Publications Program

What happens when historiography–the way historical events are committed to writing–shapes historical events as they occur? How do we read biography when it is truly “life-writing,” its subjects fully engaged with the historiographical rhetoric that would record their words and deeds?The Threshold, a study of the culture of historiography in early medieval China, explores these questions through the lens of the History of Liu-Song, a dynastic history compiled in 488 and covering the first three-quarters of the fifth century. Rhetoric courses through early medieval historiography, from the way the historian framed history for his readers to the political machinations contained within the historical narratives, from the active use of rhetorical techniques to the passive effect that embedded discourses exercised on historian, historical actor, and reader alike. Tracing these varied strands of historical argumentation, Zeb Raft shows how history was constructed through rhetorical elements including the narration of officialdom, the anecdote, and, above all, the historical document. The portrait that emerges is of an epideictic historiography where praise was mixed with irony and achievement diluted with ambivalence, and where the most secure positions lay on the threshold of political power and historical interpretation.

Xiao Hong, Yom Sang-sop, Abe Kobo and Zhong Lihe—these iconic literary figures from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all described Manchuria extensively in their literary works. Now China’s Northeast but a contested frontier in the first half of the twentieth century, Manchuria has inspired writers from all over East Asia to claim it as their own, employing novel themes and forms for engaging nation and empire in modern literature. Many of these works have been canonized as quintessential examples of national or nationalist literature--even though they also problematize the imagined boundedness and homogeneity of nation and national literature at its core. Through the theoretical lens of literary territorialization, Miya Xie reconceptualizes modern Manchuria as a critical site for making and unmaking national literatures in East Asia. Xie ventures into hitherto uncharted territory by comparing East Asian literatures in three different languages and analyzing their close connections in the transnational frontier. By revealing how writers of different nationalities constantly enlisted transnational elements within a nation-centered body of literature, Territorializing Manchuria uncovers a history of literary co-formation at the very site of division and may offer insights for future reconciliation in the region.

In Saying All That Can Be Said, Keith McMahon presents the first full analysis of the sexually explicit portrayals in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 (The Plum in the Golden Vase). Countering common views of those portrayals as “just sex” or as “bad sex,” he shows that they are rich in thematic meaning and loaded with social and aesthetic purpose. McMahon places the novel in the historical context of Chinese sexual culture, from which Jin Ping Mei inherits the style of the elegant, metaphorical description of erotic pleasure, but which the anonymous author extends in an exploration of the explicit, the obscene, and the graphic. The novel uses explicit description to evaluate and comment on characters, situations, and sexual and psychic states of being. Echoing the novel’s way of taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world, McMahon celebrates the richness and exuberance of Jin Ping Mei’s language of sex, which refuses imprisonment within the boundaries of orthodox culture’s cleanly authoritative style, and which continues to inspire admiration from readers around the world. Saying All That Can Be Said will change the way we think about sexual culture in pre-modern China.

Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialized space emerged out of multilateral power relations. In the formative years of modern Japan, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter-imperial negotiations, where empires nudged each other to secure their status with minimal costs rather than fighting a territorial scramble. Based on multiarchival, multilingual research, Demarcating Japan argues that the transformation of border islands should be understood in as an interconnected process, where inter-local referencing played a key role in the outcome—Japan’s geographical expansion in the face of domineering Extra-Asian empires. Underneath this multilateral process were the connections forged by individuals. Translators, doctors, traffickers, castaways, and indigenous hunters crisscrossed border regions and exerted violence, exchanged knowledge, forged friendships, and transformed their own lives. Although their motivations were eclectic and their interactions transcended national borders, the linkages they created were essential in driving territorialization forward. Demarcating Japan demonstrates the crucial role of nonstate actors in formulating a territory, usually narrated in the languages of inter-state relations.

By shedding light on a long-forgotten epigraphic genre that flourished in North China under the rule of the Mongol empire, or Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), this book explores the ways the conquered Chinese people understood and represented the alien Mongol ruling principles in their own cultural tradition. This epigraphic genre, which this book collectively calls “genealogical steles,” was quite unique in the history of Chinese epigraphy, for these steles were commissioned by northern Chinese officials under Mongol rule exclusively to record a family’s extensive genealogy, instead of the biography or achievements of an individual. The evolution of these steles delineates the way Mongols thoroughly recast the local elite stratum in North China who, while thinking of themselves as the heirs of traditional Chinese elite culture, fully accommodated to the principles of Mongol imperial rule and became one of its cornerstones in eastern Eurasia. Also, the rise of this epigraphic genre demonstrates that Mongol rule fundamentally affected how northern Chinese families defined, organized, and commemorated their kinship. Because most of these inscriptions are in Classical Chinese, they appear to be part of Chinese tradition. But in fact, they reflect a massive social change in Chinese society that occurred because of Mongol rule in China.

Building a Nation at War argues that the Chinese Nationalist government’s retreat inland during the Sino–Japanese War (1937–1945), its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new scientific and technical relationships with the United States led to fundamental changes in how the Nationalists engaged with science and technology as tools to promote development.The war catalyzed an emphasis on applied sciences, comprehensive economic planning, and development of scientific and technical human resources—all of which served the Nationalists’ immediate and long-term goals. It created an opportunity for the Nationalists to extend control over inland China and over education and industry. It also provided opportunities for China to mobilize transnational networks of Chinese-Americans, Chinese in America, and the American government and businesses. These groups provided technical advice, ran training programs, and helped the Nationalists acquire manufactured goods and tools.J. Megan Greene shows how the Nationalists worked these programs to their advantage, even in situations where their American counterparts clearly had the upper hand. Finally, this book shows how, although American advisers and diplomats criticized China for harboring resources rather than putting them into winning the war against Japan, U.S. industrial consultants were also strongly motivated by postwar goals.

Taiwan has been depicted as an island facing the incessant threat of forcible unification with the People’s Republic of China. Why, then, has Taiwan spent more than three decades pouring capital and talent into China?In award-winning Rival Partners, Jieh-min Wu follows the development of Taiwanese enterprises in China over twenty-five years and provides fresh insights. The geopolitical shift in Asia beginning in the 1970s and the global restructuring of value chains since the 1980s created strong incentives for Taiwanese entrepreneurs to rush into China despite high political risks and insecure property rights. Taiwanese investment, in conjunction with Hong Kong capital, laid the foundation for the world’s factory to flourish in the southern province of Guangdong, but official Chinese narratives play down Taiwan’s vital contribution. It is hard to imagine the Guangdong model without Taiwanese investment, and, without the Guangdong model, China’s rise could not have occurred.Going beyond the received wisdom of the “China miracle” and “Taiwan factor,” Wu delineates how Taiwanese businesspeople, with the cooperation of local officials, ushered global capitalism into China. By partnering with its political archrival, Taiwan has benefited enormously, while helping to cultivate an economic superpower that increasingly exerts its influence around the world.

Webtoons are the latest manifestation of the Korean Wave of popular culture that has increasingly caught on across the globe in recent years, especially among youth. Webtoons are a form of comic that are typically published digitally in chapter form. Originally distributed via the Internet, they are now increasingly distributed through smartphones to ravenous readers in Korea and around the world.Therise of webtoons has fundamentally altered the Korean cultural marketdue to the recent growth of transmedia storytelling—the flow of a story from the originaltext to various other media platforms, such as films, television, and digitalgames—and the convergenceof cultural content and digital technologies. Fans can enjoy this contentanytime and anywhere, either purely as webtoons oras webtoon-based big-screen culture.Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture analyzes webtoons through the lens of emerging digital cultures and discusses relevant cultural perspectives by combining two different, yet connected approaches, political economy and cultural studies. The book demonstrates the dynamics between structural forces and textual engagement in global media flows and illuminates snack culture and binge-reading as two new forms of digital culture that webtoon platforms capitalize on to capture people’s shifting cultural consumption. This book is also available in paperback.

Chinese ink painters of the Republican period (1911–1949) creatively engaged with a range of art forms in addition to ink, such as oil painting, drawing, photography, and woodblock prints. They transformed their medium of choice in innovative ways, reinterpreting both its history and its theoretical foundations. Juliane Noth offers a new understanding of these compelling experiments in Chinese painting by studying them as transmedial practice, at once shaped by and integral to the modern global art world.Transmedial Landscapes and Modern Chinese Painting shines a spotlight on the mid-1930s, a period of intense productivity in which Chinese artists created an enormous number of artworks and theoretical texts. The book focuses on the works of three seminal artists, Huang Binhong, He Tianjian, and Yu Jianhua, facilitating fresh insights into this formative stage of their careers and into their collaborations in artworks and publications. In a nuanced reading of paintings, photographs, and literary and theoretical texts, Noth shows how artworks and discussions about the future of ink painting were intimately linked to the reshaping of the country through infrastructure development and tourism, thus leading to the creation of a uniquely modern Chinese landscape imagery.This book is also available in paperback.

The Qing dynasty office purchase system (juanna), which allowed individuals to pay for appointments in the government, was regarded in traditional Chinese historiography as an inherently corrupt and anti-meritocratic practice. It enabled participants to become civil and military officials while avoiding the competitive government-run examination systems.Lawrence Zhang’s groundbreaking study of a broad selection of new archival and other printed evidence—including a list of over 10,900 purchasers of offices from 1798 and narratives of purchase—contradicts this widely held assessment and investigates how observers and critics of the system, past and present, have informed this questionable negative view. The author argues that, rather than seeing office purchase as a last resort for those who failed to obtain official appointments via other means, it was a preferred method for wealthy and well-connected individuals to leverage their social capital to the fullest extent. Office purchase was thus not only a useful device that raised funds for the state, but also a political tool that, through literal investments in their positions and their potential to secure status and power, tied the interests of official elites ever more closely to those of the state.This book is also available in paperback.