New Books In East Asian Studies

An exciting collection of stories of change that most people don’t usually hear from the bottom up, from the grassroots, about what’s happening in East Asia. Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia (Rutgers UP, 2025) brings together an exciting cross-regional interdisciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists, and others for a collection that addresses the last two decades' hollowing out of social connections, socioeconomic income gaps, and general precarity of life in East Asian societies. Written by authors from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, each chapter is focused on people making a difference together in socially sustainable ways, particularly in the areas of gender, labor, and environments - both built and natural. These projects all constitute acts of creative resistance to neoliberal development, and each act of creative resistance demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making new worlds and li