New Books In East Asian Studies

Matthew Mosca‘s impressively researched and carefully structured new book maps the transformation of geopolitical worldviews in a crucial period of Qing and global history. From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford University Press, 2013) traces a shift 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

Beverly Bossler‘s new book will be required reading for anyone interested in women and gender in China’s history. Covering nearly five centuries of transformations, it also offers a fascinating rethinking of the histories of neo-Confucian thought, of commercialization, and of the family in China. Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of... 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

Early Korea is a resource like no other: in an ongoing series of volumes produced by the Early Korea Project at the Korea Institute of Harvard University, the series provides surveys of Korean scholarship on fundamental issues in the study of early Korean history, archaeology, and art history. The volumes, produced... 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

Zograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope. There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan  (Stanford University Press, 2012), the zograscope not least among them. The book opens with Fukuoka’s account of stumbling upon a manuscript of... 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

I like to think of Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh‘s new book as Downton Abbey: Shanghai Edition. It is that gripping, and will keep you turning the pages that eagerly. At the same time, The Lius of Shanghai (Harvard University Press, 2013) is also an important, innovative, and timely intervention into... 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

Historian David Silbey returns to New Books in Military History with his second book, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China (Hill and Wang, 2012). The popular uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion has long only been vaguely understood, with Hollywood playing as great a role in shaping... 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

The history of modern China is bound up with that of student politics. In Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010), Fabio Lanza offers a masterfully researched, elegantly written, and thoughtful consideration of the emergence of “students” as a category in twentieth-century China. Urging us 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

Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei was prosecuted in the 1960s for producing work that imitated money. His single-sided, monochrome prints of the 1,000 yen note generated a wide-ranging set of debates over the nature of obscenity, the definition of counterfeiting, and the freedom of artists amid significant transformations in Japanese state,... 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

Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the course of that communication. In An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard University Press, 2013), Perry Link mobilizes more than three decades of reading, writing, listening, and... 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

You may come for the Astro Boy or Afro Samurai, but you’ll stay for the innovative ways that Ian Condry‘s new book brings together analyses of transmedia practice, collaboration, and materialities of democracy. The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Duke University Press, 2013) is based... 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

Erica Fox Brindley‘s recent book explores the centrality of music to early Chinese thought. Making broad use of both received and newly excavated texts, Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (SUNY Press, 2012) offers readers a history of harmony in early China. Brindley shows how 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

There is much to love about Jonathan Abel‘s new book. Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (University of California Press, 2012) brilliantly takes readers into the performance of different modes of censorship in the early and mid-twentieth century. Some practices of censorship by Japanese writers, readers, and authorities... 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

The name of the group is deceptively simple: Samul (“four objects”) + Nori (“folk entertainment”) = SamulNori. Nathan Hesselink‘s new book traces the transformations of this complex contemporary Korean drumming ensemble from its first concert in a cramped Seoul basement in 1978 through the 1990s, by which time they had... 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

Aminda M. Smith‘s fascinating new book traces the history of transformations in the way that the PRC understood social control, deviance, and thought reform. Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013) excavates the histories of thieves, prostitutes, and beggars from a wide... 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 are some books that are so fundamental to work in an academic field that practitioners refer to them simply by the author’s last name. Many of us had respectfully and affectionately referred to Endymion Wilkinson‘s Chinese History: A Manual, Revised and Enlarged (2000) simply as “Wilkinson” (or, “The Yellow... 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

Anyuan was a town of coal miners. It was a place where local secret societies held power, where rebellion and violence were part of the life of local laborers, and where the Chinese Communist revolution was experienced especially early and particularly intensely. In her meticulously researched and elegantly narrated new... 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

Gennifer Weisenfeld‘s gorgeous and thoughtful new book explores the visual culture that emerged in the wake of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012) charts a path through the widely-circulating visual tropes that comprised... 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 makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics... 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

Kevin Gray Carr‘s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shotoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stories materialized in both verbal and visual narratives, Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping... 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

It opens with a parakeet named Homer, and it closes with a dog named Hachiko. In the intervening pages, Barbara Ambros explores the deaths, afterlives, and necrogeographies of pets in contemporary Japan. Bones of Contention:Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) takes readers through the urban... 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