Asia – Page 18 – UH Press

Media in Reform-Era China

Posted on July 8, 2010 by stephchun

Serialized television drama (dianshiju), perhaps the most popular and influential cultural form in China over the past three decades, offers a wide and penetrating look at the tensions and contradictions of the post-revolutionary and pro-market period. Zhong Xueping’s Mainstream Culture Refocused: Television Drama, Society, and the Production of Meaning in Reform-Era China draws attention to the multiple cultural and historical legacies that coexist and challenge each other within this dominant form of story telling. Although scholars tend to focus their attention on elite cultural trends and avant garde movements in literature and film, Zhong argues for recognizing the complexity of dianshiju’s melodramatic mode and its various subgenres, in effect “refocusing” mainstream Chinese culture.

“This is a very timely and original work that fills a significant gap in studies on contemporary Chinese culture. It does a compelling job in showing how and why these dramas on the small screen both dramatize and mediate the social and political transformations taking place in China today. The book will contribute significantly to Chinese media studies and cultural studies and, because many TV dramas are adapted from literary works, to debates on the changing status of Chinese literature and literary studies in an era infused with commercialism and visuality. This will be a path-breaking study.” —Zhen Zhang, New York University

July 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3469-2 / $27.00 (PAPER)

Zen Sand Now Available in Paperback

Posted on July 8, 2010 by stephchun

“[Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Koan Practice, by Victor Sogen Hori,] is a thorough and excellent piece of scholarship that will, I suspect, be the standard English-language work on jakugo for many decades to come. No serious student or practitioner of Zen will want to be without a copy.” —Religious Studies Review

“The best scholarly book on actual Zen practice in Japan to appear in recent decades.” —Journal of Chinese Religions

“Not only a well-documented and meticulously researched, comprehensive sourcebook. . . . It also succeeds superbly in setting the record straight and clarifies some widespread but misguided notions about Zen.” —Japanese Journal of Religious Studies

July 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3507-1 / $32.00 (PAPER)
Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture

Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama

Posted on June 16, 2010 by stephchun

In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. The plays were seen not simply as the emergence of a new literary form but as a manifestation of modernity itself, transforming the stage into a site for the exploration of new ideas and ways of being. A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900-1930, is the first book in English to examine the full range of early twentieth-century Japanese drama. Accompanying his study, M. Cody Poulton provides his translations of representative one-act plays. Poulton looks at the emergence of drama as a modern literary and artistic form and chronicles the creation of modern Japanese drama as a reaction to both traditional (particularly kabuki) dramaturgy and European drama. Translations and productions of the latter became the model for the so-called New Theater (shingeki), where the question of how to be both modern and Japanese at the same time was hotly contested.

June 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3452-4 / $29.00 (PAPER)

Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics

Posted on June 14, 2010 by stephchun

Conventional wisdom has it that the concept of individualism was absent in early China. In Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics, an uncommon study of the self and human agency in ancient China, Erica Fox Brindley provides an important corrective to this view and persuasively argues that an idea of individualism can be applied to the study of early Chinese thought and politics with intriguing results. She introduces the development of ideological and religious beliefs that link universal, cosmic authority to the individual in ways that may be referred to as individualistic and illustrates how these evolved alongside and potentially helped contribute to larger sociopolitical changes of the time, such as the centralization of political authority and the growth in the social mobility of the educated elite class.

“Contrary to common claims about the absence of individualism in early China and its supposed reification in ‘the West,’ both the Western and Chinese traditions have historically been characterized by diverse and constantly evolving attitudes toward the individual. This book serves as an important corrective to monolithic or essentializing accounts of early Chinese thought, and the narrative concerning the evolution of the concept of the individual in early China is an interesting and novel one. It will appeal widely to people working on early Chinese thought and comparative religion more broadly.” —Edward Slingerland, University of British Columbia

June 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3386-2 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

Racializing Okinawan Diaspora in Bolivia and Japan

Posted on June 9, 2010 by stephchun

Embodying Belonging: Racializing Okinawan Diaspora in Bolivia and Japan, by Taku Suzuki, is the first full-length study of a Okinawan diasporic community in South America and Japan. Under extraordinary conditions throughout the twentieth century (Imperial Japanese rule, the brutal Battle of Okinawa at the end of World War II, U.S. military occupation), Okinawans left their homeland and created various diasporic communities around the world. Colonia Okinawa, a farming settlement in the tropical plains of eastern Bolivia, is one such community that was established in the 1950s under the guidance of the U.S. military administration. Although they have flourished as farm owners in Bolivia, thanks to generous support from the Japanese government since Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, hundreds of Bolivian-born ethnic Okinawans have left the Colonia in the last two decades and moved to Japanese cities, such as Yokohama, to become manual laborers in construction and manufacturing industries.

Based on the author’s multisited field research on the work, education, and community lives of Okinawans in the Colonia and Yokohama, this ethnography challenges the unidirectional model of assimilation and acculturation commonly found in immigration studies. In its vivid depiction of the transnational experiences of Okinawan-Bolivians, it argues that transnational Okinawan-Bolivians underwent the various racialization processes—in which they were portrayed by non-Okinawan Bolivians living in the Colonia and native-born Japanese mainlanders in Yokohama and self-represented by Okinawan-Bolivians themselves—as the physical embodiment of a generalized and naturalized “culture” of Japan, Okinawa, or Bolivia.

May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3344-2 / $47.00 (CLOTH)

The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film

Posted on May 26, 2010 by stephchun

Contemporary Chinese films are popular with audiences worldwide, but a key reason for their success has gone unnoticed: many of the films are adapted from brilliant literary works. Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film, by Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, is the first to put these landmark films in the context of their literary origins and explore how the best Chinese directors adapt fictional narratives and styles for film. She unites aesthetics with history in her argument that the rise of cinema in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the late 1980s was partly fueled by burgeoning literary movements. Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s highly acclaimed films Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live are built on the experimental works of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Yu Hua, respectively. Hong Kong new wave’s Ann Hui and Stanley Kwan capitalized on the irresistible visual metaphors of Eileen Chang’s postrealism. Hou Xiaoxian’s new Taiwan cinema turned to fiction by Huang Chunming and Zhu Tianwen for fine-grained perspectives on class and gender relations. Delving equally into the individual approaches of directors and writers, Deppman initiates readers into the exciting possibilities emanating from the world of Chinese cinema.

“Hsiu-Chuang Deppman’s ambitious book investigates the complex associative and conceptual interaction between literature and film, arguing that in many cases, a structural connection underlies the relationship. Her work is a strong challenge to those who believe literature and film should always be regarded as completely separate and unrelated. Deppman’s fascinating chapter on the hip Wong Kar-wai and his debt to novelist Liu Yichang well illustrates the way in which directors can play with and play off of narrative structures, in the process setting up a provocative intersection.” –Wendy Larson, University of Oregon

May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3454-8 / $27.00 (PAPER)

Chinese Writing and Calligraphy

Posted on May 20, 2010 by stephchun

Suitable for college and high school students and those learning on their own, Wendan Li’s Chinese Writing and Calligraphy is a fully illustrated coursebook that provides comprehensive instruction in the history and practical techniques of Chinese calligraphy. No previous knowledge of the language is required to follow the text or complete the lessons. The work covers three major areas: 1) descriptions of Chinese characters and their components, including stroke types, layout patterns, and indications of sound and meaning; 2) basic brush techniques; and 3) the social, cultural, historical, and philosophical underpinnings of Chinese calligraphy—all of which are crucial to understanding and appreciating this art form.

May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3364-0 / $25.00 (PAPER)
A Latitude 20 Book

Understanding Chinese Tombs

Posted on May 17, 2010 by stephchun

No other civilization in the premodern world was more obsessed with constructing underground burial structures than China, where for at least five thousand years people devoted a great amount of wealth and labor to build tombs and furnish them with exquisite objects and images. For the most part, tombs have been mainly appreciated as “treasure troves,” the contents of which has allowed art historians to rewrite histories of individual art forms such as bronze, jade, sculpture, and painting. However, new trends in Chinese art history place the entire burial (rather than its individual components) at the center of observation and interpretation. Wu Hung’s The Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs takes this to the next level by focusing on interpretive methods. It argues that to achieve a genuine understanding of Chinese tombs we need to reconsider a host of art historical concepts (including visuality, viewership, space, formal analysis, function, and context) and derive an analytical framework from the three most essential aspects of any manufactured work: spatiality, materiality, and temporality.

“Most informative and innovative. . . written in a lucid style that should appeal to both engaged and general readers. Wu Hung has again proven himself to be a ground-breaker of Chinese art history.” —David D. W. Wang, Harvard University

May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3426-5 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

Tomoko Aoyama Honored for Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature

Posted on May 13, 2010 by stephchun

Tomoko Aoyama is the most recent recipient of the Asian Studies Association of Australia’s Mid-career Researcher Prize for Excellence. Dr. Aoyama received the prize for her work in Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature, published by UH Press in 2008.

“At first glance, this seems an unlikely subject, but the originality of the topic is fully sustained by the clarity of exposition, the profound knowledge of modern Japanese literature (both in the original and in translation) and the assurance of the author’s voice. A wide-ranging interest in theory never obscures its application to the discussion of particular works and themes. With a broad interdisciplinary approach, the author offers many sharp and relevant insights from anthropology, history, cultural studies, feminism, etc., and her cross-cultural insights are well-based. A feature of the book is the skill with which the English reader is led to appreciate linguistic subtleties in the Japanese.” —Citation from the Prize Committee

New Kuroda Title on Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan

Posted on April 29, 2010 by stephchun

Hokkeji, an ancient Nara temple that once stood at the apex of a state convent network established by Queen-Consort Komyo (701–760), possesses a history that in some ways is bigger than itself. Its development is emblematic of larger patterns in the history of female monasticism in Japan. In Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan, Lori Meeks explores the revival of Japan’s most famous convent, an institution that had endured some four hundred years of decline following its establishment. With the help of the Ritsu (Vinaya)-revivalist priest Eison (1201–1290), privately professed women who had taken up residence at Hokkeji succeeded in reestablishing a nuns’ ordination lineage in Japan. Meeks considers a broad range of issues surrounding women’s engagement with Buddhism during a time when their status within the tradition was undergoing significant change. The thirteenth century brought women greater opportunities for ordination and institutional leadership, but it also saw the spread of increasingly androcentric Buddhist doctrine. Hokkeji explores these contradictions.

“This book makes major contributions to at least three key topics: women and Buddhism, mainstream Buddhism in premodern Japan, and religious institutions as settings for cultural and religious life. It is the first study to provide readers with a detailed and comprehensive overview of a single specific religious site and the women who lived there. Although the number of works that deal with women and Buddhism continues to grow (testifying to the on-going interest in this topic), none to my knowledge have yet attempted such a sustained analysis of a female religious order. While the so-called new Buddhism of the Kamakura period attracts the most attention from scholars, this study demonstrates the importance of the mainstream religious centers of Nara (and Kyoto) for our understanding of religions in premodern Japan.” —William M. Bodiford, University of California, Los Angeles

April 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3394-7 / $50.00 (CLOTH)
Studies in East Asian Buddhism, No. 23
Published in association with the Kuroda Institute

How Zen Became Zen Now Available in Paperback

Posted on April 29, 2010 by stephchun

The paperback edition of How Zen Became Zen: The Dispute over Enlightenment and the Formation of Chan Buddhism in Song-Dynasty China, by Morten Schlűtter, is now available.

“Its solid, sophisticated, and original research is undeniably outstanding. Schlütter presents us with many innovative and insightful observations and conclusions on the doctrinal and soteriological issues behind the enlightenment dispute, which greatly enhance our understanding of the development of Song Chan Buddhism. His exhaustive search and use of all available, relevant primary materials and well-crafted application of philological and sociohistorical approaches are especially remarkable. The achievements of this excellent work will serve to inspire the field for many years to come.” —H-Buddhism

April 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3508-8 / $27.00 (PAPER)
Studies in East Asian Buddhism, No. 22
Published in association with the Kuroda Institute

Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction

Posted on April 29, 2010 by stephchun

The Other Women’s Lib: Gender and Body in Japanese Women’s Fiction, by Julia C. Bullock, provides the first systematic analysis of Japanese literary feminist discourse of the 1960s—a full decade before the “women’s lib” movement emerged in Japan. It highlights the work of three well-known female fiction writers of this generation (Kono Taeko, Takahashi Takako, and Kurahashi Yumiko) for their avant-garde literary challenges to dominant models of femininity. Focusing on four tropes persistently employed by these writers to protest oppressive gender stereotypes—the disciplinary masculine gaze, feminist misogyny, “odd bodies,” and female homoeroticism—Julia Bullock brings to the fore their previously unrecognized theoretical contributions to second-wave radical feminist discourse.

“Julia Bullock’s lively study fills a significant lacuna in our understanding of feminist theoretical development prior to the women’s lib movement of the 1970s. Dealing with three of the most fascinating and challenging authors of the era, Bullock’s sustained literary analyses are adroit, illuminating, and informative. Her study is lucid enough to open itself to bright undergraduates, but provocative enough to engage seasoned scholars of modern literature.” —Rebecca Copeland, author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan

April 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3453-1 / $25.00 (PAPER)