Book reviews

mclc book reviews

The Unfilial

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Colleagues might be interested in this recent review on the Irish Times regarding a new novella collection in translation Find below relevant parts of the review and information about the book.–Daniel Li <Daniel.li@alaincharlesasia.com>

The Unfilial (Sinoist Books, £15.99) is a collection of four stories by Chinese writer Yao Emei 姚鄂梅. The long story – 50 or more pages – is a favourite format of mine, proving the perfect length for an evening’s reading.

In the first tale, It Runs in the Family (translated by Will Spence), a young man throws his lover from a bridge, making the family reliant on the local police chief. Things are complicated by the fact that the chief is the spurned lover of the murderer’s mother. Gran is on Her Way (translated by Olivia Milburn), is about a hospital cleaner who gave up her own child for adoption when the father was imprisoned. Years later, she finds herself drawn into the desperate circumstances of other young women, while also dealing with the hangover from her own past. It is one of the best stories you’ll read all year.

Skeletons in the Closet (translated by Honey Watson) follows a young woman’s clandestine affair with an older, married doctor. Though drawn into the passion and subterfuge, she is keenly aware of the betrayal involved. You’ll Do the Job With Skill and Ease (translated by Martin Ward) is a novella-length story about a father who gambles away his family’s house, forcing them into an itinerant living experiment, staying in hotels or squatting in friends’ houses. It is a parable about the foundational importance of home in a family.

There are common plot points among the stories – prison, mistakes, hospital, feckless men and unplanned pregnancy. Yao handles difficult subject matter with sensitivity yet also confidence. She makes bold choices and creates complex but credible human dilemmas rather than providing pat morality for reader comfort. Highly recommended.

The Unfilial: Four Tragic Tales from Modern China – Yao Emei (Trans: Will Spence, Olivia Milburn, Honey Watson and Martin Ward). 288 pp. Sinoist Books, 2024. ISBN: 978-1-83890-581-1. Pricing: £15.99

One Man Talking review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Charles Laughlin’s review of One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939, edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/laughlin/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

One Man Talking: Selected Essays
of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939

By Shao Xunmei
Edited and Translated Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala

Reviewed by Charles Laughlin
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2024)

Shao Xunmei, One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939 Edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2023. 454 pp. ISBN: 978-9629376604 (paper).

Over the past quarter century, there has been growing scholarly attention to Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 (1906-1968), initially as a poet, but increasingly as a publisher and cultural figure. One chapter of Leo Ou-fan Lee’s 1999 book Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, introduces Shao as a decadent poet alongside the “dandy” Ye Lingfeng 葉靈鳳, but also devotes space to his important role in the publishing industry.[1] In 2001, Jonathan Hutt published an article entitled “La Maison d’Or: The Sumptuous World of Shao Xunmei.” In 2016, Jicheng Sun and Harold Swindall published a collection of Shao’s poetry in English translation, The Verse of Shao Xunmei. More recently, in 2020, is Tian Jin’s critical study of Shao’s poetry, The Condition of Music: Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei.

Parallel to this increased attention to Shao’s poetry, Paul Bevan has published extensively on Western impacts on Republican era print culture with a particular emphasis on illustrated magazines, and these works have fleshed out Shao Xunmei’s broader profile as a cultural figure. In 2018, Bevan published a monograph on Shao Xunmei’s Modern Miscellany (時代畫報), and in 2020 he brought out “Intoxicating Shanghai”—An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines in Shanghai’s Jazz Age, a broader study on pictorial magazines based in Shanghai and their contributing artists. Bevan has also published a journal article on Mexican illustrator Miguel Covarrubias’ momentous encounter with 1930s Shanghai and his impact on its visual print culture (2021), and more recently a book chapter on Shao’s bookshop The Golden House and his relationship with translation (2024), both of which overlap with the content of One Man Talking. One Man Talking can thus be seen as a collection of source materials on Shao Xunmei that supplements Bevan’s research on Shao and his milieu, that establishes Shao as a cultural figure using his own (prose) voice. This effort is aided by the editors’ collaboration with Shao’s daughter Shao Xiaohong, who provided valuable materials, including an essay on Shao’s wartime publication efforts, and to whose memory the book is dedicated. The book also features a foreword by Leo Ou-fan Lee, translations and commentary by co-editor Susan Daruvala, Michel Hockx, Helen Wang, and Sun Xinqi. Continue reading One Man Talking review →

Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal: A Review Essay

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Viren Murthy’s essay “Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal,” which reviews two books: How Asia Found Herself, by Nile Green, and Asia after Europe, by Sugata Bose. The essay appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/murthy/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal:
A Review Essay

How Asia Found Herself, by Nile Green
Asia after Europe, by Sugata Bose

Reviewed by Viren Murthy
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2024)

Nile Green, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. 472 pp. ISBN: 9780300257045 (hardcover).

Sugata Bose, Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024. 288pp.ISBN: 9780674423497 (hardcover).

In the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in the category of Asia. This might seem strange because, at least since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism and, more recently, Martin E. Lewis and Kären Wiggen’s The Myth of Continents,[1] “Asia” has been easy to deconstruct. Harry Harootunian puts the problem succinctly in his critique of area studies:

It has been one of the enduring ironies of the study of Asia that Asia itself, as an object, simply doesn’t exist. While geographers and mapmakers once confidently named a sector on maps, noting even its coordinates as if in fact it existed, this enmapped place has never been more than a simulacrum of a substanceless something. It refers only to itself in the expectation that something out there will eventually correspond to it or be made to align with it. The cartographers’ art has been produced by an age-old fantasy and then reinforced by requirements of World War II. Nonetheless we have in this country professional organizations devoted to the study of this simulacrum, and educational institutions pledged to disseminating knowledge of it, even as the object vanishes before our eyes once we seek to apprehend it.[2] Continue reading Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal: A Review Essay →

Shifts of Power review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Theodore D. Huters’ review of Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, by Luo Zhitian, translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/huters/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Shifts of Power:
Modern Chinese Thought and Society

By Luo Zhitian
Translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun

Reviewed by Theodore D. Huters
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2024)

Luo Zhitian, Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Xvi + 425 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-35055-7 (hardbound) ISBN 978-90-04-35056-4 (e-book)

Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, by the prolific historian Luo Zhitian 罗志田 and admirably translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun, was originally published in Chinese in 2014 as Quanshi zhuanyi: jindai Zhongguo de sixiang yu shehui (权势转移: 近代中国的思想与社会). With one exception, this important book consists of an assemblage of nine separate articles that appeared over almost twenty years in academic journals between the late 1990s and the date of its Beijing publication as a monograph. The titles of the chapters and their original publication dates are as follows: (1) The Worship of the New: A Shift of Power in Modern Chinese Thought under the Impact of the Western Tide (1999-2000); (2) The Abolition of the Examination System and the Disintegration of the Four-Class Society: Modern Social Change in the Eyes of an Inland Member of the Gentry (1997); 3) The Impact of the Abolition of the Examination System on Rural Society (2006); (4) Shifts of Social Power in Modern China: The Marginalization of Intellectuals and the Rise of the Marginal Intellectual (1999); (5) The Worries and Responsibilities of Educated Chinese in the Age of Transition (2009); (6) The Monolithicization of Chinese Tradition: The Development of Anti-Traditional Trends in the Late Qing and Early Republic (2003); (7) The Divided West: The International Storm and the Development of Chinese Thought in the May Fourth Era (1999); (8) Reflections on the Uniqueness of Modern Chinese Nationalism (2003); and (9) The State Advances, the People Retreat: The Rise of a Trend in the Late Qing (no date). Continue reading Shifts of Power review →

Beyond Citizenship review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Frederik H. Green’s review of Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945, by Di Luo. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/green3/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and
Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945

By Di Luo

Reviewed by Frederik H. Green

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2024)

Di Luo, Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 Leiden: Brill, 2022. Xviii + 282 pp. ISBN 9789004524736 (Hardback) | ISBN 9789004524743 (eBook).

