New Books in East Asian Studies

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com

Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/

Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

Society & Culture
History
1351
Zhang Tianyi (tr. David Hull), “The Pidgin Warr...
“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just for boys (big or small),
61 min
1352
Andrew B. Kipnis, “From Village to City: Social...
“When I first went to Zouping in 1988,” writes Andrew B. Kipnis in From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press, 2016), “I could not have imagined what the place would be like by 2008” (p. 25).
65 min
1353
Reginald Jackson, “Textures of Mourning: Callig...
Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past, live in the present, and imagine possible futures.
77 min
1354
Kate McDonald, “Placing Empire: Travel and the ...
Kate McDonald‘s Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017) is a thoughtful and provocative study of the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism.
54 min
1355
Ari Heinrich, “Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Ae...
Ari Larissa Heinrich’s new book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke University Press, 2018), is a fascinating study of representations of the Chinese body in the context of biotechnology.
45 min
1356
Michelle C. Wang, “Mandalas in the Making: The ...
Michelle C. Wang’s new book Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018) joins a growing body of scholarship on esoteric Buddhism in China. Her work is an important contribution for the way in which she draw...
65 min
1357
Gordon Mathews, “The World in Guangzhou: Africa...
When we think of globalization and global cities, we might be inclined to think of New York or London. Yet in recent years, Guangzhou, the central manufacturing node in the world, has acted as a magnet for foreign traders.
52 min
1358
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey N. Wasse...
“Knowing about China,” Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey Wasserstrom note in the preface to China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2018), is today “an essential part of being an engaged citizen” (p.
59 min
1359
Ross King, “Seoul: Memory, Reinvention and the ...
Seoul, as any listener who has visited will recognize, can be a pretty overwhelming place. This is well recognized by Ross King, Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne,
52 min
1360
Ronald P. Loftus, “The Turn Against the Modern:...
Taoka Reiun (1870-1912) was a literary critic and thinker who was active from the early 1890s in Meiji period Japan. Not satisfied with the meaning of bunmei kaika (“civilization and enlightenment”), the trajectory that the government had mapped out fo...
72 min
1361
Ji-Yeon O. Jo, “Homing: An Affective Topography...
For anyone with an interest in Korean studies, the study of diaspora and globalization, and indeed in broader questions around transnational identities and encounters in East Asia and beyond, Homing will prove an invaluable text. In it Ji-Yeon Jo,
60 min
1362
Michele Zack, “The Lisu: Far from the Ruler” (U...
Recent years have brought a burgeoning interest in how highland people in mainland Southeast Asia live and communicate along and across the boundaries geographically assigned states whose lowland people and their rulers were once but are by now no long...
38 min
1363
Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, “Chinese H...
In Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations, and Contestations (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), edited by Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, gathers authors from a variety of disciplines to examine the growing emphasis on heritage...
60 min
1364
Simeon Man, “Soldiering through Empire: Race an...
Simeon Man‘s book Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the role of Asians who worked within the making of U.S. global power after 1945.
44 min
1365
Erik Mueggler, “Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse,...
The Lòlop’ò of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province have a folktale in which they, Han Chinese, and Tibetans were given the technology of writing. The Han man was wealthy, purchased paper, and wrote on paper. And so the Han continue to have writing today....
63 min
1366
Holly Gayley, “Love Letters from Golok: A Tantr...
Often when people think of Tibetan Buddhism they have a limited vision of that social reality, perhaps one that imagines monks sitting in meditation or focused on the Dalai Lama. Rarely is the historical role of female Buddhist masters central to one’s...
53 min
1367
Kathlene Baldanza, “Ming China and Vietnam: Neg...
In Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Kathlene Baldanza explores the complex diplomatic exchanges between China and Vietnam from the 13th to the 17th centuries.
30 min
1368
Ji-Young Lee, “China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Y...
Ji-Young Lee’s book investigates the changing nature of tribute relations during the Ming and High Qing between a dominant China and its less powerful neighbors, Korea and Japan. China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (Columbia U...
33 min
1369
David Wanczyk, “Beep: Inside the Unseen World o...
We all know baseball as one of America’s fondest pastimes, but did you know there’s a version of the sport designed specifically for the blind? It’s called Beep Ball, and the players, with the exception of the pitcher, are all visually impaired.
40 min
1370
Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto, eds., “Rethink...
Rethinking Japanese Studies. Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region (Routledge, 2018) is co-edited by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto. The book tries to look at the discipline of Japanese Studies from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of con...
47 min
1371
Yutao Sun and Seamus Grimes, “China and Global ...
Today I was joined by Seamus Grimes from Ireland where he is Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. With Yutao Sun (Dalian University of Technology), he just published a very interesting and timely book China and Global Value...
42 min
1372
David Atkinson, “The Burden of White Supremacy:...
Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United Sta...
69 min
1373
Nick Admussen, “Recite and Refuse: Contemporary...
Published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2016, Nick Admussen’s exciting new book Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry explores the development of twentieth-century prose poetry within the unique political and cultural context of C...
1 min
1374
Craig Clunas, “Chinese Painting and Its Audienc...
In his latest book, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences published in 2017 by Princeton University Press, Craig Clunas puts to question the entire concept of “Chinese painting” by looking at how this category is in fact a creation of its viewers.
74 min
1375
Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday, “Criminal Def...
Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday spent ten years interviewing criminal defense attorneys throughout China in order to compile the evidence on the professional lives of criminal defense attorneys in the one-party authoritarian state that is modern China...
66 min