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Book Reviews in the Age of Internet

CHUS #1  Book Reviews in the Age of the Internet (Roundtable)
Friday, January 3, 2025: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
New York Hilton, East Room

Session Organizer: Qin Shao, College of New Jersey

Chair(s):
Qin Shao, College of New Jersey

Panel:

  • Nicholas Popper, College of William & Mary and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
  • Yuanchong Wang, University of Delaware
  • Gina Anne Tam, Trinity University
  • Gillian Frank, Trinity College Dublin
  • Qin Shao, College of New Jersey

Session Description:

In the fall of 2023, a 20-page, critical review of a book on the Qing dynasty caused a small shock wave in and beyond the China field. By December, this review had more than 70, 000 full text views, a record for an academic book review. This phenomenon illustrates at least two issues relevant to academic book-reviewing: the conventional book-reviewing practice is outdated, and the learned societies, scholars and the educated public alike, are hungry for a change.

This roundtable aims to critically assess the state of book-reviewing and explore if a paradigm shift is finally on the horizon, considering the impact of the internet and social media. The advent of the internet in the past half century has reshaped every aspect of society, including scholarly research, but mainstream academic book-reviewing has largely remained unchanged. The roundtable examines the nature of book-reviewing and, with that, its functions and purposes in the age of internet.

Book-reviewing is conventionally considered a “service” to the profession. It introduces a new book, often chapter by chapter, with a light touch on the book’s merits and flaws. Such book reviews follow a predictable format without much impact. But the internet has taken over much of the function of such book-reviewing. Publishers’ webpages, commercial book sites, e-publishing, and authors’ own social media can instantly make available of a book’s main contents. All this constitutes a challenge to the standard book reviews.

This challenge requires nothing less than a redefinition of book-reviewing practice. Instead of being an afterthought of academic publishing, academic book-reviewing itself can be a scholarly activity, and a book review essay can be a piece of scholarship, if it critically and creatively analyzes the book from the large issues to the source material. Indeed, analysis should be the main function of book-reviewing. Book-reviewing must also serve as a gatekeeper and standard-bearer for academic integrity and quality. In other words, book-reviewing should be an integral part in the creation and production of new knowledge.

The problems with the standard book reviewing are well-known. Some editors have abandoned book reviews; others have called for journals’ book review section to become a “change agent”; and still others have questioned the dominance of book reviewers from the U.S and U.K. There have also been changes. Some platforms feature more substantive book reviews, provide panel reviews, and engage in a dialogue with authors. But they are in the minority.

The five speakers on the roundtable come from diverse backgrounds in the fields of European, American, and Chinese history. Some of them are current and former book review editors and book and blog editors. Together they will explore issues such as the evolution of book-reviewing, the importance of source-checking, the impact of social media, and the possibility to utilize long-form reviews and digital humanities platforms to improve the quality of book reviews.

Speakers’ Abstracts

Nicholas Popper, College of William & Mary/Omohundro Institute Book reviews themselves have a long and somewhat surprising history. While most surveys of the genre have focused on literary book reviews from the nineteenth century to the present, the form was developed and pioneered in the European republic of letters in the late seventeenth century. This book-obsessed, trans-imperial community corresponded relentlessly about books, sharing knowledge of new or rare publications whose acquisition would often entail considerable expense and energy. The initial form of book reviews, published in the periodicals flourishing across Europe, responded to this environment by balancing a variety of purposes. Not only did such reviews announce the publication of new books, but they often included significant extracts from them – providing a sample to allow readers to judge whether it was worth the effort to try to acquire them. This publicity function was at least as important in these early book reviews as the critical assessment and contextualization that historians today associate with the form.

As this suggests, book reviews respond to their broader communications environment, and in my contribution to this roundtable, I will use a brief survey their history — along with my experience as Book Review Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly, the flagship journal in early American History, and as Editor of Books at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture – to reflect on the possible directions for book reviews in our current media climate. Above all, I will argue that their role as post-publication peer review is more important than ever, and that re-thinking the structure and distribution of book reviews to emphasize this aspect may point toward broader changes in terms of venue, authorship, timing, length, and editorial practice.

Yuanchong Wang, University of Delaware

There has been a glaring gap in the expectations and practices of reviewing academic historical books. On the one hand, the AHA emphasizes the importance of evaluating “the honesty and reliability with which the historian uses primary and secondary source materials” as a standard professional conduct. On the other hand, most book reviews do not check such source materials. Filling in this gap is an assumption, or a trust, that the author has both the necessary training and integrity to use and interpret the sources correctly and the book is an honest piece of scholarship. Academic book reviews in the history field have largely been run on this assumption. Indeed, the challenge for source-checking is daunting. The limited length that academic journals offer to book reviews makes it impossible for any meaningful engagement with either primary or secondary sources. The increasing popularity of a multilingual approach to historical studies makes the examination of primary courses even more challenging. But the pitfall of skipping source-checking is also obvious. Given that the internet age has made a large number of digitized historical materials available online, this presentation proposes a new type of cooperation between academic journals and book reviewers in which the former requires the latter to write a more substantiative piece that includes a close examination of the source material.

