New Books in East Asian Studies
By New Books in East Asian Studies
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Podcast Description
Discussions with Scholars of East Asia about their New Books
| Name | Description | Released | Price | ||
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1 |
Xiaofei Tian, “Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China” | Xiaofei Tian‘s Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a model of comparative history. A study of travel writing in early medieval and nineteenth-century China,Visionary Journeys uses this juxtaposition to tell a surprising, rich, and beautiful story of travelers and their experiences of dislocation over land and sea, in heaven and hell, in poems and prose, in China and beyond. The book uses a wonderfully trans-disciplinary humanistic practice to weave diaries, images painted in words and pigment, Daoist writings and Buddhist scriptures, ethnographic and travel accounts, and other kinds of text to understand the ways that individuals dealt with profound social, political, and cultural change at different moments in China’s history. In a way, it’s a story that any traveler will be able to identify with and learn from. There is so much in this book – explorations of race, gender, family, urban life, ideas of the family, personal identity, practices of experiencing oneself in a changing world – and it rewards a close and joyful reading. | 5/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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2 |
Taylor Atkins, “Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945″ | Taylor Atkins‘ recent book is both an important contribution to East Asian Studies and an absolute delight to read. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945 (University of California Press, 2010) opens with a movie theater commercial in 2004 and closes with a metaphorical decapitation. In the intervening chapters Atkins develops a series of sophisticated and masterfully defended arguments about the ways that colonial Japan was transformed by its engagement with Korean society and culture. Integrating critical literature on empire and colonialism, Japanese and Korean cultural history, and epistemological studies of loss and of observation, Primitive Selves is a model of careful, elegant, and responsible historical work lightened by a wonderful sense of humor. It was my sincere pleasure both to read the book, and to talk with Atkins about it. As Atkins mentions in the course of his book and our conversation, all of the proceeds of the book are donated to the Tahirih Justice Center, which can be found here. | 5/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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3 |
Rowan Flad, “Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in Chin | Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words, ideas. Rowan Flad‘s Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in China’s Three Gorges (Cambridge UP, 2011) stands as a beautiful case study of what it can look like to do so. Flad juxtaposes texts, bamboo slips, ceramic sherds, animal remains, and other lines of evidence to offer an exceptionally rich account of the technology of salt production in early China, offering glimpses at comparative archeological practices, ideas of spatiality, and the diversity of uses of animals in early China along the way. Reading the book inspired, for me, new ways of thinking about the conceptual role of fragments in the work of the historian, and our conversation was similarly inspiring. | 4/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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4 |
Thomas Mullaney, “Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China” | In telling a clear story about the emergence of ethnic categories in modern China, Tom Mullaney‘s Coming to Terms With the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (University of California Press, 2011) ranges across Saussurean linguistics, census reports, oral histories, and the historiography of laboratory science. Mullaney uses a careful, focused study of the practices of the Yunnan Province Ethnic Classification Research Team to open a much wider set of questions about the ways that key concepts (including ethnic potential, linguistic intelligibility, consent) both shaped and were produced by a project to create and map the 56 minzu of today’s China. In addition to being an inspiring model of what a truly trans-disciplinary study of Chinese history can look like, Coming to Terms With the Nation is also a darn good story and a fascinating read. Give the interview a listen to learn more about the importance of language and linguists in shaping modern notions of ethnicity, the history of the 56-minzu model in China, and the idea behind Tom’s ideal bookstore. | 4/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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5 |
Laurence Monnais, C. Michele Thompson, and Ayo Wahlberg, “Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the M | Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) gives me hope for the future of edited volumes. Not only is it a fascinating and coherent treatment of the history and practice of Vietnamese medicine, but it’s also a wonderfully interdisciplinary collection of approaches that incorporates work by social scientists, humanists, and medical practitioners. The essays collectively challenge some pervasive assumptions about “traditional” versus “scientific” modes of knowledge, inviting readers to rethink our assumptions about traditional medical practices in Vietnam while offering a set of wonderful case studies to think with. This collection is a must-read for anyone working on the humanistic or social studies of medicine, but it’s also full of wonderful insights and for readers broadly interested in science studies, Asian studies, and colonial studies. I spent a very energizing hour talking with Ayo Wahlberg, one of the volume co-editors. Our conversation ranged broadly from ethnographic practice in history and anthropology, to an inspiring journey across laboratory and countryside to find a local treatment for opium withdrawal, to the ways that “our medicine” took shape in the modern history of Vietnam. | 3/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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6 |
