Announcing Our 2022 Asian Studies Catalog
Letter from the Editors:
We are pleased to present the 2022 Columbia University Press Asian studies catalog. These books span many fields in Asian studies—history, politics, literary studies, philosophy, religion, and film—and reflect the interdisciplinary and global approach of our list.
For the tea lovers among you, Robert Hellyer’s Green with Milk and Sugar tells the fascinating story of the rise and fall of Japanese tea exports to the United States, where nineteenth-century Midwestern farmers would start the day with a mug of sweet, milky sencha. In The Values in Numbers, Hoyt Long brings a computational approach to modern Japanese literary history, while the editors of Literary Information in China show how informatic practices shape literary tradition. Wai-yee Li’s The Promise and Peril of Things and Sophie Volpp’s The Substance of Fiction consider the complex role of objects in the culture and literature of late imperial China. And in Internationalist Aesthetics, Edward Tyerman offers new insight into the transnational dynamics that shaped socialist aesthetics and politics in both China and the Soviet Union.
In history and politics, we’re pleased to present several new books that shed light on Asia’s place in the world. Michael J. Green’s Line of Advantage looks at the historical context and importance of Abe’s foreign policy in Japan. Jie-Hyun Lim’s Global Easts explores the history of memory and the entanglements of Easts—East Asia and Eastern Europe—to reconsider global history from the margins. Lastly, in a new edition of Eurasian Crossroads, James A. Millward gives a sweeping account of the culturally rich and politically fraught Xinjiang region of China.
Among the new offerings in philosophy and religious studies, we’d like to highlight C. Pierce Salguero’s just-published A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine, a concise and accessible history of two and a half millennia of Buddhist interactions inside and outside Asia with the evolving discipline of medicine, a fruitful collaboration that continues today. Philosophy’s Big Questions, edited by Steven M. Emmanuel, explores such perennial topics as happiness, the structure of reality, the nature of consciousness, the limits of knowledge, and the conditions for a just society from Buddhist and Western perspectives. And In the Forest of the Blind by Matthew W. King is a groundbreaking account of the transnational literary, social, and political history of Faxian’s foundational work Record of Buddhist Kingdoms.
The How to Read Chinese Literature series continues to provide thoughtful classroom materials. The latest pair, How to Read Chinese Prose and How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese, can be used separately or together for the study of Chinese literature in English and Chinese language learning. Our fiction offerings include the short Uyghur novel The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun, translated by Darren Byler, and the Taiwanese queer sci-fi dystopian novel The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich.
Caelyn Cobb, editor for global history and politics
Christine Dunbar, editor for Asian humanities and translations
Wendy Lochner, publisher for philosophy and religion