Di Luo’s highly engaging monograph Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945, explores the intricate relationship between literacy and the rise of the nation state in Republican-period China. Luo does not focus on the means through which gains in literacy were achieved or the tangible and intangible benefits improved literacy rates presented to the newly educated citizens or the nation state. Rather, Luo’s interest lies in the question of how the practice of literacy training in itself shaped the relationship between the state and the various actors involved in literacy training, including administrators, policy makers, local cadres, teachers, and students. Literacy training remained high on the agenda of both the GMD (KMT) and the CCP throughout the first part of the twentieth century, yet there existed distinct differences in each party’s respective discourse regarding the form and purpose of literacy training as well as in the ways each party named and presented illiteracy. Luo’s intention is not to demonstrate whether the GMD’s or the CCP’s strategies for literacy training were more successful. Instead, she illustrates through a number of fascinating case studies how the various actors involved perceived the role and value of those efforts and what differences existed in the way success was recorded, measured, and presented differently by the GMD and CCP. By putting the training process at the center of her analysis, as the reader is informed in the introduction, Luo highlights the “agentive role of historical actors and their participatory experience in meaning-making, rather than literacy per se” (18). To Luo, literacy training is a social process the importance of which to the making of modern China does not rest on the practice of learning alone, but equally “on the practices of sponsoring, managing, teaching, and representing” (20). In order to document this social process and the multi-dimensional practices the GMD and CCP engaged in, Luo carefully studied government and other official records in over a dozen major libraries and archives in China and the US. The result is an eye-opening study that captivates its reader through both its depths and breath and that spans from the late Qing until the first years of the People’s Republic. Continue reading Beyond Citizenship review →

Shanghai Urban Life review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Andrea Janku’s review of Shanghai Urban Life and Its Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements, by Xiong Yuezhi. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/janku/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk A. Denton, MCLC

Shanghai Urban Life and Its
Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements

By Xiong Yuezhi
Translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun

Reviewed by Andrea Janku
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2024)

Xiong Yuezhi, Shanghai Urban Life and Its Heterogenous Cultural Entanglements Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Xvi + 425 pp. ISSN: 1874-8023; ISBN 978-90-04-51110-1 (hardback); ISBN 978-90-04-52289-3 (e-book)

Shanghai Urban Life and Its Heterogeneous Cultural Entanglements (异质文化交织下的上海都市生活, 2008) is the first in the Urban Life in Shanghai series, which comprises no less than twenty-five monographs covering a range of aspects of the history of Shanghai urban life and was published between 2008 and 2011. Led and coordinated by professor Xiong Yuezhi (熊月之), former vice president of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and director of its Institute of Historical Research, this almost encyclopaedic collection is the product of a major municipal research endeavour bringing together top academics from research institutes and universities across Shanghai. Xiong is the author of the first volume of the series, here under review in its translated version. Xiong’s monograph is also the first of the series to be translated into English by co-translators Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun, for the Brill Humanities in China Library, co-edited by Zhang Longxi and Axel Schneider. The Urban Life in Shanghai project was launched in 2001, building on almost two decades of research on the history of modern Shanghai that began with the political and economic changes and concomitant cultural and intellectual departures of the 1980s. Until then, Shanghai embodied all the dark sides of Western capitalist imperialism and China’s weakness in the face of it. From then on, Shanghai’s history could be seen in a far more nuanced and even positive light. While initial interest in Chinese scholarship focused on Shanghai’s economic modernity—Rhoads Murphey’s study on Shanghai as the “key to modern China”[2] remains an important reference—this more recent project is part of a trend in the scholarship toward a focus on culture and everyday life in the modern city. In addition, the present study explicitly aims at moving beyond this focus on modern urban culture to include the rural and “backward” that also continued to exist in the modern city, adding to its contradictions and diversity.[3] This mundane urban life unfolds in what Xiong portrays as a uniquely fertile environment created by the coexistence of the Chinese and the foreign, the local and the global, the rural and the urban, the rich and the poor in the International and French concessions and the old Chinese town. Taken as a whole, in the eyes of the author, the “heterogeneous cultural entanglements” characterizing this city, together with space for dissent (not Xiong’s wording) created by the fault lines along its multiple administrative boundaries, elevates Shanghai to an exceptional city, unparalleled in its diversity—administrative, ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural, etc. This claim goes beyond Marie-Claire Bergère’s conceptualization of Shanghai as “the other China.”[4] In her 1979 study of Shanghai as Republican China’s center of modern industry she highlights how the stigma of colonialism had marked Shanghai’s history after the Communist victory in 1949 and obscured the city’s national significance (despite its continuing centrality in practice). Then, Shanghai’s distinctiveness and otherness constituted a problem. Not anymore. Continue reading Shanghai Urban Life review →

