Superbly insightful commentary on the Olympic torch relay fracas from Geremie Barmé, author of The Forbidden City, the latest offering in HUP's Wonders of the World Series. Barmé, an expert in 20th century Chinese intellectual and cultural history, puts the protests and the Chinese reaction to them in context with a level of detail you just won't get from the newspapers.
At a time when many focus on how to combat China's rise as a world power, there are others who wonder what it might mean for us to enjoy a cooperative relationship with the newly ascendant nation. Among them is Lindsay Waters, HUP's Executive Editor for the Humanities, who for ten years has been traveling to China to forge links with those Chinese scholars who truly have their fingers on the pulse of the transformations shaking their country. The Boston Globe's "Brainiac" blog interviewed Waters on his efforts, and why being a "friend of China" does not mean giving the Chinese government a pass on the human rights issues that shock many here in the West.
We were excited to see Kate Merkel-Hess' thoughtful review of Beijing Time over at The China Beat. In her opinion, the book touches on issues of authenticity (and its less authentic counterpart) that are being more or less ignored in mainstream media treatment of China leading up to the Beijing Olympics. Is there a "real" China that's being covered up by the relentless governmental PR push ahead of the Games? Can we even justify applying the concept of "authenticity" to China in the way that we're used to doing in the West? Well, it's complicated, and Beijing Time authors Dutton, Lo, and Wu are here to guide us into the Beijing that a native sees--the Beijing of vanishing hutongs, a city built along cosmological lines as old as China itself.
From the book:
This is a city haunted by memories of greatness, extending from dynastic times, through the creation of New China in 1949, to the status as a postmodern global hub that is central to its identity today. Architecturally and spatially, Beijing incorporates many different layers and times, acknowledged and unacknowledged. While it continues to grow and to experience spectacular refashionings today, Beijing is also a museum, capturing centuries of Chinese nationhood.
Starting from here, the authors unpeel the layers of a city whose astonishing transformation in recent years threatens to obliterate all that came before it, revealing a mish-mash of buildings, ideas, objects, and sentiments that combine to form something more than the sum of their parts--a Beijing that no news story can hope to capture.
As the Olympics draw nearer, athletes are increasingly worried about the effects of Beijing's notorious air pollution on their performance in the upcoming Games. Some have considered resorting to unusual training methods such as training behind a running bus, all in an effort to acclimate one's self to pollutants and thus gain that competitive edge Olympic athletes crave (note--doctors advise that running behind a bus is not an effective way to prepare for physical exertion in a polluted environment).
Anyone who has paid attention to the news coverage of the Beijing Games will surely have realized that they're a lot more than "games"--there are real social and political stakes here, especially so considering that we are dealing with a nation as controversial as China has become. And so HUP is preparing to make its own contribution to what is sure to be a growing Olympics frenzy during the coming months, but of course we are doing it in our own inimitable way--measured, scholarly, incisive, with no fluff. Xu Guoqi's Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008 is the first book in English to take a look at what sports has meant to China and how sport has served as a catalyst for major social change in that country over the last century. Everyone knows about "ping-pong diplomacy," but did you ever step back and think to yourself--"well why ping pong?" Xu, with the aid of newly-released archival sources, is here to answer these questions. In doing so, he articulates articulates a fresh and surprising perspective on China as an international sport superpower as well as a new "sick man of East Asia." Of all the books you're going to see on China in the coming months, Olympic Dreams is likely to be one of the most original, with an argument that will outlast the more ephemeral manifestations of media frenzy that will go as fast as they came.
Below, a fascinating talk from Geremie Barmé (author of the forthcoming Wonders of the World volume on The Forbidden City) delivered at the Australian launch of Gloria Davies' Worrying about China, a book that explores the way perfectionism permeates and ultimately propels Chinese intellectual thought:
The creation and repeated evocation of rhetorical enemies is a powerful tactic in the realm of intellectual contestation. It relies on a language rich in the vocabulary of moral evaluation, a language in which practitioners employ their ideas to give careful expression to unarticulated aims. Judgments are offered or passed by means of either positive or pejorative adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs. The ground for critical debates about social justice, political process, freedom of expression, diversity, openness and cultural possibility is turned into a treacherous topography marked out by confusing signs. A lazy dichotomy between left and right is constantly presented, allowing for entrenched positions with decades-long lineages to find seemingly new expression and easy advantage. In these distorting clashes among concerned individuals, issues both of the moment and the monumental rise and fall in importance. All the while the marketplace of ideas with its media outlets celebrates those whose rhetorical flights generate sales, even if they narrow the horizons of how people can think.
