New Books Network
East Asian Studies
Nordic Asia Podcast December 6, 2021

COP26 from a Southeast Asian Perspective

Sharon Seah

Hosted by Nordic Asia Podcast
COP26 was billed as the make or break event in the fight against climate change. In conversation with Quynh Le Vo, Sharon Seah, coordinator of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s Climate …

East Asian Studies

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Interviews with scholars of East Asia about their new books.

Japanese Studies December 8, 2021

Japan on American TV

Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost

Alisa Freedman

Hosted by Jingyi Li
Alisa Freedman's book Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost (Association for Asian Studies, 2021) explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions …
Nordic Asia Podcast December 3, 2021

Rethinking China's Humanitarian Diplomacy before and during Covid-19

Lauri Paltemaa and Hermann Aubié

Lauri Paltemaa and Hermann Aubié

Hosted by Satoko Naito
As the Covid-19 pandemic spread to Europe and other parts of the globe in spring of 2020, the Chinese government started reporting donations of Personal Protective Equipment as well as …
Economic and Business History December 3, 2021

Economic Thought in Modern China

Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937

Margherita Zanasi

Hosted by Ghassan Moazzin
In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi argues that basic notions of a free market economy emerged in China a century and half earlier …
Chinese Studies November 30, 2021

The Way of the Barbarians

Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China

Shao-yun Yang

Hosted by Lance Pursey
Shao-yun Yang's The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China (University of Washington Press, 2019) challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition …
Japanese Studies November 29, 2021

Japanese Philosophy in the Making 2

Borderline Interrogations

John Maraldo

Hosted by Jingyi Li
The second of three volumes of essays that engage Japanese philosophers as intercultural thinkers, this collection critically probes seminal works for their historical significance and contemporary relevance. Japanese Philosophy in …
Asian Review of Books November 24, 2021

Distant Shores

Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier

Melissa Macauley

Hosted by Nicholas Gordon
“The Europeans raise all the cattle, but the Chinese get all the milk.” This joke, told in colonial Singapore, was indicative of the importance of the Chinese diaspora throughout Southeast …
East Asian Studies November 24, 2021

Sound of the Border

Music and Identity of Korean Minority Nationality in China

Sunhee Koo

Hosted by Ed Pulford
When faced with some of the complex identity questions which often arise in borderlands, Koreans in China – known as Chosonjok in Korean, Chaoxianzu in Chinese – have long seemed …
Diplomatic History November 24, 2021

Unconditional

The Japanese Surrender in World War II

Marc Gallicchio

Hosted by Grant Golub
Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender formally ended the war in the Pacific …
East Asian Studies November 23, 2021

Indigenous Cultural Translation

A Thick Description of Seediq Bale

Darryl Sterk

Hosted by Li-Ping Chen
Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale (Routledge, 2020) is about the process that made it possible to film the 2011 Taiwanese blockbuster Seediq Bale in Seediq, an endangered indigenous …
Nordic Asia Podcast November 19, 2021

Chinese Digital Vigilantism: The Mediated and Mediatised Justice-Seeking

A Conversation with Qian Huang

Joanne Kuai

Hosted by Joanne Kuai
What is digital vigilantism? How do Chinese citizens seek justice online? How does digital vigilantism reflect contemporary Chinese technological and socio-political development? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting …
Philosophy November 19, 2021

Reconsidering the Life of Power

Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy

James Garrison

Hosted by Malcolm Keating
Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy by James Garrison (SUNY Press 2021), argues that the tradition of Confucian philosophy can provide …
Japanese Studies November 18, 2021

Invisibility by Design

Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy

Gabriella Lukács

Hosted by Jingyi Li
In the wake of labor market deregulation during the 2000s, online content sharing and social networking platforms were promoted in Japan as new sites of work that were accessible to …
Asian Review of Books November 18, 2021

The Lettuce Diaries

How A Frenchman Found Gold Growing Vegetables In China

Xavier Naville

Hosted by Nicholas Gordon
Many Western entrepreneurs and businesses have foundered in trying to set up shop in China. Different expectations, different ways of doing business, different institutions and platforms—all come together to remove …
East Asian Studies November 17, 2021

Lineages of the Literary

Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China

Nicole Willock

Hosted by Daigengna Duoer
What happened to the Buddhist scholars who stayed behind in Tibet and China after the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans fled from the People’s Liberation Army in 1959 …
Japanese Studies November 11, 2021

Japan's Nationalist Right in the Internet Age

Online Media and Grassroots Conservative Activism

Jeffrey J. Hall

Hosted by Jingyi Li
Japan's nationalist right have used the internet to organize offline activism in increasingly visible ways. Jeffrey J. Hall, investigates the role of internet-mediated activism in Japan's ongoing historical and territorial disputes …
Japanese Studies November 11, 2021

Tokyo Boogie-Woogie

Japan's Pop Era and Its Discontents

Hiromu Nagahara

Hosted by Shatrunjay Mall
Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan's Pop Era and its Discontents (Harvard University Press, 2017) by Hiromu Nagahara is the first English-language history of the origins and impact of the Japanese pop music industry. The …
Chinese Studies November 9, 2021

The Funeral of Mr. Wang

Life, Death, and Ghosts in Urbanizing China

Andrew B. Kipnis

Hosted by Suvi Rautio
Today I spoke to Professor Andrew Kipnis about his book on social change in urban China from the perspective of funerals. In rural China funerals are conducted locally, on village land …
Japanese Studies November 8, 2021

Water, Wood, and Wild Things

Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town

Hannah Kirshner

Hosted by Takeshi Morisato
Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town  (Viking, 2021) is memoir, ethnography, cookbook, and sketchbook rolled into one." This is the Princeton Independence's description of the polyvocal and …
East Asian Studies November 5, 2021

Remapping the Contested Sinosphere

The Cross-Cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan

Chia-Rong Wu

Hosted by Li-Ping Chen
In the past four hundred years, the cultural position of Taiwan has been undergoing a series of drastic changes due to constant political turmoil. From the early seventeenth century to …