Our Hawai‘i and Pennsylvania warehouses will be closed for inventory June 21–30, 2010. Shipments will resume July 1, 2010.
Author: stephchun
Global Oriental Change of Distribution Agreement
Effective July 1, 2010, University of Hawai‘i Press will no longer distribute Global Oriental Publishers Ltd. University of Hawai‘i Press will fulfill all orders through June 30, 2010. The last date to place orders for in-stock Global Oriental books through University of Hawai‘i Press is June 15, 2010. University of Hawai‘i Press will continue to accept returns until July 31, 2010. The new distributor noted below will solicit and take orders and accept returns as of July 1, 2010.
Effective July 1, 2010, Brill will be distributing Global Oriental titles in North America. Orders and returns should be directed to:
BRILL
c/o Books International
P.O. Box 605
Herndon, VA 20172-0605
USA
1-800-337-9255 (toll free in US & Canada only); 1-703-661-1585
Fax: 1-703-661-1501
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.brill.nl
Understanding Islam in Indonesia Launch and Author Q&A
Last month the USINDO (United States-Indonesia Society) in Washington, D.C., hosted a book launch for Robert Pringle’s Understanding Islam in Indonesia: Politics and Diversity. Read about the launch here, including comments by Mr. Salman Al Farisi, Chargé d’Affaires, Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia, and Dr. Jonah Blank, Policy Director, South and Southeast Asia, Committee on Foreign Relations (Majority), United States Senate, and a brief Q&A with the author.
Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics
Conventional wisdom has it that the concept of individualism was absent in early China. In Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics, an uncommon study of the self and human agency in ancient China, Erica Fox Brindley provides an important corrective to this view and persuasively argues that an idea of individualism can be applied to the study of early Chinese thought and politics with intriguing results. She introduces the development of ideological and religious beliefs that link universal, cosmic authority to the individual in ways that may be referred to as individualistic and illustrates how these evolved alongside and potentially helped contribute to larger sociopolitical changes of the time, such as the centralization of political authority and the growth in the social mobility of the educated elite class.
“Contrary to common claims about the absence of individualism in early China and its supposed reification in ‘the West,’ both the Western and Chinese traditions have historically been characterized by diverse and constantly evolving attitudes toward the individual. This book serves as an important corrective to monolithic or essentializing accounts of early Chinese thought, and the narrative concerning the evolution of the concept of the individual in early China is an interesting and novel one. It will appeal widely to people working on early Chinese thought and comparative religion more broadly.” —Edward Slingerland, University of British Columbia
June 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3386-2 / $52.00 (CLOTH)
Extra! Extra! Read All About It!
In the last week Hawai‘i has seen two of its dailies, long-time rivals the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser, “merge” into the new Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Now’s your chance to read all about the history of Hawai‘i’s newspapers and SAVE BIG!
Purchase George Chaplin’s Presstime in Paradise: The Life and Times of The Honolulu Advertiser, 1856–1995, for $9.99 (hardcover; regular price $41.99) or $5.99 (paperback; regular price $21.99). The Hawaiian Journal of History calls Presstime in Paradise “a solid and highly readable contribution. . . . A primary source for future historians. . . . . Irreplaceable.”
Or purchase the award-winning Shaping History: The Role of Newspapers in Hawai‘i, by Helen Geracimos Chapin, for $4.99 (paperback; regular price $31.99). Winner of a Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award for Excellence in Reference Books, Shaping History “[brings] to light the obscure but important history of Hawai‘i’s alternative press [. . .] another of Chapin’s contributions is to illustrate the coziness of Hawai‘i’s mainstream press with the powers that be” (Honolulu Magazine).
Tahitians, Europeans, and Ecological Exchange
When Captain Samuel Wallis became the first European to land at Tahiti in June 1767, he left not only a British flag on shore but also three guinea hens, a pair of turkeys, a pregnant cat, and a garden planted with peas for the chiefess Purea. Thereafter, a succession of European captains, missionaries, and others planted seeds and introduced livestock from around the world. In turn, the islanders traded away great quantities of important island resources, including valuable and spiritually significant plants and animals. What did these exchanges mean? What was their impact? The answers are often unexpected. They also reveal the ways islanders retained control over their societies and landscapes in an era of increasing European intervention. Jennifer Newell’s Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans, and Ecological Exchange explores—from both the European and Tahitian perspective—the effects of “ecological exchange” on one island from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day.
May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3281-0 / $45.00 (CLOTH)
Racializing Okinawan Diaspora in Bolivia and Japan
Embodying Belonging: Racializing Okinawan Diaspora in Bolivia and Japan, by Taku Suzuki, is the first full-length study of a Okinawan diasporic community in South America and Japan. Under extraordinary conditions throughout the twentieth century (Imperial Japanese rule, the brutal Battle of Okinawa at the end of World War II, U.S. military occupation), Okinawans left their homeland and created various diasporic communities around the world. Colonia Okinawa, a farming settlement in the tropical plains of eastern Bolivia, is one such community that was established in the 1950s under the guidance of the U.S. military administration. Although they have flourished as farm owners in Bolivia, thanks to generous support from the Japanese government since Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, hundreds of Bolivian-born ethnic Okinawans have left the Colonia in the last two decades and moved to Japanese cities, such as Yokohama, to become manual laborers in construction and manufacturing industries.
