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Tsai Ming-Liang and a Cinema of Slowness

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LimHow can we qualify slowness in cinema? What is the relationship between a cinema of slowness and a wider sociocultural “slow movement”? A body of films that shares a propensity toward slowness has emerged in many parts of the world over the past two decades. This is the first book to examine the concept of cinematic slowness and address this fascinating phenomenon in contemporary film culture. 

Providing a critical investigation into questions of temporality, materiality, and aesthetics, and examining concepts of authorship, cinephilia, and nostalgia, Song Hwee Lim offers insight into cinematic slowness through the films of the Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. Through detailed analysis of aspects of stillness and silence in cinema, Lim delineates the strategies by which slowness in film can be constructed. By drawing on writings on cinephilia and the films of directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, he makes a passionate case for a slow cinema that calls for renewed attention to the image and to the experience of time in film. 

Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness will speak to readers with an interest in art cinema, queer studies, East Asian culture, and the question of time. In an age of unrelenting acceleration of pace both in film and in life, this book invites us to pause and listen, to linger and look, and, above all, to take things slowly. 

Written by Song Hwee Lim
2014 | 240 pages | 29 illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3684-9 | $45.00s | Cloth

Association for Asian American Studies Conference in San Francisco and the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference in Chicago

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University of Hawai‘i Press is exhibiting at two conferences this week, showcasing new and recent titles from our Spring catalog as well as our Asian Studies catalog.

In San Francisco from April 16-19 at the Grand Hyatt for the Association for Asian American Studies Conference, acquisitions editor Masako Ikeda will be available to meet with prospective authors.

In Chicago, editor Stephanie Chun will be at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference from April 16-19 at the Marriott Chicago.

Some titles to look out for at both meetings: From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film, Scrutinized!: Surveillance in Asian North American Literature, Dubious Gastronomy: The Culture Politics of Eating Asian in the USA, and Capturing Contemporary Japan: Differentiation and Uncertainty.

Please visit us to see our latest titles and take advantage of the conference offer of a 20% discount and free shipping in the U.S. Free shipping applies only to orders received or placed at the conference.

Surf Science: An Introduction to Waves for Surfing, Third Edition

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buttSurfRevEdHave you ever wondered where waves come from? What makes every one different, why some peel nicely and others just close out? Why, some days, waves come in sets of six and others in sets of three, and what factors affect the behavior of a surfing break? If you have, this book by Tony Butt is for you.

Now in its third edition, Surf Science is the first book to talk in depth about the science of waves from a surfer’s point of view. It fills the gap between surfing books and waves textbooks and will help you learn how to predict surf. You don’t need a scientific background to read it—just curiosity and a fascination for waves.

2014 | 136 pages
Paper ISBN 978-0-8248-3954-3, $35.00

Surfing Places, Surfboard Makers: Craft, Creativity, and Cultural Heritage in Hawaii, California, and Australia

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Warren&GibsonOver the last forty years, surfing has emerged from its Pacific islands origins to become a global industry. Since its beginnings more than a thousand years ago, surfing’s icon has been the surfboard—its essential instrument, the point of physical connection between human and nature, body and wave. To a surfer, a board is more than a piece of equipment; it is a symbol, a physical emblem of cultural, social, and emotional meanings. Based on research in three important surfing locations—Hawai‘i, southern California, and southeastern Australia—this is the first book to trace the surfboard from regional craft tradition to its key role in the billion-dollar surfing business. 

The surfboard workshops of Hawai‘i, California, and Australia are much more than sites of surfboard manufacturing. They are hives of creativity where legacies of rich cultural heritage and the local environment combine to produce unique, bold board designs customized to suit prevailing waves. The globalization and corporatization of surfing have presented small, independent board makers with many challenges stemming from the wide availability of cheap, mass-produced boards and the influx of new surfers. The authors follow the story of board makers who have survived these challenges and stayed true to their calling by keeping the mythology and creativity of board making alive. In addition, they explore the heritage of the craft, the secrets of custom board production, the role of local geography in shaping board styles, and the survival of hand-crafting skills.

From the olo boards of ancient Hawaiian kahuna to the high-tech designs that represent the current state of the industry, Surfing Places, Surfboard Makers offers an entrée into the world of surfboard making that will find an eager audience among researchers and students of Pacific culture, history, geography, and economics, as well as surfing enthusiasts.

Written by Andrew Warren and Chris Gibson
2014 | 288 pages | 35 illustrations
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8248-3828-7, $55.00
Paper ISBN 978-0-8248-3943-7, $28.00

 

Recasting Red Culture in Proletarian Japan: Childhood, Korea, and the Historical Avant-Garde

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Recasting Red Culture turns a critical eye on the influential proletarian cultural movement that flourished in 1920s and 1930s Japan. This was a diverse, cosmopolitan, and highly contested moment in Japanese history when notions of political egalitarianism were being translated into cultural practices specific to the Japanese experience. Both a political and historiographical intervention, the book offers a fascinating account of the passions—and antinomies—that animated one of the most admirable intellectual and cultural movements of Japan’s twentieth century, and argues that proletarian literature, cultural workers, and institutions fundamentally enrich our understanding of Japanese culture.

Weaving over a dozen translated fairytales, poems, and short stories into his narrative, Samuel Perry offers a fundamentally new approach to studying revolutionary culture. By examining the margins of the proletarian cultural movement, Perry effectively redefines its center as he closely reads and historicizes proletarian children’s culture, avant-garde “wall fiction,” and a literature that bears witness to Japan’s fraught relationship with its Korean colony. Along the way, he shows how proletarian culture opened up new critical spaces in the intersections of class, popular culture, childhood, gender, and ethnicity.

2014 | 248 pages | 12 illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3893-5 | $49.00s | Cloth

Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan

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CribbWild Man from Borneo offers the first comprehensive history of the human-orangutan encounter. Arguably the most humanlike of all the great apes, particularly in intelligence and behavior, the orangutan has been cherished, used, and abused ever since it was first brought to the attention of Europeans in the seventeenth century. The red ape has engaged the interest of scientists, philosophers, artists, and the public at large in a bewildering array of guises that have by no means been exclusively zoological or ecological. One reason for such a long-term engagement with a being found only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra is that, like its fellow great apes, the orangutan stands on that most uncomfortable dividing line between human and animal, existing, for us, on what has been called “the dangerous edge of the garden of nature.”

Beginning with the scientific discovery of the red ape more than three hundred years ago, this work goes on to examine the ways in which its human attributes have been both recognized and denied in science, philosophy, travel literature, popular science, literature, theatre, museums, and film. The authors offer a provocative analysis of the origin of the name “orangutan,” trace how the ape has been recruited to arguments on topics as diverse as slavery and rape, and outline the history of attempts to save the animal from extinction. Today, while human populations increase exponentially, that of the orangutan is in dangerous decline. The remaining “wild men of Borneo” are under increasing threat from mining interests, logging, human population expansion, and the widespread destruction of forests. The authors hope that this history will, by adding to our knowledge of this fascinating being, assist in some small way in their preservation.

Written by Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffin
2014 | 328 pages | 55 illustrations, 2 maps
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3714-3 | $54.00 | Cloth

 

Architecturalized Asia: Mapping a Continent through History

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Rujivacharakul_front1-UHP.inddThis collection explores built environments and visual narratives in Asia via cartography, icons and symbols in different historical settings. Architecturalized Asia grows out of a three-year project focusing on cultural exchange in the making of Asia’s boundaries as well as its architectural styles and achievements. The editors — architectural scholars at University of Delaware, Seattle University, University of Washington and Harvard University, respectively – attracted contributions from Asia, Europe, and North America.

The manuscript consists of three sections – in Mapping Asia: Architectural Symbols from Medieval to Early Modern Periods, authors examine icons and symbols in maps and textual descriptions and other early evidence about Asian architecture. Incorporating archival materials from Asia and Europe, the essays present views of Asian architecture seen from those who lived on the continent, those who saw themselves residing along the margins, and those who identified themselves as outsiders. The second section, Conjugating Asia: The Long-Nineteenth Century and its Impetus, explores the construction of the field of Asian architecture and the political imagination of Asian built environments in the nineteenth century. It discusses the parallel narratives of colonialism and Orientalism in the construction of Asia and its architectural environment, mapping how empire-expanding influences from Europe and North America have defined “Asia” and its regions through new vocabularies and concepts, which include, among others, “Eurasia,” “Jap-Alaska,” “Asie coloniale,” “the Orient,” and “Further India.” The third section, Manifesting Asia: Building the Continent with Architecture, addresses the physical realization of “Asian” geographic ideas within a set of specific local and regional contexts in the twentieth century. It examines tangible constructions as legible documents of these notional constructions of Asia, and discusses their construction processes, materials and critical receptions as evidence of the physical’sreciprocal relationship to the conceptual. Regions and conditions covered include French Indochina, Iran, post-Soviet Central Asia, Japanese landscape, and the construction of theAfro-Asian built environment.

 

Edited by Vimalin Rujivacharakul, H. Hazel Hahn, Ken Tadashi Oshima, and Peter Christensen
Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Architecture

2014 | 324 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3952-9 | $55.00s | Cloth

Capturing Contemporary Japan: Differentiation and Uncertainty

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KawanoCOVER8.inddWhat are people’s life experiences in present-day Japan? Capturing Contemporary Japan addresses fundamental questions vital to understanding Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household, a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the “professional” housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success.

Contributors draw on rich, nuanced fieldwork data collected during the 2000s to examine work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in these pages vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly.

Edited by Satsuki Kawano, Glenda S. Roberts, and Susan Orpett Long

2014 | 376 pages | 12 illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3868-3 | $55.00s | Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3869-0 | $25.00s | Paper

Scrutinized!: Surveillance in Asian North American Literature

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ChiuCOVER3.inddChang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field, Don Lee’s Country of Origin, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Susan Choi’s A Person of Interest. These and a host of other Asian North American detection and mystery titles were published between 1995 and 2010. Together they reference more than a decade of Asian North America monitoring that includes internment, campaign financing, espionage, and post-9/11 surveillance. Monica Chiu reveals how Asian North American novels’ fascination with mystery, detection, spying, and surveillance is a literary response to anxieties over race.

Scrutinized! is broadly about oversight and insight. The race policing of the past has been subsumed under post-racism—an oversight based on a persistent visual construction of race. Readers revisit Oriental visions, or Asian stereotypes, and then encounter official documentation on major events, such as the Japanese American and Japanese Canadian internment. The former visions, which endure, and the latter documents, diplomatically forgotten, shape how Asian subjects were and are scrutinized and to what effect. They determine which surveillance images remain emblazoned in a nation’s collective memory and which face political burial.

2014 | 208 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3842-3 | $45.00s | Cloth
Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies

 

Julie Nelson Davis Foresees Rich Collection of Japanese Art Books As Researchers’ Treasure

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photo by Connie Kang for The Daily Pennsylvanian

Associate professor of art history Julie Nelson Davis was interviewed by The Daily Pennsylvanian about the recent donation of 1,300 books and periodicals on Japanese art to University of Pennsylvania libraries. Davis, author of Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty, called the endowment by Shirley and Marilyn Luber (wife and daughter of the late Philadelphia art collector Gilbert Luber) “one of the broadest and deepest private collections of books about Japanese prints I have ever encountered.” She hopes her students will be able to use the collection in her curatorial seminar this spring.

Professor Davis’ forthcoming Partners in Print: Artistic Collaboration and the Market for Ukiyo-e in Late Eighteenth-Century Japan is scheduled for spring 2015. Illustrated with more than a hundred color and black-and-white photographs, Davis’ account of collaboration in ukiyo-e will offer a new approach to understanding the production and reception of the images of the “floating world” in early modern Japan.

UH Press at American Historical Association Annual Meeting, January 2-5, Washington, D.C.

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University of Hawai‘i Press is exhibiting at the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting, January 2-5 in Washington, D.C.

Press acquisitions editor Masako Ikeda is attending. Please visit our booth to browse our newest titles and take advantage of the event special: a 20% discount and free shipping in the U.S. The free shipping applies to orders received or placed at the conference.

Ancient Ryukyu: An Archaeological Study of Island Communities

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Ancient Ryukyu explores 30,000 years of human occupation in the Ryukyu Islands, from the earliest human presence in the region up to A.D. 1609 and the emergence of the Ryukyu Kingdom. It focuses on the unique geopolitical position of the islands, their environment, and the many human communities whose historical activities can be discerned. Drawing on the impressive work of dozens of local archaeologists who have brought the islands’ early history to life, Richard Pearson describes explorers and sojourners and colonists who arrived thousands of years ago, and their ancient trade links to Japan, Korea, and China.

Through analysis of work completed at about 120 sites described in dozens of rare Japanese government reports with limited circulation, Pearson is able to show that many modern features of the culture, politics, and economy of the Ryukyu Islands have very deep roots.

“This extremely important study in Pacific and island archaeology makes use of the huge database generated by Okinawan archaeology in the postwar era and places the Okinawan islands in the context of current theoretical debates within island archaeology in the Pacific and beyond. It is also a major study of premodern Okinawa. With its many valuable overviews and discussions, as well as its original analyses and interpretations, it will undoubtedly become the definitive text in English.” —Mark Hudson, Nishikyushu University

November 2013 | 432 pages | 36 illustrations | 20 maps
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3712-9 | $55.00 | Cloth

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