250 years later, it's one of the most loved novels in Chinese literature, with dozens of adaptations and an entire field of scholarship dedicated to it. In this episode, Stanford professor Ronald Egan discusses the revolutionary story and its...
Ramon Pacheco Pardo, "Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop" (Oxford UP, 2022)
August 04, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesIf there’s a country that “punches above its weight”, it’s South Korea. It’s home to some of the world’s largest and most important companies, and the source of pop culture that dominates Asia—and even planted a foothold in the West. But the country’s growth would have been astounding to those at the end of the Korean War. The Republic of Korea was poor, devastated by war, and stuck deep in Cold War politics. Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop (Hurst, 2022) by Ramon ...
Benjamin R. Young, "Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World" (Stanford UP, 2021)
August 02, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesFar from always having been an isolated nation and a pariah state in the international community, North Korea exercised significant influence among Third World nations during the Cold War era. With one foot in the socialist Second World and the other in the anticolonial Third World, North Korea occupied a unique position as both a postcolonial nation and a Soviet client state, and sent advisors to assist African liberation movements, trained anti-imperialist guerilla fighters, and completed b...
The Future of Korea: A Discussion with Eugene Y. Park
August 02, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesThere have been times when Korea has lived in periods of prolonged stability and tranquillity. But there have also been times, such as now, when it seems to have an outsized influence on global affairs – as is certainly the case of North Korea the influence of which is far bigger than its GDP figures would suggest it might have. With is nuclear capability and ruthless authoritarianism, North Korea has engaged Beijing and Washington as the highest level. And the economic miracle in the south a...