Based on the author’s multisited field research on the work, education, and community lives of Okinawans in the Colonia and Yokohama, this ethnography challenges the unidirectional model of assimilation and acculturation commonly found in immigration studies. In its vivid depiction of the transnational experiences of Okinawan-Bolivians, it argues that transnational Okinawan-Bolivians underwent the various racialization processes—in which they were portrayed by non-Okinawan Bolivians living in the Colonia and native-born Japanese mainlanders in Yokohama and self-represented by Okinawan-Bolivians themselves—as the physical embodiment of a generalized and naturalized “culture” of Japan, Okinawa, or Bolivia.
May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3344-2 / $47.00 (CLOTH)
Talking Hawaii’s Story Editors at Na Mea Hawaii
Based on oral history interviews conducted by the Center for Oral History at UH Mānoa, Talking Hawai‘i’s Story: Oral Histories of an Island People presents a rich sampling of the landmark work done by the Center, making accessible 29 first-person narratives that previously only appeared in the COH semiannual newsletter. The book’s three coeditors, Michi Kodama-Nishimoto, Warren S. Nishimoto, and Cynthia A. Oshiro will speak at Native Books/Nā Mea Hawai‘i in Ward Warehouse (phone: 596-8885) on Sunday, June 13, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. The free talk is open to the public and will be followed by a book signing and light refreshments. Books will be available for purchase.
The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film
Contemporary Chinese films are popular with audiences worldwide, but a key reason for their success has gone unnoticed: many of the films are adapted from brilliant literary works. Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film, by Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, is the first to put these landmark films in the context of their literary origins and explore how the best Chinese directors adapt fictional narratives and styles for film. She unites aesthetics with history in her argument that the rise of cinema in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the late 1980s was partly fueled by burgeoning literary movements. Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s highly acclaimed films Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live are built on the experimental works of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Yu Hua, respectively. Hong Kong new wave’s Ann Hui and Stanley Kwan capitalized on the irresistible visual metaphors of Eileen Chang’s postrealism. Hou Xiaoxian’s new Taiwan cinema turned to fiction by Huang Chunming and Zhu Tianwen for fine-grained perspectives on class and gender relations. Delving equally into the individual approaches of directors and writers, Deppman initiates readers into the exciting possibilities emanating from the world of Chinese cinema.
“Hsiu-Chuang Deppman’s ambitious book investigates the complex associative and conceptual interaction between literature and film, arguing that in many cases, a structural connection underlies the relationship. Her work is a strong challenge to those who believe literature and film should always be regarded as completely separate and unrelated. Deppman’s fascinating chapter on the hip Wong Kar-wai and his debt to novelist Liu Yichang well illustrates the way in which directors can play with and play off of narrative structures, in the process setting up a provocative intersection.” –Wendy Larson, University of Oregon
May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3454-8 / $27.00 (PAPER)
Chinese Writing and Calligraphy
Suitable for college and high school students and those learning on their own, Wendan Li’s Chinese Writing and Calligraphy is a fully illustrated coursebook that provides comprehensive instruction in the history and practical techniques of Chinese calligraphy. No previous knowledge of the language is required to follow the text or complete the lessons. The work covers three major areas: 1) descriptions of Chinese characters and their components, including stroke types, layout patterns, and indications of sound and meaning; 2) basic brush techniques; and 3) the social, cultural, historical, and philosophical underpinnings of Chinese calligraphy—all of which are crucial to understanding and appreciating this art form.
May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3364-0 / $25.00 (PAPER)
A Latitude 20 Book
Understanding Chinese Tombs
No other civilization in the premodern world was more obsessed with constructing underground burial structures than China, where for at least five thousand years people devoted a great amount of wealth and labor to build tombs and furnish them with exquisite objects and images. For the most part, tombs have been mainly appreciated as “treasure troves,” the contents of which has allowed art historians to rewrite histories of individual art forms such as bronze, jade, sculpture, and painting. However, new trends in Chinese art history place the entire burial (rather than its individual components) at the center of observation and interpretation. Wu Hung’s The Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs takes this to the next level by focusing on interpretive methods. It argues that to achieve a genuine understanding of Chinese tombs we need to reconsider a host of art historical concepts (including visuality, viewership, space, formal analysis, function, and context) and derive an analytical framework from the three most essential aspects of any manufactured work: spatiality, materiality, and temporality.
“Most informative and innovative. . . written in a lucid style that should appeal to both engaged and general readers. Wu Hung has again proven himself to be a ground-breaker of Chinese art history.” —David D. W. Wang, Harvard University
May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3426-5 / $50.00 (CLOTH)
“One of the great Indian plays of the millennium”
One of the most significant plays of post-Independence India, Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug takes place on the last day of the Great Mahabharata War. The once-beautiful city of Hastinapur is burning, the battlefield beyond the walls is piled with corpses, and the few survivors huddle together in grief and rage, blaming the destruction on their adversaries, divine capriciousness—anyone or anything except their own moral choices. Andha Yug explores our capacity for moral action, reconciliation, and goodness in times of atrocity and reveals what happens when individuals succumb to the cruelty and cynicism of a blind, dispirited age.
“Andha Yug is one of the great Indian plays of the millennium, and in Alok Bhalla it has found an ideal translator. . . . A model in the fraught field of translation.” —Girish Karnad, playwright, Padma Bhushan and Jnanpith Laureate
“Bhalla’s fine translation is austere and rigorous, negotiating both the epic scale of the play and the Spartan simplicity of its poetry.” —Keki N. Daruwalla, poet, Sahitya Akademi Laureate
May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3517-0 / $20.00 (PAPER)
Manoa 22:1