New Books in Taiwan Studies

Passing, Posing, Persuasion: Cultural Production and Coloniality in Japan's East Asian Empire (U Hawaii Press, 2023) interrogates the intersections between cultural production, identity, and persuasive messaging that idealized inclusion and unity across Japan’s East Asian empire (1895–1945). Japanese propagandists drew on a pan-Asian rhetoric that sought to persuade colonial subjects to identify w...

Daughters of Shandong (Berkley Books, 2024), the author’s first and based on the life of her grandmother, follows the fortunes of a mother and three daughters abandoned by their wealthy family in soon-to-be Communist China. It is 1948, and Chairman Mao’s forces have moved into Shandong Province, driving the Nationalist Army into retreat. Although the town of Zhucheng is small and rural, the Ang fa...

In 1971, the New York Times called the Taiwanese-Chinese chef, Fu Pei-Mei, the “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.” But, as Michelle T. King notes in her book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (Norton, 2024), the inverse–that Julia Child was the Fu Pei-Mei of French cuisine–might be more appropriate. Fu spent decades on Taiwanese television, wrote three semina...

Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) explores a multilingual archive of contemporary queer and feminist videos by Asian diasporans in North America, Europe, and East Asia. It grapples with the pressing question of how media representation can critique and advance social justice for racialized minorities in the wake of today’s unprecedente...

Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II (Harvard UP, 2022) argues that the Chinese Nationalist government’s retreat inland during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new scientific and technical relationships with the United States led to fundamental chang...

Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a groundbreaking book, of which the findings have significant implications both for German-China relations and also in understanding the rising influence of autocratic China on liberal democracies globally. In today's interview, Associate Professor Andreas Fulda and I spoke about Germany's entangl...

How is Buddhism seen and practiced in Taiwan? And how do neighbouring countries influence Taiwanese Buddhism? In this episode we explore the religious landscape of Taiwan in conversation with Dr. Yushuang Yao, a leading expert on religion in contemporary Taiwan. Yushuang Yao is an Associate Professor at Fo Guang University, Taiwan, specializing in contemporary religions of Taiwan. She is also a re...

In this episode, Jenna Tang shares with us her translation of Lin Yi-Han's Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise: A Novel (HarperVia, 2024), one of the most iconic works of Taiwan's #MeToo movement. Thirteen-year-old Fang Si-Chi lives with her family in an upscale apartment complex in Taiwan, a tightknit community of strict yet doting parents and privileged children raised to be ambitious, dutiful, an...

The Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers (MHM Limited and Amsterdam University Press, 2022) offers a comprehensive overview of women writers in Japan, from the late 19th century to the early 21st. Featuring 24 newly written contributions from scholars in the field—representing expertise from North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia—the Handbook introduces and analyzes work...

Today’s book is: The Translator’s Daughter: A Memoir (Mad Creek Books, 2024), by Grace Loh Prasad, which is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home. Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States,...

In December 1937, Bernhard Sindberg arrives at a cement factory outside of Nanjing. He’s one of just two foreigners, and he gets there just weeks before the Japanese invade and commit the now infamous atrocities in the Chinese city. As the writer Peter Harmsen notes, Bernhard’s background isn’t particularly compelling: He’s bounced from job to job, and is known for butting heads with his colleague...

Indoctrinating the Youth: Secondary Education in Wartime China and Postwar Taiwan, 1937-1960 (U Hawaii Press, 2024) examines how the Guomindang (GMD or Nationalists) sought to maintain control of middle-school students and cultivate their political loyalty over the trajectory of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Civil War, and postwar Taiwan. During the Sino-Japanese War the Nationalists manag...

While many today use Cold War 2.0 to refer to the standoff between U.S. and China, it is worth remembering that the first Cold War never ended in Asia, as evidenced by the political situation on the Korean Peninsula and that surrounding the Taiwan Strait. How has Cold War figured into the (controversial) modernisation process of East and Southeast Asia as well as the various (critical) imaginaries...

Transpacific Cartographies: Narrating the Contemporary Chinese Diaspora in the U.S. (Rutgers University Press, 2023) examines how contemporary Chinese diasporic narratives address the existential loss of home for immigrant communities at a time of global precarity and amid rising Sino-US tensions. Focusing on cultural productions of the Chinese diaspora from the 1990s to the present -- including n...

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023) explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals,...

Contemporary Chinese film and literature often draw on time-honored fantastical texts and tales which were founded in the milieu of patriarchy, parental authority, heteronormativity, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. Cathy Yue Wang's Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy (Wayne State University Press, 2023) examines the processes by which...

The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing. A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device?  In The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024), Thomas Mullaney sets out...

A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War.  So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Co...

Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke UP, 2021) explores the significance of transnational educational mobility in the life aspirations of young, middle-class Chinese women. Based on extensive, long-term ethnographic research, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried...

As Taiwan gains prominence on international headlines, often framed in terms of conflict with China, it’s easy to neglect the island nation’s human stories and nuances. Niki Alsford’s book Taiwan Lives: A Social and Political History (University of Washington Press, March 2024) aims to provide a more nuanced counterweight to the sensationalism and soundbites that come up in Anglophone discourse ab...

Today’s guest is Charles B. Jones, Associate Professor and Director of the Religion and Culture graduate program in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America. He will be speaking with us about his new book Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: Understanding a Tradition of Practice, just published in the Pure Land Buddhist Studies series with University of Hawaiʻi Pre...

How can we build a more equal economy? In Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy (U California Press, 2024), Neil Lee, a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, explores the question of how societies have fostered and supported innovation. The book challenges conventional assumptions that innovative economies must be unequal. Drawin...

Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s fourth short story collection, Cravings (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), contains twelve beautifully-written tales. They each start simply before delving into universal human struggles of love, aging, repercussions, and community. Characters mull over or confront decisions and recognize or bemoan past mistakes. A little girl’s life changes while she’s sneaking olives...

Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. In the international literary space, which privileges the West, Malaysia is considered remote. The institutions of modern Chinese literature favor mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Within Malaysia, only texts in Malay, the national language, are considered national literature by the state. However, Mahua authors have prod...

On the podcast today, I am joined by Professor Anru Lee, who is professor of anthropology at John Jay College, the City University of New York. Anru will be talking about her new book, Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan, which was published just last year in 2023 by University of Hawai’i Press. Haunted Modernities interrogates the nature of shared expressi...