New Books In East Asian Studies

Linda Rui Feng‘s beautiful new book shows us the Tang city of Chang’an as we’ve not seen it before. City of Marvel and Transformation: Chang’an and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015) remaps Chang’an as a lived space and a city created by wandering... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

In late imperial China, how did local elites connect with and influence the central government? How was local information made and managed? How did the state incorporate frontier areas into the empire? How were books produced and read, and by whom? In his new book, Joseph R. Dennis helps answer... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Eric Tagliacozzo, Peter C. Perdue, and Helen F. Siu‘s “Asia Inside Out” project is a model for interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship in all kinds of ways. Planned as a trilogy, the first two volumes were released this year. Asia Inside Out: Changing Times (Harvard University Press, 2015) collects essays by... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Federico Marcon‘s new book opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces practices and practitioners of natural knowledge from the late-sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Minghui Hu‘s new book takes Dai Zhen as a case study to look at broader transformations in classical scholarship, technical methodologies, politics, and their relationships in the Qing period. This story of Dai Zhen begins before his birth and ends after his death, extending from a moment in which the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Nineteenth-century Nanjing was a “city of virtues,” the raw material out of which a series of communities in China built the time and space of their utopian visions. Chuck Wooldridge‘s beautifully written and thoughtfully composed new book City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions (University of Washington... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Anna M. Shields has written a marvelous book on friendship, literature, and history in medieval China. One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China (Harvard University Press, 2015) is the first book-length study of friendship in the Chinese tradition. Focusing on the period from the 790s through... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

“There was China before there was an America, and it is because of China that America came to be.” According to Gordon H. Chang‘s new book, the idea of “China” became “an ingredient within the developing identity of America itself.” Written for a broad audience, Chang’s Fateful Ties: A History... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Shellen Wu‘s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press, 2015) brings readers into the nineteenth century industrialization of China, when coal became the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Paul A. Christensen‘s new book is a thoughtful ethnography of drinking, drunkenness, and male sociability in modern urban Japan. Focusing on two major alcohol sobriety support groups in Japan, Alcoholics Anonymous and Danshukai, Japan, Alcoholism, and Masculinity: Suffering Sobriety in Tokyo (Lexington Books, 2014) explores the ways that admitting to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Parks M. Coble‘s new book is a wonderful study of memory, war, and history that takes the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 and its aftermath as its focus. China’s War Reporters: The Legacy of Resistance against Japan (Harvard University Press, 2015) is organized in two major parts. The first part (Ch.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Barak Kushner‘s new book considers what happened in the wake of Japan’s surrender, looking closely at diplomatic and military efforts to bring “Japanese imperial behavior” to justice. Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Harvard University Press, 2015) focuses on the aftermath of the Japanese... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Korea presents a fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity. For instance, the first continuous Christian community in the peninsula was founded by Koreans themselves without any missionaries coming into the country. In their new book, A History of Korean Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2014),Sebastian C. H. Kim and Kirsteen... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Jonathan M. Reynolds‘s new book looks carefully at how photographers, architects, and others wrestled with a postwar identity crisis as they explored and struggled with new meanings of tradition, home, and culture in modern Japan. Building on the work of Walter Benjamin, Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

What is knowledge, why is it valuable, and how might it be cultivated? Barry Allen‘s new book carefully considers the problem of knowledge in a range of Chinese philosophical discourses, creating a stimulating cross-disciplinary dialogue that’s as much of a pleasure to read as it will be to teach with.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Carlos Rojas‘s new book is a wonderfully transdisciplinary exploration of discourses of sickness and disease in Chinese literature and cinema in the long twentieth century. As its title indicates, Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2015) focuses particularly on what Rojas calls “homesickness,” a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

In his recent book, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Steven E. Kemper examines the Sinhala layman Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) and argues that this figure has been misunderstood by both Sinhala nationalists, who have appropriated him for their own political ends,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Emily T. Yeh‘s Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press, 2013) is an award-winning critical analysis of the production and transformation of the Tibetan landscape since 1950, construing development as a “state project that is presented as a gift to the Tibetan people” especially... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Dr. Ruth Hayhoe, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, has dedicated her academic career to the study of Chinese education. Now, after several decades of becoming one of the most recognizable names in the field of international and comparative education, she has... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Kurtis R. Schaeffer‘s new translation of Tenzin Chogyel’s The Life of the Buddha(Penguin Books, 2015) is a boon for teachers, researchers, and eager readers alike. Composed in the middle of the eighteenth century, The Life of the Buddha (or more fully rendered, The Life of the Lord Victor Shakyamuni, Ornament... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies