ABOUT WOMEN by Bing Xin (translated, with introduction and annotation, by Mao Chen) forthcoming with Beijing Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2012.

About Women [guanyu nüren] is a collection of sixteen essays first published in 1943 and has appeared in five different editions ever since.  The sixteen stories that form the collection offer different images of women.  Bing Xin’s use of narrative voice constitutes an interesting challenge to conventions of gender construction that have been important to most traditional and much modern literature. In About Women Bing Xin's interests in gender issues are evident through her use of narrative voice as an ironic ploy.  The sophisticated male narrator that disguises the gender of the author functions subtly to undermine male authority and its appearance of total mastery.  Within the broader framework of About Women, Bing Xin’s use of the gentleman's voice combines objective narration with destabilization of gender in literary representation.

IMPERIAL DESIGNS: ITALIANS IN CHINA 1900-1947 by Shirley Smith (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: Spring 2012) is the first text in English dealing comprehensively with the subject of the Italian colonial experience in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent scholarship on both the liberal and fascist Italian colonial enterprise centers on the Mediterranean and Northern Africa—expeditions, wars, ultimate occupation of territories, and their effect on and in Italy even up to most recent times. This study opens another chapter concerning the other side of the globe and three Italian enclaves there: Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. These are both a window on the Italian experience in the Far East and confirmation of the imperial policy and rhetoric of conquest used throughout the west in the same time period. A journalist (Luigi Barzini, Sr.), diplomats (Salvago Raggi, Varè, and Ciano), military personnel, and other foreign nationals tell the story through their letters and diaries. Fascist bureaucrats follow liberal diplomats. They all interact with the local metropolitan and rural poor and cultivate a generalized colonial white man’s detachment from their surroundings. The final chapter and conclusions briefly summarize the presence of chinoiserie in the Italian imaginary and show how the Celestial Empire has continued to function in the construction of identity in the dichotomy between self and other.

POST-WALL GERMAN CINEMA AND NATIONAL HISTORY: UTOPIANISM AND DISSENT IN DIVIDED GERMANY AND BEYOND by Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien (Camden House: Spring 2012) examines how contemporary German history films use the nation’s past to map a common future.

Since unification, a radical shift has taken place in Germans' view of their country's immediate past, with 1989 replacing 1945 as the primary caesura. The cold-war division, the failed socialist state, the '68 student movement, and the Red Army Faction - historical flashpoints involving political oppression, civil disobedience, and the longing for utopian solutions to social injustice - have come to be seen as decisive moments in a collective history that unites East and West even as it divides them. Telling stories about a shared past, establishing foundational myths, and finding commonalities of experience are pivotal steps in the construction of national identity. Such nation-building is always incomplete, but the cinema provides an important forum in which notions of German history and national identity can be consumed, negotiated, and contested. This book looks at history films made since 1989, exploring how utopianism and political dissent have shaped German identity. It studies the genre as a set of texts that pit valiant individuals against an unjust, corrupt government, examining commercially successful films (Good Bye, Lenin!, Das Leben der Anderen, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, and Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei), films that won artistic acclaim but only modest box-office success (Berlin is in Germany, Muxmäuschenstill, Raus aus der Haut, and Die Architekten), and those that failed to gain critical or public approval (Führer Ex, Das Versprechen, Baader, and Die Stille nach dem Schuß). At issue is the overriding question: to what extent do these films contribute to a narrative that legitimizes the German nation-state?