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Chris Berry’s review of Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality, edited by Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/chris-berry2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Routledge Handbook of Chinese
Gender & Sexuality

Edited by Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao

Reviewed by Chris Berry

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao, eds., Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2024. Xvii + 379 pp. ISBN: 978-1-032-22729-0 (cloth); 978-1-032-22733-7 (paper); 978-1-003-27394-3 (e-book).

In their introductory essay in the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality, Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao acknowledge that there are already numerous monographs and anthologies in the field. However, they stake a claim for their book as an intervention rather than just a representative round-up of leading work. All the essays are new. Furthermore, although the editors aim for broad coverage, they also have what I see as four corrective interventions. Whereas, they claim, the field has favored the pre-1949 era, they aim to spotlight the contemporary. Whereas the roots of much work in area studies approaches China and Chineseness as a site of difference or even exceptionalism, they highlight work that is transnational in approach, understanding China and Chineseness as constant processes of becoming shaped and responding to transnational flows. In response to the proliferation of work on the peripheral areas of the larger Sinosphere favored by Sinophone scholarship, they center the volume on the People’s Republic of China (PRC). And finally, whereas the balance of existing work has tilted toward the social sciences, they emphasize arts, humanities, and cultural studies approaches, and, in particular, a “queering” approach that moves away from research that assumes fixed gender and sexual identities and toward work that questions them. In this review, I first briefly introduce the contents of this substantial volume of new writing, and then return to address some of the positions staked out by these four interventions. Continue reading Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality review →

Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Leigh Jenco’s review of Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World, by Liang Qichao, edited and translated by Peter Zarrow. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/jenco/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio:
Essays on China and the World

By Liang Qichao
Edited and Translated by Peter Zarrow

Reviewed by Leigh Jenco
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Liang Qichao. Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World Edited and translated by Peter Zarrow. Penguin Classics, 2023. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780241568781 (paperback); 9781802060140 (ebook).

As a political theorist who works on Chinese thought within the notoriously Eurocentric fields of political science and philosophy, I have been waiting a very long time for a volume like this one. Peter Zarrow has finally undertaken the considerable scholarly effort to translate, masterfully and lucidly, key essays from Liang Qichao 梁啟超, arguably the most influential figure of twentieth-century Chinese thought barring only Mao Zedong. We can now easily include in our introductory courses several weeks of key readings from the greatest mover-and-shaker to come out of the late Qing period—the figure who “invented political journalism, promoted democratic reforms, and introduced Western political theory to Chinese readers,” and “led China’s break from tradition” (ix). This volume is a real milestone.

Zarrow begins the volume with a brisk and accessible introduction that sketches the historical context without becoming bogged down in irrelevant detail. His translator’s note explains how he chose the essays to translate: he focuses on those that mainly deal with questions we would consider closer to political theory than to historiography or journalism (the other contributions for which Liang is known), and that are representative of Liang’s thinking at distinct junctures in his life. These junctures also organize the volume’s four parts: Early Reformist Thought (1896-1898), Radicalism (1899-1903), Cultural Reform (1904-1911), and Syncretism and Progress (1912-1929).  Long known as a bit of a plagiarist, Liang’s Chinese translations of Japanese-language material published under his own name are also not included in this volume, nor are his writings on literature or history, which have been published elsewhere (and Zarrow helpfully provides a bibliographic list). Continue reading Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio review →

When the Yellow River Floods review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Robin L. Visser’s review of When the Yellow River Floods: Water, Technology, and Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature, by Hui-Lin Hsu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/visser/. My thanks to MCLC literary studies book review editor, Nicholas Kaldis, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

When the Yellow River Floods: Water, Technology, and
Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature

By Hui-Lin Hsu

Reviewed by Robin L. Visser

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Hui-Lin Hsu, When the Yellow River Floods: Water, Technology, and Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2024, X + 163 pp. ISBN: 978-988-8842-77-3 (Hardback).

When the Yellow River Floods comprehensively analyzes polymath author Liu E’s (刘鹗, 1857-1909) popular late Qing novel, The Travels of Lao Can (老残游记, 1907), by engaging hydraulics, medicine, occult knowledge, and literary, social, and political history. Published in 2024 by Hong Kong University Press, the hardcover edition of 163 pages is comprised of an introduction, five chapters, and a brief conclusion. In his analysis, Hui-Lin Hsu challenges conventional understandings of late Qing literary history by connecting water management principles to literary nation-building, demonstrating how river engineering techniques inform the novel’s landscape descriptions and its medical, political, and national sentiment discourses. Though Liu E died in infamy after being exiled to Xinjiang on trumped-up charges, Travels was first serialized in 1903 to popular acclaim and retains scholarly relevance into the twenty-first century.[1]

The introduction pairs the frequent flooding of the Yellow River during Liu E’s lifetime to his work as a river engineer from 1888 to 1893 after a catastrophic dike breach in Zhengzhou killed over 930,000 people. Based on his surveys and mapping of the Yellow River in Henan, Zhili, and Shandong, Liu wrote Chart of the Course of the Yellow River (豫,直,鲁三省黄河图) and Five Essays on River Management (治河五说), key sources for Hsu’s analysis of The Travels of Lao Can. In them, Liu proposes a new embankment system of oblique dikes (斜提) that “defend water with water” (以水敌水), inspired by flood control methods attributed to the mythical Da Yu (大禹). Hsu argues that this pliant water management technique directly informs Liu E’s understanding of late Qing politics. Continue reading When the Yellow River Floods review →

HK Media and Asia’s Cold War review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Man-Fung Yip’s review of Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War, by Po-Shek Fu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/man-fung-yip/. My thanks to our new media studies book review editor, Shaoling Ma, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War

By Po-Shek Fu

Reviewed by Man-Fung Yip

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Po-Shek Fu, Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 256pp. ISBN: 9780190073770 (paperback); 9780190073763 (hardcover)

Over the decades, Po-Shek Fu has established himself as one of the most respected scholars in the field of Chinese-language cinema. His latest book on the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong of the 1950s and 1960s, with a focus on film and print media, offers the first systematic English-language study of this important but little-examined subject.

Divided into four main chapters, plus a preface and an epilogue, the book covers the period—from the late 1940s to the late 1960s—to which the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong was most germane. The first chapter offers a comprehensive mapping of the cinematic Cold War in Hong Kong and makes a convincing case for what Fu calls the “cinematic containment” of leftist or pro-communist “patriotic” cinema on the part of pro-Taiwan forces and the United States. Each of the following three chapters focuses on a case study to further explore the complex dynamics and meanings of the cultural Cold War in Hong Kong: the US-sponsored Chinese Student Weekly and its ties with the liberal “third force” movement in Republican China in chapter 2; Asia Pictures, a film studio founded by Chang Kuo-sin 張國興 with support from the Asia Foundation (a CIA-funded nongovernmental organization), in chapter 3; and the Shaw Brothers studio in chapter 4. The epilogue concludes the book by focusing on the period of the late 1960s and 1970s, when the rise of a new, local-born generation challenged and reshaped the Cold War networks of émigré cultural production, which in turn led to a gradual winding down of Hong Kong’s status as a battlefield of Asia’s cultural Cold War. Continue reading HK Media and Asia’s Cold War review →

‘To Govern the Globe’ review

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The famous Southeast Asia historian Alfred McCoy has published an important new book, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change on world history, and where it is heading with China as an aspiring new world empire. I’ve written a review of it:

“Cycles of History: Review Essay on Alfred McCoy’s To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.” By Magnus Fiskesjö. International Institute for Asian Studies newsletter (June 2024).

