I’m on the California northward swoop this afternoon, having spent yesterday at University of California-Irvine and today, thanks to a 3 a.m. start in Los Angeles and monumentally placid weather on the coast, working in the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford.
UC-Irvine is the home of Prof. Jeffrey Wasserstrom and his China Beat blog. The blog’s leading essay today, by James Millward of Georgetown, provides an excellent model for academic blogging, and is a very useful guide to the meaning of a recent (and somewhat stunning) Bloomberg piece on Western scholars of Xinjiang denied visas into China. Don’t miss it; the link is here.
Not to be missed by students and scholars of Chinese national minority groups!
For its part, Hoover is hosting a tremendous exhibit of China-related revolutionary materials, entitled “A Century of Change” which is likewise fascinating. The focus on the Republican Era provides a path to understanding contemporary China which privileges nationalism over communism in the construction of modern Chinese identity. It also includes a handful of stunning posters from the Japanese occupation of North China from 1937-1940. For more on the exhibit, an attractive popular blog has more information (including a mention of the new text about Iris Chang’s life, by her mother), while the Hoover Institution provides a more in-depth catalog of the exhibition contents.
Finally, Iris Chang’s mother has written a new book, entitled The Woman Who Could Not Forget, about her daughter. The book was published this past May; as a review points out, the author will be reading from the text tomorrow in Cupertino. As this is a subject of great interest to me as well as to many readers and students, I will endeavor to get to the event and survey the book with something resembling alacrity.
In the meantime I have 20 boxes of Iris Chang papers to excavate. Didn’t Kirkegaard, that target of so many St. Olaf papers, once write a treatise on repetition?
Adam Cathcart 