Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Asian Studies

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to Asian Studies

Posted on May 8, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on Asia. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Writing violence: the politics of form in early modern Japanese fiction
Atherton, David. Columbia, 2023

Atherton radically transforms understanding of 17th- and 18th-century commercial fiction in Japan by analyzing how existing forms, such as modular plot lines and established character types, were manipulated to create new perceptions of the world. These works have been dismissed as didactic, frivolous, or plagiaristic, but through close readings and consideration of the sociohistorical context, Atherton offers provocative new interpretations of several texts. Medieval tales presented disasters as supernaturally wrought, but Atherton shows how an account of a huge fire in Japan’s capital in 1657 highlights a new secular “information economy” and the “integrity and benevolence of the political order” (p. 62). Whereas conventional revenge stories treated authorized vendettas as virtuous violence that affirmed a rigid political hierarchy, Atherton argues that revenge stories by Saikaku and Chikamatsu made moral clarity impossible. Uncertainty is also apparently the point of an account of a man who beheaded his sister, which authorities pigeon-holed as an honor killing. View on Amazon

2. Truly human: Indigeneity and Indigenous resurgence on Formosa
Simon, Scott. Toronto, 2023

Simon (Univ. of Ottawa, Canada) draws on two decades of experience to assess the sacred, customary law of Indigenous people in Taiwan and why their way of life remains a crucial alternative to standard Western ways of thinking and doing. The central ethnological topics provide a contemporary updating of hunting as a way of life, headhunting (now banned of course) as a framework for collective action, the life of the spirit and of the heart, and the way memory is intertwined with actual, documented history. These topical discussions are detailed and strongly grounded in lived experience, historical records, the broader context of Taiwan, and recent debates in anthropology. Simon’s analysis is also extremely well grounded in linguistic details as he traces ideas that oscillate among Indigenous languages, different versions of Chinese, and Japanese from the colonial period. His comparative comments about Indigenous people in Canada are an added bonus. Overall, the book provides an excellent path for rethinking Indigenous peoples,  View on Amazon

3. Sensory anthropology: culture and experience in Asia
Low, Kelvin E. Y. Cambridge, 2023

This volume is fascinating in its unique subject and presentation, presenting a truly new idea in cross-cultural studies. Yow (National Univ. of Singapore) explores how the senses are envisioned and used in a variety of historical and cultural contexts in Asia. His examination is so wide ranging it is difficult to condense. The book also attempts to create a new “modality” for the study of the senses (p. 13). The first section discusses sensory practices and moral positionings. The second section discusses what happens when the modalities are in flux and cultural comparison. The overall goal is to understand key anthropological themes through the prism of the senses and sensory relations. The groundbreaking nature of this well-documented, delightful study cannot be overstated. View on Amazon

4. Japan’s nuclear disaster and the politics of safety governance
Koppenborg, Florentine. Cornell, 2023

Koppenborg (Technical Univ. of Munich, Germany) explains how Japan has retained a strong, independent, nuclear safety regulator since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of March 2011. She demonstrates that, prior to the disaster, for a half century, the regulation of nuclear power was weak in Japan as industry interests had captured the regulatory agency. Since the disaster, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority has fended off government efforts to weaken safety regulations costly to the nuclear power industry. Koppenborg shows how small administrative reforms empowered the agency to retain its independence. This well-researched study is thoroughly grounded in the policy literature. The tale is complicated, but Koppenborg wisely avoids making “just so” arguments. The findings have relevance beyond Japan as nations strive to develop independent regulatory agencies that use the best technical expertise to balance protecting public safety with limiting production costs. Koppenborg’s work is an empirical case study that contributes significantly to the theoretical understanding of the politics and practices of regulatory design.  View on Amazon.

5. Civil war in Guangxi: the Cultural Revolution on China’s southern periphery
Walder, Andrew George. Stanford, 2023

Walder (sociology, Stanford Univ.) uses newly accessible materials, namely, an 18-volume collection compiled in the 1980s as part of an investigation into repudiating the Cultural Revolution and those responsible for “Mao’s remarkably destructive schemes,” to explain why conventional explanations of events in 1967–68 Guangxi do not reflect what actually occurred (p. 199). The source materials include both statistical data and narrative information that provide an “unprecedented window” onto the people and events of the period (p. 207). For Walder, events in Guangxi were so deadly because of centralization in China under an “unusually radical supreme leader” and local reaction to rebuilding a less radical political order (p. 198). Walder’s strong analysis of the materials and clear, concise writing style make this book essential reading to understand why such extreme violence took place in this region. Readers must have a good knowledge of Chinese history at the time, the central players, and the wider international response in Vietnam to fully follow the author’s narrative for the mass killings as part of the Cultural Revolution. View on Amazon.

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