New Books in East Asian Studies

In 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade the Wa, an upland people living predominantly on what is today the Burma-China frontier, still needed to be introduced to other scholars of the region. Magnus Fiskesjö, the article’s author, began with the caveat that it was by no means complete and was intended only by way of brief introduction. But the article held out the promise of more, and now its author has delivered, with Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture (Berghahn, 2021). In this episode, Magnus joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss everything from rice beer to silver mining, opium production and warfare, the tension between the Wa egalitarian ethos and practices of slave holding, and the present and possible future conditions for a people on the periphery of mainland Southeast Asia in an age of intolerant ethno-nationalism.Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Holly High, Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village Jane Ferguson, Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand and a Nation-State Deferred James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States Nick Cheesman is Associate Professor, Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University and Senior Fellow, Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo (Fall 2022). He hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network. 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 does it mean to be a meritocracy? Ask an ordinary person, and they would likely say it means promoting the best and brightest in today’s society based on merit. But that simple explanation belies many thorny questions. What is merit? How do we measure talent? How does equality come into play? And how do we ensure that meritocracies don’t degenerate into the same old privileged systems they strived to replace?Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi write in their edited volume Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford UP, 2022) that “Few public policy issues generate as much analysis or rouse as much emotion as the question of how to make society more meritocratic,” Tarun, Michael, and their fellow contributors try to define, study, and interrogate the idea of meritocracy with reference to two countries in particular: India, and China.In this interview, Tarun, Michael and I talk about meritocracy, why they chose Asia as their focus, and why it’s important to understand how this idea is implemented in practice.Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School and the first director of Harvard's Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute. Michael Szonyi is Frank Wu Professor of Chinese History and former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.(A quick editorial note! Tarun unfortunately had to leave slightly early in our interview, meaning he’s not present in the outro!)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Making Meritocracy. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

The late Qing was a time of great turmoil and upheaval but also a time of great possibility, as scholars, officials, the press, and revolutionaries all sought to find ways to shape China’s future. For many, as explored in Daniel Barish’s new book, Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861-1912 (Columbia UP, 2022), the solution lay not outside the Qing but within it — with the emperor himself.Learning to Rule explores the education of the final three Qing emperors, looking at how debates about Western learning, foreign language education, the Manchu Way, and constitutionalism played out in the classrooms of the Qing emperors. Not only is this an intimate and deeply human look at the emperor and court life, it also shows just how involved the Qing was in global conversations about the role and education of a monarch, with many drawing on the examples of rulers in Russia and Japan when proposing their own plans for the Qing. Vividly written, this book will be of interest to any readers looking to learn about the late Qing, modern Chinese history, and the history of global empires — as well as those who might be curious about what it was like to try to teach the Son of Heaven.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

“The Little Mermaid” has become popular around the world since the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen published it almost two centuries ago. Lucy Fraser’s The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of “The Little Mermaid” (Wayne State University Press, 2017) uses Japanese and American transformations of “The Little Mermaid” to think through the pleasures that the text provides for consumers. Building on Mayako Murai’s From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West, Fraser tracks transformations from the nineteenth century through 2008, with particular attention to literary and filmic media.The binary languages of the title are matched by a series of binaries that Fraser identifies within The Little Mermaid and its transformations. Fraser shows how Andersen’s story presents readers with strict binaries – like human-merfolk, sea-land, and soul-soulless – only for the protagonist to transgress them. The Pleasures of Metamorphosis then presents readers with more binaries – between transformations that emphasize the (male, human) prince and those that emphasize the (female, non-human) mermaid, for example – to show the diverse pleasures inherent to the text. In so doing, The Pleasures of Metamorphosis traverses Disney’s classic animated film and Studio Ghibli’s more recent Ponyo (2008) as well as literature by a host of skilled writers, including Yumiko Kurahashi, Banana Yoshimoto, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Oscar Wilde, Kōbō Abe, Yōko Ogawa, Shūji Terayama, and Hiromi Kawakami. The book concludes by showing the promise of theories surrounding Japan’s shōjo, or girls’, culture for non-Japanese works.Lucy Fraser is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at The University of Queensland, Australia, where she teaches Japanese language and literature.Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University who researches Japanese culture and contemporary media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Haruki Murakami, a global literary phenomenon, has said that he started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy. What he has not discussed as much is what he needed self-therapy for. This book argues that by understanding more about why Murakami writes, and by linking this with the question of how he writes, readers can better understand what he writes. Murakami's fiction, in other words, can be read as a search for self-therapy. In five chapters which explore Murakami's fourteen novels to date, Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy: Stories from the Second Basement (Bloomsbury, 2022) argues that there are four prominent therapeutic threads woven through Murakami's fiction that can be traced back to his personal traumas - most notably Murakami's falling out with his late father and the death of a former girlfriend – and which have also transcended them in significant ways as they have been transformed into literary fiction. The first thread looks at the way melancholia must be worked through for mourning to occur and healing to happen; the second thread looks at how symbolic acts of sacrifice can help to heal intergenerational trauma; the third thread looks at the way people with avoidant attachment styles can begin to open themselves up to love again; the fourth thread looks at how individuation can manifest as a response to nihilism. Meticulously researched and written with sensitivity, the result is a sophisticated exploration of Murakami's published novels as an evolving therapeutic project that will be of great value to all scholars of Japanese literature and culture.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

How should one dwell in endtime? In this SPIDER-spun web of a book, Wendi Adamek guides readers to the visual and textual traces left by Buddhist nuns, monks, and devotees on mountainsides in Baoshan, north central China, and through them, the soteriology of Buddhism in the medieval world. The convents have vanished and the stones weathered, but the skillful work in maintaining co-constitutive relations is as palpable as ever.Thoroughly researched and artfully written, Practicescapes and the Buddhists of Baoshan (Hamburg Buddhist Studies, 2021) advances scholarship without leaving the lay reader behind. The comparative insights, theory-work, and appended transcriptions of this definitive study constitute a gift to past, present, and future travelers.This book is available open-access.Jessica Zu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Religion at USC Dornsife. She specializes in modern Chinese Yogācāra and Buddhist social philosophy. You can find her on Twitter @ JessicaZu7 or email her at xzu@usc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question--what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how can this help us rethink notions of cultural production? In Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Stevie Suan examines how anime's recognizable media-form--no matter where it is produced--reflects the problematics of globalization. The result is an incisive look at not only anime but also the tensions of transnationality. Far from valorizing the individualistic "originality" so often touted in national creative industries, anime reveals an alternate type of creativity based in repetition and variation. In exploring this alternative creativity and its accompanying aesthetics, Suan examines anime from fresh angles, including considerations of how anime operates like a brand of media, the intricacies of anime production occurring across national borders, inquiries into the selfhood involved in anime's character acting, and analyses of various anime works that present differing modes of transnationality. Anime's Identity deftly merges theories from media studies and performance studies, introducing innovative formal concepts that connect anime to questions of dislocation on a global scale, creating a transformative new lens for analyzing popular media.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

On July 6, 1998, the last flight took off from Kai Tak International Airport, marking the end of an era for Hong Kong aviation. For decades, international flights flew over the roofs of Kowloon apartments, before landing on Kai Tak’s runway, extending out into the harbor.Kai Tak–frankly, a terrible place for one of the world’s busiest international airports–is a good symbol of the story of Hong Kong’s aviation, as told in Hong Kong Takes Flight: Commercial Aviation and the Making of a Global Hub, 1930s–1998 (Harvard University Press, 2022) by John D. Wong and published by Harvard University Press.Hong Kong’s growth as a hub for commercial aviation was often unplanned, often the result of compromise–and yet wildly successful. The city was able to carve a niche for itself, in both the declining British empire and the wider world, while also having to deal with colonial bureaucracy, geopolitics, fierce competition and an entirely new Communist government across the border.In this interview, John and I talk about Hong Kong’s history with aviation, from its very start with flying boats and puddlejumpers right through to the jumbo jet era.John D. Wong is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Hong Kong. He is also the author of Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge University Press, 2016)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Hong Kong Takes Flight. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Based on a close reading of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s extant films, this book provides insights into the ways the director created narrative structures and used symbolism to construct meaning in his films. Against critics’ insistence that Ozu was indifferent to plot and unlikely to use symbols, Geist reveals the director’s subtle iconographic paradigms. Her incisive understanding of the historical and cultural context in which the films were conceived amplifies her analysis of the films’ structure and meaning.Ozu: A Closer Look (Hong Kong UP, 2022) guides the reader through Ozu’s earliest silent films, his sound films made during the wartime period and subsequent American Occupation of Japan, and finally takes up specific themes relevant to his later, better-known films. Geist also examines the impact that Ozu’s films had on specific directors in Europe, America, and Japan. Intended for film scholars, students, and fans of the director, this book provides fresh insights into the director’s films and new challenges in studies on Ozu.Kathe Geist is an art historian and author of The Cinema of Wim Wenders.Gustavo E. Gutiérrez Suárez is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology. His areas of interest include Andean and Amazonian Anthropology, Film theory and aesthetics. You can follow him on Twitter vía @GustavoEGSuarez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies