New Books in East Asian Studies
Episodes
Michael Gibbs Hill, trans., Wang Hui, “China from Empire to Nation-State” (Harvard UP, 2014)
17 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Gibbs Hill‘s new translation renders into English, for the first time, the introduction and overview to Wang Hui‘s 4-volume Rise of Modern...
Clark Chilson, “Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment” (University of Hawaii Press, 2014)
11 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Clark Chilson‘s new book, Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) ...
Joan Kee, “Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
07 Nov 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Joan Kee‘s new book is a gorgeous and thoughtful introduction to the history of contemporary art in Korea. Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and t...
Kenneth Brashier, “Public Memory in Early China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014)
29 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Ken Brashier’s new book is another tour de force and must-read for scholars of Chinese studies. Public Memory in Early China (Harvard University Asi...
Paul Copp, “The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism” (Columbia UP, 2014)
27 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Copp‘s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuse...
Eugene Y. Park, “A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea” (Stanford UP, 2014)
20 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Eugene Y. Park‘s A Family of No Prominence: The Descendants of Pak Tokhwa and the Birth of Modern Korea (Stanford University Press, 2014) traces thi...
Chun-fang Yu, “Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan” (U of Hawaii Press, 2013)
14 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Chan-fang Yu‘s new book, Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013...
Yong Zhao, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?” (Jossey-Bass, 2014),
07 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
China has had an amazing developmental path over the past thirty years. Decade long double digit economic growth numbers along with more assertion on ...
Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950” (Duke UP, 2014)
02 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 ...
Shengqing Wu, “Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937” (Harvard Asia Center, 2014)
25 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Shengqing Wu’s gorgeous new book begins by exploring the image of the treasure pagoda to introduce readers to an aesthetics of ornamental lyricism i...
Todd A. Henry, “Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945” (U of California Press, 2014)
21 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Todd Henry’s new book is a wonderful study of public space as a laboratory for producing the experiences and engines of colonial society. Assimilati...
Leslie Grant, “West Meets East: Best Practices from Expert Teachers in the United States and China” (ASCD, 2014)
14 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Teachers have recently become a target in the educational reform debate. Most would agree that great teachers are crucial for education. However, ther...
Lara Jaishree Netting, “A Perpetual Fire: John C. Ferguson and His Quest for Chinese Art and Culture” (Hong Kong UP, 2013)
11 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Lara Netting’s new book explores the life, career, and work of one man as a window into the history and associated practices of “Chinese art” du...
Albert Park and David Yoo, eds., “Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America” (University of Hawaii Press, 2014)
10 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Modernity and religion have often been seen as fundamentally at odds. However, the articles in Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and ...
Jolyon Thomas, “Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan” (University Of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
06 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The worlds of cinema and illustrated fiction are replete with exciting data for the historian of religion. Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Rel...
Hideaki Fujiki, “Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013)
04 Sep 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Stardom has a history. Hideaki Fujiki‘s new book traces that history through a story of the transformations of Japanese film stars in the early twen...
Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)
16 Aug 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the s...
Tine M. Gammeltoft, “Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam” (University of California Press, 2014)
22 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Tine Gammeltoft‘s new book explores the process of reproductive decision making in contemporary Hanoi. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Select...
Christina Laffin, “Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)
15 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Known primarily as a travel writer thanks to the frequent assignment of her Diary in high school history and literature classes, Nun Abutsu was a thir...
Craig Clunas, “Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)
02 Jul 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Craig Clunas‘s new book explores the significance of members of the imperial clan, or “kings” in Ming China. A king was established in a “stat...
Wensheng Wang, “White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire” (Harvard UP, 2014)
23 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Wensheng Wang‘s new book takes us into a key turning point in the history of the Qing empire, the Qianlong-Jiaqing reign periods. In White Lotus Reb...
James Carter, “Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk” (Oxford UP, 2011)
11 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Jay Carter‘s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, H...
Stephen R. Platt, “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War” (Vintage, 2012)
03 Jun 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen R. Platt‘s new book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenl...
Robert A. Rhoads, et al., “China’s Rising Research Universities: A New Era of Global Ambition” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014)
31 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Robert A. Rhoads, Xiaoyang Wang, Xiaoguang Shi, Yongcai Chang are the authors of China’s Rising Research Universities: A New Era of Global Ambition ...
Anne Allison, “Precarious Japan” (Duke University Press, 2013)
23 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“[All] I want to eat is a rice ball.” This was the last entry in the diary of a 52-year-old man who starved to death in an apartment he had occupi...
