We are pleased to showcase new and forthcoming titles in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series.
The Studies of the WEAI series was inaugurated in 1962 to bring to public attention the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia. The books are published by academic and trade presses and represent scholars of East Asia from around the world.
FALL 2016 AND WINTER 2017 TITLES
The Cultural Revolution on Trial: Mao and the Gang of Four
by Alexander C. Cook
Cambridge University Press, 2016
The trial of Cultural Revolution leaders, including Mao’s widow and her Gang of Four, was the signal event in China’s post-Mao transition. In its wake, Chinese socialism emerged from the rubble of the Cultural Revolution to create the China that we know today. This spectacular show trial was a curious example of transitional justice, marking a break from the trauma of the past, a shift to the present era of reform, and a blueprint for building a better future. In this groundbreaking reconstruction of the most famous trial in Chinese history, Alex Cook shows how the event laid the cornerstone for a new model of socialist justice; at the same time, a comparison of official political and legal sources with works of popular literature reveals the conflicted cultural dimensions of this justice. The result, Cook argues, saved Chinese socialism as ruling ideology, but at the cost of its revolutionary soul.
Learn more about the book here.
Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan
by G. Clinton Godart
University of Hawaii Press, 2017
“G. Clinton Godart has written one of the best books in modern Japanese intellectual history in recent years. Nuanced in analysis, deftly written, and with a compelling reinterpretation of the role of religion in modern Japan, it challenges many aspects of the secularization thesis of modernization. Godart demonstrates that religion and science are more than compatible: They are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the truth. A valuable study that will shatter many a shibboleth in the Japan studies field.
Highly recommended!”
– Kevin M. Doak, Georgetown University
Learn more about the book here.
Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence
by Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Cambridge University Press, 2016
“Amid the recent scholarly turn toward the study of dictatorship, one authoritarian institution remains poorly understood: the coercive apparatus. Dictators and Their Secret Police thus fills an important void. Greitens presents a compelling theory of why autocrats choose different types of coercive institutions and demonstrates the long-term consequences of these choices. Her book makes an important contribution to our understanding of authoritarian durability and breakdown. Impressively researched and beautifully written, Dictators and Their Secret Police will be widely read and assigned. Indeed, it is essential reading for scholars of authoritarianism.”
– Steven Levitsky, Harvard University
–Features cases in Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines
Learn more about the book here.
Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers
by Yoshikuni Igarashi
Columbia University Press, 2016
“A bracing, riveting, and lucid retelling of postwar Japanese culture, Homecomings is the best kind of cultural history, capturing the mesh of experience, memory, history, and representation. The book reveals the psychic and ethical complexities of the lives of soldiers who returned to a defeated nation. It shows how postwar Japanese culture was created out of those experiences and how they were narrated and represented across culture in writing, photography, and film.”
– Alan Tansman, University of California, Berkeley
Learn more about the book here.
Samurai to Soldier: Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan
by D. Colin Jaundrill
Cornell University Press, 2016
“Samurai to Soldier is an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century Japan in general and its military history in particular. D. Colin Jaundrill carefully traces the transformation of military organization and soldiering across the divide of the Meiji Restoration, when samurai warriors were replaced by modern soldiers. It’s not a straightforward story, and its unexpected complications tell us much not only about the origins of Japan’s modern military but also a key process in Japan’s transition from early modernity to modernity.”
– David L. Howell, Harvard University
Learn more about the book here.
The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China
by Dorothy Ko
University of Washington Press, 2016
“Ko fires the imagination in her examination of the inkstone in its full richness, both as a writing tool and a sculptural work of art in early Qing dynasty society. These objects tell us complex stories about artistic competition, gendered values, and the many roles of craft in eighteenth-century China.”
-Foong Ping, author of The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court
Learn more about the book here.
Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption After Empire
by Yukiko Koga
The University of Chicago Press, 2016
“Most discussions of coming to terms with the past have taken the Holocaust as their paradigm. Koga’s important new book looks elsewhere and comes to strikingly original conclusions. Focused on three cities in Northeast China and set in the aftermath of Japanese empire, Inheritance of Loss goes beyond familiar references to the politics of postwar memory and points us toward the political economy of redemption in the wake of colonial modernity. This is a fresh and brilliant intervention that will be of interest to scholars of trauma and memory as well as globalization and postcolonial studies.”
– Michael Rothberg, University of California, Los Angeles
Learn more about the book here.
Negotiating Rural Land Ownership in Southwest China: State, Village, Family
by Yi Wu
University of Hawaii Press, 2016
“Yi Wu’s pioneering research on contested property relations draws on more than a decade of innovative fieldwork in villages and courts in rural Southwest China. Her framing concept of ‘bounded collectivism,’ emerging from the study of land disputes, draws attention to powerful continuities that never ceased to define rural life through the storm of land revolution, collectivization and Cultural Revolution to the contemporary era of market-driven family farming. Where many studies have focused on the role of the Party in reshaping rural society, Wu highlights the continued salience of cultural norms rooted in rural settlements and families in shaping significant social outcomes.”
– Mark Selden, Cornell University
Learn more about the book here.
The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China
by Guobin Yang
Columbia University Press, 2016
“Guobin Yang’s illuminating study establishes the lasting impact of China’s feisty Red Guard generation on contemporary Chinese politics. This absorbing book has much to offer students of modern China, as well as those interested in more general questions of political culture, popular protest, and the complicated memories and meanings of a living revolutionary tradition. A major contribution to our understanding of the Cultural Revolution and its multiple legacies.”
– Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University
Learn more about the book here.
