New Books in East Asian Studies

Befitting an art history book, Erin Schoneveld’s Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-Garde (Brill, 2018) is a beautifully packaged analysis of the early twentieth-century Japanese modern art collective Shirakaba and its eponymous coterie magazine (1910-1923). Shirakaba, which means “white birch,” is recognized as the most significant art movement of the period, and had a lasting impact on the discourse and practice of art in modern Japan. The group’s journal was among the first and most important Japanese art magazines to include the works of prominent European artists, and doing so shaped the contours of the art world of twentieth-century Japan.Schoneveld shows how Shirakaba arose in opposition to the statist art of the young Meiji state, the strategies deployed to promote its artistic agenda, how the group established sometimes tangible and direct personal, artistic, and ideological connections to the European artists who represented the ideal of individualism, and how the movement changed over time from an avant-garde bastion to become central to the mainstream of the Japanese art scene in the early 1920s. In addition, the book reveals dynamic tensions between statism and Shirakaba’s individualism, between the group’s ethos of individualism and the realities of being a collective, between being avant-garde and establishment, and between different generations of Shirakaba artists themselves, as well as between virtual and physical exhibition spaces and the status of original versus reproduced art. Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism is an important contribution not just to Japanese art history, but to rethinking the global spread, reception, and adoption and adaptation of modernity and modernism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

In 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education. Years before, she had –at approximately the same time– converted to both Christianity and to Maoism. In prison she lost the second faith but clung to the first.She is, judges her biographer Lian Xi, the only Chinese citizen to have openly and steadfastly opposed Mao and his regime–denouncing lies such as those conveyed in the “Great Leap Forward” poster, reproduced above. From her cell, Lin wrote long poems and essays, some written in her own blood, denouncing those who had brought China into such a condition of misery and oppression.Eventually she was judged incapable of re-education and executed. Her family was billed (as was typical) for the cost of the bullet that ended her life.But Lin Zhao’s writings survived: Totalitarian societies are also bureaucratic ones, strangely loath to destroy even the evidence of their own tyranny. When Lin Zhao’s sentence was commuted during the rule of Deng Xiaoping, her family gained access to her work.In 21st-century China, these writings have made her a prophet of change and a voice denouncing oppression. They have also made her as much an opponent of the current government as she was of Mao’s dictatorship.This may be the most important, and also the most moving, conversation I’ve have had the privilege of hosting. Recorded in Lian Xi’s office at Duke Divinity School, he and I discuss his new book Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao's China (Basic Books, 2018), Lin Zhao’s life and times, the survival of her writings, and her growing influence in modern China. Please listen, and share with others interested in history, China, human rights, and the triumph of the human person over tyranny.Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Today’s guest is Charles B. Jones, Associate Professor and Director of the Religion and Culture graduate program in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America. He will be speaking with us about his new book Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: Understanding a Tradition of Practice, just published in the Pure Land Buddhist Studies series with University of Hawaiʻi Press.Jones is the author is several articles and books, including Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State 1660-1990, which was a foundational work in the field and the first history of its type to be published in any language. Now, Jones is once again breaking new ground with this study of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism, which is the first book in any western language to provide a comprehensive overview of the Chinese Pure Land tradition, a notably understudied area in western-language Buddhist Studies scholarship.In this work, Jones explores many of the core doctrines, practices and controversies of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism, situating them historically and in the modern period, drawing on a wealth of previously unexamined primary sources, many of which he is making available to readers in English translation for the first time. This book challenges readers to rethink many longstanding assumptions about Chinese Pure Land Buddhism, including the nuanced relation of self-power and other-power as conceived in the Chinese tradition, the notion of Pure Land as a so-called “easy” path appealing to non-elite practitioners, debates about the nature of the Pure Land itself and how it is thought to exist in the world, the multifaceted practice of nian fo (念佛, nembutsu in Japanese or “buddha-recollection”), as well as the deeply fraught question of the historical development of the lineage of Pure Land “patriarchs”. This work will be of interest to all scholars of Buddhist Studies, and a valuable classroom resource for teaching Pure Land Buddhism, Buddhist Studies and Chinese Religions.Lina Verchery is a PhD candidate in Buddhist Studies at Harvard University. She specializes in the study of modern Chinese Buddhist monasticism, with a secondary focus in Religion and Film. She can be reached at linaverchery@fas.harvard.edu or via her website www.linaverchery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Noelle Giuffrida’s book, Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018), tells the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art through the story of renowned curator and museum director Sherman E. Lee (1918-2008). This book provides one of the first forays into post-war North American collecting and exhibiting, carefully reconstructing the rise of the USA as the scholarly hub on Chinese art, in many ways displacing Europe’s dominance in this area. As such, Separating Sheep from Goats, contributes hugely to the historiography of the field of East Asian art and gives sense of individuals and their contributions, rather than institutions. Relying on extensive archival research, Noelle Giuffrida shines light on the so-called ‘Monuments Men’ and namely their time in East Asia in this engaging and lavishly illustrated book.In this podcast, Noelle and I talk about we talk about the archival research that went into writing this book, the generosity of scholars, such as James Cahill, who shared notes and documents before passing away as well as Sherman E. Lee’s unique role as curator and museum director, his relationship with the ‘old guard’ of Harvard-educated scholars who came before him, the fascinating yet barely-known history of the ‘Monuments Men’ in East Asia, as well as the need for connoisseurship and contextual scholarship in the study and understanding of Chinese painting.Ricarda is an Assistant Curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Asian Department, East Asia section. She is also a part-time PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art looking at Chinese court art from the first half of the nineteenth century. Find out more via Twitter @RicardaBeatrix Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Wang Gungwu has long been recognized as a world authority on the history of China and the overseas Chinese. His work has been inspired by his own experience growing up Chinese in Southeast Asia, but with strong family, educational, and indeed emotional connections to China. In his new memoir, Home Is Not Here (NUS, 2018), he recollects his upbringing in British Malaya at a time of great political turmoil, which included the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, and the Japanese invasion and occupation of Malaya. Following World War II his studies in China at the National Central University in Nanjing were cut short by the imminent victory of the Chinese Communist Party in China’s civil war. This book is an intimate reflection on the themes of family, education, language, Chinese identity, and the search for a sense of home during a tumultuous period in Southeast Asian and Chinese history.Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg’s coauthored Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace (Cambridge University Press, 2019) uses the fate of castles after the Meiji coup of 1868 as a case study to explore aspects of Japan’s modern history including historical memory, cultural heritage, and state-civil society and national-regional relations. The authors show that although castles entered the modern era as a symbol of the dark “feudal” past Japan hoped to leave behind, they quickly took on a diverse set of functions and meanings. According to Benesch and Zwigenberg, urban castles in particular—such as those in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya—were important to the formation of both national and regional identities, playing key symbolic and practical roles as parks, military garrisons, representations of various collective pasts, etc. Especially as society was militarized in the 1930s, castles came to be celebrated as a unification of modernity and tradition, the imperial and local, military and civilian. Though the political climate and the valences of Japan’s recent and more distant pasts were thrown into upheaval with war and defeat, even after 1945 castles retained a literally and figuratively large footprint in Japan. The authors explore the divergent histories of castles including Hiroshima, Kanazawa, and Kokura and the “castle boom” of the early postwar decades to illustrate ongoing tensions between visions for individual regions and Japan itself in the period of national rebuilding that followed World War II, and conclude with reflections on the significance of the current wave of castle reconstructions with “authentic” materials and techniques in the context of growing global interest in cultural heritage as a kind of intellectual property that conveys both soft power and hard currency. Whether dismantled or garrisoned or transformed into munitions factories or parks, and whether original, bombed, rebuilt, or conjured up as roadside attractions, Benesch and Zwigenberg show that the shifting circumstances and meanings of castles can teach us much about Japan’s modern history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

