New Books in East Asian Studies
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Top 10 New Books in East Asian Studies Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best New Books in East Asian Studies episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to New Books in East Asian Studies for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite New Books in East Asian Studies episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Andrew G. Walder, “China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed” (Harvard UP, 2015)
New Books in East Asian Studies
10/18/24 • 80 min
"With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that 1949 was actually the beginning, not the end, of the Chinese revolution." Building from this premise, Andrew G. Walder's new book looks at the ways that China was transformed in the 1950s in order to understand why and how Mao's decisions and initiatives - among those of other leaders - had the effects that they did. Written for a broad reading audience, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Harvard University Press, 2015)focuses on a core theme: the results of Mao's initiatives were often "unintended, unanticipated, and unwanted," by Mao himself, the party leadership, and the broader population. To help readers understand why this is important and how it happened, the first part of Walder's book offers a detailed and compelling account of the Communist Party's road to power and the legacy of this struggle for what happened after, including a military mobilization that formed the bureaucratic foundation for the new Chinese state, an organization oriented toward discipline and unity, and a flawed economic system imported from the Soviet Union. (Walder pays special attention to the differences in party tactics for mobilizing the cities and countryside.) The later chapters explore the transformations in the party in the 1950s and after, including a significant change in the meaning and motives for party membership that spurred Mao to enact measures with consequences ranging from counterproductive to devastating. China Under Mao analyzes these consequences, including the political and organizational causes of the massive failure of the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath. The book ends with a call to rethink Mao's legacy.
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Francisca Yuenki Lai, "Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires" (Hong Kong UP, 2021)
New Books in East Asian Studies
08/25/24 • 63 min
Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires (Hong Kong UP, 2021) is the first book about Asian female migrant workers who develop same-sex relationships in a host city. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, the book explores the meanings of same-sex relationships to these migrant women. Instead of searching for reasons to explain why they engage in a same-sex relationship, this book provides an ethnographic perspective by addressing their Sunday activities and considering how migration policies and the practices of Hong Kong people unintentionally produce alternative sexuality and desires for them.
The author contrasts the migrant experiences of same-sex relationships with the Western discourse that individuals carry a strong sense of sexual identification prior to migration; same-sex desires among Indonesian domestic workers are often not realized until they leave home. Addressing the changes from maid to queer, this book documents the intersections of domestic work, labor migration, race, and religion on the sexual subject formation, specifically how Indonesian women negotiate heteronormativity and remake a space for their love, sex, and intimacy. For those interested in lesbian studies, Asian labor migration, sexual citizenship, and queer migration, this ethnography fills an important gap in explaining how the feminization of international migration and the constraints imposed on live-in domestic workers unintentionally become productive possibilities of queerness and normativity.
Qing Shen is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.
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Jonathan Chatwin, "The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China's Future" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
New Books in East Asian Studies
04/18/24 • 51 min
Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour has become a milestone in Chinese economic history. Historians and commentators credit Deng’s visit to Guangzhou Province for reinvigorating China’s market reforms in the years following 1989—leading to the Chinese economic powerhouse we see today.
Journalist Jonathan Chatwin follows Deng’s journey in The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China's Future (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Chatwin follows Deng—from its start in Wuhan, through the Special Economic Zones of Shenzhen and Zhuhai, and back up to Shanghai—and explains how a savvy Deng, then out of office, got China’s leaders to embrace market reforms again.
Jonathan Chatwin is a non-fiction writer and journalist. His work has appeared in CNN, the South China Morning Post and the BBC. He is the author of Long Peace Street: A Walk in Modern China (Manchester University Press: 2019) and Anywhere Out of the World: The Work of Bruce Chatwin (Manchester University Press: 2012).
Catch our first interview with Jonathan on Long Peace Street here!
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.
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Sujin Lee, "Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
New Books in East Asian Studies
01/17/24 • 58 min
In 2007, Japan’s health minister referred to women ages 15-50 as “birthing machines.” The context was a speech about Japan’s declining birthrate and projected population shrinkage. As Sujin Lee shows in Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan (Stanford UP, 2023), neither population anxieties nor the idea of women as childbearing devices whose wombs were the property of the state are new. However, when the “population problem” became a public preoccupation for politicians, scientists, and activists in the 1910s, it was an expression of worries about overpopulation and carrying capacity in a “resource-poor” nation and empire. Wombs of Empire traces the trajectory of population discourses and practices from these years through wartime Japan, with particular attention to the ways in which notions of motherhood were constructed hierarchically within the context of empire and war, and how Malthusian population control discourses formulated by leftists, feminists, scientists, and politicians gave way to the natalism of total war.
Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.
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Anne Allison, "Being Dead Otherwise" (Duke UP, 2023)
New Books in East Asian Studies
10/04/23 • 71 min
In contemporary Japan, death isn’t what it used to be. Anne Allison’s Being Dead Otherwise (Duke UP, 2023) examines the changing realities of death as a personal and social phenomenon and an opportunity for business innovation and “self-death making.” Factors including the world’s oldest population, declining childbirth rates, and a growing number of single households mean that more Japanese are living and dying alone. Changed social and familial structures have upended some of the foundational bonds that previously defined what it meant to live, die, care for the dead, and be cared for in your own turn. Allison explores both the proliferation of new industries, services, initiatives, voluntary communities, and businesses that have popped up in response to these changes; and also the ways in which individuals faced with uncertainty about their own deaths have begun to create and plan new ways of dying for themselves. From the massive ENDEX mortuary services industry bonanza held annually in Japan’s largest exhibition venue to automated just-in-time columbaria with robotic priests on the one hand and from “ending notes”― antemortem expressions of postmortem wishes and goodbyes―to the crematorium and the bone crusher on the other, this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and ultimately affirming look at Japan’s shifting ecology of death and its radical future potential.
Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.
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Robin Visser, "Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan" (Columbia UP, 2023)
New Books in East Asian Studies
04/18/24 • 71 min
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, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness.
Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls “Beijing Westerns” with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies.
By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.
Robin Visser is professor and associate chair of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (2010).
Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.
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Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020)
New Books in East Asian Studies
12/02/20 • 67 min
China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty. How can something so large be so bewildering?
In One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2020), Eyck Freymann, a DPhil Candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, explores the nature, function, and purposes of OBOR. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Greece, Freymann sifts through the purposeful ambiguity of the Chinese Communist Party and unravels a series of popular myths about OBOR.
He finds that OBOR is not controlled by a monolithic state apparatus; that recipient nations do not consider OBOR a debt trap; and that appeal of OBOR is growing, not shrinking.
Ultimately, Freymann argues that the infrastructure projects are a sideshow to something else: Xi Jinping’s project to restore China’s greatness in world affairs and to solidify his place at the helm of the new Chinese empire.
John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.
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Thersa Matsuura, "The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth" (Adams Media, 2024)
New Books in East Asian Studies
06/01/24 • 30 min
Discover everything you’ve ever wondered about the legendary spirits, creatures, and figures of Japanese folklore including how they have found their way into every corner of our pop culture from the creator of the podcast Uncanny Japan.
Welcome to The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth (Adams Media, 2024): a fascinating journey through Japan’s folklore through profiles of the legendary creatures and beings who continue to live on in pop culture today.
From the sly kitsune to the orgrish oni and mischievous shape-shifting tanuki, learn all about the origins of these fantastical and mythical creatures. This gorgeous package is complete with stained edges and stunning four-color illustrations. With information on their cultural significance, a retelling of a popular tale tied to that particular yokai, and how it’s been spun into today’s popular culture, this handsome tome teaches you about the stories and histories of the beings that inspired characters in your favorite movies, animes, manga, and games.
Thersa Matsuura is an American expat who has lived in Japan for over thirty years. Her fluency in the language allows her to explore her favorite part of Japanese culture: all the myths, legends, folktales, and superstitions. Thersa retells these Japanese folktales and ghost stories on her popular podcast Uncanny Japan. Thersa has also published two short story collections, including A Robe of Feathers and Other Stories and The Carp-Faced Boy and Other Tales, a collection of horror stories inspired by Japanese folktakes, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in 2017.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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Christine Loh, "Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong" (Hong Kong UP, 2018)
New Books in East Asian Studies
03/07/19 • 58 min
There can be little doubt that Hong Kong has stood out as a particularly intense East Asian news hotspot in recent years. Whether reports have focused on pro-democracy protests, abducted booksellers or PRC Mainland integration plans, most of this news has revolved around a common theme - namely questions over Beijing's ruling Chinese Communist Party and its influence in Hong Kong.
On this background, Christine Loh’s book Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong(Hong Kong University Press, 2018) is an indispensable guide to the Party's approaches to Hong Kong over time. As a former-lawmaker in the city’s Legislative Council, founder of the think tank Civic Exchange, and many other things, Loh makes the most of her unique vantage point on contemporary CCP affairs, as well her invaluable access to insights from the her hometown's colonial past. This book sets its analysis of how the Party seeks to maintain supremacy in Hong Kong within all-important historical context, and consequently will be a vital resource for anyone wishing to understand the questions of political culture, power and influence which are pivotal to the future of East Asia and the world at large.
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Eyck Freymann, "One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World" (Harvard UP, 2020)
New Books in East Asian Studies
08/25/24 • 67 min
China’s One Belt One Road policy, or OBOR, represents the largest infrastructure program in history. Yet little is known about it with any certainty. How can something so large be so bewildering?
In One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2020), Eyck Freymann, a DPhil Candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, explores the nature, function, and purposes of OBOR. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Greece, Freymann sifts through the purposeful ambiguity of the Chinese Communist Party and unravels a series of popular myths about OBOR.
He finds that OBOR is not controlled by a monolithic state apparatus; that recipient nations do not consider OBOR a debt trap; and that appeal of OBOR is growing, not shrinking.
Ultimately, Freymann argues that the infrastructure projects are a sideshow to something else: Xi Jinping’s project to restore China’s greatness in world affairs and to solidify his place at the helm of the new Chinese empire.
John Sakellariadis is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Student Research Grantee. He holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University.
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FAQ
How many episodes does New Books in East Asian Studies have?
New Books in East Asian Studies currently has 1411 episodes available.
What topics does New Books in East Asian Studies cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture, History and Podcasts.
What is the most popular episode on New Books in East Asian Studies?
The episode title 'Andrew G. Walder, “China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed” (Harvard UP, 2015)' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on New Books in East Asian Studies?
The average episode length on New Books in East Asian Studies is 61 minutes.
How often are episodes of New Books in East Asian Studies released?
Episodes of New Books in East Asian Studies are typically released every 2 days.
When was the first episode of New Books in East Asian Studies?
The first episode of New Books in East Asian Studies was released on Apr 4, 2009.
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