Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei was prosecuted in the 1960s for producing work that imitated money. His single-sided, monochrome prints of the 1,000 yen note generated a wide-ranging set of debates over the nature of obscenity, the definition of counterfeiting, and the freedom of artists amid significant transformations in Japanese state, society, and politics. In Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Duke University Press, 2013), William Marotti situates Akasegawa’s work within an ecology of the everyday in a wonderfully transdisciplinary study of avant-garde artistic production in postwar Japan. Marotti’s narrative combines close readings of literary, visual, and performative works with a careful political history of Occupation Japan, opening up a conversation about the politics of art in the global 1960s. Readers will find fascinating examples of experimental artistic production in these pages, in media ranging from collages to exhibitions to train trips to musical improvisations to waste materials of various sorts, and including the guillotines of the book’s title. Also included are explorations of the changing figure of the emperor in 1960s Japan, considerations of the police order of Rancière, and conversations about quarantine and scientific observation of the everyday world. Enjoy!

Rhythm, metaphor, politics: these three features of language simultaneously enable us to communicate with each other and go largely unnoticed in the course of that communication. In An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Harvard University Press, 2013), Perry Link mobilizes more than three decades of reading, writing, listening, and speaking in the service of a profoundly transdisciplinary exploration of the particular anatomy of the Chinese language within the larger species of human language more generally. It is a bold and ambitious project, but one that never strays far beyond the specific archive of carefully chosen examples, cases, and utterances from the history of and in Chinese speech and writing. Link integrates a wide range of sophisticated methodological instruments from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, prosody, music theory, politics, linguistics, and other fields into a narrative argument that avoids getting mired in the professional jargon that often plagues attempts at synthetic and highly original theoretical work. He is notably careful to avoid creating a generalizing and essential “Chinese language” in these pages, emphasizing the importance of a perspective that recognizes the historical and contemporary existence of different registers of language use, from different forms and idiolects of informal Chinese to political language game-playing: sometimes by very different users, and sometimes by the same individual in the course of performing the different roles demanded by daily life. It is clear, it is imaginative, it is at turns funny and inspiring (often at the same time), and it made me read, speak, and hear Chinese in a new way. It was an absolute pleasure to talk with Perry about it, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

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 transmedia practice, collaboration, and materialities of democracy. The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Duke University Press, 2013) is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a range of spaces of anime production that include studios, toy factories, fan conventions, and online communities. What results is a fascinating exploration of how the social aspects of media generate successful anime tv programs and films, forms of labor, and ways of thinking about masculinity, love, and modern life. Condry argues that collaborative creativity has been central to producing the social energy necessary for the global success of Japanese anime. For Condry, it also helps explain a broader “globalization from below” whereby new forms of media emerge from local and grassroots efforts to appeal to and impact a diverse range of audiences. Through a series of case studies that observe contemporary and historical anime production practices from different angles, readers of The Soul of Anime are offered a window into the many forms of labor necessary to produce the many different media that collectively make up anime production, from the painstaking production of handmade storyboards to the conceiving of innovative characters and worlds that serve as platforms for the creation and circulation of anime stories. In addition to all of this, there are little boy samurais with wind-up keys in their heads, gods that speak only in rap, egg-shaped characters that get hard-boiled when stressed out, mega-robots, men who want to marry 2D anime character-ladies, and a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson. Enjoy!

Erica Fox Brindley’s recent book explores the centrality of music to early Chinese thought. Making broad use of both received and newly excavated texts, Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (SUNY Press, 2012) offers readers a history of harmony in early China. Brindley shows how the concept was integral to integrating what might otherwise be considered disparate areas – music, the body, and the cosmos – into a system that had ramifications for politics, ethics, and health. Pt. I of the book focuses on the connection between music and the state. Crucially, music was not just reflective of state health in early China, but could causally influence the health of the state and the cosmos. It was treated as a civilizing tool and a mode of cultural unification. Pt. II looks at relationships between music, politics, and religion, paying special attention to how music influenced the emotional, moral, and physical health of individuals. The concept of “music” here is expansive, incorporating many aspects of sound and the sonic. It is a wonderfully thoughtful work that contributes to a number of fields in redirecting our collective attention to the sensorium of early China and its impact on the textual archive.

There is much to love about Jonathan Abel’s new book. Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (University of California Press, 2012) brilliantly takes readers into the performance of different modes of censorship in the early and mid-twentieth century. Some practices of censorship by Japanese writers, readers, and authorities left traces that now rest in a transnational and multi-sited archive of marks, symbols, and conspicuous absences. In extended sections of the book that treat the preservation, production, and redaction of censors’ traces as they emerge from this translocal archive, Abel considers how the structures and processes of a textual archive (broadly defined) offer an architecture for building a history of censorship.

Along the way, we are offered insights into the kinds of texts in which the history of the censor is inscribed, the kinds of texts and subjects that most invited the censor’s hand (whether the “censor” was an author self-editing or an authority figure coming to a text after its completion), and the capacities of censorship to generate new forms of literary production. At several points in the book (and especially in Pt III) Abel is wonderfully self-reflexive, experimenting with narrative forms to embody the kinds of textual practices that he writes about in his own writing style. The book closes with a coda that looks at information restriction in mid-twentieth century Japan and critically considers prevailing attitudes toward historicization in the disciplines of Asian studies. Redacted is full of contributions to fields that might not be obvious from the title: readers interested in archive studies, histories of the body, studies of translation, and histories of observation and violence will find inspiration here. Enjoy!

The name of the group is deceptively simple: Samul (“four objects”) + Nori (“folk entertainment”) = SamulNori. Nathan Hesselink’s new book traces the transformations of this complex contemporary Korean drumming ensemble from its first concert in a cramped Seoul basement in 1978 through the 1990s, by which time they had become a prominent media presence in Korea and abroad. Framing the story within the larger discourse of Pŏpko ch’angshin (preserving the old while creating the new), SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2012) introduces readers and listeners to the wider history of Korean percussion music. Hesselink locates the roots of SamulNori in itinerant performance culture in Korea, focusing in particular on the namsadang wandering minstrels and their acrobatics, puppetry, and other performing arts in what reads as a wonderful contribution to the broader history of movement and itinerancy in world history. (Fans of the film The King and the Clown [Wang ui namja, 2005] will recognize this category of namsadang performers!) A CD is included with the book, allowing readers to listen in on some of the major SamulNori works in Hesselink’s account. (My particular favorites were the songs produced by the collaboration between SamulNori and the Euro-American jazz quartet Red Sun.) Readers who are already acquainted with traditional Korean percussion will find much of interest in this history, and others will find a new world of music to explore.  Enjoy!

Aminda M. Smith’s fascinating new book traces the history of transformations in the way that the PRC understood social control, deviance, and thought reform. Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) excavates the histories of thieves, prostitutes, and beggars from a wide range of letters, diaries, novels, films, memoirs, oral histories, media accounts, and classified government documents. Reintegrating vagrants into the history of reeducation changes how we understand the scope and nature of the Chinese Communist thought reform project. Smith takes us into the reeducation centers that served as laboratories where the rapidly changing ideas about the relationships between thought reform, labor, and individuals were worked out over the course of the early twentieth century. Taking readers from the countryside into urban centers and ultimately into Beijing, the book traces the emergence and metamorphosis of notions of the “People” over the course of this history, paying special attention to the central role that marginal figures of society played in definitions of this crucial concept. In addition to introducing some of the fascinating individuals that populate Smith’s account, in the course of our conversation we also talked about the opportunities and challenges of accessing those stories from an archive of “official sources.” Enjoy!

