STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Robert Culp (Columbia University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. Amid early twentieth-century China’s epochal shifts, a vital and prolific commercial publishing industry emerged. Recruiting late Qing literati, foreign-trained academics, and recent graduates of the modernized school system to work as … [Read more...]
The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Sidney Xu Lu (Cambridge University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. This innovative study demonstrates how Japanese empire-builders invented and appropriated the discourse of overpopulation to justify Japanese settler colonialism across the Pacific. Lu defines this overpopulation discourse as … [Read more...]
Borderland Memories: Searching for Historical Identity in Post-Mao China
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Martin T. Fromm (Cambridge University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. In the 1980s, as China transitioned to the post-Mao era, a state-sponsored oral history project led to the publication of local, regional, and national histories. They took the form of written and transcribed personal testimonies … [Read more...]
Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia
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...]
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...]