Gina Anne Tam, Trinity University,

Social media has sharply transformed the world of academic book reviews. From #twitterstorians to Facebook groups, Goodreads to booktok, social media has created new forums in which we, as scholars, can publicize the books we write as well as offer our own endorsements, critiques, and opinions about the books of others. Social media as a medium also promotes unprecedented reach and urgency; it allows for fast, real-time discussion of books and reviews of them that include audiences formerly omitted from academic discourses. Together, these realities have created new opportunities and risks for academics in discussing the afterlives of books, opportunities and risks that are often unique to different platforms, different subjects, and different audiences.

My goal in this presentation is to address a series of ways in which social media has affected academic book reviews. I contend that social media has created a double-edged sword for both authors and reviewers. On the one hand, it has allowed for both reviewers and authors to reach new audiences, gain new feedback, and engage in more robust, diverse, and sustained conversations about academic work than ever before. For junior scholars in particular, this can be a particularly rewarding part of the review-writing and book-writing experience. On the other hand, the immediacy of social media, and the fact that nearly all social media platforms purposefully bolster content that is controversial and emotionally laden, creates new risks. From the possibility of “going viral” for writing or receiving a negative review in a way that is unprecedently public, to the possibility that emotionally-charged fast responses can create a “pile-on” effect that spirals and causes long-lasting misunderstandings, social media can also create a chilling effect for both authors and reviewers that can hinder innovative scholarship and rigorous critique.

Gillian Frank, Trinity College Dublin

At their best, academic book reviews help scholars learn about new scholarship, contextualize this scholarship within broader disciplinary conversations, and think through the limits and possibilities of each work’s interventions, methodologies and evidence. But too often, journals have difficulty finding volunteers to perform this important and time-consuming task. It is an open secret that the readership for such reviews is limited and that many reviews–whether out of politeness or deference–follow a stultifying form: chapter summary, contextualization, tepid critique, and (bold) praise. 

This presentation maps the structural and formal limits and possibilities of the written book review genre. It then makes a case for supplementing written book reviews–especially by using digital humanities platforms–with other types of public conversation and exchange that might spur critical engagement among scholars and between authors and readers.

Qin Shao,  College Of New Jersey

Conventional book-reviewing has largely functioned as a news release—in about 600-1,000 words, the review announces the publication of a new book and introduces its main contents. But the internet has rendered such a function unnecessary, as numerous websites and social media accounts, by the publishers, the booksellers, and the authors, are doing exactly the same job. Academic book-reviewing must redefine itself to justify its relevance.  How can the mainstream book reviews evolve from a much-diminished service role to an invigorating force for scholarly and intellectual pursuit in the academic community? The long-form review essays, often more than 5,000 words, published by The New York Review of Books (NYRB) and other such literary platforms, may serve as an inspiration. Those review essays are often themselves an expansive study of the subject matters. For instance, a review of two books on privacy in NYRB (March 9, 2023) starts with a story about a robotic vacuum cleaner taking photographs of a woman using the toilet and goes on to a detailed study of the evolution of privacy law in the U.S. While the essay engages with larger historical and legal issues, it also offers critical insights about the values and shortcomings of the two books. Such a review contributes to the depth and breadth of the subject matter and becomes an indispensable reading itself on privacy rights. Academic book-reviewing can also become an integral part of scholarship if it redefines its functions and purposes and invests in the necessary time, energy, and other resources.

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Surveying the Nation

CHUS #11. Surveying the Nation: Rediscovering the “People” in China’s Republican Era, 1912–49
Monday, January 6, 2025: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
New York Hilton, East Room

Session Organizer: Xiaoyan Ren (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Chair(s):
Yue Du, Cornell University

Papers:
“Obstructed Embrace”: The ID Card Institution in Shanghai, 1945–49
Xiaoyan Ren, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Competing Colonialities: Nation-State Building and Nation-Empire Construction of Chinese and Japanese Migration Projects in Manchuria, 1914–45
Luming Xu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The Problem of Chinese Population: Discourses of Chinese Population and Population Science, 1918–39
Zhelun Zhou, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Comment: Yue Du, Cornell University

Panel Description

Recent scholarship on the history of Republican China represented by works such as Di Luo’s Beyond Citizenship (2022), Tong Lam’s A Passion for Facts (2011), Peter Zarrow’s After Empire (2012), Janet Y. Chen’s Guilty of Indigence (2012), and Zwia Lipkin’s Useless to the State (2006) reflects both a continuing exploration of issues of modernity and a new interest  in state-building processes from the perspectives of knowledge-production and state efforts of social engineering and classification. This panel builds upon and extends this new scholarship on nation-state building efforts in the Republican era. Centering around the issues of population, identification card systems, and migration, this panel aims to highlight the efforts by the state and the elites to rediscover and re-define the “people” and the population in relation to state sovereignty, the collection and management of information about the “people,” and the agency of the “people” in these processes.

Using academic treatises, articles in newspapers and popular journals, and government documents from the 1920s and 1930s, Zhou examines the problematization of the population and the initiation of a population science in China; Xu investigates the state-led settler colonialism in the respective migration projects in Manchuria promoted by both China and Japan to claim sovereignty over this land; and Ren explores the contested ID card policy in Shanghai after 1945 as part of the state-building project and the multifarious obstacles that impeded its implementation.

Paper Abstracts

 “Obstructed Embrace:” the ID Card Institution in Shanghai, 1945-1949

Xiaoyan Ren, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

This paper examines the Chinese Nationalist government’s modern state building efforts through the lens of identification card policy in post-war Shanghai (1945-1949). In the aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the Nationalist government issued identification cards to render the population more “legible” to the state, albeit faced with considerable challenges and resistance. Focusing on Shanghai, one of the cities that piloted the ID card policy, this paper examines the multifarious obstacles to the policy’s implementation, in terms of technology (photos, seal stamps, standardization of names), administrative systems, and the impact of Japanese occupation. My research sheds fresh light on the state-society relations during this period, centering on the following questions: How did society appropriate and resist newly introduced technology of state surveillance? How was the class of “state brokers” transformed in Republican China and what new roles did they play? What legacy did the Second Sino-Japanese War leave for China that might linger even until today? 

The use of photos, seal stamps, and standardized names for individual identification encountered considerable resistance and appropriation in Republican China. The role of baojia chiefs (local community leaders) as administrators illustrates how they appropriated the ID card policies for personal advantage. The collective memory of “citizen’s cards” issued during Japanese rule in Shanghai led to an enduring perception of identification documents as stigmatized symbols of foreign invasion and illegitimate rule. All this challenged the implementation of the identification card policy in post-1945 Shanghai.

Competing Colonialities: Nation-State Building and Nation-Empire Construction of Chinese and Japanese Migration Projects in Manchuria, 1914-1945

Luming Xu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

This study focuses on the migration projects launched respectively by China and Japan in Manchuria from the 1910s to the 1940s to claim sovereignty over this land. It employs the term “competing colonialities” to characterize this particular piece of migration history, for both the Republican Chinese governments, intellectuals, and Japanese colonial authorities have used the phrase “colonize” (Ch. zhibian; Jp. Takushoku) to define their respective migration projects. These two parallel colonial enterprises clashed in 1931, when the Manchurian Incident broke out, as the Japanese army took over the whole of Manchuria by force, and the state of Manchukuo was established the next year. Although the Republican state lost its control over Manchuria until 1945, the ROC government transformed its coloniality into a rhetoric about “national humiliation” (guochi) by producing anti-Japanese propaganda at the national scale. At the same time, the Japanese promoted the independence of the state of Manchukuo from China, transforming Japanese coloniality into the ideology of “Harmony of the Five Races” (Gozoku Kyōwa).  This study argues that underneath the myths of nation and empire, migrants were the central pillars to the macro-level nation- and state-building, while migrants in Manchuria themselves have also taken advantage of Chinese and Japanese colonialities at the micro-level to create myths of their own, such as the myth of chuang guandong among Han Chinese migrants, and literary genre of bazoku in Japanese settlers’ communities.

 “The Problem of Chinese Population”: Discourses of Chinese Population and Population Science, 1918-1939

Zhelun Zhou, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Starting from the May Fourth era (1915 to 1922) to the 1930s, Chinese intellectuals and elites had voiced their concerns of China’s large population. Prior to and after Margaret Sanger’s visit in 1922, Chinese intellectuals, such as Chen Changheng, Sun Benwen, and Tao Menghe, not only suggested birth control to limit population growth, but also introduced approaches to measure and survey both the quantity and quality of population. In the 1930s, sociologist Chen Da proposed to formulate the discipline of population science to further manage the population and eventually to compel the KMT government to legislate laws for population control. Though the KMT state never formally legislated and practiced its eugenic-oriented population policy, this attention to population management and control remained consistent through the Republican period until 1949. The concerns with population coincided with the growing intellectual emphasis on social surveys and the social sciences during that era. Using intellectual treatises, newspaper articles, and governmental records, this paper explores how population came to be perceived as a problem in the 1920s and how the problematization of this issue served to stimulate the rising discussion of population science among Chinese intellectuals in the 1930s. Overall, the intense discussion on the Chinese population reflected intellectuals’ pursuit of modernization, as they attempted to concretize the population in measurable terms.