Andrew Field, “Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954″ | “To think of Shanghai is to think of its nightlife: the two are synonymous.” From here, Andrew Field takes us on a dance across modern Chinese history, through its nightscapes and ballrooms, into the sprawls of its settlements and the pages of its pictorials. Based on a wide range of sources from architectural blueprints to oral interviews, Field’s book succeeds in both showing us new sides of characters we thought we knew, and in introducing a new cast of historical actors who helped shape the rise of urban modernity in Shanghai. Picking up Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954 (The Chinese University Press, 2010), readers join Field to listen to the jazz of expatriate Whitey Smith at the wedding of Chiang Kai-shek and Song Mei-ling, to learn dance hall etiquette along with “dance empresses” anointed in annual competitions, and to follow the gangsters, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs through the Dancer’s Uprising of 1948 and beyond. | 3/7/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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7 |
Timothy Brook, “The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties” | Tim Brook‘s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010) rewards the reader on many levels. Though it provides an excellent introduction to Yuan and Ming history for both students and advanced scholars, it’s not merely a dry textbook: The Troubled Empire also succeeds in a provocative re-conceptualization of many central concepts in Chinese history. Beginning with soaring dragons and ending with rats on a bookshelf, Brook offers us what is simultaneously an ecological history of early modern China, a comparative account of the Yuan and Ming in global history, and an exemplary case study of transdisciplinary history at its most engaging. I learned a great deal reading it, and we had a great time talking about it. | 2/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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8 |
Carol Benedict, “Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010″ | Carol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011) is many things at the same time; among other things, it’s both an exceptionally rich account of an object (or set of objects) that were crucial to the history of China in the world, and an engaging journey through the history of modern China on the leaves and flowers and stalks of a plant. Benedict’s book traces the narrative of tobacco in China from early modern encounters to the “cigarette century” of today. In addition to situating Chinese history within a larger global framework, it is also very sensitive to the multi-sited and trans-regional story of tobacco within China, showing change and continuity across the late imperial/modern divide. This is a work that is profoundly trans-disciplinary in scope, and as a result it rewards readers interested in any number of disciplines, including the histories of commodities, disease, China, modern literature, gender, global encounters, and trade. | 2/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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9 |
Erik Mueggler, “The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet” | First things first: this is an outstanding book. In the course of The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011), Erik Mueggler weaves together the stories of two botanists traveling through western China and Tibet in a lyrically-written story that treats the nature of writing, bodies, beauty, images, violence, and history in creating experiences of the earth. The characters are compelling, the story is important, and the work speaks to readers well beyond the field of East Asian Studies. Listen to Mueggler’s comments, and then read the book. You will learn much, as I certainly did. | 2/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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10 |
Marta Hanson, “Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China” | Marta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of the 21st century, Hanson’s book maps the transformations of medicine and healing in late imperial China that accompanied transforming geographies of empire. Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2011) is both the biography of a disease and a masterful tour through the history of medical practice and knowledge in later imperial China. Over the course of our discussion, we talked about the people and ideas that inspired Hanson’s work, the importance of “eureka moments,” and the SARS epidemic in Beijing. The author has generously shared a discount on her book for listeners of New Books in East Asian Studies. To order a copy of the book through the Routledge Press website at a 20% discount, visit http://www.routledge.com/9780415602532/ and enter discount code SECM11 at the checkout to claim your discount. Offer expires 28th February 2012. | 1/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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11 |
Tong Lam, “A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949″ | We tend to take for granted that we have bodies, that these bodies are knowable and measurable, and that we understand how to relate our own bodies to those of the people around us. To put it more simply: if I were to ask you how tall you were, how much you weighed, or what year you were born, while you might balk at providing an honest answer you wouldn’t be flummoxed by the question. We are modern bodies, and as such we are walking, talking, identifiable, and countable collections of facts. Tong Lam’s A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949 (University of California Press, 2011) explores the practices through which this became possible in the context of China during the first half of the twentieth century. Lam’s book looks closely at the construction of the Chinese nation-state through censuses, social surveys, and other social and political technologies. His sources range from census forms, to diaries, to fiction in a rich and focused work that will appeal to anyone interested in the ways that the concept of the modern nation is shaped by the histories of science, soulstealing, society, and sentiment. A Passion for Facts also poses a particular methodological challenge: what can it look like to trace the emergence of categories that change the way we understand the world? | 12/22/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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12 |
Mark Rowe, “Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism” | Mark Rowe’s new book Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a fascinating study of the life of Buddhism in Japan by looking at the many facets of death in modern Japanese Buddhism. Rowe guides us from the early background of the temple-parishioner system in Tokugawa Japan to a modern context in which the emergence of new funerary forms has re-defined what post-mortem embodiment means, in terms of relationships, fear, materiality, and nature. In this exceptionally rich an sensitively wrought study, Rowe re-conceptualizes what it looks like to study Buddhism in modern Japan by weaving an account from texts, objects, voices, and personal experience. It is also a fascinating read, full of surprising stories and insights. We covered many topics in the course of our wide-ranging interview, including the changing conception of the “family” in Asian studies, what it’s like to be the head of parking at an eternal memorial grave, the physicality of death, and why choosing a head temple priest both is and is not like Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. | 12/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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13 |
