“The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century” by Thant Myint-U
Myanmar or Burma? Thant Myint-U begins this timely and important book unraveling the basic question of what to call this country.
“A Friend in Deed: Lu Xun, Uchiyama Kanzo, and the Intellectual World of Shanghai on the Eve of War” by Joshua A Fogel
Toward the end of his life, Algernon Blackwood famously reminisced that “I used to tell strange, wild, improbable tales…” The tale of the friendship between Lu Xun and Uchiyama Kanzō would have met Blackwood’s standard—a look at Shanghai during those times, now nearly 100 years ago, suggests why.
“Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World” by Kris Lane
As China and the West look at decoupling, it’s worth remembering that the world has been through this several times since they first coupled three-quarters of the way through the 16th century. That’s when the Manila Galleon connected Asia and the Americas, a trade that was, to mix metaphors, oiled by silver.
“A Song For China: How My Father Wrote Yellow River Cantata” by Ange Zhang
Only a few pieces of Chinese classical instrumental music have come close to entering the standard orchestral repertory. The 1939 “Yellow River Cantata” with lyrics by Guang Weiran set to music by Xian Xinghai, and the “Yellow River Concerto” later derived from it, is one of these.
Aeneas Anderson and Isabella Bird: Travelers in China
Earnshaw Books, an independent publisher specializing in China matters, has recently issued two books featuring westerners sojourning in China over a period of a century and a half. Frances Wood, a respected scholar of Chinese history, presents the account of Aeneas Anderson, who served as a valet to Lord Macartney when the latter led an…
“Southeast Asia After the Cold War: A Contemporary History” by Ang Cheng Guan
British writer EH Carr in his classic text on international relations, The Twenty Years’ Crisis: 1919 to 1939, argues that ideas of peace and cooperation between nations cannot stand up to the realities of international instability and competition. In Carr’s time the League of Nations was ineffectual in preventing a return to war in Europe….
“Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes”, edited by Susan Whitfield
Some books are next to impossible to review. Silk Roads is one: encyclopedic in scope and structure, made up of several dozen short essays by almost as many different authors, each lavishly illustrated with indescribable photos of objects and places.
New Book Announcement: “The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique”, edited by Cathy J Schlund-Vials, Guy Beauregard and Hsiu-chuan Lee
Human rights violations have always been part of Asian American studies. From Chinese immigration restrictions, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, yellow peril characterizations, and recent acts of deportation and Islamophobia, Asian Americans have consistently functioned as subordinated “subjects” of human rights violations. The Subject(s) of Human Rights brings together scholars from North America and Asia…
New Book Announcement: “The Original Meaning of the Yijing: Commentary on the Scripture of Change” by Zhu Xi, translated and edited by Joseph A Adler
The Yijing (I Ching), or Scripture of Change, is traditionally considered the first and most profound of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual based on trigrams and hexagrams, by the beginning of the first millennium it had acquired written explanations and a series of appendices attributed to Confucius, which transformed it into a work…
New Book Announcement: “Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts: The Pandit Collection” by Hartmut Buescher
This new catalogue describes the holdings of the so-called Pandit Collection held at the Royal Library, Copenhagen. A diverse collection of more than 1,200 Sanskrit texts, it comprises codices ranging in length from several hundred folios to a single folio, or a manuscript fragment, often produced by educated (or in other cases by less educated)…
New Book Announcement: “Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958” by Yurou Zhong
Chinese Grammatology traces the origins, transmutations, and containment of this script revolution to provide a groundbreaking account of its formative effects on Chinese literature and culture, and lasting implications for the encounter between the alphabetic and nonalphabet worlds.
New Book Announcement: “Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique” by Crystal Mun-hye Baik
In Reencounters, Crystal Mun-hye Baik examines what it means to live with and remember an ongoing war when its manifestations—hypervisible and deeply sensed—become everyday formations delinked from militarization. Contemplating beyond notions of inherited trauma and postmemory, Baik offers the concept of reencounters to better track the Korean War’s illegible entanglements through an interdisciplinary archive of…
New Book Announcement: “The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon” by William C Hedberg
The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in 12th-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan in the early 17th century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work…
New Book Announcement: “Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou” by David Chaffetz
The diva is a nearly universal phenomenon. Wherever poetry, music and mime have been practised with virtuosity, great women performers always take centre stage. Traditional Asian divas are however less well known and understood among English language readers than the great divas of Mozart and Puccini. Whether from Shiraz at the court of the Injuids,…
New Book Announcement: “Forty-Seven Samurai: A Tale of Vengeance and Death in Haiku and Letters” by Hiroaki Sato
A remarkable and true tale of loyalty, vengeance, and ritual suicide… In the spring of 1701, the regional lord Asano Naganori wounded his supervising official, Kira Yoshinaka, during an important ceremony in the ruling shogunate’s Edo Castle and was at once condemned to death. Within two years, in the dead of winter, a band of…