Xiaojue Wang, “Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide” (Harvard UP, 2013)
15 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
1949 was a crucial year for modern China, marking the beginning of Communist rule on the mainland and the retreat of the Nationalist government to Tai...
Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, “The Religious Question in Modern China” University of Chicago Press, 2011
28 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Social phenomena that some people like to call ‘religion’ has long shaped Chinese culture. In the twentieth century, defining the boundaries of wh...
Michelle King, “Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China” (Stanford UP, 2014)
26 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Michelle King‘s new book explores the intertwined histories of imperialism and infanticide. Situating the histories of infant killing and abandonmen...
Michael Wert, “Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2013)
18 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Wert‘s new book considers the construction of memory around the “losers” of the Meiji Restoration, individuals and groups whose reputati...
Miriam Kingsberg, “Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History” (University of California Press, 2013)
08 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Miriam Kingsberg‘s fascinating new book offers both a political and social history of modern Japan and a global history of narcotics in the modern w...
Tobie Meyer-Fong, “What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth-Century Century China” (Stanford UP, 2013)
01 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Tobie Meyer-Fong‘s beautifully written and masterfully argued new book explores the remains (in many senses and registers, both literal and figurati...
Andrea Bachner, “Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture” (Columbia UP, 2014)
23 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Andrea Bachner‘s wonderfully interdisciplinary new book explores the many worlds and media through which the Chinese script has been imagined, repre...
Christopher P. Hanscom, “The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013)
16 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), Christopher P. Hansc...
Benjamin A. Elman, “Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China” (Harvard UP, 2013)
09 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Benjamin A. Elman‘s new book explores the civil examination process and the history of state exam curricula in late imperial China. Civil Examinatio...
Marc L. Moskowitz, “Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China” (University of California Press, 2013)
02 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In contemporary China, the game of Weiqi (also known as Go) represents many things at the same time: the military power of the general, the intellect ...
Emma Teng, “Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943” (University of California Press, 2013)
23 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Emma Teng‘s new book explores the discourses about Eurasian identity, and the lived experiences of Eurasian people, in China, Hong Kong, and the US ...
Patricia Ebrey, “Emperor Huizong” (Harvard University Press, 2014)
03 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Patricia Ebrey‘s beautifully written and exhaustively researched new book introduces readers to an emperor of China as artist, collector, father, ru...
Daisuke Miyao, “The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema” (Duke UP, 2013)
28 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Duke UP, 2013), Daisuke Miyao explores a history of light and its absence in Japanese ci...
Joshua Fogel, “Japanese Historiography and the Gold Seal of 57 C.E.: Relic, Text, Object, Fake” (Brill, 2013)
21 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Joshua A. Fogel‘s new book is a carefully researched and wonderfully thoughtful exploration of the transformations of an artifact as read through th...
Scott Cook, “The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation” (Cornell East Asia Program, 2012)
15 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
It’s always a joy when I have the opportunity to talk with the author of a book that is clearly a game-changer for its field. In The Bamboo Texts of...
David Spafford, “A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013)
07 Jan 2014
Contributed by Lukas
So many history books take for granted that a story about the past needs to focus on change (gradual or dramatic, transformative or subtle) as its mot...
Michael J. Hathaway, “Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China” (University of California Press, 2013)
28 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Globalization is locally specific: global connectivity looks different from place to place. Given that, how are global connections made? And why do th...
David Tod Roy, “The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei” (Princeton UP, 1993-2013)
16 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
By any measure, David Tod Roy‘s translation The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, Vol. 1-5 (Princeton University Press, 1993-2013) is a ...
David Novak, “Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation” (Duke UP, 2013)
03 Dec 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Thinking about “Noise” in the history and practice of music means thinking in opposites. Noise is both a musical genre, and is not. It both produc...
Timothy J. Brook, “Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer” (Bloomsbury, 2013)
29 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The story opens with a closing and closes with an opening. The closing is the sale of the map of Martin Waldseemuller, “America’s birth certificat...
Andrea S. Goldman, “Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing 1770-1900” (Stanford UP, 2012)
26 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Before the twentieth century, opera was a kind of cultural glue: it was both a medium of mass-communication, and a powerful shaper and reflector of t...
Darryl E. Flaherty, “Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan” (Harvard Asia Center, 2013)
17 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In global narratives of modern legal history, Asia tends to fall short relative to Europe and the US. According to these narratives, while individuals...
Ian Jared Miller, “The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo” (University of California Press, 2013)
10 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
A new understanding of animals was central to how Japanese people redefined their place in the natural world in the nineteenth century. In The Nature...
Sienna R. Craig, “Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine” (University of California Press, 2012)
03 Nov 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Two main questions frame Sienna R. Craig‘s beautifully written and carefully argued new book about Tibetan medical practices and cultures: How is ef...
Aaron S. Moore, “Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)
26 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
We tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japa...
Rowan K. Flad and Pochan Chen, “Ancient Central China” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
19 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most exciting approaches in the contemporary study of China is emerging from work that brings together archaeological and historical modes ...
Henrietta Harrison, “The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village” (University of California Press, 2013)
10 Oct 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Henrietta Harrison‘s new book is the work of a gifted storyteller. In its pages, the reader will find Boxers getting drunk on communion wine, wolf a...
John P. DiMoia, “Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and Nation-Building in South Korea Since 1945” (Stanford UP, 2013)
27 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
For a patient choosing among available forms of healing in the medical marketplace of mid-20th century South Korea, the process was akin to shopping. ...
Paul O’Connor, “Islam in Hong Kong: Muslims and Everyday Life in China’s World City” (Hong Kong UP, 2012)
20 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What does the everyday experience of Muslim minorities look like? We have often heard about what Muslims deal with in the West. But what about Muslim ...
Louise Young, “Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan” (University of California Press, 2013)
17 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
During the interwar period (1918-1937), the city began to take its modern shape in Japan. At the same time, development in the Japanese provinces beca...
Fabian Drixler, “Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660-1950” (University of California Press, 2013)
05 Sep 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The book opens on a scene in the mountains of Gumna, Japan. A midwife kneels next to a mother who has just given birth, and she proceeds to strangle t...
Christine Yano, “Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific” (Duke UP, 2013)
28 Aug 2013
Contributed by Lukas
This cat has a complicated history. In addition to filling stationery stores across the globe with cute objects festooned with little whiskers and bow...
Jonathan Hay, “Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China” (University of Hawaii Press, 2010)
19 Aug 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010) is a study of domestically produced, portable ...
John Osburg, “Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich” (Stanford UP, 2013)
09 Aug 2013
Contributed by Lukas
John Osburg‘s new book explores the rise of elite networks of newly-rich entrepreneurs, managers of state enterprises, and government officials in C...
James A. Milward, “The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction” (Oxford UP, 2013)
05 Aug 2013
Contributed by Lukas
James A. Milward‘s new book offers a thoughtful and spirited history of the silk road for general readers.The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (...
T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes, eds., “Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History” (Harvard UP, 2012)
29 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
T. J. Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes have produced a volume that will change the way we learn about and teach the history of health and healing in Ch...
Matthew W. Mosca, “From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China” (Stanford, 2013)
22 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Matthew Mosca‘s impressively researched and carefully structured new book maps the transformation of geopolitical worldviews in a crucial period of ...
Beverly Bossler, “Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity” (Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2013)
11 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Beverly Bossler‘s new book will be required reading for anyone interested in women and gender in China’s history. Covering nearly five centuries o...
Mark Byington, ed., “Early Korea: The Rediscovery of Kaya in History and Archaeology” (University of Hawaii Press, 2012)
01 Jul 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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 Univer...
Maki Fukuoka, “The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan” (Stanford UP, 2012)
22 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Zograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope. There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: ...
Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh, “The Lius of Shanghai” (Harvard University Press, 2013)
12 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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 th...
David J. Silbey, “The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China” (Hill and Wang, 2012)
03 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Fabio Lanza, “Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing” (Columbia UP, 2010)
30 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The history of modern China is bound up with that of student politics. In Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2...
William Marotti, “Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan” (Duke UP, 2013)
22 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei was prosecuted in the 1960s for producing work that imitated money. His single-sided, monochrome prints of the 1,000 ...
Perry Link, “An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics” (Harvard UP, 2013)
13 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the c...
Ian Condry, “The Soul of Anime” (Duke UP, 2013)
30 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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 tra...
Erica Fox Brindley, “Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China” (SUNY Press, 2012)
16 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Erica Fox Brindley‘s recent book explores the centrality of music to early Chinese thought. Making broad use of both received and newly excavated te...
Jonathan E. Abel, “Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)
01 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
There is much to love about Jonathan Abel‘s new book. Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (University of California Press, 2012) ...
Nathan Hesselink, “SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
28 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The name of the group is deceptively simple: Samul (“four objects”) + Nori (“folk entertainment”) = SamulNori. Nathan Hesselink‘s new book t...
Aminda M. Smith, “Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013)
19 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Aminda M. Smith‘s fascinating new book traces the history of transformations in the way that the PRC understood social control, deviance, and though...
Endymion Wilkinson, “Chinese History: A New Manual” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012)
08 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Elizabeth J. Perry, “Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition” (University of California Press, 2012)
05 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Gennifer Weisenfeld, “Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923” (University of California Press, 2012)
01 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Gennifer Weisenfeld‘s gorgeous and thoughtful new book explores the visual culture that emerged in the wake of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Imaging...
Bruce Rusk, “Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature” (Harvard UP, 2012)
12 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’...
Kevin Gray Carr, “Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
06 Feb 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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 J...
Barbara R. Ambros, “Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012)
30 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Michael Gibbs Hill, “Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture” (Oxford UP, 2013)
23 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
What do “Rip van Winkle,” Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Aesop’s Fables have in common? All of them were translated into Chinese by Lin ...
Richard J. Smith, “The I Ching: A Biography” (Princeton UP, 2012)
16 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Texts have lives. They grow, travel, transform, fade, and are reborn into new and other lives. In The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton University Press...
Gene Cooper, “The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China: Red Fire” (Routledge, 2013)
10 Jan 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Gene Cooper‘s new book is a multi-sited ethnographic study of market and temple fairs in the region of Jinhua, a city on the east coast of China and...
Barak Kushner, “Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup” (Global Oriental, 2012)
20 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
I bet you’ve never heard of the “Smash the Baltic Fleet Memorial Togo Marshmallow.” I hadn’t either, before reading Barak Kushner‘s lively a...
Jack W. Chen, “The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty” (Harvard Yenching Institute, 2010)
13 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
After coming to power in a series of violent and deceptive acts, including tricking his father into cuckolding the Emperor, Li Shimin went on to becom...
Thomas David DuBois, “Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia” (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
13 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Do historians of East Asia sufficiently account for the role of religious communities in the construction of history? Of course, there are histories o...
Michael David Kaulana Ing, “The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism” (Oxford University Press, 2012)
03 Dec 2012
Contributed by Lukas
How did the authors of the one of the most important Confucian ritual texts in early China recognize, explain, and cope with mistakes and dysfunction ...
Cosima Bruno, “Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation” (Brill, 2012)
26 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Cosima Bruno‘s new book asks us to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the relationship between a poem and its translation? In the cours...
Christopher Bush, “Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media” (Oxford UP, 2010)
13 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Orientalism, the ideograph, and media theory grew up together. In Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford University Press, 2010), Christ...
Jini Kim Watson, “The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
06 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Jini Kim Watson‘s book links literature, architecture, urban studies, film, and economic history into a wonderfully rich account of the fictions of ...
Shih-Shan Susan Huang, “Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012)
31 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Shih-Shan Susan Huang‘s beautiful new book explores visual culture of religious Daoism, focusing on the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. Pict...
Carl S. Yamamoto, “Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Charisma in Twelfth-Century Tibet” (Brill, 2012)
24 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Lama Zhang, the controversial central figure in Carl S. Yamamoto‘s new book may or may not have participated in animal sacrifice, sneezed out a snak...
Christopher Nugent, “Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010)
13 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Christopher Nugent‘s wonderful recent book will change the way you read. At the very least, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circu...
Jason Josephson, “The Invention of Religion in Japan” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
13 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
In 1853, the Japanese were required to consider what the word religion meant when western powers compelled the Tokugawa government to ensure freedom o...
Shawn Bender, “Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion” (University of California Press, 2012)
13 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Since the “taiko boom” of the closing decades of the 20thcentury, taiko drumming has arguably become Japan’s most globally successful performanc...
Giusi Tamburello, “Concepts and Categories of Emotion in East Asia” (Carocci editore, 2012)
04 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
What is the relationship between language and the emotions? Where ought we look for evidence of emotion in historical and literary texts? Is it possib...
Qiliang He, “Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949” (Brill, 2012)
27 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Using the example of pingtan storytelling to reexamine the history of cultural reform in the People’s Republic of China, Qiliang He‘s new book int...
Amy Stanley, “Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)
19 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
With prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan thro...
Par Cassel, “Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan” (Oxford UP, 2012)
13 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Extraterritoriality was not grafted whole onto East Asian societies: it developed over time and in a relationship with local precedents, institutions,...