Literary Roundup: Five New Releases By NYU Shanghai Faculty

NYU Shanghai faculty members have some new books out, from a biography on China’s first premier to reimagining China’s relationship with emerging new technologies. Check out these new titles and put them on your 2024 reading list.

Zhou Enlai: A Life Hardcover

By Chen Jian (Harvard University Press)

Published on May 7, 2024

Chen Jian, Distinguished Global Network Professor of History, authors a new book, Zhou Enlai: A Life. This is the first comprehensive biography of Zhou in English written with the support of multi-lingual, multi-archival, and multi-source research. It portrays Zhou as a devoted Communist revolutionary, an influential politician and statesman, an accomplished diplomatic giant and, in the final analysis, a human being. It also brings to light Zhou’s visions and aspirations, political acumen, and enormous administrative and executive capacity. More broadly, the Zhou story told by Chen epitomizes China’s tortuous path toward modernity, while helping the reader understand how China becomes the nation it is today.

Machine Decision Is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence

Edited by Benjamin Bratton, Anna Greenspan, and Bogna Konior (MIT Press)

Published on July 30, 2024

Co-edited by Associate Professor of Contemporary Global Media Anna Greenspan and Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts (IMA) Bogna Konior, who lead NYU Shanghai’s Center for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Culture, along with former Visiting Professor Benjamin Bratton, this new volume tracks the history of Chinese AI and reexamines China’s engagement with AI by moving beyond the clichés that dominate contemporary debate. Contributing experts from across various fields draw on a mixture of speculative thought experiments and cutting-edge use cases to offer views on topics including AI and Chinese philosophy, AI ethics and policy-making, the development of computational models in early Chinese cybernetics, and the aesthetics of Sinofuturism. It provides a fresh perspective on what AI is today in China, and what it might become.

China and the Wireless Undertow: Media as Wave Philosophy

By Anna Greenspan (Edinburgh University Press)

Published on October 2023

In her latest book, Professor Greenspan reimagines the relationship between China and ubiquitous wireless technology by synthesizing contemporary media theory with modern Chinese thought on three critical historical figures including Tan Sitong, Xiong Shili, and Mou Zongsan. The book takes a fresh look at the key issues around technological evolution in a shifting geopolitical landscape, offers an alternative to certain myopias of Western media theory, and presents a deep, historical engagement with issues and debates surrounding Chinese cyberculture.

Miscellany of the South Seas: A Chinese Scholar's Chronicle of Shipwreck and Travel through 1830s Vietnam

Translated by Zhao Lu and Kathlene Baldanza (University of Washington Press)

Published on July 12, 2023

In this first English translation of Chinese scholar Cai Tinglan’s 1830s saga at sea (as known as Hainan Zazhu in Chinese), Cai documents his encounters with the daily life, culture, religious practices, and government affairs of the early Nguyễn dynasty of Vietnam. Assistant Professor of Global China Studies Zhao Lu and historian Kathlene Baldanza have made Cai’s adventures accessible to English-speakers for the first time, while providing a comprehensive introduction which explains the social, political, and economic context of his travels, along with extensive annotation and a glossary of terms.

Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Modern Japan and the Wider World

With contribution by Warren Stanislaus (Brill)

Published on November 2, 2023

This new volume tackles current interpretative problems in the study of the opening of Japan to the Western world in the 19th century by looking beyond existing methods and theories to rethink the country and its global connections through new organizing frameworks. Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for Global Perspectives on Society (GPS) Warren A. Stanislaus’ chapter, “Laughing at Civilisation: Charles Wirgman’s Japan Punch and the Reopening of Great Britain,” reveals the unlikely story of a popular treaty port humor magazine, which diverged from a civilizing mission to playfully reimagine the opening of Japan and satirize Western notions of progress.