Sincerely,

Magnus Fiskesjö, magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu

Theater and Politics in Socialist China: A Review Essay

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Letizia Fusini’s review essay, “Theater and Politics in Socialist China,” which treats recently published books on modern Chinese drama by Maggie Greene, Siyuan Liu, and Xiaomei Chen. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/fusini/. My thanks to Jason McGrath, our soon-to-be-former book review editor for media, film, and drama studies, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Theater and Politics in Socialist China:
A Review Essay

Resisting Spirits, by Maggie Greene
Transforming Tradition, by Siyuan Liu
Performing the Socialist State, by Xiaomei Chen

Reviewed by Letizia Fusini
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)

Maggie Greene, Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform and Cultural Transformation in the PRC Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. 260pp ISBN: 9780472074303 (hardcover)

Siyuan Liu, Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 472pp. ISBN: 9780472132478 (hardcover); 9780472128723 (ebook)

Xiaomei Chen, Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 384pp. ISBN: 9780231197762 (hardcover); 9780231552332 (ebook)

Nearly a decade ago, in Autumn 2016, I had the opportunity and the privilege to teach an undergraduate survey course on the history of Chinese theater, the only one of its kind in the UK back then. I was a freshly minted PhD graduate and that was my first teaching post. Aside from developing my lecturing skills, the main challenge was to find creative strategies to make the subject more accessible to students who were majoring in theater studies and knew almost nothing about Chinese culture and history. The task became even more daunting when, due to time constraints, I had to condense the history of the rise of modern drama (huaju 话剧) and the transformations of classical theater (xiqu 戏曲) throughout the late-Qing, Republican and early socialist epochs within the space of a couple of hours. Since I wanted to avoid information overload, I began to look for a unifying thread that could hthelp me connect these three periods and, in my research, I came across an excerpt from a text written by Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 in 1904, where the future founder of the CCP eulogizes theater as the best “vehicle for social reform” (120), tracing the paternity of this idea to Confucius, who once said that “nothing is better than yue [乐, the performing arts lato sensu] at transforming social conventions” (118). These thoughts, written just before the dawn of the Republican period and yet rooted in the Confucian tradition, prefigured the Zeitgeist of the New Culture and May Fourth Movements, which, in turn, would be lauded by Mao Zedong in his essay “On New Democracy” as “having pioneered an unprecedentedly great and thoroughgoing cultural revolution” (361) whose only fault was that it failed to serve the interests of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Through these connections, I was able to visualize the (r)evolution of Chinese theater in the first half of the twentieth century as a tree growing out of Confucian roots and projecting its branches and foliage in a Marxist direction culminating with the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. My goal was to convey to my students the impression I had gotten vis-à-vis that short statement by Chen Duxiu about the power of theater to effect social change. The fact that in China, the attribution of a pedagogic and political function to theater is a traditional concept rather than a twentieth-century novelty, hence not an exclusive prerogative of the Communist period or of the Cultural Revolution, was the unifying thread I was looking for. What was initially a mere perception on my part, found confirmation in Richard Schechner’s foreword to the collection in which I originally found Chen Duxiu’s text, where he notes that “the roots of Mao’s attitude—that theater is an excellent educator and that rulers ought to use it as such—go deep in Chinese history. From an early date, theater was seen as a way of reaching ordinary people who could not read” (x). Continue reading Theater and Politics in Socialist China: A Review Essay →

Angloscene review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleasesd to announce publication of Ruodi Duan’s review of Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations, by Jay Ke-Schutte. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/ruodi-duan/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Angloscene: Compromised Personhood
in Afro-Chinese Translations

By Jay Ke-Schutte

Reviewed by Ruodi Duan

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)

Jay Ke-Schutte, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. 219 pp. ISBN: 9780520389816 (paperback); 9780520389823 (ebook).

New approaches to China-Africa studies that center the mediating role of race remain greatly needed. Jay Ke-Schutte’s Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations, which is available for free in electronic format from Luminosa, takes on this call. Through an ethnography conducted in the 2010s of the relationships and micro-interactions between Chinese and African students in Beijing, Ke-Schutte argues that these encounters are continually articulated through the vectors of whiteness, cosmopolitanism, and use of the English language. This landscape, Ke-Schutte argues, comprises the “Angloscene,” which is constituted through acts of interpersonal and intercultural translation.

I appreciate many aspects of the book. The ethnographic descriptions are rich and well-composed. Ke-Schutte accords much-deserved attention to how the dynamic afterlives of Third World unity still manifest in current-day grassroots exchanges, such as when an African student implores a Chinese street vendor to “help out a Third World brother!” (5). Relatedly, I find very provocative the connections that Ke-Schutte highlights between labor migrancy in apartheid-era South Africa and the aspirations of female rural-to-urban migrant workers in contemporary Beijing (72-75). Ke-Schutte’s willingness to tackle some of the most impossible questions in the articulation and reception of Black identities in modern Chinese society (i.e., who can be a racist?) leads to unanticipated and deeply insightful observations. For one, I am intrigued by the global reach of “white political correctness” as a register of the civilizational expectations that govern subaltern subjects (89). The exchanges between Adam, a Zimbabwean student, and his Chinese ex-girlfriend Lili at a costume party capture this dynamic. Adam and Lili found themselves trapped in an impossible bind given their use of English language as the vehicle for communication, unable to escape the racialized positions and aspirations that elevate Tim, Lili’s new white boyfriend, to relative unassailability and authority. Continue reading Angloscene review →

Utopian Fiction in China review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Hang Tu’s review of Utopian Fiction in China: Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902-1912, by Shuk Man Leung. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/hang-tu/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Utopian Fiction in China:
Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902-1912

By Shuk Man Leung

Reviewed by Hang Tu

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)

Shuk Man Leung, Utopian Fiction in China: Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902-1912 Leiden: Brill, 2023, Xiii + 306 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-68038-8 (Hardcover).

May 1, 2024 was a strange day to reflect on the theme of utopianism. On university campuses across America, anger and frustration was rife among participants of protests and counter-protests. The violence of the Middle East crisis spilled over into the American public, sharpening partisan divisions in an already polarized country. In such an atmosphere of mutual recriminations and accusations of political crimes, many would dismiss any utopian vision as naïvely, if not recklessly, pedantic, a pale intellectual legacy discussed in seminar rooms. Indeed, throughout the post-pandemic world, regional wars, power rivalries, and the law of the jungle have been taking over. East and West, dystopian sentiment was ascendant—the shared affect of those confronting various failed utopian projects with bitter resignation and cynicism. A second decade into the twenty-first century, to borrow from Enzo Traverso’s apt phrase, we find ourselves in an era that suffers the “eclipse of utopia,” one without visible, thinkable, or imaginable alternatives. Hence, isn’t it simply anachronistic to still be speaking about utopia today? Continue reading Utopian Fiction in China review →

Stories from an Ancient Land review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Mark Bender’s review of Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture, by Magnus Fiskesjö. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/bender/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Stories from an Ancient Land:
Perspectives on Wa History and Culture

By Magnus Fiskesjö

Reviewed by Mark Bender

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)

Magnus Fiskesjö, Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Xiv + 414. ISBN: 9781789208870 (Hardcover).

Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture is a much-needed examination of the history and culture of the Wa (Va) people of the borderlands of Yunnan province in southwest China and the Wa State located in eastern Myanmar (Burma). Stories from an Ancient Land was published in 2021 by Berghahn Books, New York, in a hard cover edition of 414 pages, along with black and white photos and maps. Within studies of ethnicity in Southwest China and Southeast Asia, the Wa (Va) are a well-known but relatively understudied ethnic group in comparison to the Yi, Dai, Lahu, Bai, Miao/Hmong, Yao, and other ethnicities that have received ample treatment in Anglophone scholarship in recent decades, from researchers in various fields (especially anthropology), including Stevan Harrell, Shao-hua Liu, Erik Mueggler, Sara Davis, Shanshan Du, Beth Notar, Louisa Schein, Nicholas Tapp, Ralph Litzinger, Anthony Walker, Helen Rees, Katherine Swancutt, Yanshuo Zhang, Duncan Poupard, and others. Based on his extensive fieldwork in Ximeng county, Yunnan, and supported by archival data from various sources, some dating into antiquity, Fiskesjö tells the stories of a misunderstood ethnic group that has figured in the upland economies, regional and international politics, and popular imaginings of the border regions they have for millennia called home. Continue reading Stories from an Ancient Land review →