Author: stephchun
Death, Trauma, and Lu Xun’s Refusal to Mourn
Lu Xun (1881–1936), arguably twentieth-century China’s greatest writer, is commonly cast in the mold of a radical iconoclast who vehemently rejected traditional culture. The contradictions and ambivalence so central to his writings, however, are often overlooked. Challenging conventional depictions, Literary Remains: Death, Trauma, and Lu Xun’s Refusal to Mourn, by Eileen J. Cheng, captures Lu Xun’s disenchantment with modernity and his transformative engagements with traditional literary conventions in his “modern” experimental works. Lurking behind the ambiguity at the heart of his writings are larger questions on the effects of cultural exchange, accommodation, and transformation that Lu Xun grappled with as a writer: How can a culture estranged from its vanishing traditions come to terms with its past? How can a culture, severed from its roots and alienated from the foreign conventions it appropriates, conceptualize its own present and future?
“Eileen Cheng’s study explores Lu Xun’s complex interaction with the past through sophisticated and nuanced analyses of a large corpus of his writings. With its solid textual scholarship and original and illuminating interpretations, her work constitutes an important contribution to Lu Xun studies.” —Kirk Denton, Ohio State University
April 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3595-8 / $54.00 (CLOTH)
The Logic of Pacific Island Culture
Why are islanders so lavishly generous with food and material possessions but so guarded with information? Why do these people, unfailingly polite for the most part, laugh openly when others embarrass themselves? What does a smile mean to an islander? What might a sudden lapse into silence signify? These questions are common in encounters with an unfamiliar Pacific Island culture. Making Sense of Micronesia: The Logic of Pacific Island Culture, by Francis X. Hezel, S.J., is intended for westerners who find themselves in contact with Micronesians—as teachers, social workers, health-care providers, or simply as friends—and are puzzled by their island ways. It is for anyone struggling to make sense of cultural exchanges they don’t quite understand.
The author focuses on the guts of island culture: the importance of the social map, the tension between the individual and social identity, the ways in which wealth and knowledge are used, the huge importance of respect, emotional expression and its restraints, island ways of handling both conflict and intimacy, the real but indirect power of women. Far from a theoretical exposition, the book begins and ends with the real-life behavior of islanders. Each section of every chapter is introduced by a vignette that illustrates the theme discussed. The book attempts to explain island behavior, as curious as it may seem to outsiders at times, against the over-riding pattern of values and attitudes that have always guided island life.
April 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3661-0 / $27.00 (CLOTH)
Five Dollar Friday Sale is April 5 / Five Books for $5 Each
The next Five Dollar Friday Sale is this week Friday, April 5. From 8am to 4pm (HST), these Pacific titles will be available for $5 each at our website, while supplies last:
New in the Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory Series
Potent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia, by Catherine Allerton, is an ethnographic investigation of the power of the landscape and the implications of that power for human needs, behavior, and emotions. Based on two years of fieldwork in rural Flores, the book situates place-making and mobility of the Manggarai within the larger contexts of diverse human-environment interactions as well as adat revival in postcolonial Indonesia. Although it focuses on social life in one region of eastern Indonesia, the work engages with broader theoretical discussions of landscape, travel, materiality, cultural politics, kinship, and animism.
“Potent Landscapes is a brilliant new work that breaks fresh ground in the anthropological study of place and culture in Southeast Asia. Bringing a phenomenological interest in ‘dwelling’ to her ethnographic portrayal of everyday life in the southern Manggarai settlements of West Flores, Indonesia, Catherine Allerton takes readers on a revealing and richly rewarding journey into the ‘shape of the land’ there. Her book offers a wealth of ideas and comparative material for scholars working in other parts of Asia and the Pacific, and an accessible account sure to fascinate and inspire students of anthropology.” —Kenneth M. George, University of Wisconsin-Madison
April 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3800-3 / $25.00 (PAPER)
In a village community in the highlands of Cambodia’s Southwest, people struggle to rebuild their lives after nearly thirty years of war and genocide. Recovery is a tenuous process as villagers attempt to shape a future while contending with the terrible rupture of the Pol Pot era. Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia, by Eve Monique Zucker, tracks the fragile progress of restoring the bonds of community in O’Thmaa and its environs, the site of a Khmer Rouge base and battlefield for nearly three decades between 1970 and 1998.
“With an ethnographer’s acumen, Zucker shows us how the members of a community in post-conflict Cambodia have sought to rebuild their lives, a process involving complicated issues of trust, social memory, and moral order. Forest of Struggle is a must-read for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of social suffering and the remaking of social worlds after prolonged conflict and genocide.” —Alexander Hinton, Rutgers University
April 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3805-8 / $28.00 (PAPER)
View a full list of titles in the series Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning and Memory.
Spring Break 2013 Schedule
As part of the University of Hawai‘i’s Green Days initiative, University of Hawai‘i Press will be closed March 25-29, 2013. The Press will reopen Monday, April 1. Mahalo for your support!
UH Press at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, March 21-24, San Diego
University of Hawai‘i Press will be exhibiting at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, March 21-24, at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego.
Editors Patricia Crosby and Pamela Kelley will be attending, together with marketing director Colins Kawai and Asia studies product manager Steve Hirashima. Please visit us at booths 307, 309, and 311, where we will be offering a 20% discount and free shipping in the U.S. (Free shipping applies only to orders received or placed at the conference.)
Our publishing partners will be exhibiting nearby: Ateneo de Manila University Press/University of the Philippines Press (booth 313), Cornell University East Asia Program (booth 308), MerwinAsia/Seoul Selection/Shanghai Press and Publishing Development (booth 314), NIAS Press-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (booth 312), and NUS Press-Singapore (booth 310). See you in San Diego!
Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia
In Indonesia, light skin color has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia, by L. Ayu Saraswati, explores Indonesia’s changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture.
“In this book L. Ayu Saraswati offers a lucid and compelling accounting of how ideas of beauty and race circulate and become affective in transnational Indonesia. Offering a distinctive approach to global culture as an affective domain, as well a sharp and nuanced critique of histories of whiteness, this book will be of tremendous value to all scholars and students interested in unlearning the affective and aesthetic scripts of race.” —Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012)
Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning and Memory
March 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3736-5 / $25.00 (PAPER)
Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood
From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood, by Yiman Wang, traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Wang revolutionizes our understanding of Chinese cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point—Shanghai in the Chinese case—she argues for a multi-local process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyzes how southern Chinese cinema (huanan dianying) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through trans-regional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of Chinese cinema.
“This study of remaking in Chinese cinema is both one of the most sophisticated and insightful analyses of the remake phenomenon in general and a work that reveals a series of fascinating and hitherto occluded connections and links in Chinese-language film history. Each case study is a revelation for the reader. This rigorous and original piece of scholarship reveals, investigates and narrates forgotten connections across borders and between major filmmaking cities and in this way makes new contributions to film history. The primary readership for the work will be students and scholars of Chinese cinema, but its contribution to larger debates about transnational cinema and remaking in general should be recognized and it should find a wider readership in cinema studies, as well as in Chinese studies.” —Chris Berry, University of London
Critical Interventions
March 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3607-8 / $49.00 (CLOTH)
Plant & Gardening Book Sale: March 12-19, 40% Off Select Titles
Mark your calendars and get ready to get planting! UH Press will be offering more than 30 plant and gardening titles at 40% off: online only, March 12-19 (starts and ends noon, HST), while supplies last (sale prices in red):
A Native Hawaiian Garden: How to Grow and Care for Island Plants – $26.99/$16.19
Breeding Anthuriums in Hawaii – $31.00/$18.60
Breeding Dendrobium Orchids in Hawaii – $31.00/$18.60
Ethnic Culinary Herbs: A Guide to Identification and Cultivation in Hawai‘i – $26.99/$16.19
Flowers of the Pacific Island Seashore: A Guide to the Littoral Plants of Hawai‘i, Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, Cook Islands, Fiji, and Micronesia – $19.00/$11.40
A to Z of South East Asian Orchid Species – $39.00/$23.40
Hawaiian Heritage Plants: Revised Edition – $31.99/$19.19
Hawai‘i’s Ferns and Fern Allies – $25.00/$15.00
Landscape Planning in Singapore – $40.00/$24.00
Loulu: The Hawaiian Palm – $48.00/$28.80
Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawaii, Revised Edition – $97.00/$58.20
Orders and Families of Malayan Seed Plants – $22.00/$13.20
Plants for Tropical Landscapes: A Gardener’s Guide – $41.99/$25.19
Plants in Hawaiian Culture – $31.99/$19.19
Plants and Flowers of Hawai‘i – $26.99/$16.19
Poisonous Plants of Paradise: First Aid and Medical Treatment of Injuries from Hawai‘i’s Plants – $21.99/$13.19
Polynesian Herbal Medicine – $27.00/$16.20
Rainforest Trees of Samoa: A Guide to the Common Lowland and Foothill Forest Trees of the Samoan Archipelago – $27.00/$16.20
Samoan Herbal Medicine: ‘O La‘au ma Vai Fofo o Samoa – $13.00/$7.80
Small Trees for the Tropical Landscape – $41.99/$25.19
Specialty Crops for Pacific Islands – $75.00/$45.00
The Classical Gardens of Suzhou – $20.95/$12.57
The Essential Guide to Creating a Chinese-Style Garden – $29.95/$17.97
The Ornamental Edible Garden – $24.99/$14.99
The Small Food Garden: Growing Organic Fruit and Vegetables at Home – $19.99/$11.99
The World of Bananas in Hawai‘i: Then and Now – $80.00/$48.00
Tongan Herbal Medicine – $13.00/$7.80
Trees of Hawai‘i – $14.99/$8.99
Trees of Our Garden City: A Guide to the Common Trees of Singapore – $42.00/$25.20
Tropical Exotics – $36.99/$22.19
Tropical Shrubs – $36.99/$22.19
Useful Plants of Guam: A Facsimile Edition Reprint of the Original Book Published in 1905 – $60.00/$36.00