Category: Association for Asian Studies

August 30, 2022

“Seoul, So Far Away” from Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

Park Wan-suh

“Suddenly a blinding flash shot from a building straight into my eyes. The light was unlike any I’d seen before. There was no fire, but it was more intense than any flame. I clung to my mother in fear. She...

March 29, 2022

The Complex Image of Empress Dowager Cixi of the Qing Empire

Daniel Barish

“In Barish’s study of imperial education, Empress Dowager Cixi emerges as a skillful coalition builder, open to diverse policy stances, who participates in the global movement toward nationalizing monarchies. Learning to Rule offers readers a fresh, complex vision of Qing...

March 23, 2022

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...

March 8, 2022

Reflections on International Women’s Day and Chinese History

Elizabeth LaCouture

On International Women’s Day, March 8, 1942, the author Ding Ling published her “Thoughts on March 8” in the Yan’an Soviet newspaper. She opened with a question: “When will it no longer be necessary to attach special weight to the...

March 2, 2022

Jon Wilson in Conversation with Alisa Freedman on Japan on American TV

The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Asia Shorts book series—distributed by Columbia University Press—offers concise, engagingly written titles by highly qualified authors on topics of significance in Asian Studies. Topics are intended to be substantive, generate discussion and debate within...

January 26, 2022

A Soviet Futurist in Beijing

Sergei Tretyakov’s Internationalist Aesthetics

Edward Tyerman

“You are travelling to Beijing. You must write travel notes. But not just as notes for yourself. No, they must have social significance.” These are the opening words of “Moscow—Beijing,” a 1925 travel sketch written by the Soviet writer Sergei...

September 16, 2021

I-Novel, You-Novel, True-Novel, False-Novel

By Jeremy Tiang

“Compared to the world of novels—of the imagination—the real world was a letdown.”      ~Minae Mizumura, Inheritance from Mother (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter) Lo Yi-Chin’s Faraway tells the story of a man named Lo Yi-Chin, also a Taiwanese novelist, who...

September 9, 2021

Gender Bending and Homosexuality in an Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel

By Susan Chan Egan

What does one make of a male adolescent who is sometimes mistaken for a girl; fancies himself a calligrapher and aesthete; has excessive sympathy for all things pretty that extends even to fallen flower petals; indulges in affectionate sex play...

September 7, 2021

Q&A: Pai Hsien-yung on Chinese Notions of the Afterlife and The Story of the Stone

The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber) is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature. Embedded in the novel is a biting critique of imperial China’s political and social system. The...

June 17, 2021

Challenged Friendships in Challenging Times

From the Introduction to U.S. Strategy in the Asian Century

By Abraham Denmark

As the twenty-first century seems to be dominated by great power competition between China and the United States, everyone wonders whether war will come and how to avoid it. In U.S. Strategy in the Asian Century: Empowering Allies and Partners,...

June 1, 2021

Transtopia: A Keyword for Our Century

By Howard Chiang

My first attempt to bring together Chinese studies and transgender studies dates to a conference I organized in 2009. That conference resulted in an edited volume called Transgender China (2012). Not long after the book appeared, I discovered that my...

May 13, 2021

Q&A: Minae Mizumura on An I-Novel

Minae Mizumura is one of Japan’s most respected novelists. Published in 1995, her An I-Novel— a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s—radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. In this Q&A, Mizumura...