STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Wen-Qing Ngoei (Cornell University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. Arc of Containment recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from World War II through the end of American intervention in Vietnam. Setting aside the classic story of anxiety about falling dominoes, Wen-Qing … [Read more...]
Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860–1945
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Alyssa M. Park (Cornell University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. Sovereignty Experiments tells the story of how authorities in Korea, Russia, China, and Japan—through diplomatic negotiations, border regulations, legal categorization of subjects and aliens, and cultural policies—competed to control … [Read more...]
Statebuilding by Imposition: Resistance and Control in Colonial Taiwan and the Philippines
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Reo Matsuzaki (Cornell University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. How do modern states emerge from the turmoil of undergoverned spaces? This is the question Reo Matsuzaki ponders in Statebuilding by Imposition. Comparing Taiwan and the Philippines under the colonial rule of Japan and the United … [Read more...]
Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Corey Byrnes (Columbia University Press, 2018) For information from the publisher, please click here. In 1994, workers broke ground on China’s Three Gorges Dam. By its completion in 2012, the dam had transformed the ecology of the Yangzi River, displaced over a million people, and forever altered a landscape immortalized in centuries … [Read more...]
Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. This study of modern Japan engages the fields of art history, literature, and cultural studies, seeking to understand how the “beautiful woman” (bijin) emerged as a symbol of Japanese culture during the Meiji period … [Read more...]