What to make of the fact that China is ruled by a Communist Party which detains and arrests people studying Maoism, organising workers, or campaigning for women’s liberation is a difficult task. All the more so when that same Party continues to speak in the language of socialist construction, mass organization and Leninist control of the ‘commanding heights’. This is one reason why the compendium Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (Verso & Australian National University Press, 2019), edited by Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere, is such an invaluable project.Through 53 pithy chapters which deal with key ideas from class struggle to thought reform, and trace rich thematic strands linked to affect, aesthetics, internationalism, tradition and the state, this book offers a vast lexicon of fresh approaches to the dizzying world of change and consistency which characterize today’s China. Furthermore, the collection is a highly readable account of recent Chinese history which should prove indispensable in working out where the country is going next and, in the spirit of the radicalism which is the book’s subject matter, it is also open access and free to download from the ANU Press website.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Railroads and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2019) looks at the development of railroads in China from the late 19th century to the post-Mao reform period. Treating railroads as institutions, Elisabeth Köll charts how railroads and railway management companies were constructed and developed, how railway lines were disrupted by war, and then how they were re-organized and re-structured – often by re-packaging pre-1949 ideas – in the Communist period. Throughout Köll is attentive to historical continuities and disruptions, paying particular attention to the tensions that existed between centralization and decentralization, which, as she shows, ultimately created a system where regionally autonomous railroad bureaus exist within a centralized hierarchy. By drawing on sources that range from archival materials to oral testimonies, Köll has created not only the first comprehensive history of railroad operation in China, but also a book filled with fascinating details, including the absurdities of railroad accounting practices in semi-colonial China, what you learn when you look at the rate of railroad accidents during the Great Leap Forward (spoiler alert: as you will hear in the podcast, the rates are definitely not good!), and much, much more, all of which will be of interest to historians and railfans alike.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilization at Harvard University. She is interested in translation, Manchu language books, and anything that involves a good kesike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies