Author: stephchun

Art from Burma in the Denison Museum

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The collection of Burmese art housed at the Denison Museum in Granville, Ohio, includes more than 1,500 objects dating from the late first millennium A.D., through the twentieth century. While particularly strong on textiles originating with minority groups in Burma, it also includes Buddha images, lacquer objects, works on paper, manuscripts, wood carvings, and pieces made from bronze, silver, and ivory. The core holdings were acquired by Baptist missionaries, United States government employees, diplomats, and others living in Burma, and this material was augmented by judicious purchases.

Eclectic Collecting: Art from Burma in the Denison Museum, edited by Alexandra Green, discusses theoretical approaches to the study of textiles and examines in some depth the production and use of textiles by the Karenic, Chin, Kachin, Lahu, and Tai, and Wa minority groups, as well as ethnic Burmans, within the context of their histories and cultures. Vibrant photographs illustrate the distinctive designs characteristic of each population group and the production techniques they use.

270 illus., 261 in color, 2 maps

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3311-4 / $60.00 (CLOTH)

Hakka Soul

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Hakka Soul: Memories, Migrations, Meals, by Chin Woon Ping, chronicles the dreams, ambitions, and idiosyncrasies of her family, beginning with the death of her grandmother in pre-Independence Malaya. It was a tumultuous period when the occupying Japanese army had just been defeated, the British colonial government was losing its grip on the country, and a communist guerilla insurgency had broken out in the jungles of the Malay Peninsula. Her stories follow the family’s move to the United States and a journey to China to visit her father’s ancestral home.

Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies
August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3289-6 / $24.00 (PAPER)

Victoria Kneubuhl Book Signings in August

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Victoria Kneubuhl will be signing copies of her recently published book, the mystery novel Murder Casts a Shadow, at:

Barnes & Noble—Ala Moana Center, Saturday, August 16, 2:00 p.m.
Native Books/Na Mea Hawai‘i—Ward Warehouse, Thursday, August 21, 6:30–8:30 p.m. Group reading by the author and friends, songs by Ku‘uipo Kumukahi, light refreshments to follow.
Borders—Pearlridge, Saturday, August 23, 12 noon
Borders—Ward Center, Sunday, August 24, 2:00 p.m.

Victoria Kneubuhl is also the author of Hawai‘i Nei: Island Plays, published by University of Hawai‘i Press. Both books are available at the UH Press website for 20% off until September 1, 2008.

Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan

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Alternate attendance (sankin kotai) was one of the central institutions of Edo-period (1603–1868) Japan and one of the most unusual examples of a system of enforced elite mobility in world history. It required the daimyo to divide their time between their domains and the city of Edo, where they waited upon the Tokugawa shogun. Based on a prodigious amount of research in both published and archival primary sources, Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan, by Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, renders alternate attendance as a lived experience, for not only the daimyo but also the samurai retainers who accompanied them. Beyond exploring the nature of travel to and from the capital as well as the period of enforced bachelorhood there, Vaporis elucidates—for the first time—the significance of alternate attendance as an engine of cultural, intellectual, material, and technological exchange.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3205-6 / $50.00 (CLOTH)

Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific

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What is globalization? How is it gendered? How does it work in Asia and the Pacific? The authors of the sixteen original and innovative essays presented in Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory, edited by Kathy E. Ferguson and Monique Mironesco, take fresh stock of globalization’s complexities. They pursue critical feminist inquiry about women, gender, and sexualities and produce original insights into changing life patterns in Asian and Pacific Island societies. Each essay puts the lives and struggles of women at the center of its examination while weaving examples of global circuits in Asian and Pacific societies into a world frame of analysis. The work is generated from within Asian and Pacific spaces, bringing to the fore local voices and claims to knowledge.

August 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3241-4 / $35.00 (PAPER)

Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China

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The seventeenth century is generally acknowledged as one of the most politically tumultuous but culturally creative periods of late imperial Chinese history. Scholars have noted the profound effect on, and literary responses to, the fall of the Ming on the male literati elite. Also of great interest is the remarkable emergence beginning in the late Ming of educated women as readers and, more importantly, writers. Only recently beginning to be explored, however, are such seventeenth-century religious phenomena as “the reinvention” of Chan Buddhism—a concerted effort to revive what were believed to be the traditional teachings, texts, and practices of “classical” Chan. And, until now, the role played by women in these religious developments has hardly been noted at all. Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China, by Beata Grant, is an innovative interdisciplinary work that brings together several of these important seventeenth-century trends.

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3202-5 / $46.00 (CLOTH)

Bridal Laments in Rural China

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Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China, by Anne E. McLaren, is the first in-depth study of Chinese bridal laments, a ritual and performative art practiced by Chinese women in premodern times that gave them a rare opportunity to voice their grievances publicly. Drawing on methodologies from numerous disciplines, including performance arts and folk literatures, the author suggests that the ability to move an audience through her lament was one of the most important symbolic and ritual skills a Chinese woman could possess before the modern era.

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3232-2 / $54.00 (CLOTH)

“Performing Grief introduces us to the fascinating culture of the bridal lament. Drawing upon the rich materials from the small village of Shuyuan in Nanhui near Shanghai for her primary materials, the author reconstructs a once vibrant culture in which young women on the eve of their wedding voiced their anxieties in ritual songs. The study is based on extensive local research, makes full use of the existing scholarship on female traditions of lament inside and outside China, and illustrates its argument with the almost complete translation of one of the most fully preserved cycle of laments. This study is an absolute must for anyone who is interested in the position of women in traditional society until quite recently. It also is essential reading for anyone working in the field of Chinese women’s literature as it highlights the rich oral traditions of poor rural women.” –Wilt Idema, Harvard University

A Distinctive History of Haena

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Ha‘ena is a land steeped in antiquity yet vibrantly beautiful today as any Hollywood fantasy of a tropical paradise. He ‘aina momona, a rich and fertile land linked to the sea and the rising and setting sun, is a place of gods and goddesses: Pele and her sister, Hi‘iaka, and Laka, patron of hula. It epitomizes the best that can be found in the district of northwestern Kaua‘i, known to aboriginal Hawaiians as Hale Le‘a (House of Pleasure and Delight). Ha‘ena: Through the Eyes of Ancestors, by Carlos Andrade, is an ambitious attempt to provide a unique perspective in the complex story of the ahupua‘a of Ha‘ena.

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3119-6 / $30.00 (CLOTH)

Our Great Qing Now Available in Paperback

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Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China, by Johan Elverskog, is now available in paperback.

“Elverskog’s book is a pleasure to read, managing as it does to weave together a detailed knowledge of modern Mongol history and the broad scope of its relevance for Asian history. His research is solidly based in the classics of Mongol history, as well as close readings of an impressive array of archive materials . . . made accessible to the non-specialist here for the first time. He frames his arguments within a wide-ranging body of theoretical work covering both religion and politics. At the same time, this book is refreshingly comparative, especially in terms of other empires (from the Roman to the British).” —Journal of Chinese Religions

“Masterful . . . represents an important contribution to the ‘new Qing history’ that is now changing the image of late imperial China by offering more nuanced interpretations of this period.” —International Journal of Asian Studies

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3330-5 / $23.00 (PAPER)

Racial Performativity and World War II

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In The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II, Emily Roxworthy contests the notion that the U.S. government’s internment policies during World War II had little impact on the postwar lives of most Japanese Americans. After the curtain was lowered on the war following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Americans behaved as if the “theatre of war” had ended and life could return to normal. Roxworthy demonstrates that this theatrical logic of segregating the real from the staged, the authentic experience from the political display, grew out of the manner in which internment was agitated for and instituted by the U.S. government and media. During the war, Japanese Americans struggled to define themselves within the web of this theatrical logic, and they continue to reenact this trauma in public and private to this day.

July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3220-9 / $35.00 (CLOTH)

“This is an original and well-written analysis, contributing much to the literature on internment and, thereby, re-energizing the ideological stages of internment discourse.” —Caroline Chung Simpson, University of Washington

New Edition of Popular Divorce Guide Now Available

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Praise for the Second Edition:
“An impressively detailed, insightful, and compassionate guide.” —Honolulu Advertiser
“Jewelry stores should hand this book out with the purchase of every engagement ring.” —Honolulu Magazine

This completely revised and updated third edition of the award-winning
Divorce with Decency: The Complete How-To Handbook and Survivor’s Guide to the Legal, Emotional, Economic, and Social Issues, by Bradley A. Coates, includes the most current research, statistics, and insights on the effects of divorce on spouses, their children, and society overall. Written by a prominent divorce lawyer with more than thirty years of experience, it is the most comprehensive treatment of the legal, emotional, economic, psychological, and social aspects of marital relationships and divorce available anywhere in a single volume.

A Latitude 20 Book
July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3310-7 / $19.95 (PAPER)

Ways of Being and Place in Vanuatu

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The Other Side: Ways of Being and Place in Vanuatu, by John Patrick Taylor, is the first major ethnographic and historical study of the Sia Raga people of north Pentecost Island, a region that was home to the late Father Walter Lini, Vanuatu’s first prime minister. Exploring Raga social, spatial, and historical consciousness, this richly poetic account provides important theoretical contributions to ongoing debates in Pacific anthropology about the relation between structure and history, and place and time. It reveals important insights into the convergence of indigenous and exogenous cosmologies and hegemonies historically, and shows how these are implicated in contemporary social, ritual, and material cultural expressions. These analyses engage with broader concerns relating to colonial and postcolonial identities, political economy, and globalization in island Melanesia.

Pacific Islands Monograph Series, No. 22
July 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3302-2 / $52.00 (CLOTH)
Published in association with the Center for Pacific Islands, University of Hawai‘i

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