We are excited to announce a new title in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series: The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, published by the University of Chicago Press. The book's author is Emily Baum, an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. Throughout most of history, in China the … [Read more...]
Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City
Haydon Cherry (Yale University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. Historian Haydon Cherry offers the first comprehensive social history of the urban poor of colonial French Saigon by following the lives of six individuals—a prostitute, a Chinese laborer, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an incurable invalid, and a poor Frenchman—and how … [Read more...]
Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Franz Prichard (Columbia University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. In the postwar years, an eruption of urbanization took place across Japan, from its historical central cities to the outer reaches of the archipelago. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese literary and visual media took a deep … [Read more...]
Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Claire E. Edington (Cornell University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. To read the author Q&A, please click here. Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with … [Read more...]
The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War
STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES Jeremy A. Yellen (Cornell University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. In The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jeremy Yellen exposes the history, politics, and intrigue that characterized the era when Japan's "total empire" met the total war of World War II. He illuminates the ways in which the … [Read more...]