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 us had respectfully and affectionately referred to Endymion Wilkinson’s Chinese History: A Manual, Revised and Enlarged (2000) simply as “Wilkinson” (or, “The Yellow Book,” as opposed to an earlier blue-covered version of the text), and have had well-worn and dog-eared copies of it on hand at all times. I purchased my own copy shortly after beginning my doctoral program, and immediately understood why the encyclopedic guide to research in Chinese history had been so formative and so indispensible for so many people. It was in every way an essential text for anyone studying or practicing the history of China.

The recent publication of Wilkinson’s Chinese History: A New Manual (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) was and remains a major event. The manual quickly sold out (within a month of its publication!), and Wilkinson has already submitted revisions for a second printing. Chinese History: A New Manual is in many ways an entirely new organism that is quite different from its predecessors. It incorporates a million new words of text and substantially new material on everything from Chinese archaeology to environmental history. Its seventy-six chapters range from the basics of the Chinese language to the nuances of historical bibliography, incorporating detailed accounts of topics that are fundamental to understanding China and its culture (geography, literature, food and drink, etc.), as well as chronologically-organized research guides to individual periods of Chinese history. Scattered throughout the text are insets on a wide range of material, from nonverbal salutations to the mariner’s compass, that together comprise a wonderful kind of miscellany. The book is, in every way, absolutely indispensible to work in Chinese history.

In the course of our conversation, we talked about many aspects of the genesis of and research strategies that produced Wilkinson’s project. We also talked about the present state and possible futures of Chinese history, and the qualities that might make a work into a lasting contribution to that field. Enjoy!

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 laborers, and where the Chinese Communist revolution was experienced especially early and particularly intensely. In her meticulously researched and elegantly narrated new book, Elizabeth J. Perry explores the significance of Anyuan both as a cornerstone of Mao’s revolutionary mobilization efforts, and as an emblem that was appropriated and re-appropriated by different groups with different agendas after Mao’s death. Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition (University of California Press, 2012) carefully traces how Communist leaders deployed a range of cultural tropes and resources in the service of political persuasion. As a result of a sustained and successful effort at cultural positioning in Anyuan via the visual, verbal, ritual, and performance arts, Communist leaders like the charismatic Li Lisan and the disciplined Liu Shaoqi translated the social resources and labor infrastructure of China’s “Little Moscow” into an engine of revolution. Perry takes readers into the classrooms, textbooks, and discussion groups that helped make this possible. She also chronicles the changing significance of Anyuan in the context of the transformation of the Chinese Communist revolution from a proletarian to a peasant movement, exploring the very different roles that militarization and violence played in this new revolutionary environment, and the later role of Anyuan as an emblem variously wielded by authors, painters, filmmakers, and others who constructed very different versions of a revolutionary tradition. It is a book well worth reading, both as a window into a crucial period and space of Chinese history and as a model of careful narrative argument.

Gennifer Weisenfeld‘s gorgeous and thoughtful new book explores the visual culture that emerged in the wake of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012) charts a path through the widely-circulating visual tropes that comprised the intermedia landscape of the earthquake’s aftermath. Along the way, images of firestorms and catfish guide us though a genealogy of the belief in the moral connections between human action and disaster in Japan. Photographs, seismograms, and maps introduce us to a “visual lexicon of disaster” in which these images were simultaneously wielded as markers of authority and instruments for masking some important moments of invisibility in the aftermath of the earthquake. A decapitated building, the “ultimate modern ruin,” asks us to contemplate the relationship between the individual, the nation, and modernity in the context of a massive spectacle of destruction. Images of refugees, catfish, and naked bathers help us understand how different groups claimed the earthquake for various social and political purposes. Monuments, children’s drawings, cartoons, photographs of bodies and bones: the exceptionally wide range of materials mobilized and reproduced in Imaging Disaster provides the reader with a kind of visual archive, just as Weisenfeld offers us a model for how to write a history that is informed by a close reading of visual texts. The book also considers how disaster brings class and regional inequities into relief more generally, considering how we might frame the Kanto earthquake within this larger context that includes the March 2011 disaster in Japan while remaining sensitive to the particularities of each case. It is a wonderful and compelling book.

For “Selling Shiseido,” the unit that Weisenfeld has developed for MIT’s Visualizing Cultures program, see this website.  [Users can link to Parts 2 & 3 from this site, as well.]

First things first: this is a book of amazing, beautiful poetry, and you should read it.

In translating Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2012), Lucas Klein has given readers access to a bilingual journey through more than two decades of the Xi Chuan’s evolution as a writer, a person, and a historian. The poems collected and rendered in Notes on the Mosquito range from evocative lyric verse about shepherds and loneliness to historical essays that consider the “New Qing History.” (It is a striking range, and one that was quite unexpected for this reader and historian.) In our conversation, Lucas was generous enough to explain many aspects of his process and approach as a translator, and to read a number of the translated poems collected in the volume. We talked about several aspects of his work, including both practical issues and more conceptual questions about the linking of history and poetry in the writing of a poet and a reader’s approach to the resulting work. It was a pleasure, and I hope you enjoy listening.

What makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics of a Han dynasty “critic in the borderlands” to the theories of May Fourth intellectuals, Bruce Rusk’s elegantly written and carefully argued new book traces the changing relationships between secular and canonical poetry over 25 centuries of verse in China. Rusk introduces readers to a cast of fascinating characters in the course of this journey, from a versifying “drive-by” poet to a gifted craftsman of textual forgeries. In the course of an analysis of the changing modes of inscribing relationships between classical studies and other fields in China, we learn about poems on stone and metal, literary time-travel, ploughing emperors, and how to excavate the first drafts of Zhu Xi. This is an exceptionally rich account that ranges from the history of literary anthologies to the circulation of interpretive tropes in poetic commentaries, and in doing so it transcends the disciplinary boundaries of historical and literary studies of China. Enjoy!

Kevin Gray Carr’s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shōtoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stories materialized in both verbal and visual narratives, Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) frames Shōtoku as a symbolic vessel.

Part I of the book looks at the changing identities of the prince as objects of devotion and veneration, tracing his visual cult through the fourteenth century. In this context, the figure of Shōtoku, across multiple lives and associations with other religious figures, grounded a new sacred topography whose center had shifted away from India and China and toward the spaces of Japan.

Part II of the book focuses on the visual culture that mapped the various identities of the prince onto the Japanese sacral landscape. It guides readers through the experience of the paintings in the Hōryū-ji Picture Hall and places them within a wider cultic landscape. Carr introduces the notion of “cognitive maps” that integrated the elements of time, space, and personhood into the many renderings of Shōtoku’s life that were simultaneously cartographic, narrative, and iconic. In addition to this fine-grained and innovative analysis of the time and space of visual materials, Carr also shows readers the centrality of stories and storytelling in helping us make sense of the world around us, and of our own place in it.

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, and necrogeographies of pets in contemporary Japan. Bones of Contention:Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) takes readers through the urban spaces of pet memorialization, from zoos and aquaria to pet cemeteries and household altars. The story begins with an introduction and two chapters that offer a broad grounding in the mythical and religious accounts of animals in premodern Japanese texts, as well as a modern history of animal mortuary rites in Japan. Modern animal memorial rituals, Ambros argues, emerged out of a context of the increasing commodification and consumption of animals, and she describes fascinating accounts of the memorializing of animals by whalers and fishers, in the food industry, and in the context of research laboratories and zoos. From the third chapter on, the book focuses specifically on pets and their hybrid status between animal and human, describing responses to some of the key questions that have animated attitudes toward and practices surrounding the death of pets in modern Japan. Are pet memorial rituals religious activities (and thus tax-exempt)? Are pet remains more like the bones of family members or the broken bodies of dolls, or are they simply trash? Should people be allowed to have their pets interred with them after death? Are the spirits of deceased animal companions angry and vengeful, or are they protective and loving? Across interviews, necro-landscapes, chat rooms, and books by a wide range of interlocutors from historians to psychics, Bones of Contention expertly traces the very different ways that these questions have been engaged and debated in contemporary Japan. Enjoy!

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 Shu (Lin Qinnan, 1852-1924), a major force in the literary culture of late Qing and early Republican China. In Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), Michael Gibbs Hill charts the rise and precipitous fall of Lin’s career in an exploration of the making of the modern intellectual in China. Completing over 180 translations of Western literary works into classical Chinese while not knowing a single foreign language, Lin built a “factory of writing” dependent on the mental labor of 20 assistants trained in a range of foreign languages. Hill examines the texture of some of the translations produced by this network, offering a model for the close reading of translations both as literary sources and as sources of conflict over competing visions of intellectual, political, and national authority. Lin was ultimately caught in the crosshairs of prominent scholars and activists arguing over the relative roles of classical and vernacular language within a national project, but not before using his writing as a space to work out ideas about the roles of race, slavery, filial piety, and ethics in the transforming society of modern China. It’s a fascinating story about what it has meant in the past, and what it might mean in the future, to render ideas across linguistic realms.

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, 2012), Richard J. Smith has given us a wonderfully readable (and assignable, and shareable, and enjoyable) life of one of the most important texts in Chinese history.

In early chapters describing the origins of and mythology surrounding the Yijing (or I Ching, or Book of Changes, or Classic of Changes, among other names by which we know the text), Smith also introduces us to the intricacies and beauty of the text’s language, and some surprising ways that it engages the histories of animal sacrifice and natural history. We watch as the text metamorphoses from a primarily divinatory to a rhetorical organism, seeing it grow Wings (Ten Wings, in particular) and mature into a classic, moving into and out of relationships with various commentators and analysts, emperors and officials, scholars and fortune tellers soon after. Smith offers tales of the text’s travels in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Tibet, and its translation into Western languages. He describes some of the many ways that the text was reborn in the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, by writers and musicians and myriad artists and scholars. It is a fascinating life story, and one well worth reading.

In the course of the interview, Rich mentions this piece for the Huffington Post:

His book Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography, and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times can be found here.

For more of Rich’s thoughts on the Yijing, see his 2008 book Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I-Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in China..

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 the home of Hengdian, “China’s Hollywood.” The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China: Red Fire (Routledge, 2013) weaves together historical and ethnographic methodologies in a spirited account of the genealogies and contemporary practices of a variety of forms of performance at these local gatherings. After providing an extended background of the region, its religious institutions and perspectives, and on the history of temple fairs in general in Part 1 of the book, Part 2 moves into the economic, cultural, religious, and political dimensions that contribute to the “red fire” of temple fairs in Jinhua today. Cooper shows how the local fair can serve both as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque atmosphere (replete with elements of freak show and circus) and a site of everyday forms of resistance. The book also features a wonderfully detailed account of the arts of popular performance at the fairs, from small-cymbal narrative (xiaoluo shuo) to opera (wuju) competitions, and looks closely at the religious dimension of secular temple gatherings. Cooper’s lively voice infuses every page of the book and each moment of the interview.

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 and illuminating new book on the history of ramen in Japan. Grounded in ample research that incorporates archival and ethnographic methods, Slurp!: A Social and Culinary History of Ramen – Japan’s Favorite Noodle Soup (Global Oriental, 2012) takes us from the early history of noodles and breadstuffs in China and Japan to the styrofoam bowl of instant ramen on modern grocery shelves. In Kushner’s able and playful historical hands, this genealogy of foodways is interwoven with strands of Buddhist history, urban and colonial studies, and a detailed account of the emergence of a national cuisine in nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan, memorial marshmallows and all. Kushner’s book explores the ways that military influence, the rise of “nutrition” as a health concern, and prevailing conditions of hunger and starvation created a social and political context out of which ramen emerged along with new ways of eating alone and away from home. As if all of that wasn’t enough reason to read the book, you’ll also learn about the Ramen Philosophers Hall and the technology behind making those crispy instant ramen noodles. Slurp!

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 become a ruler whose reign as Emperor Taizong has been hailed as a model of good government throughout East Asia. Jack W. Chen’s recent book explores the ways that Taizong shaped the representations and meanings of his empire by shaping the literary representations of power as he and others embodied it. The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty (Harvard Yenching Institute, 2010) is a journey through those articulations of sovereignty in the course of a masterful analysis of the literary world of early medieval China. Several fascinating themes run through this highly transdisciplinary work, which contributes meaningfully to larger histories of corporeality and the body, of historiographical practice, of experiences and articulations of space and movement, and of the historical ethics and rituals of rulership. It is a treat for the scholar of literature and the historian alike.

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 in ritual? The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism (Oxford University Press, 2012) brings readers into the intricacies of the text of the Liji. Michael Ing respects the diversity of perspectives in the text while paying close attention to the ways that its authors shared a central concern with failures in ritual practice. Fluent ritual agents in the Liji were able to open and transform the script of a ritual to suit the changing contexts of a changing world. Rituals, however, could still fail, as a result of either preventable mistakes by these ritual agents or unavoidable failures inherent in the ritual script itself. The authors of the Liji attempted to help readers cope with a deep anxiety over this dissonance in ritual practice: though rituals were meant to construct an ordered world, they could fail to bring about such a world, and the reasons for that failure were not always clear. Ing proposes a tragic theory of early Confucian ritual practice in which the Liji authors embraced ambiguity in their depictions of whether ritual failures were or were not preventable. He suggests the creative and therapeutic opportunities that emerge from these anxieties, and ultimately situates this tragic theory of ritual in the Liji within the broader field of ritual studies.

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 course of Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation (Brill, 2012), Bruno helps us imagine what an answer to that question might look like while guiding us through the sounds and spaces of contemporary Chinese poet Yang Lian. Between the Lines proposes an innovative way to read a poem through and with its translations, using a “triangular comparative analysis” that juxtaposes the original poem with a number of its translations to identify shifts in the lines of the poem that serve as landmarks in the conceptual and textual world of the poet. Bruno uses this translation-focused methodology of reading to reveal fascinating dimensions of time, space, and subjectivity in Yang Lian’s work, and to guide our attention to the performative importance of rhythm, blank space, punctuation, and sound in his verse. Readers who are interested in Chinese poetry will find much to absorb and transport them in these pages, and readers interested in the theory and practice of translation will find a clear articulation of a set of methodological tools that could potentially bear fruit when rendering texts across many different genres and languages. Enjoy!

Orientalism, the ideograph, and media theory grew up together. In Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford University Press, 2010), Christopher Bush offers a wonderfully trans-disciplinary account of modernism through the figure of the ideograph, or Chinese writing as imagined in the West. The beginning of the book introduces the ways that modernism wove together speculations about Chinese writing and responses to technological media. The following four chapters develop this set of ideas by looking at different conceptions of the ideograph and the uses to which they were put in texts ranging from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Each chapter explores a particular author or authors’ engagement with China (or with an idea thereof) through a specific understanding of what Chinese writing was and how it related to a given technological medium. Bush thus takes us from Ezra Pound and Paul Claudel’s imagistic ideograph and photography, to Victor Segalen’s inscriptive ideograph and phonography, to Walter Benjamin’s mimetic ideograph and cinematography, and finally to Paul Valéry’s historical ideograph and telegraphy. Bush’s work is particularly fascinating not just in integrating media theories into the history of thinking of/with China, but also in its attention to the ways that China was central to how modernists refashioned their ideas of time and space. It is a wonderful work that helps scholars of East Asia understand an important period in the history of engagement with one of the central objects of our field. Enjoy!

Jini Kim Watson’s book links literature, architecture, urban studies, film, and economic history into a wonderfully rich account of the fictions of urban transformation in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Ranging from the colonial period to the late 1980s, The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) introduces fictional, poetic, and cinematic texts that reflect the different but concordant ways that writers in these newly industrializing cityscapes of the Pacific Rim negotiated new built environments and experiences of modern space. Watson expertly guides us through a historical and theoretical account of colonial urban development and the literature that emerged from it, before moving to the postwar and postcolonial context of the mid-late twentieth century. Individual subjectivities, as we encounter them in a series of fascinating literary texts, are reimagined in cities full of high-rise apartments, construction sites, and spatial forms that grow in tandem with forms of urban labor. Watson’s book considers the refiguring of interiors and exteriors, collectivities and persons, men and women, points and routes. Several chapters offer a comparative analysis of nationalist discourses and fictional forms in light of a new urban space pulsing with flows of commodities and laboring bodies. By the end of the book, the reader leaves this wonderful collection of stories and analyses inspired to think about and experience built space anew. (This reader certainly did!)

Shih-Shan Susan Huang’s beautiful new book explores visual culture of religious Daoism, focusing on the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) is divided into two sections, devoted loosely to esoteric and exoteric realms of knowledge. The “Inner Chapters” of Part I of the book consider esoteric Daoist images associated with meditation, visualization, and breathing practices. These chapters take readers into a world of Daoist cosmography, considering images of the body and the cosmos and the relation between these realms. Ranging from body worms to star voyages, from images of heaven and the underworld to bird forms in True Form Charts, from maps of paradise to forms of writing, the images and objects in Pt. I collectively create an archive of Daoist imagery while being very careful to explain how particular forms of image did very specific types of work. The “Outer Chapters” of Pt. II of the book examine exoteric Daoist works, including the material culture and spatial design of Daoist ritual space, ritual performance, and liturgical paintings. These chapters bring our attention to the materiality and ephemerality of some Daoist images, introducing the production and interpretation of Daoist paintings and offering us a basis for comparing the Daoist context with that of Buddhist imagery. It is an exceptionally rich study that will no doubt influence many fields in East Asian studies. Enjoy!

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 snake-like creature, and engaged in other acts of putative sorcery early in his life. What we can say about this fascinating character, however, is that he was a powerful military and political figure who sustained a community through the “multidimensional mastery” of time, space, and discourse. Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Charisma in Twelfth-Century Tibet (Brill, 2012) uses Lama Zhang to explore a key moment in Central Tibetan history, the medieval Buddhist revival sometimes known as the Tibetan Renaissance. Yamamoto’s wonderfully multidisciplinary approach considers the centrality, at many different lev els, of practices that transformed fragments into unified wholes in the context of social groups, political institutions, and religious practices in the history of medieval Tibet and its relationship with Buddhism. The book asks us to rethink our notions of lineage, family, and clan in this larger context, and reimagines literary genres in the context of Tibetan and Buddhist texts. Enjoy!

Christopher Nugent’s wonderful recent book will change the way you read.

At the very least, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010) will transform the way we think and write about medieval poetry in China. Nugent’s book urges readers to reconsider what we can assume about the authorship and authorial control of Tang poems, showing us the ways that our understanding and appreciation of literature can be radically altered when we reconsider poems as material objects. The analysis begins with a story of textual variation in a set of manuscript copies of a long narrative poem, preserved together in the Dunhuang caves, that reads the material history of the poem through traces of scribal practices and errors. The book then moves through a discussion of memory practices in medieval China, offering a useful comparative perspective from the scholarly literature on memory arts in medieval Europe, and shows how memorial practices shaped the circulation of  Tang poetry. This is followed by chapterlong reflections on the functions and meanings of orality and writing in Tang poetic culture, as poems were circulated, were inscribed on public walls, and were stumbled upon in postal stations. A final chapter looks closely at Tang practices of compiling and collecting the poetic works of a single author, and relates these practices to the very different collecting strategies of the Song period. With broad-ranging implications for scholarship in history and religious studies, as well as literature, Nugent’s book is exceptionally rich and was the basis for a great conversation. Enjoy!

Since the “taiko boom” of the closing decades of the 20^th century, taiko drumming has arguably become Japan’s most globally successful performance medium. Shawn Bender’s recent book takes us through the history and spaces of this art, from the stretching of animal skins to make its instruments through the seemingly incongruous sounds of taiko in The Scorpion King. Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion (University of California Press, 2012) is a wonderfully rich study that will satisfy readers completely unfamiliar with the medium, as well as taiko aficionados. Based on years of fieldwork with a number of groups and extended experience living and working with taiko performers, Bender’s work focuses on the ways that the history and ethnography of taiko can help us understand how living and performing in modern global societies transforms our experience of the local, and how the performance of locality is embodied in the muscles and bones of human flesh. In the course of our conversation we spoke of many aspects of the work and of taiko, including the marathon-running drummers of Kodo, Pierre Cardin’s taste for loincloths, and interesting recent attempts to standardize taiko drumming through printed textbooks. Enjoy!

What is the relationship between language and the emotions? Where ought we look for evidence of emotion in historical and literary texts? Is it possible to talk about the emotional states of entire cultures or groups of peoples, and if so, how should that level be reconciled with that of the emotional experience of the individual? Are there categories of emotions that are shared across cultures?

Embracing a multidisciplinary approach to these questions and others, Concepts and Categories of Emotion in East Asia (Carocci editore, 2012) collects essays that range over time and space, each investigating some aspect of the discourse and experience of emotion in East Asian history. When taken together, the contributions explore several major thematics in the history of emotion. Some investigate the ways that collective emotions are expressed in documents, or the ways that a document’s genre might shape the way emotions are expressed by it. Some look at the ways that sources can manipulate a reader’s emotions. Some propose or work within a schema for classifying and organizing the language of emotions across a wide range of materials within a particular cultural context. In our conversation about the volume and the major issues it raises and engages with, editor Giusi Tamburello spoke about the genesis of the project and of her own contributions to and interests in it. I very much enjoyed talking with her, and I hope you enjoy the interview!

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 integrates political history and performance studies to challenge some widely-held assumptions about the history of the arts in modern China. In Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949 (Brill, 2012). He asks us to reexamine our assumptions about the extent to which the CCP succeeded in making cultural products into tools of propaganda under Mao’s rule. Ultimately, the book argues, the role of the state has been overemphasized, while that of the market has been largely overlooked in the scholarship on cultural reform before the Cultural Revolution. Incorporating rarely-seen archival materials with a series of interviews with storytellers, Communist cadres, and pingtan writers and their fans, Gilded Voices introduces an art form that became an important instrument of political activism and propagandizing, and traces the transformations of the genre into new physical spaces, markets, and visual and aural media. The book offers a fascinating case study that informs broader histories of censorship and theater, and explores the important ways that economic concerns helped shape cultural reform and political activism in China in since 1949.

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 through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012 ) undermines our assumptions about seemingly basic categories like marriage, freedom, and sex. It also maps the ways that the spaces of prostitution in early modern Japan transformed together with the rise of a market economy, leading us from major cities like Edo and Nagasaki, through mining towns and ports, to pilgrim sites in the Inland Sea. While the increasing commercialization of the Tokugawa economy was liberating for some, creating new opportunities for travel and leisure, Stanley shows that this new “freedom” was actually oppressive for many women. Initially understood as filial daughters embedded in families and communities that they worked to support, by the 19th century women who worked in the sex trade were increasingly seen as autonomous economic actors. As their bodies became commodities, prostitutes became symbols of the destructive influences of urban culture in the villages to which they increasingly came to work. Stanley’s book introduces these women and their world in a book that is rich with case studies that bring us into the lives of individual prostitutes, their families and employers, and the fascinating documents that allow us a glimpse into their stories.

Extraterritoriality was not grafted whole onto East Asian societies: it developed over time and in a relationship with local precedents, institutions, and understandings of power. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012) uses a trans-regional and transnational focus to explore the history of extraterritoriality and the treaty port system in nineteenth century societies. Eschewing the kinds of teleological narratives that privilege current nation states, Pär Cassel locates late Qing, Tokugawa, and Meiji debates in a deep history of legal pluralism, notions of “foreign” identity, and inter-ethnic relations.  Cassel uses an impressive range of press accounts, legal texts, and other sources to unfold the ways that the very different trajectories of extraterritoriality in China and Japan had very different consequences for the two countries. Cassel’s book ranges across some fascinating case studies from the histories of opium, counterfeiting, and the police. In addition to being required reading for anyone working in the history of modern China or Japan, Grounds of Judgment is also of special note to readers interested in the ways that language, dialect, and translation have shaped modern history, legal reform, and international relations. Enjoy!

Alan Christy

We don’t often make the chance to properly acknowledge the importance of translation to the understanding of history, let alone to talk about it at any length. Alan Christy has done a wonderful service in his careful, elegant, and accessible translation of Amino Yoshihiko’s Rethinking Japanese History (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2012). Originally a two-volume Japanese text published in the mid-1990s, Amino’s work is a clearly written account of major themes in Japanese historiography. It is full of the evidence of his self-reflexivity as a scholar who was perpetually learning and transforming his own understanding of history, and simultaneously eager to share that knowledge to help others forge their own paths through the history of Japan and beyond. The chapters range across many topics – pirates and bandits, maritime history, the nature of writing, the assumptions of “agrarian fundamentalism,” pollution, women in history – all the while keeping a thematic cohesion around key points that were central to Amino’s work as a historian. In our conversation, Christy and I spoke about many of these key themes, as well as the practice of translating Amino’s work and the importance of a historiographical mode that is in conversation with ethnographic practice. It is a fascinating work that deserves wide recognition, and it was a great pleasure to talk with Christy about it. Enjoy!

Miryam Sas’ Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exceptionally rich study that has a great deal to offer scholars across the humanities. The book looks at the experimental arts in postwar Japan in a study that ranges across works of experimental theater, film, video, dance, photography, poetry, essay, and other forms of text. Much of the study focuses on close readings of the work of artists who were experimenting with different modes of performance, and different ways of relating language, image, materiality, and time, to explore the possibilities of encounter from many different frames.

Scholars of embodiment will find much of interest here, as will readers interested in the histories of intimacy, of collectivity, and of materiality. There are also some fascinating characters along the way, including experimental theater troupes that set fire to cars and gave audience members drugs during performances, and characters that experimented with a “self-spanking machine.” The artists in Sas’ book consider the relationship between performance texts and mapping, experiment with darkness and blindness to challenge the notion of a performance as a fully perceptible experience, and use collective activity as a space to explore relationships, and to challenge assumptions about truth and power. In the course of these fascinating accounts and close readings, Sas introduces us to ways of thinking about crimes as “contagious,” and invites us to consider notions of the “Japanese body,” “Japan,” the “Orient,” and even “home” as counterfeit coins. It is an immensely stimulating study and will leave you with much to think about.

If New Books in East Asian Studies were an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe and if one of the perks that came along with being an All-Powerful Force of Good In The Universe were to ensure that certain books got major awards, then we would exercise that perk in the case of Ken Brashier’s Ancestral Memory in Early China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).

Brashier’s book is a meticulously-researched, clearly organized, and compelling account of the ancestral cult of early China. Brashier focuses his arguments on the “cognitive aspects” of the cult, and in this respect the book offers a way to think about metaphor, remembrance, and forgetting in time that potentially extends well beyond the context of early China. After an introduction that lays out the arguments of the book and introduces the structural metaphors of lineage, tree, and watershed that will recur throughout the study, Part I introduces the basic ritual prescriptions of ancestral remembrance through the lens of performance theory. From prescriptions, the book then proceeds to descriptions of actual practice in Part II, focusing on case studies of exemplary moments in the practice and adaptation of ritual throughout early China. Part III then shifts from the sacrificers to the ancestral spirits themselves, proposing a spectrum with which to think about the range of ideas about the agency of ancestral spirits and the degree to which their existence was dependent on the memory of the living. The final two Parts of the book return to the themes of performative thinking and tie the entire book together in a study of the symbolic language and practice of ancestral memory in ancient China in terms of ritual and altar, time and space.

It is an astoundingly powerful and erudite study that also makes for an enjoyable reading experience. I ad a wonderful and inspiring time talking with Ken Brashier about this book and his future projects. Enjoy!

Roel Sterckx’s book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2011) had me at drunken séances. (Drunken séances! Do you really need another excuse to read it?) It is a compelling and engaging read, and a wonderful resource for anyone interested in early China, the history of food, ritual studies, or the history of sensation. Sterckx’s work explores the culture, philosophies, and practices of sacrificial religion in early China, focusing on the ways that food and consumption at the dinner table and ritual altar helped shape ways of thinking about human sagehood and the relationships between the human and spirit worlds. The book ranges from the practices and language of cooking to the spiritual sensorium, from sacrificial procedure as a search and a multimedia event to the portrayal of Confucius in early texts about dining and sacrifice, from lively butchers to bland stews. In a particularly fascinating chapter on the economy of religious sacrifice, Sterckx considers how the demands of the spirit economy may have undermined that of humans in early China.

Also, there are drunken séances.

*Listeners will notice that the connection was a bit spotty at the very end of the interview. Stick with it! It’s worth it.

Roger Hart’s The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) is the first book-length study of linear algebra in imperial China, and is based on an astounding combination of erudition and expertise in both Chinese history and the practice and history of linear algebra. Alternating among an interdisciplinary array of materials and ideas that range from the Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Arts to modern matrix theory, Hart argues for the importance of visualization to the solution of linear algebra problems in China in the years before Leibniz. In the course of a detailed and exhaustive account of fangcheng practice, Hart explores issues of primary importance to the history of science broadly writ, including the relationship and distinction between popular and elite knowledge, the challenges of inferring and extracting historical practices from the textual record, and the challenges of translating scientific terminology across the languages and cultures of the past and present. Hart’s book is a unique and standout contribution to the history of science in what have been called “non-Western” cultures, and our conversation touched on both the specifics of his study and the broader historiographical issues that his work speaks to. Enjoy!

Using materials that range from poetry and fiction to historiography and film, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. (Routledge, 2011) proposes a sharp critique of the way that China’s history from 1949-1979 has been understood and written in a wide variety of texts. Daniel Vukovich argues that there is a new, Sinological form of orientalism that characterizes the China field, characterized by a shift in orientalist logic from a discourse of difference to a cultural logic of sameness that describes China as being in the process of becoming-the-same as the USA and the West. It is a bold and ambitious book that takes on scholarly and popular writings on many key themes in modern Chinese historiography, from the Tiananmen protests to the Cultural Revolution, from the dominance of numeracy in the historiography of Great Leap Forward to the dominance of crowds and mass-belonging in fictional representations of Mao, from the pedagogy of Chinese-language film studies to the scholarly appreciation (or lack thereof) of the dimensions of Maoist discourse. It is a pointed and spirited book that incorporates a remarkably transdisciplinary range of approaches and texts. Enjoy!

What do walking backward, water calligraphy, and belting out popular songs in public have in common? All of them can be conceived as techniques for cultivating life, or yangsheng, and they are all featured in Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang’s wonderful new book.

Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (Zone Books, 2012) explores life as a process through an ethnographic and philosophical study of everyday life activism in contemporary Beijing. It is a remarkably wide-ranging book in its conception and methodologies, exploring forms of modern self-help (or self-health) via discussions that range from the changing nature of long underwear to the meaning of life, from popular health literature to the films of Ning Ying, from urban politics leading up to the 2008 Olympics to the circulation of common sense. Farquhar and Zhang bring the reader along for morning and evening walks through the public spaces of West City District of Beijing, and into the private spaces of yangsheng practitioners in their homes, inviting us to listen in on a dinner conversation that concludes the study. It is a marvelous, creative, and inspiring book that manages to balance careful analysis of philosophical texts with humor and liveliness.

What did money mean to the people of medieval Japan?

In Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), Ethan Segal takes readers through a fascinating exploration of the politics, society, and culture of pre-1600 Japan. One of the wonderful things about this book is the extent to which Ethan Segal very carefully contextualizes early medieval Japan within a broader global history, situating this economic history in a network of relations with the Mongols and China. East Asianists, take note: Segal’s work is of great interest to those working beyond the field of economic history, and speaks to the history of foreign policy and relations, ideas of virtue, and social history as well. Written in a very fluid and accessible style, Coins, Trade, and the State is an excellent read for anyone interested in cultures of exchange and their histories.

Merry (Corky) White’s new book Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2012) opens with a memory of stripping naked and being painted blue in an underground coffeehouse, and closes with a guide to some of the author’s favorite cafes in Japan. This framing alone is worth the price of admission. In addition to being an extraordinarily spirited, witty, and enjoyable book, however, Coffee Life in Japan is also a thoughtfully argued and exhaustively researched account of the history and ethnography of coffee and cafes in modern Japan. This wide-ranging and trans-disciplinary work explores the spaces of the modern café, be they social, solitary, or occasionally silent and sprinkled with stuffed animals. White introduces readers to chaptersful of fascinating characters, including passionate coffee experts who train like dancers to learn to create the perfect cup. This is a surprising book, a pleasure to read, and a treasure for anyone interested in the history of drink, of global commodities, and of Japan.

Patricia Maclachlan’s recent book The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871-2010 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a fascinating political and institutional history of the postal system in modern Japan. Over the course of a story that takes us through the development of road and rail and into elections and workers’ unions, Maclachlan introduces us to an institution responsible for far more than simply delivering the mail, incorporating health consultation, filling prescriptions, helping the elderly and infirm deposit money into accounts, and providing life insurance at various points in its history. We follow postal workers through the ups and downs of their careers, through earthquakes and elections, watching as they develop a powerful influence in Japanese policymaking and navigate the crossroads of tradition and modernity. Many readers (myself included) will be surprised to find that the postal system in Japan has deep political roots, let alone a history that has been so central to helping shape the electoral system of modern Japan. The People’s Post Office will enrich the way its readers understand the politics of Japan of today, and it was a pleasure to talk with Patti about it. Enjoy!

Luke Roberts‘ Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) is a gracefully-written study of the performance of authority in Tokugawa politics. It is also one of the most thoughtful historical studies that I’ve had the pleasure to read in a long time. In the course of rereading Tokugawa documents to propose a wonderfully fresh way of thinking about political space in history, Roberts challenges us to rethink our assumptions about how to read evidence of such seemingly basic categories as life and death, truth and secrecy. A boon for scholars of Japan and non-specialists alike, Performing the Great Peace is worth a read for anyone interested in what it means now, and what it has meant across space and time, to understand and write about the past.

Xiaofei Tian‘s Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a model of comparative history. A study of travel writing in early medieval and nineteenth-century China,Visionary Journeys uses this juxtaposition to tell a surprising, rich, and beautiful story of travelers and their experiences of dislocation over land and sea, in heaven and hell, in poems and prose, in China and beyond. The book uses a wonderfully trans-disciplinary humanistic practice to weave diaries, images painted in words and pigment, Daoist writings and Buddhist scriptures, ethnographic and travel accounts, and other kinds of text to understand the ways that individuals dealt with profound social, political, and cultural change at different moments in China’s history. In a way, it’s a story that any traveler will be able to identify with and learn from. There is so much in this book – explorations of race, gender, family, urban life, ideas of the family, personal identity, practices of experiencing oneself in a changing world – and it rewards a close and joyful reading.

Taylor Atkins‘ recent book is both an important contribution to East Asian Studies and an absolute delight to read. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945 (University of California Press, 2010) opens with a movie theater commercial in 2004 and closes with a metaphorical decapitation. In the intervening chapters Atkins develops a series of sophisticated and masterfully defended arguments about the ways that colonial Japan was transformed by its engagement with Korean society and culture. Integrating critical literature on empire and colonialism, Japanese and Korean cultural history, and epistemological studies of loss and of observation, Primitive Selves is a model of careful, elegant, and responsible historical work lightened by a wonderful sense of humor. It was my sincere pleasure both to read the book, and to talk with Atkins about it.

As Atkins mentions in the course of his book and our conversation, all of the proceeds of the book are donated to the Tahirih Justice Center, which can be found here.

Many of us try to be thoughtful about the ways that we incorporate (or try, at least, to incorporate) different modes of evidence into our attempts to understand the past: objects, creatures, words, ideas. Rowan Flad‘s Salt Production and Social Hierarchy in Ancient China: An Archaeological Investigation of Specialization in China’s Three Gorges (Cambridge UP, 2011) stands as a beautiful case study of what it can look like to do so. Flad juxtaposes texts, bamboo slips, ceramic sherds, animal remains, and other lines of evidence to offer an exceptionally rich account of the technology of salt production in early China, offering glimpses at comparative archeological practices, ideas of spatiality, and the diversity of uses of animals in early China along the way. Reading the book inspired, for me, new ways of thinking about the conceptual role of fragments in the work of the historian, and our conversation was similarly inspiring.

In telling a clear story about the emergence of ethnic categories in modern China, Tom Mullaney‘s Coming to Terms With the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (University of California Press, 2011) ranges across Saussurean linguistics, census reports, oral histories, and the historiography of laboratory science. Mullaney uses a careful, focused study of the practices of the  Yunnan Province Ethnic Classification Research Team to open a much wider set of questions about the ways that key concepts (including ethnic potential, linguistic intelligibility, consent) both shaped and were produced by a project to create and map the 56 minzu of today’s China. In addition to being an inspiring model of what a truly trans-disciplinary study of Chinese history can look like, Coming to Terms With the Nation is also a darn good story and a fascinating read.

Give the interview a listen to learn more about the importance of language and linguists in shaping modern notions of ethnicity, the history of the 56-minzu model in China, and the idea behind Tom’s ideal bookstore.

Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) gives me hope for the future of edited volumes. Not only is it a fascinating and coherent treatment of the history and practice of Vietnamese medicine, but it’s also a wonderfully interdisciplinary collection of approaches that incorporates work by social scientists, humanists, and medical practitioners. The essays collectively challenge some pervasive assumptions about “traditional” versus “scientific” modes of knowledge, inviting readers to rethink our assumptions about traditional medical practices in Vietnam while offering a set of wonderful case studies to think with. This collection is a must-read for anyone working on the humanistic or social studies of medicine, but it’s also full of wonderful insights and for readers broadly interested in science studies, Asian studies, and colonial studies.

I spent a very energizing hour talking with Ayo Wahlberg, one of the volume co-editors. Our conversation ranged broadly from ethnographic practice in history and anthropology, to an inspiring journey across laboratory and countryside to find a local treatment for opium withdrawal, to the ways that “our medicine” took shape in the modern history of Vietnam.

“To think of Shanghai is to think of its nightlife: the two are synonymous.”

From here, Andrew Field takes us on a dance across modern Chinese history, through its nightscapes and ballrooms, into the sprawls of its settlements and the pages of its pictorials. Based on a wide range of sources from architectural blueprints to oral interviews, Field’s book succeeds in both showing us new sides of characters we thought we knew, and in introducing a new cast of historical actors who helped shape the rise of urban modernity in Shanghai. Picking up Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954 (The Chinese University Press, 2010), readers join Field to listen to the jazz of expatriate Whitey Smith at the wedding of Chiang Kai-shek and Song Mei-ling, to learn dance hall etiquette along with “dance empresses” anointed in annual competitions, and to follow the gangsters, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs through the Dancer’s Uprising of 1948 and beyond.

Tim Brook‘s The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2010) rewards the reader on many levels. Though it provides an excellent introduction to Yuan and Ming history for both students and advanced scholars, it’s not merely a dry textbook: The Troubled Empire also succeeds in a provocative  re-conceptualization of many central concepts in Chinese history. Beginning with soaring dragons and ending with rats on a bookshelf, Brook offers us what is simultaneously an ecological history of early modern China, a comparative account of the Yuan and Ming in global history, and an exemplary case study of transdisciplinary history at its most engaging. I learned a great deal reading it, and we had a great time talking about it.

Carol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011) is many things at the same time; among other things, it’s both an exceptionally rich account of an object (or set of objects) that were crucial to the history of China in the world, and an engaging journey through the history of modern China on the leaves and flowers and stalks of a plant. Benedict’s book traces the narrative of tobacco in China from early modern encounters to the “cigarette century” of today. In addition to situating Chinese history within a larger global framework, it is also very sensitive to the multi-sited and trans-regional story of tobacco within China, showing change and continuity across the late imperial/modern divide.

This is a work that is profoundly trans-disciplinary in scope, and as a result it rewards readers interested in any number of disciplines, including the histories of commodities, disease, China, modern literature, gender, global encounters, and trade.

First things first: this is an outstanding book.

In the course of The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011), Erik Mueggler weaves together the stories of two botanists traveling through western China and Tibet in a lyrically-written story that treats the nature of writing, bodies, beauty, images, violence, and history in creating experiences of the earth. The characters are compelling, the story is important, and the work speaks to readers well beyond the field of East Asian Studies. Listen to Mueggler’s comments, and then read the book. You will learn much, as I certainly did.

Marta Hanson‘s book is a rich study of conceptions of space in medical thought and practice. Ranging from a deep history of the geographic imagination in China to an account of the SARS outbreak of the 21st century, Hanson’s book maps the transformations of medicine and healing in late imperial China that accompanied transforming geographies of empire. Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2011) is both the biography of a disease and a masterful tour through the history of medical practice and knowledge in later imperial China. Over the course of our discussion, we talked about the people and ideas that inspired Hanson’s work, the importance of “eureka moments,” and the SARS epidemic in Beijing.

The author has generously shared a discount on her book for listeners of New Books in East Asian Studies. To order a copy of the book through the Routledge Press website at a 20% discount, visit http://www.routledge.com/9780415602532/ and enter discount code SECM11 at the checkout to claim your discount. Offer expires 28th February 2012.

We tend to take for granted that we have bodies, that these bodies are knowable and measurable, and that we understand how to relate our own bodies to those of the people around us. To put it more simply: if I were to ask you how tall you were, how much you weighed, or what year you were born, while you might balk at providing an honest answer you wouldn’t be flummoxed by the question. We are modern bodies, and as such we are walking, talking, identifiable, and countable collections of facts.

Tong Lam’s A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949 (University of California Press, 2011)  explores the practices through which this became possible in the context of China during the first half of the twentieth century. Lam’s book looks closely at the construction of the Chinese nation-state through censuses, social surveys, and other social and political technologies. His sources range from census forms, to diaries, to fiction in a rich and focused work that will appeal to anyone interested in the ways that the concept of the modern nation is shaped by the histories of science, soulstealing, society, and sentiment. A Passion for Facts also poses a particular methodological challenge: what can it look like to trace the emergence of categories that change the way we understand the world?

Mark Rowe’s new book Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a fascinating study of the life of Buddhism in Japan by looking at the many facets of death in modern Japanese Buddhism. Rowe guides us from the early background of the temple-parishioner system in Tokugawa Japan to a modern context in which the emergence of new funerary forms has re-defined what post-mortem embodiment means, in terms of relationships, fear, materiality, and nature. In this exceptionally rich an sensitively wrought study, Rowe re-conceptualizes what it looks like to study Buddhism in modern Japan by weaving an account from texts, objects, voices, and personal experience. It is also a fascinating read, full of surprising stories and insights. We covered many topics in the course of our wide-ranging interview, including the changing conception of the “family” in Asian studies, what it’s like to be the head of parking at an eternal memorial grave, the physicality of death, and why choosing a head temple priest both is and is not like Donald Trump’s The Apprentice.

Simply put: you should read Andrew F. Jones’s new book, Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Harvard UP, 2011).

It is both an immense pleasure to read, and a truly brilliant study of the ways that a discourse of development was taken up from evolutionary works of Lamarck, Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley and translated or vernacularized into narrative forms of modern Chinese literature. Jones guides us through magic shows, children’s primers, films about toys, science fiction, and many other sources for understanding the ways that development emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a mode of narrating history in China. In the course of our conversation, we ranged from x-ray technologies that could detect qi, to a natural history museum including peng birds, to a man who was, for me, easily The Most Awesome Historical Figure In Recent Memory.

Here’s the “Modern Sketch“ visual archive at the MIT Visualizing Cultures website that Jones mentions in the interview.

Daqing Yang’s Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is a gift to both historians of East Asia and scholars of science and technology studies (STS). Yang’s book dissects the body of the Japanese empire from 1853-1945 to reveal its pulsing “nerve system” in a network of communication technologies that extended well into Northeast and Southeast Asia. This extraordinarily rich and well-documented account moves from the first public demonstration of a working electric telegraph with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, to the Japanese acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. Along the way, Yang’s book offers wonderful glimpses of a range of sources that include the North China Telegraph & Telephone Co. company song, an adventure-action-romance film about telecommunications-enabled espionage, and experiments in early fax technology.  We spoke for an hour (and could have spoken for many more) about this fascinating history of techno-imperialism.

In what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010), introduces readers to a rich history of women’s medicine (fuke) in the context of late imperial China. Reproducing Women offers much more than a history of ideas and practices of women’s health in the late Ming and early Qing, however. Wu weaves together an impressive range of sources, including comparative perspectives from contemporary contexts, to create a fascinating account of the ways that human bodies were experienced and understood in Chinese medical history. In the course of our discussion and our journey through the book, we touched on topics ranging from monastery handbooks, to the late imperial version of Kinko’s, to the comparative history of pregnancy tests.

Peter Mauch‘s Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exhaustively researched and very rich biographical account of the man who was Japan’s ambassador to the US in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. Mauch traces the geopolitical developments of Japanese/US relations from 1877-1951, a crucial period that embraces two World Wars and many fascinating transformations in modern transnational history. The book relates this story through the life of Nomura, naval officer turned ambassador, allowing readers a rare glimpse into the processes and negotiations through which this sailor-diplomat wrestled with conflicting senses of duty, commitment, and reason. A boon not only for scholars of Japan, the book is also a fascinating model of the historian’s craft in its use of biography to simultaneously offer a macro-history of modern global politics, and a micro-history of a vibrant and critical mind reasoning in the course of some very difficult decisions.

Cuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was actually consumed. Eric Rath‘s recent book Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2010) is a rich study of the culture, practices, performance, and literature of food in early modern Japan. Rath takes us from medieval culinary manuscripts penned by men of the knife, all the way to sukiyaki recipes clipped from newspapers in 1950s America. Focusing on late medieval culinary manuscripts and early modern printed cookbooks, Rath shows that cuisine in pre-modern Japan blended the edible with the uneaten, puns with pickles, and rituals with rice cakes. This is a wonderfully written account of the history of food in its many spaces: on the page, on the cutting board, on the tray, in the kitchen, and in transit.

In the course of our interview we talked about the practical challenges of researching the history of cuisine in early modern Japan, the theater of slicing up carp, the Iberian roots of tempura, and the proper way to eat a flying quail food display.

In the course of his concise and clearly written new book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2011), Michael Keevak investigates the emergence of a “yellow” and “Mongolian” East Asian identity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Becoming Yellow incorporates a wide range of sources in its exploration of the European imagination of an East Asian racial identity, including poetry, travel accounts, medical and anthropological texts, and children’s toys. Over the course of our interview, we talked about the difficulties and rewards of trying to situate the idea of a “Yellow Peril” in historical context, and the potential pitfalls along the way.

Anyone who has been following the news this year has likely heard of Ai Weiwei. This provocative and gifted Chinese artist-activist has made 2011 headlines for his controversial work Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads and for his recent arrest by Chinese police.

What has been less widely appreciated is Ai’s profound impact and insight as a cultural critic, Internet artist, and chronicler of contemporary events in China. Before it was shut down on 28 May 2009 by Chinese authorities, his blog provided a Chinese-language digest of Ai’s perspectives on topics ranging from the nature of humanity to hair cuts, from his “Fairytale” project to his efforts to compile a list of the children killed in the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, from the contemplation of a “Bullshit Tax” to the 2009 Xinjiang protests. By turns hilarious, touching, and tragic, his online writing offered a perspective on current events in China that was very different from the sort of coverage available in popular Western-language news outlets.

With the support and collaboration of Ai himself, Lee Ambrozy has collected, edited, and translated a selection of the artist’s written and photographic blog posts and tweets in Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 (MIT Press, 2011). Spanning the period from the founding of Ai’s blog in 2006 to his final posts in 2009, Lee’s translation is a treasure-box that not only offers a glimpse into the life and work of this transformative artist, but also speaks to the nature and power of internet culture in today’s China. We spoke for an hour about her experience creating the volume, the challenges and joys of the translator’s practice, and the story of the Grass Mud Horse, among many other things. It is an inspiring volume, and well worth a read.

In her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schäfer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor official in southern China, Song  has earned a major reputation among scholars of Chinese history for writing the Tiangong kaiwu, a work on practical knowledge that covers topics ranging from salt-making, to gunpowder, to metallurgy. Schäfer’s book flesh out Song’s character, the social and physical world in which he lived, and  the universe of his many writings, while opening a new stage for the study of technology and craftsmen in the early modern world.

In the course of our interview, we explored Song’s fateful picnic, his thoughts on the morality of things, and the use of images as a form of argumentation, and we considered what might happen if you put a fish in a box for three days.

[Crossposted from New Books in Public Policy] How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael Auslin’s Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard University Press, 2011), the author, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the history of cultural exchange between the United States and Japan, and how important that exchange has been, and continues to be, from a political perspective.

Auslin, who is also a columnist for WSJ.com, analyses the “enduring cultural exchange” between the two countries, and describes the various stages through which this vital relationship has evolved over the last century and one half.  As Auslin shows, the relationship between the United States and Japan has had a large number of twists and turns, culminating in the current close and mutually beneficial connection between the two nations. In our interview, we talk about baseball, pop culture, gunboat diplomacy, and the first Japanese ever to set foot in America.  Read all about it, and more, in Auslin’s useful new book.

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[Crossposted from New Books in History] Most everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them. Hollywood made movies about them. Some of us can even name a few of the convicted (Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, etc.). But fewer of us know about what might be called “Nuremberg East,” that is, the Toyko trials held after the defeat of the Japanese in World War Two. These proceedings generated few books, no movies, and therefore occupy only a minor place in Western historical memory. Thanks to Yuma Totani’s excellent book, The Tokyo War Crimes Trials. The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Harvard, 2008; also available in Japanese here), that may change. We should hope it does, because the Tokyo trials were important. They not only helped the Japanese come to terms with what their government and military had done during the war (truth be told, they are still coming to terms with it today), but it also set precedents that are still being applied in international law today. More than that, Totani offers a challenging interpretation of the trials. They weren’t so much “victor’s justice” (the common interpretation in Japan) as a lost opportunity. Reading her book one can’t help but get the feeling that the Americans and their confederates bungled the trials badly. Instead of trying to establish personal responsibility in all cases, the Allies simply arrested the upper echelons of the Japanese civil and military elite and selected those who were “representative” for indictment. Those who were not indicted—though probably just as culpable as those who were—were set free, giving rise to the myth that they had brokered deals with the Americans. The prosecution was headed by an inattentive alcoholic (Joseph Keenan) who preferred interrogating the accused to gathering hard documentary evidence. The defense was comprised of ill-prepared Japanese attorneys and their less-than-helpful Allied aids. Confusion reigned in the courtroom. And of course there were significant translation problems throughout. The trials were something of a farce. I always wondered why many Japanese today don’t think very highly of the Tokyo proceedings. Now, thanks to Yuma Totani’s informative book, I have a better understanding of why.

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