Podcasts about east asian studies center

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwar material constraints and technological shortages, cultural workers (and audiences) became human components of audiovisual media networks that connected and built the new nation. Through a careful reading of archival sources and oral interviews, Li excavates two historically grounded terms, the guerrilla and the spirit medium, to develop a theoretical framework that explains how cinema and propaganda functioned in the socialist state. Her chapters explore the top-down visions of the cinematic image economy (the directives laid down by Mao and Jiang Qing), the grassroots labor of mobile projectionists, and the memories of film workers and audiences who, respectively, struggled to contain and enjoyed the polysemy inherent in socialist film experience. I'm very eager to hear Jie Li tell us more about this fascinating text! NOTE: I apologize for sound issues in the recording and hope you can enjoy our conversation despite them! Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwar material constraints and technological shortages, cultural workers (and audiences) became human components of audiovisual media networks that connected and built the new nation. Through a careful reading of archival sources and oral interviews, Li excavates two historically grounded terms, the guerrilla and the spirit medium, to develop a theoretical framework that explains how cinema and propaganda functioned in the socialist state. Her chapters explore the top-down visions of the cinematic image economy (the directives laid down by Mao and Jiang Qing), the grassroots labor of mobile projectionists, and the memories of film workers and audiences who, respectively, struggled to contain and enjoyed the polysemy inherent in socialist film experience. I'm very eager to hear Jie Li tell us more about this fascinating text! NOTE: I apologize for sound issues in the recording and hope you can enjoy our conversation despite them! Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwar material constraints and technological shortages, cultural workers (and audiences) became human components of audiovisual media networks that connected and built the new nation. Through a careful reading of archival sources and oral interviews, Li excavates two historically grounded terms, the guerrilla and the spirit medium, to develop a theoretical framework that explains how cinema and propaganda functioned in the socialist state. Her chapters explore the top-down visions of the cinematic image economy (the directives laid down by Mao and Jiang Qing), the grassroots labor of mobile projectionists, and the memories of film workers and audiences who, respectively, struggled to contain and enjoyed the polysemy inherent in socialist film experience. I'm very eager to hear Jie Li tell us more about this fascinating text! NOTE: I apologize for sound issues in the recording and hope you can enjoy our conversation despite them! Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwar material constraints and technological shortages, cultural workers (and audiences) became human components of audiovisual media networks that connected and built the new nation. Through a careful reading of archival sources and oral interviews, Li excavates two historically grounded terms, the guerrilla and the spirit medium, to develop a theoretical framework that explains how cinema and propaganda functioned in the socialist state. Her chapters explore the top-down visions of the cinematic image economy (the directives laid down by Mao and Jiang Qing), the grassroots labor of mobile projectionists, and the memories of film workers and audiences who, respectively, struggled to contain and enjoyed the polysemy inherent in socialist film experience. I'm very eager to hear Jie Li tell us more about this fascinating text! NOTE: I apologize for sound issues in the recording and hope you can enjoy our conversation despite them! Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwar material constraints and technological shortages, cultural workers (and audiences) became human components of audiovisual media networks that connected and built the new nation. Through a careful reading of archival sources and oral interviews, Li excavates two historically grounded terms, the guerrilla and the spirit medium, to develop a theoretical framework that explains how cinema and propaganda functioned in the socialist state. Her chapters explore the top-down visions of the cinematic image economy (the directives laid down by Mao and Jiang Qing), the grassroots labor of mobile projectionists, and the memories of film workers and audiences who, respectively, struggled to contain and enjoyed the polysemy inherent in socialist film experience. I'm very eager to hear Jie Li tell us more about this fascinating text! NOTE: I apologize for sound issues in the recording and hope you can enjoy our conversation despite them! Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwar material constraints and technological shortages, cultural workers (and audiences) became human components of audiovisual media networks that connected and built the new nation. Through a careful reading of archival sources and oral interviews, Li excavates two historically grounded terms, the guerrilla and the spirit medium, to develop a theoretical framework that explains how cinema and propaganda functioned in the socialist state. Her chapters explore the top-down visions of the cinematic image economy (the directives laid down by Mao and Jiang Qing), the grassroots labor of mobile projectionists, and the memories of film workers and audiences who, respectively, struggled to contain and enjoyed the polysemy inherent in socialist film experience. I'm very eager to hear Jie Li tell us more about this fascinating text! NOTE: I apologize for sound issues in the recording and hope you can enjoy our conversation despite them! Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwar material constraints and technological shortages, cultural workers (and audiences) became human components of audiovisual media networks that connected and built the new nation. Through a careful reading of archival sources and oral interviews, Li excavates two historically grounded terms, the guerrilla and the spirit medium, to develop a theoretical framework that explains how cinema and propaganda functioned in the socialist state. Her chapters explore the top-down visions of the cinematic image economy (the directives laid down by Mao and Jiang Qing), the grassroots labor of mobile projectionists, and the memories of film workers and audiences who, respectively, struggled to contain and enjoyed the polysemy inherent in socialist film experience. I'm very eager to hear Jie Li tell us more about this fascinating text! NOTE: I apologize for sound issues in the recording and hope you can enjoy our conversation despite them! Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song's account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

Margaret Hillenbrand's On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China's exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China's economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers' experience of civic suspension and their class others' fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy.  Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture's capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff's edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Margaret Hillenbrand's On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China's exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China's economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers' experience of civic suspension and their class others' fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy.  Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture's capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff's edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Margaret Hillenbrand's On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China's exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China's economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers' experience of civic suspension and their class others' fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy.  Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture's capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff's edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Margaret Hillenbrand's On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China's exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China's economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers' experience of civic suspension and their class others' fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy.  Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture's capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff's edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Margaret Hillenbrand's On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China's exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China's economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers' experience of civic suspension and their class others' fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy.  Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture's capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff's edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Margaret Hillenbrand's On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China's exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China's economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers' experience of civic suspension and their class others' fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy.  Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture's capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff's edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Margaret Hillenbrand's On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China's exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China's economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers' experience of civic suspension and their class others' fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy.  Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture's capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff's edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Margaret Hillenbrand's On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China's exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China's economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers' experience of civic suspension and their class others' fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy.  Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture's capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff's edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

Margaret Hillenbrand's On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China's exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China's economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers' experience of civic suspension and their class others' fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy.  Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture's capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff's edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023) is an anthology of research co-edited by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (University of Canterbury) and Professor Ming-ju Fan (National Chengchi University). This collection of original essays integrates and expands research on Taiwan literature because it includes both established and young writers. It not only engages with the evolving trends of literary Taiwan, but also promotes the translocal consciousness and cultural diversity of the island state and beyond. Focusing on the new directions and trends of Taiwan literature, this edited book fits into Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, and Asian studies. Chia-rong Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He specializes in Sinophone literature and film through the lens of postcolonial theories, indigenous studies, diaspora, and ecocriticism. Dr. Wu is the author of Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond (Cambria Press, 2016) and Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan (Cambria Press, 2020) and has published in such academic journals as the British Journal of Chinese Studies, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and American Journal of Chinese Studies. Ming-ju Fan is a Distinguished Professor of Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She is the author of Spatial/Textual/Politics, Literary Geography: Spatial Reading of Taiwanese Fiction, Chronological Searches of Taiwanese Women's Fiction and Critic Artisan, Like a Box of Chocolate: Criticism on Contemporary Literature and Culture; Co-Editor of The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023) is an anthology of research co-edited by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (University of Canterbury) and Professor Ming-ju Fan (National Chengchi University). This collection of original essays integrates and expands research on Taiwan literature because it includes both established and young writers. It not only engages with the evolving trends of literary Taiwan, but also promotes the translocal consciousness and cultural diversity of the island state and beyond. Focusing on the new directions and trends of Taiwan literature, this edited book fits into Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, and Asian studies. Chia-rong Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He specializes in Sinophone literature and film through the lens of postcolonial theories, indigenous studies, diaspora, and ecocriticism. Dr. Wu is the author of Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond (Cambria Press, 2016) and Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan (Cambria Press, 2020) and has published in such academic journals as the British Journal of Chinese Studies, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and American Journal of Chinese Studies. Ming-ju Fan is a Distinguished Professor of Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She is the author of Spatial/Textual/Politics, Literary Geography: Spatial Reading of Taiwanese Fiction, Chronological Searches of Taiwanese Women's Fiction and Critic Artisan, Like a Box of Chocolate: Criticism on Contemporary Literature and Culture; Co-Editor of The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023) is an anthology of research co-edited by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (University of Canterbury) and Professor Ming-ju Fan (National Chengchi University). This collection of original essays integrates and expands research on Taiwan literature because it includes both established and young writers. It not only engages with the evolving trends of literary Taiwan, but also promotes the translocal consciousness and cultural diversity of the island state and beyond. Focusing on the new directions and trends of Taiwan literature, this edited book fits into Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, and Asian studies. Chia-rong Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He specializes in Sinophone literature and film through the lens of postcolonial theories, indigenous studies, diaspora, and ecocriticism. Dr. Wu is the author of Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond (Cambria Press, 2016) and Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan (Cambria Press, 2020) and has published in such academic journals as the British Journal of Chinese Studies, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and American Journal of Chinese Studies. Ming-ju Fan is a Distinguished Professor of Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She is the author of Spatial/Textual/Politics, Literary Geography: Spatial Reading of Taiwanese Fiction, Chronological Searches of Taiwanese Women's Fiction and Critic Artisan, Like a Box of Chocolate: Criticism on Contemporary Literature and Culture; Co-Editor of The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023) is an anthology of research co-edited by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (University of Canterbury) and Professor Ming-ju Fan (National Chengchi University). This collection of original essays integrates and expands research on Taiwan literature because it includes both established and young writers. It not only engages with the evolving trends of literary Taiwan, but also promotes the translocal consciousness and cultural diversity of the island state and beyond. Focusing on the new directions and trends of Taiwan literature, this edited book fits into Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, and Asian studies. Chia-rong Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He specializes in Sinophone literature and film through the lens of postcolonial theories, indigenous studies, diaspora, and ecocriticism. Dr. Wu is the author of Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond (Cambria Press, 2016) and Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan (Cambria Press, 2020) and has published in such academic journals as the British Journal of Chinese Studies, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and American Journal of Chinese Studies. Ming-ju Fan is a Distinguished Professor of Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She is the author of Spatial/Textual/Politics, Literary Geography: Spatial Reading of Taiwanese Fiction, Chronological Searches of Taiwanese Women's Fiction and Critic Artisan, Like a Box of Chocolate: Criticism on Contemporary Literature and Culture; Co-Editor of The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches (Lexington Books, 2022) argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of “pure literature” and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War. Li-Chun Hsiao is professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, teaching at its School of International Liberal Studies, as well as its Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies. Hsiao is also the author of the monograph The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation: Universality, Postcoloniality, and Nationalism in the Age of Globalization (ibidem Press, 2021). Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches (Lexington Books, 2022) argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of “pure literature” and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War. Li-Chun Hsiao is professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, teaching at its School of International Liberal Studies, as well as its Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies. Hsiao is also the author of the monograph The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation: Universality, Postcoloniality, and Nationalism in the Age of Globalization (ibidem Press, 2021). Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches (Lexington Books, 2022) argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of “pure literature” and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War. Li-Chun Hsiao is professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, teaching at its School of International Liberal Studies, as well as its Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies. Hsiao is also the author of the monograph The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation: Universality, Postcoloniality, and Nationalism in the Age of Globalization (ibidem Press, 2021). Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches (Lexington Books, 2022) argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of “pure literature” and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War. Li-Chun Hsiao is professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, teaching at its School of International Liberal Studies, as well as its Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies. Hsiao is also the author of the monograph The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation: Universality, Postcoloniality, and Nationalism in the Age of Globalization (ibidem Press, 2021). Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches (Lexington Books, 2022) argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets' were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of “pure literature” and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists' expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan's modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism's mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War. Li-Chun Hsiao is professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, teaching at its School of International Liberal Studies, as well as its Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies. Hsiao is also the author of the monograph The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation: Universality, Postcoloniality, and Nationalism in the Age of Globalization (ibidem Press, 2021). Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People's Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan's politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC's efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan's national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen's treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide. Ian Rowen is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the editor of Transitions in Taiwan. Follow him on Twitter @iirowen. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People's Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan's politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC's efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan's national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen's treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide. Ian Rowen is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the editor of Transitions in Taiwan. Follow him on Twitter @iirowen. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People's Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan's politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC's efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan's national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen's treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide. Ian Rowen is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the editor of Transitions in Taiwan. Follow him on Twitter @iirowen. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People's Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan's politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC's efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan's national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen's treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide. Ian Rowen is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the editor of Transitions in Taiwan. Follow him on Twitter @iirowen. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell UP, 2023) shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People's Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan's politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC's efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary “One China,” tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan's national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen's treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide. Ian Rowen is Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the editor of Transitions in Taiwan. Follow him on Twitter @iirowen. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Owing to Taiwan's multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers' creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the “post-truth” era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022) focuses on three interrelated themes – the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers' experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors' co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination. Pei-yin Lin is Associate Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She is author or editor of multiple books, most recently Gender and Ethnicity in Taiwanese Literature: Japanese Colonial Era to Present Day (2021) and Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming (2019, co-edited with Bi-yu Chang). Wen-chi Li is Susan Manning Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK. He and Colin Bramwell won first prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition. In Taiwan, Li has published three poetry collections as well as co-edited the book Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBT. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Owing to Taiwan's multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers' creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the “post-truth” era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022) focuses on three interrelated themes – the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers' experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors' co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination. Pei-yin Lin is Associate Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She is author or editor of multiple books, most recently Gender and Ethnicity in Taiwanese Literature: Japanese Colonial Era to Present Day (2021) and Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming (2019, co-edited with Bi-yu Chang). Wen-chi Li is Susan Manning Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK. He and Colin Bramwell won first prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition. In Taiwan, Li has published three poetry collections as well as co-edited the book Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBT. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Owing to Taiwan's multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers' creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the “post-truth” era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022) focuses on three interrelated themes – the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers' experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors' co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination. Pei-yin Lin is Associate Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She is author or editor of multiple books, most recently Gender and Ethnicity in Taiwanese Literature: Japanese Colonial Era to Present Day (2021) and Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming (2019, co-edited with Bi-yu Chang). Wen-chi Li is Susan Manning Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK. He and Colin Bramwell won first prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition. In Taiwan, Li has published three poetry collections as well as co-edited the book Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBT. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Owing to Taiwan's multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers' creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the “post-truth” era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022) focuses on three interrelated themes – the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers' experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors' co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination. Pei-yin Lin is Associate Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She is author or editor of multiple books, most recently Gender and Ethnicity in Taiwanese Literature: Japanese Colonial Era to Present Day (2021) and Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming (2019, co-edited with Bi-yu Chang). Wen-chi Li is Susan Manning Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK. He and Colin Bramwell won first prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition. In Taiwan, Li has published three poetry collections as well as co-edited the book Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBT. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai's films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai's films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation. Conceiving of Tsai's cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai's body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol and Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai's films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai's films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation. Conceiving of Tsai's cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai's body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol and Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai's films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai's films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation. Conceiving of Tsai's cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai's body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol and Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai's films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai's films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation. Conceiving of Tsai's cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai's body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol and Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai's films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai's films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation. Conceiving of Tsai's cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai's body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol and Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai's films. Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai's films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation. Conceiving of Tsai's cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai's body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol and Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their identities. In Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan (U Chicago Press, 2022), ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig shows how rap music has become a powerful tool in the post-authoritarian period for both exploring and producing new knowledge about the ethnic, cultural, and political history of Taiwan. Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, taking readers to concert venues, music video sets, scenes of protest, and more to show how early MCs from marginalized ethnic groups infused rap with important aspects of their own local languages, music, and narrative traditions. Aiming their critiques at the educational system and a neoliberal economy, new generations of rappers have used the art form to nurture associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship, making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present. Meredith Schweig is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Emory. Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular musics of East Asia, with a particular emphasis on narrative, gender, and cultural politics in post-authoritarian Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their identities. In Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan (U Chicago Press, 2022), ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig shows how rap music has become a powerful tool in the post-authoritarian period for both exploring and producing new knowledge about the ethnic, cultural, and political history of Taiwan. Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, taking readers to concert venues, music video sets, scenes of protest, and more to show how early MCs from marginalized ethnic groups infused rap with important aspects of their own local languages, music, and narrative traditions. Aiming their critiques at the educational system and a neoliberal economy, new generations of rappers have used the art form to nurture associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship, making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present. Meredith Schweig is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Emory. Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular musics of East Asia, with a particular emphasis on narrative, gender, and cultural politics in post-authoritarian Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Formosa Files is delighted to announce a very special episode in collaboration with the University of Southern California's East Asian Studies Center and the New Books Network! The USC's Li-ping Chen recently interviewed Andrew D. Morris, the author of a 2022 book (of the same name as this episode's title) on the defector pilots who risked it all to fly their planes (mostly military jets, but one famous case was a commercial airliner) to Taiwan from China. Each case is fascinating; some are even shocking. Many thanks to Li-ping Chen and Andrew D. Morris. Links to Morris' book and more info on the New Books Network can be found at www.formosafiles.com. Check out https://newbooksnetwork.com/defectors-from-the-prc-to-taiwan-1960-1989 for the unedited interview.

In On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation (Hong Kong UP, 2022), Michael Keevak traces the Western reception of the Chinese concept of “face” during the past two hundred years, arguing that it has always been linked to nineteenth-century colonialism. “Lose face” and “save face” have become so normalized in modern European languages that most users do not even realize that they are of Chinese origin. “Face” is an extremely complex and varied notion in all East Asian cultures. It involves proper behavior and the avoidance of conflict, encompassing every aspect of one's place in society as well as one's relationships with other people. One can “give face,” “get face,” “fight for face,” “tear up face,” and a host of other expressions. But when it began to become known to the Western trading community in China beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was distorted and reduced to two phrases only, “lose face” and “save face,” both of which were used to suggest distinctly Western ideas of humiliation, embarrassment, honor, and reputation. The Chinese were judged as a race obsessed with the fear of “losing (their) face,” and they constantly resorted to vain attempts to “save” it in the face of Western correction. “Lose face” may be an authentic Chinese expression but “save face” is different. “Save face” was actually a Western invention. Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University. His books include Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars (2017), Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (2011), The Story of a Stele: China's Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625–1916 (HKUP, 2008), The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar's Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (2004), and Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (2001). Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network