Mar 2025
Tom Lynch, "Outback and Out West: The Settler-Colonial Environmental Imaginary" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and Out West: The Settler Colonial Environmental Imaginary (U Nebraska Press, 2022), emeritus professor of English at the University o ... Show More
1h 4m
Jul 17
Paul Stangl, "San Francisco Seafood: A History from Ocean to Table" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
For early San Franciscans, seafood was an important source of nutrition and a feature of social life, inspiring culinary developments that remain components in California cuisine more than a century later. Consumers interested in flavorful alternatives to meat and associated heal ... Show More
1h 4m
Jul 11
Mary E. Mendoza, "Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border" (UNC Press, 2026)
As many as ten thousand people attempt to illegally cross the border between the US and Mexico each month, braving deserts, rivers, and other environmental hazards in the process. But the very illegality of that crossing has an environmental history, writes Penn State University ... Show More
53m 59s
May 2024
Martin Dusinberre, "Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
In Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories (Cambridge UP, 2023), Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth centu ... Show More
1h 6m
Dec 2014
Joseph D. Hankins, “Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan” (U of California Press, 2014)
Joseph D. Hankins‘s marvelous new ethnography of the contemporary Buraku people looks at the labor involved in “identifying, dismantling, and reproducing” the Buraku situation in Japan and beyond. Taking readers on a journey from Lubbock, Texas to Tokyo, India, and back again, Wo ... Show More
1h 9m
Aug 2024
Season 3, Episode 10: Jean Dong, Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World
Send us Fan MailPlease join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and China expert, Jean Dong as they discuss Dong’s fascinating book, Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World: Demystifying Enduring Traditions and Dynamic Constraints. Ms. Dong offers a rich and subtle historical perspective on C ... Show More
40m 34s
Apr 2024
A beautiful day in the (old) neighborhood
<p>Journalist Ray Suarez joins the pod to discuss immigration, ethnic identity, assimilation, old neighborhoods, and his new book We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century-An Oral History.</p>
<p>Read an excerpt of the book on the Cracks in PoMo Substack</p>
<p>and order ... Show More
41m 53s
Dec 2022
Stevie Suan, "Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question--what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how ... Show More
58m 38s
Sep 2024
Sharon M. Quinsaat, "Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
When people migrate and settle in other countries, do they automatically form a diaspora? In Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora (U Chicago Press, 2024), Sharon M. Quinsaat explains the dynamic process through which a diaspora is strategically construct ... Show More
55m 59s
Jul 2023
529 Ten Thousand Things and the Asian American Experience (with Shin Yu Pai) | My Last Book with Ross Benjamin
Jacke talks to Shin Yu Pai, currently the Civic Poet of Seattle, about her career as an artist and her podcast Ten Thousand Things, which explores a collection of objects and artifacts that tell us something about Asian American life. PLUS Ross Benjamin (translator of The Diaries ... Show More
59m 25s
This episode features a conversation with Dr. Michael R. Jin regarding his recently published book Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: The Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific. Published in November 2021 by Stanford University Press, the book weaves together Jin’s specializations in migration and diaspora studies, Asian American history, critical r ... Show More
