Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present offers a sophisticated yet accessible interpretation of modern Chinese history through visual imagery. With rich illustrations and a companion website, it is an ideal textbook for college-level courses on modern Chinese history and on modern visual culture. The introduction provides a methodological framework and historical overview, while the chronologically arranged chapters use engaging case studies to explore important themes. Topics include: Qing court ritual, rebellion and war, urban/rural relations, art and architecture, sports, the Chinese diaspora, state politics, film propaganda and censorship, youth in the Cultural Revolution, environmentalism, and Internet culture. Companion website: http://visualizingmodernchina.org

In Visualizing China, the authors launch a broad inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of the story of visuality in modern China. The essays cluster around several nodal points including photographs, advertising, posters and movies, from the 1840s to the 1960s.

Visualizing Beauty examines the intersections between feminine ideals and changing socio-political circumstances in China, Japan, and Korea during the first half of the twentieth century. Eight essays present a broad range of visual products that informed concepts of beauty and womanhood, including fashion, interior design magazines, newspaper illustrations, and paintings of and by women. Studying "Traditional Woman" and "New Woman" as historical categories, this anthology contemplates the complex relations between feminine subjectivity and the promotion of modernity, commerce, and colonialism.

This book is a teaching textbook for both lower and upper level courses on modern Chinese history and/or modern visual culture. With fourteen chapters of well-illustrated original scholarship, the contributors introduce key themes of modern Chinese history while providing students with critical thinking skills in visual studies and analysis.

China’s century of revolutionary change has been heard as much as seen, and nowhere is this more evident than in an auditory history of the modern Chinese poem. From Lu Xun’s seminal writings on literature to a recitation renaissance in urban centers today, poetics meets politics in the sounding voice of poetry. Supported throughout by vivid narration and accessible analysis, Voices in Revolution offers a literary history of modern China that makes the case for the importance of the auditory dimension of poetry in national, revolutionary, and postsocialist culture. Crespi brings the past to life by first examining the ideological changes to poetic voice during China’s early twentieth-century transition from empire to nation. He then traces the emergence of the spoken poem from the May Fourth period to the present, including its mobilization during the Anti-Japanese War, its incorporation into the student protest repertoire during China’s civil war, its role as a conflicted voice of Mao-era revolutionary passion, and finally its current adaptation to the cultural life of China’s party-guided market economy. Voices in Revolution alters the way we read by moving poems off the page and into the real time and space of literary activity. To all readers it offers an accessible yet conceptually fresh and often dramatic narration of China’s modern literary experience. Specialists will appreciate the book’s inclusion of noncanonical texts as well as its innovative interdisciplinary approach.

Ai Hisano exposes how corporations, the American government, and consumers shaped the colors of what we eat and even the colors of what we consider “natural,” “fresh,” and “wholesome.” The yellow of margarine, the red of meat, the bright orange of “natural” oranges—we live in the modern world of the senses created by business. Ai Hisano reveals how the food industry capitalized on color, and how the creation of a new visual vocabulary has shaped what we think of the food we eat. Constructing standards for the colors of food and the meanings we associate with them—wholesome, fresh, uniform—has been a business practice since the late nineteenth century, though one invisible to consumers. Under the growing influences of corporate profit and consumer expectations, firms have sought to control our sensory experiences ever since. Visualizing Taste explores how our perceptions of what food should look like have changed over the course of more than a century. By examining the development of color-controlling technology, government regulation, and consumer expectations, Hisano demonstrates that scientists, farmers, food processors, dye manufacturers, government officials, and intermediate suppliers have created a version of “natural” that is, in fact, highly engineered. Retailers and marketers have used scientific data about color to stimulate and influence consumers’—and especially female consumers’—sensory desires, triggering our appetites and cravings. Grasping this pivotal transformation in how we see, and how we consume, is critical to understanding the business of food.

A compelling examination of the ultimate global commodity, blue and white porcelain, from kiln to consumers across the globe.