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Popular Culture Association | UHP in New Orleans

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Popular Culture Association
American Culture Association

2015 Annual Conference | New Orleans, Louisiana | April 1-4

Contact Acquisitions Editor Stephanie Chun: chuns@hawaii.edu

spillerJavaphilia

Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance

Henry Spiller

278 pages | 41 illustrations | Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific

Cloth | 978-0-8248-4094-5 | $42.00

 

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Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity

Sonia Ryang

208 pages | 12 color illustrations | Food in Asia and the Pacific

Cloth | 978-0-8248-3935-2 | $39.00

PDX / Montreal / Chicago | Find UHP this week!

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EXHIBITS | This Week

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The Association for Asian Studies
Annual Conference

March 26-29 | Chicago, Illinois

Contact our Acquisitions Editors:
Pamela Kelley: pkelley@hawaii.edu and Stephanie Chun: chuns@hawaii.edu

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Society for Cinema & Media Studies

March 25-29 | Montreal, Quebec

Contact Acquisitions Editor Pamela Kelley: pkelley@hawaii.edu

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You can also find us in the Pacific Northwest:

fdaa5cc9-474d-46af-8324-1df076bf4029ACRL 2015 Conference

March 25-28 | Portland, Oregon

Contact Digital Publishing Manager Trond Knutsen: tknutsen@hawaii.edu

25% Off Sale | Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave’ Goes Viral in Wall Street Journal

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Purchase Hokusai’s Great Wave for 25% OFF in our Online Store

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From The Wall Street Journal

How Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave’ Went Viral

By ELLEN GAMERMAN
March 18, 2015
 
 

“The Great Wave,” Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print from the early 1830s, may be the most famous artwork in Japanese history, and its popularity isn’t cresting anytime soon.

The image of a wave towering over Mount Fuji is the subject of a new book and recent exhibits in Paris and Berlin. It is on view in a show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and another major display is expected at the British Museum in 2017. Starting April 5, the piece takes a starring role in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s largest ever exhibition of Japanese prints.

The artwork exists in that rare stratosphere of images that are both instantly recognizable and internationally famous. “The Great Wave” has gone viral over time, first circulating the old-fashioned way—via traders and tall ships in the 19th century. Since then, the woodcut has been called an inspiration for Claude Debussy’s orchestral work, “La Mer,” and appears in poetry and prose by Rainer Maria Rilke, Pearl S. Buck and Hari Kunzru. Levi’s and Patagonia used it in marketing campaigns. It has been preserved in cyberspace as a Google Doodle and an emoji.

“There is no work of nonwestern art that has a comparable level of recognition,” said Christine Guth, author of “Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon” released this year. Ms. Guth, who is acting head of the history of design program at London’s Royal College of Art, said the print has been used to symbolize everything from economic power to military threats to natural disaster: “An image that originated in Japan took on a life of its own.”

Sarah Thompson, the MFA show’s curator, said the museum was the first in the world to stage a Hokusai exhibit in the early 1890s.

The show in Boston, which runs until early August, features more than 230 works from Hokusai’s seven-decade career, including illustrated printed books, a long screen painting and paper dioramas. The exhibit, six years in the making, is built on works entirely from the MFA’s collection. It just finished a multicity tour in Japan.

“The Great Wave”— formally titled “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” from the Hokusai series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji”—adorns marketing for the Boston show. Inside the exhibit, though, visitors will have to look for it. The work, about the size of a piece of legal paper, will be grouped with the series of Mount Fuji prints.

The image is a mix of east and west—a blending of techniques that Hokusai picked up from Japanese artists and his own knowledge of European prints. The woodblock depicts Mount Fuji, a hallowed place in Japan, but pushes the peak deep into the distance using western perspective. The wave was printed on Japanese mulberry paper but marked by a color new to Japan—a vibrant Prussian blue created from synthetic dye in Germany.

The work was fairly accessible to the Japanese—one scholar has said it went for the price of a large bowl of noodle soup—while the snobbish view of prints inside the country made it easier for the series to travel abroad.

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Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon
by Christine Guth

January 2015 | 272 pages | 70 color illustrations, 5 black & white
Paper ISBN 978-0-8248-3960-4 | $20.00 $15.00
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8248-3959-8 | $57.00 $42.75

Kuaaina Kahiko: Life and Land in Ancient Kahikinui, Maui

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In early Hawai‘i, kua‘āina were the hinterlands inhabited by nā kua‘āina, or country folk. Often these were dry, less desirable areas where much skill and hard work were required to wrest a living from the lava landscapes. The ancient district of Kahikinui in southeast Maui is such a kua‘āina and remains one of the largest tracts of undeveloped land in the islands. Named after Tahiti Nui in the Polynesian homeland, its thousands of pristine acres house a treasure trove of archaeological ruins—witnesses to the generations of Hawaiians who made this land their home before it was abandoned in the late nineteenth century.

Kua‘āina Kahiko follows kama‘āina archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch on a seventeen-year-long research odyssey to rediscover the ancient patterns of life and land in Kahikinui. Through painstaking archaeological survey and detailed excavations, Kirch and his students uncovered thousands of previously undocumented ruins of houses, trails, agricultural fields, shrines, and temples. Kirch describes how, beginning in the early fifteenth century, Native Hawaiians began to permanently inhabit the rocky lands along the vast southern slope of Haleakalā. Eventually these planters transformed Kahikinui into what has been called the greatest continuous zone of dryland planting in the Hawaiian Islands. He relates other fascinating aspects of life in ancient Kahikinui, such as the capture and use of winter rains to create small wet-farming zones, and decodes the complex system of heiau, showing how the orientations of different temple sites provide clues to the gods to whom they were dedicated. 

Kirch examines the sweeping changes that transformed Kahikinui after European contact, including how some maka’āinana families fell victim to unscrupulous land agents. But also woven throughout the book is the saga of Ka ‘Ohana o Kahikinui, a grass-roots group of Native Hawaiians who successfully struggled to regain access to these Hawaiian lands. Rich with ancedotes of Kirch’s personal experiences over years of field research, Kua’āina Kahiko takes the reader into the little-known world of the ancient kua‘āina.

Written by Patrick Vinton Kirch

2014 | 336 pages | 80 illustrations, 5 maps
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3955-0 | $49.00 | Cloth

From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film

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GreeneCOVER1.inddThroughout the twentieth century, American filmmakers have embraced cinematic representations of China. Beginning with D.W. Griffith’s silent classic Broken Blossoms (1919) and ending with the computer-animated Kung Fu Panda (2008), author Naomi Greene explores China’s changing role in the American imagination. Taking viewers into zones that frequently resist logical expression or more orthodox historical investigation, the films suggest the welter of intense and conflicting impulses that have surrounded China. They make clear that China has often served as the very embodiment of “otherness”—a kind of yardstick or cloudy mirror of America itself. It is a mirror that reflects not only how Americans see the racial “other” but also a larger landscape of racial, sexual, and political perceptions that touch on the ways in which the nation envisions itself and its role in the world.

In the United States, the exceptional emotional charge that imbues images of China has tended to swing violently from positive to negative and back again: China has been loved and—as is generally the case today—feared. Using film to trace these dramatic fluctuations, From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda relates them to the larger arc of historical and political change. Suggesting that filmic images both reflect and fuel broader social and cultural impulses, the author argues that they reveal a constant tension or dialectic between the “self” and the “other.” Significantly, with the important exception of films made by Chinese or Chinese American directors, the Chinese other is almost invariably portrayed in terms of the American self. Placed in a broader context, this ethnocentrism is related both to an ever-present sense of American exceptionalism and to a Manichean world view that perceives other countries as friends or enemies.

Greene analyzes a series of influential films, including classics like Shanghai Express (1932), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), The Good Earth (1936), and Shanghai Gesture (1941); important cold war films such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and The Sand Pebbles (1966); and a range of contemporary films, including Chan is Missing (1982), The Wedding Banquet (1993), Kundun (1997), Mulan (1998), and Shanghai Noon (2000). The author’s consideration makes clear that while many stereotypes and racist images of the past have been largely banished from the screen, the political, cultural, and social impulses they embodied are still alive and well.

Written by Naomi Greene

2014 | 280 pages | 31 illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8248-3836-2 | $25.00
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3835-5 | $65.00

Critical Interventions Series

In Transit: The Formation of a Colonial East Asian Cultural Sphere

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KleemanThis work examines the creation of an East Asian cultural sphere by the Japanese imperial project in the first half of the twentieth century. It seeks to re-read the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” not as a mere political and ideological concept but as the potential site of a vibrant and productive space that accommodated transcultural interaction and transformation. By reorienting the focus of (post) colonial studies from the macro-narrative of political economy, military institutions, and socio-political dynamics, it uncovers a cultural and personal understanding of life within the Japanese imperial enterprise.

The negative impact of Japanese imperialism on both nations and societies has been amply demonstrated and cannot be denied, but In Transit focuses on the opportunities and unique experiences it afforded a number of extraordinary individuals to provide a fuller picture of Japanese colonial culture. By observing the empire—from Tokyo to remote Mongolia and colonial Taiwan, from the turn of the twentieth century to the postwar era—through the diverse perspectives of gender, the arts, and popular culture, it explores an area of colonial experience that straddles the public and the private, the national and the personal, thereby revealing a new aspect of the colonial condition and its postcolonial implications.

Written by Faye Yuan Kleeman

2014 | 320 pages | 10 illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3860-7 | $52.00 | Cloth

The World of East Asia Series

Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders

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Besnier-GenderTransgender identities and other forms of gender and sexuality that transcend the normative pose important questions about society, culture, politics, and history. They force us to question, for example, the forces that divide humanity into two gender categories and render them necessary, inevitable, and natural. The transgender also exposes a host of dynamics that, at first glance, have little to do with gender or sex, such as processes of power and domination; the complex relationship among agency, subjectivity, and structure; and the mutual constitution of the global and the local.

Particularly intriguing is the fact that gender and sexual diversity appear to be more prevalent in some regions of the world than in others. Gender on the Edge is an exploration of the ways in which non-normative gendering and sexuality in one such region, the Pacific Islands, are implicated in a wide range of socio-cultural dynamics that are at once local and global, historical, and contemporary. The authors recognize that different social configurations, cultural contexts, and historical trajectories generate diverse ways of being transgender across the societies of the region, but they also acknowledge that these differences are overlaid with commonalities and predictabilities.

Edited by Niko Besnier and Kalissa Alexeyeff

2014 | 408 pages | 20 illustrations | 2 maps
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3882-9 | $65.00s | Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3883-6 | $35.00s | Paper

Not for sale in East and Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand

Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaii

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MacLennanAlthough little remains of Hawai`i’s plantation economy, the sugar industry’s past dominance has created the Hawai`i we see today. Many of the most pressing and controversial issues—urban and resort development, water rights, expansion of suburbs into agriculturally rich lands, pollution from herbicides, invasive species in native forests, an unsustainable economy—can be tied to Hawai`i’s industrial sugar history.

In Sovereign Sugar, Carol MacLennan unravels the tangled relationship between the sugar industry and Hawai`i’s cultural and natural landscapes. It is the first work to fully examine the complex tapestry of socioeconomic, political, and environmental forces that shaped sugar’s role in Hawai`i. While early Polynesian and European influences on island ecosystems started the process of biological change, plantation agriculture, with its voracious need for land and water, profoundly altered Hawai`i’s landscape.

2014 | 400 pages | 21 illustrations | 4 maps
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3949-9 | $39.00s | Cloth

Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America

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ParkCOVER5.inddThe story of Catholicism and Protestantism in China, Japan, and Korea has been told in great detail. The existing literature is especially rich in documenting church and missionary activities as well as how varied regions and cultures have translated Christian ideas and practices. Less evident, however, are studies that contextualize Christianity within the larger economic, political, social, and cultural developments in each of the three countries and its diasporas.

The contributors to Encountering Modernity address such concerns and collectively provide insights into Christianity’s role in the development of East Asia and as it took shape among East Asians in the United States. The work brings together studies of Christianity in China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan and its diasporas to expand the field through new angles of vision and interpretation. By moving beyond issues of missiology and church history, it asks how Christianity represented an encounter with modernity that set into motion tremendous changes throughout East Asia and in transnational diasporic communities in the United States.

Edited by Albert L. Park and David K. Yoo

2014 | 264 pages | 7 illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3947-5 | $42.00s | Cloth
Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies

 

Local Story: The Massie-Kahahawai Case and the Culture of History

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Rosa-REVThe Massie-Kahahawai case of 1931–1932 shook the Territory of Hawai‘i to its very core. Thalia Massie, a young Navy wife, alleged that she had been kidnapped and raped by “some Hawaiian boys” in Waikīkī. A few days later, five young men stood accused of her rape. Mishandling of evidence and contradictory testimony led to a mistrial, but before a second trial could be convened, one of the accused, Horace Ida, was kidnapped and beaten by a group of Navy men and a second, Joseph Kahahawai, lay dead from a gunshot wound. Thalia’s husband, Thomas Massie; her mother, Grace Fortescue; and two Navy men were convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter, despite witnesses who saw them kidnap Kahahawai and the later discovery of his body in Massie’s car. Under pressure from Congress and the Navy, territorial governor Lawrence McCully Judd commuted their sentences. After spending only an hour in the governor’s office at ‘Iolani Palace, the four were set free.

Local Story is a close examination of how Native Hawaiians, Asian immigrants, and others responded to challenges posed by the military and federal government during the case’s investigation and aftermath. In addition to providing a concise account of events as they unfolded, the book shows how this historical narrative has been told and retold in later decades to affirm a local identity among descendants of working-class Native Hawaiians, Asians, and others—in fact, this understanding of the term “local” in the islands dates from the Massie-Kahahawai case. It looks at the racial and sexual tensions in pre–World War II Hawai‘i that kept local men and white women apart and at the uneasy relationship between federal and military officials and territorial administrators. Lastly, it examines the revival of interest in the case in the last few decades: true crime accounts, a fictionalized TV mini-series, and, most recently, a play and a documentary—all spurring the formation of new collective memories about the Massie-Kahahawai case. 

Written by John P. Rosa

2014 | 176 pages
Cloth 978-0-8248-2825-7, $45.00
Paper 978-0-8248-3970-3, $19.99

Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun: Essays by Zen Master Kim Iryop

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Kim-ReflectionsJACKETfront.pdfThe life and work of Kim Iryŏp (1896–1971) bear witness to Korea’s encounter with modernity. A prolific writer, Iryŏp reflected on identity and existential loneliness in her poems, short stories, and autobiographical essays. As a pioneering feminist intellectual, she dedicated herself to gender issues and understanding the changing role of women in Korean society. As an influential Buddhist nun, she examined religious teachings and strove to interpret modern human existence through a religious world view. Originally published in Korea when Iryŏp was in her sixties, Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun (Ŏnŭ sudoin ŭi hoesang) makes available for the first time in English a rich, intimate, and unfailingly candid source of material with which to understand modern Korea, Korean women, and Korean Buddhism. 

Throughout her writing, Iryŏp poses such questions as: How does one come to terms with one’s identity? What is the meaning of revolt and what are its limitations? How do we understand the different dimensions of love in the context of Buddhist teachings? What is Buddhist awakening? How do we attain it? How do we understand God and the relationship between good and evil? What is the meaning of religious practice in our time? We see through her thought and life experiences the co-existence of seemingly conflicting ideas and ideals—Christianity and Buddhism, sexual liberalism and religious celibacy, among others.

This volume challenges readers with her creative interpretations of Buddhist doctrine and her reflections on the meaning of Buddhist practice. In the process she offers insight into a time when the ideas and contributions of women to twentieth-century Korean society and intellectual life were just beginning to emerge from the shadows, where they had been obscured in the name of modernization and nation-building.

Written by Kim Iryŏp
Translated by Jin Y. Park

2014 | 328 pages
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8248-3878-2, $49.00

Korean Classics Library: Philosophy and Religion

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