New Books in East Asian Studies

With questions over how ideas are translated across borders and between languages as acute as ever today, it is sometimes easy to forget that our efforts to understand each other are mediated through many accreted layers of previous translations. Pu Wang’s The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) takes us deep into th...

On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, five activists were detained by the police in China for their plans to distribute anti-sexual harassment stickers. Although such detainments usually last 24 hours, these women were detained 37 days, the legal limit for detention without bringing charges. Dubbed the Feminist Five, news of the women spread rapidly through social media. The author of L...

Tonight we are talking with Federico Varese about his new book Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories (Princeton University Press, 2011). Whenever you read a book about transnational crime one of the themes will be about how globalisation has made it easier for organized crime groups to operate. You will also see another chapter about how large mafia style groups are spre...

In the late second century BCE, a series of trading route developed between China in the east and Rome’s empire in the west. Craig Benjamin’s Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 100 BCE-250 CE (Cambridge University Press, 2018) describes the emergence of these routes and the roles the empires of the era played in their development. Benjamin credits the pastoral nomadic tribes of...

The story of popular entertainment in American immigrant communities is only just beginning to be told. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao from University of Illinois Press (2017) addresses the history of Cantonese Opera performed in Chinatowns in cities across North America with a primary focus on San Francisco, New York City, and Vancouver during the 1920s. Using a weal...

How does music link people across time and space? How do singers modulate their repertoires to forge links with audiences both within and across local, regional and national borders? What are the consequences of these developments? In Song King: Connecting People, Places and Past in Contemporary China (University of Hawaii Press 2018), Dartmouth College Assistant Professor Levi S. Gibbs seeks to a...

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Pr...

Ian Johnson’s new book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon, 2017),  was called "a masterpiece of observation and empathy" by The New York Review of Books, and The Economist, who included the book on its Best of 2017 list, said the book, "Shows how a resurgence of faith is quietly changing the country." The Guardian said the book is "full of moving encounters with Chines...

Given its expanding multimedia presence in Asia and around the world for many years now, K-pop is a phenomenon that is hard to ignore. This “animal that thrives on excess,” as Suk-Young Kim puts it (p. 6) is more than just music, however, as it offers us a way of looking at a host of fascinating and important subjects in politics, economics, anthropology and performance studies. Suk-Young Kim's bo...

Sayaka Chatani’s Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2018) tackles the fraught question of how and why young men in marginalized and rural areas of Japan and its colonies became emotionally invested in the project of Japanese nationalism and militarism. Why did so many rural youth, especially in colonial Taiwan and Korea, active...

Emily Baum’s The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 as part of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series, is a genealogy of “psychiatric modernity,” of the invention and reinvention of modern mental illness in Beijing, 1901-1937. Focusing on the pivotal roles of the city’s police-run munic...

More than forty year after its end the Vietnam War casts a long shadow over our understanding of Vietnam’s modern history. But the acute focus on the war has perhaps distorted our understanding of modern Vietnam. Christopher Goscha’s award-winning new book, Vietnam: A New History (Basic Books, 2016), brilliantly paints a picture of an ancient, diverse, and complex country which had already begun t...

The Crossroads of Globalization. A Latin American View (World Scientific Publishing Co. 2019) explores the complex interaction of several forces shaping the current world economic situation. Alfredo Toro Hardy analyzes the leadership of China and the economic strength of Asia, transnational companies, and international organizations like the IMF as forces in favor of globalization, while populism,...

Though most renowned for his award-winning Tibetan films, Pema Tseden, is also a prolific author and translator. Enticement (State University of New York Press 2018) is a collection of Pema Tseden’s short stories edited and translated by Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani and Michael Monhart, with assistance from Southwest University’s Carl Robertson and INALCO’s Francoise Robin. Along with a translator’s...

With recent events having raised hopes that significant change may be afoot in North Korea, it is important to remember that DPRK society has in fact been undergoing steady transformation for a considerable period of time. Among the most important dimensions of this are the changes that have occurred in the kind of information North Koreans have access to, and this is the subject of Jieun Baek's e...

Monica Kim provides a fresh look at the Korean War with a people-centered approach that studies the experiences of prisoners of war. As the first major conflict after the 1949 Geneva Conventions, POW repatriation during the Korean War became a new battleground for the recognition of state sovereignty and a larger tool for political propaganda. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold...

Eiko Maruko Siniawer’s Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018) is an absorbing look at the multiple and changing ways that waste—of resources, possessions, time, money, etc.—has been conceptualized in Japan since 1945. More than a history of garbage and waste disposal, Waste is a look at the aspirations and discontents of a rapidly changing society in which waste has been e...

At an often-stressful time in global affairs, and with the very idea of the ‘international community’ seemingly under threat, it can be beneficial to look at the 'global order’ from its disorderly fringes. Andray Abrahamian’s North Korea and Myanmar: Divergent Paths (McFarland, 2018) does precisely this, comparing and contrasting North Korea’s and Myanmar’s long careers as ‘pariah’ states during t...

Jonathan Fulton's China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies (Routledge, 2018) sheds light on China’s increasing economic role at a moment that the traditionally dominant role in international oil markets of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers is changing as a result of the United States having become more or less self-sufficient, China replacing the US as the Gulf’s foremost export market,...

In his new book On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and The Threat of Nuclear War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Van Jackson succinctly explains the major issues facing U.S.-North Korea relations since the Korean Armistice Agreement. Jackson argues that the 2017 nuclear crisis was a product of a gradual hardening of U.S. policy towards North Korea, as well as the particular characteristics of the curre...

China’s global rise has been analysed from many perspectives in recent years. But pressing questions over how understandings of gender – and particularly masculinity – have been changing amidst increasing mutual contact between China and the wider world have been asked less often. Derek Hird and Geng Song are among the foremost contributors to a steadily growing body of work in this area, however,...

At a time when trade between China and the outside world is rarely out of the news, it remains important to remember that in centuries past global commerce moved in directions very different from those which dominate the present. This was especially evident during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Western countries and Japan employed a mix of coercive and collaborative mechanisms to fois...

As public knowledge grows of the Chinese state’s subjugation of the central Asian region of Xinjiang, many may find themselves wondering what Beijing’s interest in this distant region is in the first place. Judd Kinzley’s new book Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands(University of Chicago Press, 2018) goes a long way to answering this and many other relat...

Alessandro Arduino and Xue Gong’s Securing the Belt and Road, Risk Assessment, Private Security and Special Insurances Along the New Wave of Chinese Outbound Investments (Red Globe Press, 2018) significantly contributes to an understanding not only of China’s ambitious infrastructure and energy driven Belt and Road Initiative, but also the increasing challenges it poses for China itself.  The mult...

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced...