Book Excerpt: “Staging for the Emperors: A History of Qing Court Theatre, 1683–1923” by Liana Chen
“Far from static or stale, these rites and rituals were intimately connected to the display of power and processes of empowerment.”
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Mo Yan Speaks: On politics, literature, translators, and more
“Writers have to activate all their senses, including taste, sight, sound, and touch, as well as other mysterious senses absent from the usual list.”
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Book Excerpt: “The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami” by Michael Ackland
Haruki Murakami has often been accused of being a feckless, merely popular writer, but in this study Michael Ackland demonstrates that this is not the case, arguing that Murakami has not only assimilated the existentialist heritage but innovatively changed and revitalized it, thereby placing exciting personal possibilities within the reach…
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Book Excerpt: “The Legend of Prince Golden Calf in China and Korea” by Wilt Idema
“This book—the first on the historical development of the legend of the golden calf—is yet another contribution to the extraordinary list of important works that Professor Idema has analyzed and translated into English for a global readership.” Anne McLaren of the University of Melbourne wrote this of Wilt Idema’s The…
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AAS 2023: A Celebration
The AAS conference in Boston was excellent. It was wonderful to see many familiar faces and make new acquaintances. Thank you to those who visited our booth and came to our reception! It was also an honor to have Professor Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania), editor of the Cambria Sinophone…
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Interview: Anne McLaren on the Lower Yangtze’s Unique Cultural Heritage
For the Ear to Asia podcast, Anne McLaren, author of Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and the Local in Chinese Regional Culture discusses the unique traditional cultures and epic folk songs of the lower Yangtze region.
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On this day, Gao Xingjian was born in 1940
Happy birthday to Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, a painter, novelist, essayist, and more. Below, read about two essay collections Gao published with Cambria—in which he discusses aesthetics, the climate crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic—and a study of his original artistry: Called “a tour de force” and “a most valuable collection…
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Book Excerpt from “Resourcing the National Security Enterprise” (Chapter 11)
In chapter 11, “Resourcing Homeland Security,” Mark Troutman examines the Department of Homeland Security. Because of its relative youth and extensive mandates, DHS’s process for creating and resourcing strategy is both the least developed and possibly the most consequential. Troutman argues that the DHS’s mission is likely to grow because…
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Book Excerpt from “Resourcing the National Security Enterprise” (Chapter 10)
In chapter 10, “Programming Department of Defense Strategic Priorities,” John Ferrari discusses time as a critical factor in the resourcing calculus. He talks both about the time needed to become an expert of the system and in terms of the time an idea or strategy has the greatest chance of…
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Book Excerpt from “Resourcing the National Security Enterprise” (Chapter 9)
In chapter 9, “Resourcing Military Readiness,” Laura Junor Pulzone gives an in-depth look at military readiness, showing the complex factors that influence this readiness and the ways the Department of Defense assesses it. Maintaining ready forces, Junor Pulzone writes, proves challenging both because the complexity of the mechanisms undergirding ready…
