Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

This comprehensive study of fiction written in response to the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011 (3/11)--and subsequent meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear power plant--and to government and industry ineptitude, prevarication, and obfuscation is captivating and enlightening. The coverage of related trenchant topics (e.g., atomic bomb literature arising from Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and of the marginalization of victims of both the atomic bombs and Fukushima is wide-ranging, each event illuminating the next. The book is organized effectively from local to global, from the epicenter to the culture of "nuclearity" on a wide geopolitical scale, encompassing nuclear landscapes, the secrecy enshrouding the nuclear, and communities living on irradiated ground. The heart of DiNitto's excellent book is Tohoku, an "internal colony" and the region of Japan where Fukushima is located. Tohoku long served in a tributary relationship to the capital and nation. Framing Tohoku as such enables one to understand the shift of 3/11 from a national to a regional disaster. Novelist Furukawa Hideo incorporates these elements of Tohoku in his experimental work Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (2016), undermining dominant national discourses. DiNitto's analyses of this and other Fukushima works of fiction astutely reveal the fissures in a purportedly fail-safe, invulnerable Japanese nuclear power plant.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

The Umbrella Movement, arguably the largest Occupy event to date, began in 2014. Pang (City University of Hong Kong) takes the movement and the particular context of Hong Kong as a point of departure to project a vision of city democracy that can run parallel to state democracy. This study is divided into three parts. The first part offers an overview of the global Occupy movements and homes in on Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement to reflect the social nature of the broader project. The second part focuses on the arts, artifacts, and documentary videos produced during the Umbrella Movement. The third part investigates Hong Kong on a larger scale, focusing on its colonial and postcolonial conditions as well as the tensions between civil disobedience and the law to demonstrate the global meanings of Hong Kong's democratic project. The book addresses three sets of issues: cultural identity and political activism, collective events and autonomous individuals, and the politics of appearance. Building on an insider's firsthand experiences, The Appearing Demos provides great insights and is essential reading for students and scholars of social movements and collective action, as well as of Hong Kong and China studies.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Similar in approach and excellence to Michael Emmerich's The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature (CH, May'14, 51-4870), the present reception history explores how the sprawling, rollicking Chinese novel Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin), written in or before the 16th century, played a key role in changing Japanese perceptions of the Chinese literary tradition itself and its connection with the shifting canon of Japanese literature. Hedberg (Arizona State Univ.) demonstrates that grappling with the unfamiliar vernacular language of the text started a shift away from regarding China as the authority for timeless, universal values to perceiving it as simply a different country with perplexing mores and an exotic material culture. The author follows this through to the modern period, when Western concepts of literature were brought into triangulation with both Chinese views and Japanese kokugaku ("national literature") formulations. Though Hedberg maintains a unitary focus on one text, he ranges far and wide, providing revelations even on general problems such as the pressures a present moment imposes on anyone's view of the past and the contradictions thus engendered. Meticulously researched and written with clarity and wit, this is literary historiography at its best and most illuminating.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.