Andrew Jones, “Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking in Modern Chinese Culture” | Simply put: you should read Andrew F. Jones’s new book, Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard UP, 2011). It is both an immense pleasure to read, and a truly brilliant study of the ways that a discourse of development was taken up from evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley and translated or vernacularized into narrative forms of modern Chinese literature. Jones guides us through magic shows, children’s primers, films about toys, science fiction, and many other sources for understanding the ways that development emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a mode of narrating history in China. In the course of our conversation, we ranged from x-ray technologies that could detect qi, to a natural history museum including peng birds, to a man who was, for me, easily The Most Awesome Historical Figure In Recent Memory. Here’s the “Modern Sketch“ visual archive at the MIT Visualizing Cultures website that Jones mentions in the interview. | 11/30/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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14 |
Daqing Yang, “Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945″ | Daqing Yang’s Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a gift to both historians of East Asia and scholars of science and technology studies (STS). Yang’s book dissects the body of the Japanese empire from 1853-1945 to reveal its pulsing “nerve system” in a network of communication technologies that extended well into Northeast and Southeast Asia. This extraordinarily rich and well-documented account moves from the first public demonstration of a working electric telegraph with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, to the Japanese acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. Along the way, Yang’s book offers wonderful glimpses of a range of sources that include the North China Telegraph & Telephone Co. company song, an adventure-action-romance film about telecommunications-enabled espionage, and experiments in early fax technology. We spoke for an hour (and could have spoken for many more) about this fascinating history of techno-imperialism. | 11/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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15 |
Yi-Li Wu, “Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China” | In what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010), introduces readers to a rich history of women’s medicine (fuke) in the context of late imperial China. Reproducing Women offers much more than a history of ideas and practices of women’s health in the late Ming and early Qing, however. Wu weaves together an impressive range of sources, including comparative perspectives from contemporary contexts, to create a fascinating account of the ways that human bodies were experienced and understood in Chinese medical history. In the course of our discussion and our journey through the book, we touched on topics ranging from monastery handbooks, to the late imperial version of Kinko’s, to the comparative history of pregnancy tests. | 11/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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16 |
Peter Mauch, “Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War” | Peter Mauch‘s Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exhaustively researched and very rich biographical account of the man who was Japan’s ambassador to the US in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. Mauch traces the geopolitical developments of Japanese/US relations from 1877-1951, a crucial period that embraces two World Wars and many fascinating transformations in modern transnational history. The book relates this story through the life of Nomura, naval officer turned ambassador, allowing readers a rare glimpse into the processes and negotiations through which this sailor-diplomat wrestled with conflicting senses of duty, commitment, and reason. A boon not only for scholars of Japan, the book is also a fascinating model of the historian’s craft in its use of biography to simultaneously offer a macro-history of modern global politics, and a micro-history of a vibrant and critical mind reasoning in the course of some very difficult decisions. | 10/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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17 |
Eric Rath, “Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan” | Cuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was actually consumed. Eric Rath‘s recent book Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2010) is a rich study of the culture, practices, performance, and literature of food in early modern Japan. Rath takes us from medieval culinary manuscripts penned by men of the knife, all the way to sukiyaki recipes clipped from newspapers in 1950s America. Focusing on late medieval culinary manuscripts and early modern printed cookbooks, Rath shows that cuisine in pre-modern Japan blended the edible with the uneaten, puns with pickles, and rituals with rice cakes. This is a wonderfully written account of the history of food in its many spaces: on the page, on the cutting board, on the tray, in the kitchen, and in transit. In the course of our interview we talked about the practical challenges of researching the history of cuisine in early modern Japan, the theater of slicing up carp, the Iberian roots of tempura, and the proper way to eat a flying quail food display. | 8/4/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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18 |
Michael Keevak, “Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking” | In the course of his concise and clearly written new book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2011), Michael Keevak investigates the emergence of a “yellow” and “Mongolian” East Asian identity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Becoming Yellow incorporates a wide range of sources in its exploration of the European imagination of an East Asian racial identity, including poetry, travel accounts, medical and anthropological texts, and children’s toys. Over the course of our interview, we talked about the difficulties and rewards of trying to situate the idea of a “Yellow Peril” in historical context, and the potential pitfalls along the way. | 7/12/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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19 |
Lee Ambrozy, “Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009″ | Anyone who has been following the news this year has likely heard of Ai Weiwei. This provocative and gifted Chinese artist-activist has made 2011 headlines for his controversial work Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads and for his recent arrest by Chinese police. What has been less widely appreciated is Ai’s profound impact and insight as a cultural critic, Internet artist, and chronicler of contemporary events in China. Before it was shut down on 28 May 2009 by Chinese authorities, his blog provided a Chinese-language digest of Ai’s perspectives on topics ranging from the nature of humanity to hair cuts, from his “Fairytale” project to his efforts to compile a list of the children killed in the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, from the contemplation of a “Bullshit Tax” to the 2009 Xinjiang protests. By turns hilarious, touching, and tragic, his online writing offered a perspective on current events in China that was very different from the sort of coverage available in popular Western-language news outlets. With the support and collaboration of Ai himself, Lee Ambrozy has collected, edited, and translated a selection of the artist’s written and photographic blog posts and tweets. Spanning the period from the founding of Ai’s blog in 2006 to his final posts in 2009, Lee’s translation is a treasure-box that not only offers a glimpse into the life and work of this transformative artist, but also speaks to the nature and power of internet culture in today’s China. We spoke for an hour about her experience creating the volume, the challenges and joys of the translator’s practice, and the story of the Grass Mud Horse, among many other things. It is an inspiring volume, and well worth a read. | 6/21/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Dagmar Schäfer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” | In her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schäfer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor official in southern China, Song has earned a major reputation among scholars of Chinese history for writing the Tiangong kaiwu, a work on practical knowledge that covers topics ranging from salt-making, to gunpowder, to metallurgy. Schäfer’s book flesh out Song’s character, the social and physical world in which he lived, and the universe of his many writings, while opening a new stage for the study of technology and craftsmen in the early modern world. In the course of our interview, we explored Song’s fateful picnic, his thoughts on the morality of things, and the use of images as a form of argumentation, and we considered what might happen if you put a fish in a box for three days. | 5/31/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Michael Auslin, “Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations” | [Crossposted from New Books in Public Policy] How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael Auslin’s Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard University Press, 2011), the author, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the history of cultural exchange between the United States and Japan, and how important that exchange has been, and continues to be, from a political perspective. Auslin, who is also a columnist for WSJ.com, analyses the “enduring cultural exchange” between the two countries, and describes the various stages through which this vital relationship has evolved over the last century and one half. As Auslin shows, the relationship between the United States and Japan has had a large number of twists and turns, culminating in the current close and mutually beneficial connection between the two nations. In our interview, we talk about baseball, pop culture, gunboat diplomacy, and the first Japanese ever to set foot in America. Read all about it, and more, in Auslin’s useful new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook if you haven’t already. | 5/5/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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22 |
Yuma Totani, “The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II” | [Crossposted from New Books in History] Most everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them. Hollywood made movies about them. Some of us can even name a few of the convicted (Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, etc.). But fewer of us know about what might be called “Nuremberg East,” that is, the Toyko trials held after the defeat of the Japanese in World War Two. These proceedings generated few books, no movies, and therefore occupy only a minor place in Western historical memory. Thanks to Yuma Totani’s excellent book, The Tokyo War Crimes Trials. The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Harvard, 2008; also available in Japanese here), that may change. We should hope it does, because the Tokyo trials were important. They not only helped the Japanese come to terms with what their government and military had done during the war (truth be told, they are still coming to terms with it today), but it also set precedents that are still being applied in international law today. More than that, Totani offers a challenging interpretation of the trials. They weren’t so much “victor’s justice” (the common interpretation in Japan) as a lost opportunity. Reading her book one can’t help but get the feeling that the Americans and their confederates bungled the trials badly. Instead of trying to establish personal responsibility in all cases, the Allies simply arrested the upper echelons of the Japanese civil and military elite and selected those who were “representative” for indictment. Those who were not indicted—though probably just as culpable as those who were—were set free, giving rise to the myth that they had brokered deals with the Americans. The prosecution was headed by an inattentive alcoholic (Joseph Keenan) who preferred interrogating the accused to gathering hard documentary evidence. The defense was comprised of ill-prepared Japanese attorneys and their less-than-helpful Allied aids. Confusion reigned in the courtroom. And of course there were significant translation problems throughout. The trials were something of a farce. I always wondered why many Japanese today don’t think very highly of the Tokyo proceedings. Now, thanks to Yuma Totani’s informative book, I have a better understanding of why. Please become a fan of “New Books in East Asian Studies” on Facebook if you haven’t already. | 3/11/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 22 Episodes |
Customer Reviews
Intelligent talk about smart books
One of the best book-chat podcasts available. Lengthy interviews with the authors of
recent books in Asian Studies. The interviewer clearly knows her stuff, but it smart
enough to let the authors have their say. A real service to the field.
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