Former Khmer Rouge "Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea was arrested at his home in Pallin, Cambodia yesterday and brought to Phnom Penh to hear charges from a tribunal set up to address atrocities committed during the Khmer Rouge years of 1975-79. The tribunal represents an attempt on the part of the Cambodian state and the international community to come to terms with what occurred during those years--to obtain a semblance of clarity, and possibly justice, with regard to the fate of the millions who died while the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia.
It's not hard to imagine how a process designed to address one of the most visible atrocities of the twentieth century can be fraught with difficulty. How to express the sheer scale of horror that befell people in Cambodia, Rwanda, or any number of other sites of atrocity? This complex task is the subject of James Dawes' That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, published this month. Drawing on firsthand accounts from fieldworkers around the world, the book gives a painfully clear picture of the pitfalls of confronting a past in which so many have such a crucial stake. Dawes recognizes that it is through the act of telling stories that survivors and witnesses keep the memory of an event alive, and that even this seemingly simple act is complicated when one attempts to address atrocity on such a large scale.
||| Listen to an audio interview with James Dawes, author of That the World May Know.
Ramachandra Guha's Financial Times roundup of new India books includes Martha Nussbaum's The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future, in which the celebrated scholar argues that the rise of the Hindu right poses the greatest threat the secular Indian state has ever faced:
Nussbaum's main concern in The Clash Within is the threat posed to Indian democracy by the rise of the Hindu right. She presents a case study of the riots in the state of Gujarat in 2002, when a pogrom of Muslims was overseen and directed by elected politicians. Through a series of revealing interviews with ideologues, she skewers the absurdities of a "Hindu" history, in which centuries of persecution by Muslim and British rulers are to be avenged by the militants of the present day. But the Indian state is not spared either--as she points out, the criminal justice system is in a state of near-collapse, incapable of bringing to book ordinary criminals, let alone rioters allied with politicians.
Nussbaum considers India "a second home," and The Clash Within is a heartfelt meditation on a country that in Nussbaum's opinion is headed down a dangerous road.
Two new posts up on our sister blog "Off the Page: The Harvard Press Author Forum":
First up is J. Scott Turner, author of The Tinkerer's Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself, on whether we've seen the end of the intelligent design debate.
Second is Benjamin E. Elman, author of On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 and A Cultural History of Modern Science in China, on whether new technologies will temper the trend toward authoritarianism in China.
Enjoy...
We've just learned that the Chinese translation of Danian Hu's China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917-1979 has been selected as one of the ten best books published in China in 2006 by the editors of Zhonghua dushu bao ("China Book Reading Weekly"), a popular and influential periodical among students and intellectuals in China (the linked article is in Chinese, by the way).
Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan ("Chinese Newsweek"--not affiliated with the U.S. magazine of the same name) also prepared a report (this link is also in Chinese) on Hu's analysis of Einstein's "rebirth" during the Cultural Revolution, a subject that comprises the last chapter of his fantastic book.
Here's the lowdown from the Harvard University Asia Center on their latest offering, Adam L. Kern's Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyoshi of Edo Japan:
Manga from the Floating World is the first full-length study in English of the kibyôshi, a genre of sophisticated pictorial fiction widely read in late-eighteenth-century Japan. By combining analysis of the socioeconomic and historical milieus in which the genre was produced and consumed with three annotated translations of works by major author-artist Santô Kyôden (1761–1816) that closely reproduce the experience of encountering the originals, Adam Kern offers a sustained close reading of the vibrant popular imagination of the mid-Edo period. The kibyôshi, Kern argues, became an influential form of political satire that seemed poised to transform the uniquely Edoesque brand of urban commoner culture into something more, perhaps even a national culture, until the shogunal government intervened.
Based on extensive research using primary sources in their original Edo editions, the volume is copiously illustrated with rare prints from Japanese archival collections. It serves as an introduction not only to the kibyôshi but also to the genre’s readers and critics, narratological conventions, modes of visuality, format, and relationship to the modern Japanese comicbook (manga) and to the popular literature and wit of Edo. Filled with graphic puns and caricatures, these entertaining works will appeal to the general reader as well as to the more experienced student of Japanese cultural history.
It's a beautiful, innovatively-designed volume that does justice to Kern's path-breaking research on this little-known predecessor to manga, which has experienced a steady growth in popularity even outside of Japan that shows no signs of abating.
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