New Books In East Asian Studies

“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao's China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how to take part in revolution,” and it develops that argument in a series of case studies that take readers into the local context of museums, revolutionary monuments, model neighborhoods, and more in Shanghai, while paying careful attention to the ways that the Shanghai case resonates with the larger scope of Maoist China as a whole. It’s a study that will be of interest to readers of Chinese history, museum studies, material cultures, and more. Enjoy! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our

Have you ever felt that the grammar of Asian languages does not fit with the framework that we use to describe them? In the late 19th century, Asian grammarians began adapting the European-based grammatical frameworks describing their languages, but this application was not straightforward. In Japan, the question of grammar eventually became entangled with larger debates about cultural identity, heritage, and nationalism. In this episode, Jonathan Puntervold unfolds the story of conservative Japanese language scholar, Yamada Yoshio (1875-1957) and his legacy on Japanese linguistics, in conversation with Tyra Orton. Jonathan is a PhD fellow at the Department of Global Studies at Aarhus University and is currently a visiting researcher at NIAS. With a background in general linguistics and Japanese studies, his research has generally focused on the nature of Japanese grammar and the many different descriptions of it across time and space. The episode focuses on his recently submitted PhD thesis, If the shoe fits

Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first dedicated study of how the oldest Japanese myths, recorded in the eighth-century texts Kojiki and Nihon shoki, changed in meaning and significance between 800 and 1800 CE. Generations of Japanese scholars and students have turned to these two texts and their creation myths to understand what it means to be Japanese and where Japan fits into the world order. As the shape and scale of the world explained by these myths changed, these myths evolved in turn. Over the course of the millennium covered in this study, Japan transforms from the center of a proud empire to a millet seed at the edge of the Buddhist world, from the last vestige of China’s glorious Zhou Dynasty to an archipelago on a spherical globe. Analyzing historical records, poetry, fiction, religious writings, military epics, political treatises, and textual commentary, Matthieu Felt identifies the geographical, cosmological, epistemological, and semiotic c

In his monumental new book, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017), Kristian Petersen takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the layers and complexities of Sino-Muslim intellectual and social history. On the way readers meet the major scholars and texts that played a formative role in the development of the Han Kitab tradition, and revel in navigating the terms and stakes of their discourses and debates on critical questions of pilgrimage, scriptural interpretation, and the sanctity of the Arabic language. In addition to constituting a field turning contribution to the study of Islam in China, this book is also among the most dazzling interventions in translation studies. All students and scholars of Islam, Religion, Asian Studies, and Translation Studies will have much to benefit from this brilliant study. It will also make an excellent text in both undergraduate and graduate courses on Muslim intellectual history, Asia

On an August night in 1933 Harbin in then-Japanese controlled Manchuria–Semyon Kaspe, French citizen, famed concert musician, and Russian Jew, is abducted after a night out. Suspicion falls on the city’s fervently anti-semitic Russian fascists. Yet despite pressure from the French consulate, the Japanese police slow-walk the investigation—and three months later, Semyon is found dead. The abduction, murder and trial catch the world’s attention right as Japan is trying to win international support for the puppet state of Manchukuo—and it’s the subject of Scott Seligman’s latest book, Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China (U Nebraska Press, 2023) In this interview, Scott and I talk about Harbin, the major players in Semyon’s abduction and murder, and how the investigation and trial became an international sensation. Scott D. Seligman is a writer and historian. He is the national award-winning author of numerous books, i

Even in states where borders and sovereignty are supposedly well established, large movements of transnational migrants are seen to present problems, as today’s crises show the world over. But as Alyssa Park’s book Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) shows, when both peoples and whole political paradigms are on the move simultaneously, we are able to look in very new ways at how governance works and how it interrelates with issues of human mobility. In this richly informative and captivating book, Park focuses on the movement of Koreans around the point where China, Russia and Korea converged from the mid-19th century onwards. Deftly moving between intimate migrant experiences and higher-level government activity, the author’s interweaving of the personal and the political gives us a newly grounded perspective on several large empire-states and how they came to understand sovereignty, population and loyalty in the 1

Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. The book is divided into two parts, each addressing one of the “two Pacific Wars,” as Yellen puts it: a “war of empires” and “an anticolonial war… for independence.” The first half of the book treats the Japanese “high policy” of the Sphere. Here, Yellen not only provides—through the Coprosperity Sphere—a provocative new reading of the Tripartite Pact and the imbrication of Japan’s regional and global geopolitical strategies, but also outlines an important timeline of how Japanese conceptualizations of the Sphere evolved w

Analysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building. Although many feminist critics have articulated women's active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated narratives of empire-building have been largely supported and rectified. In contrast, the roles of marginalized women, such as sex workers, women entertainers, hostesses, and hibakusha have rarely been analyzed. This book addresses this intellectual lacuna by closely examining memories, (semi-)autobiographical stories, and newspaper articles, grounded or inspired by lived experiences not only in Japan, but also in Shanghai, Manchukuo, colonial Korea, and the Pacific. Chapters further explore the voices of diasporic Korean women (Zainichi Korean woman born in Japan, as well as Korean American woman born in Korea) whose lives were impacted, intervening ethnocentric na

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwar material constraints and technological shortages, cultural workers (and audiences) became human components of audiovisual media networks that connected and built the new nation. Through a careful reading of archival sources and oral interviews, Li excavates two historically grounded terms, the guerrilla and the spirit medium, to develop a theoretical framework that explains how cinema and propaganda functioned in the socialist state. Her chapters explore the top-down visions of the cinematic image economy (the directive

The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan: Sociality, Space and Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) by Dr. James Cummings explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Taking an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men construct and experience ways of ‘sexual being’ – as gay, homosexual, tongzhi and/or in the scene – and what these mean for the ways of living they see as possible within a socio-cultural, political and material context characterised by pervasive heteronormativity. It explores what it means for gay men in Hainan to ‘come into the scene’, how internet and mobile technologies figure in their everyday processes of sexual categorisation and how these men negotiate orientations and disorientations towards the future in relation to dominant heterosexual life scripts of marriage and reproduction. This book offers vital insights into the production and restriction of non-heterosexual lives in diverse settings, while addressing

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written.  Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. He considers how the literary qualities of inscriptions interact with the visual and physical properties of the things that bear them. Kelly argues that inscribing an object became a means for authors to grapple with the materiality and t

Russia and China, the largest and most populous countries in the world, respectively, have maintained a delicate relationship for four centuries. In addition to a four-thousand-kilometer border, they have periodically shared a common outlook on political and economic affairs. But they are, in essence, profoundly different polities and cultures, and their intermittent alliances have proven difficult and at times even volatile. In China and Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (Yale UP, 2023), Philip Snow provides a full account of the relationship between these two global giants. Looking at politics, religion, economics, and culture, Snow uncovers the deep roots of the two nations' alignment. We see the shifts in the balance of power, from the wealth and strength of early Qing China to the Tsarist and Soviet ascendancies, and episodes of intense conflict followed by harmony. He looks too at the experiences and opinions of ordinary people, which often vastly differed from those of their governments, a

Olga V. Solovieva's book The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, Or the Art of Speaking Differently (Oxford UP. 2023) offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically

In August, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to complain about how U.S. regulations are holding local sunscreens back compared to the rest of the world. And while she didn’t name any specific country, the video featured headlines that did name one nation: South Korea. On social media, Korean cosmetics are now viewed as the world’s best. But where did this success come from—and, perhaps, what does it say about South Korea? Elise Hu, during her time in South Korea, tried to find out, researching and reporting on not just the cosmetics industry, but gender politics, the culture of lookism, K-Pop, and cosmetic surgery, all covered in her latest book Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital (Dutton, 2023) In this interview, Elise and I talk about South Korea, its world-leading cosmetics industry, and what that says about gender and lookism in this buzzing East Asian economy. Elise Hu is a correspondent and host at-large for NPR, the American news network; and since Apr

Today I talked to Wayne Soon about his book Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford UP, 2020). In 1938, one year into the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese military found itself in dire medical straits. Soldiers were suffering from deadly illnesses, and were unable to receive blood transfusions for their wounds. The urgent need for medical assistance prompted an unprecedented flowering of scientific knowledge in China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. Wayne Soon draws on archives from three continents to argue that Overseas Chinese were key to this development, utilizing their global connections and diasporic links to procure much-needed money, supplies, and medical expertise. The remarkable expansion of care and education that they spurred saved more than four million lives and trained more than fifteen thousand medical personnel. Moreover, the introduction of military medicine shifted biomedicine out of elite, urban civilian institutions and laboratories and transformed it int

Migration is a theme intertwined with hopes and dreams. In Borderland Dreams: The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers (Duke UP, 2023), June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursuing their borderland dreams, are transformed into a transnational ethicized class. Kwon analyzes the persistent desire of Korean Chinese to “leave to live better” at the intersection between the neoliberalizing regimes of post-socialist China and post–Cold War South Korea. Scrutinizing the tensions and affinities among the Korean Chinese, North and South Koreans, and Han Chinese whose lives intertwine in the borderland, Kwon captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese workers caught between the asce

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf, 2023), a book ten years in the making, is the definitive account of the postwar trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals, and the impact it had on the modern history of Asia. Written by Gary Bass, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, the book shines a much-needed spotlight on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the criminal process historically overshadowed by its namesake in Nuremberg for the senior leaders of the Nazi regime in the Third Reich. In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the victorious powers turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. To them, it was clear that Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for their crimes. For the Allied powers, the trials were an opportunity both to render judgment on their vanquished foes and to create a legal framework to prosecute wa

Environmental organising in Beijing emerged in an unlikely place in the 2000s: new gated residential communities. After rapid population growth and housing construction led to a ballooning trash problem and overflowing landfills, many first-time homeowners found their new neighbourhoods facing an unappetizing prospect—waste incinerator projects slated for their backyards. Delving into the online and offline conversations of communities affected by the proposed incinerators, A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jean Yen-chun Lin demonstrates how a rising middle class acquires the capacity for organising in an authoritarian context. Dr. Lin examines how urban residents create civic life through everyday associational activities—learning to defend property rights, fostering participation, and mobilising to address housing-related grievances. She shows that homeowners cultivated petitioning skills, informational networks,

Welcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and I am speaking today to Prof. Tristan Brown about his book, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton UP, 2023). Brown’s book considers fengshui, that is, the knowledge of orienting structures, such as graves and houses, in accordance with well-established cosmological principles, as an administrative technology and language of power that was intrinsic to governance through the Qing legal code. Fengshui has long been dismissed as a “superstition” whose historical significance is limited to its obstruction of (narrowly) infrastructural development and (broadly) modernization. Laws of the Land instead pushes us to understand fengshui as a form of knowledge production that allowed the state to govern in an era of increasing resource scarcity and crisis.  The book covers cases related to land use (and misuse) in relation to graves, examination success, and mining concerns. It introduces

Japan has historically maintained extended periods of isolationist policies and continues to uphold some of the strictest immigration laws in the world today. The country has also long had a tumultuous relationship with non-ethnic Japanese residents, including Taiwanese and Korean nationals who were first forced to become Japanese citizens under imperialist rule, only to be deprived of their statuses after Japan formally lost its colonies. More recently, foreign nationals seeking employment and residency have been effectively disallowed from acquiring long-term working visas, while many others have unsuccessfully sought asylum, with tragic consequences.  Listen to Dr. Sara Park and Dr. Yoko Demelius discuss the historical background and current developments that have shaped the current state of immigration policies in Japan. While difficulties faced by the diverse group of non-ethnic Japanese immigrants and residents vary, the researchers make clear that they are treated with a persistent and pervasive lack o