The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II, by Emily Roxworthy, garnered an Honorable Mention for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the Barnard Hewitt Award committee, American Society for Theatre Research. The award is presented each year to the best book in “theatre history or cognate disciplines” published during the previous calendar year.
Category: Awards
Art as Politics Wins AJCU Award
Art as Politics: Re-Crafting Identities, Tourism, and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia, by Kathleen M. Adams, has been awarded the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities’ Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award in the Social Sciences:
“This book is quite rare because it combines sophisticated interdisciplinary analysis, extensive firsthand field research, and a narrative that is both compelling and delightful to read. . . . Adams’ understanding of the complex effects of global tourism on indigenous cultures is even further amplified by her reflections about how anthropology itself is far from a neutral actor in this process. Her stories about how the various elements of Toraja society try to get her to validate their own identity and status struggles wonderfully balance academic theories with personal experience. This is not only social science at its best but it is written with the emotion and insight of excellent literature.”
Van Dyke receives UH Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Research
University of Hawai‘i law professor Jon Van Dyke, author of Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘i?, has been awarded the University of Hawai‘i Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Research. The medal for research recognizes “scholarly contributions that expand the boundaries of knowledge and enrich the lives of students and the community.”
Professor Van Dyke and the two other recipients of this year’s award will be recognized at the annual convocation ceremony on September 15, 10 a.m., at UH’s Kennedy Theatre.
The Best of the Best: Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents
Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific by Patrick D. Nunn, was featured in “The Best of the Best from the University Presses: Books You Should Know About” program, held at the 2009 American Library Association Annual Conference this month. “Best of the Best” titles are chosen by a panel of public and secondary school librarians as having “exceptional editorial content and subject matter” and are considered “essential to most library collections.”
Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face Now in Paperback
Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual, and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China, by Christine Mollier, is now available in paperback. The book is a recent recipient of the Prix Stanislas Julien, a prestigious prize from the French academic society Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which recognizes Western-language scholarship on the Asian humanities.
“In Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face, Christine Mollier undertakes five detailed case studies, each one illuminating a different dimension of the ritual, iconographic, and scriptural interactions of Buddhists and Taoists in medieval China. Mollier does not simply assert that these traditions influenced one another; she reveals in breathtaking detail the wide array of techniques used by Buddhists and Taoists as they appropriated and transformed the texts and icons of their rivals. . . . Mollier’s work in this volume is brilliant. She deftly navigates through manuscripts, canonical texts, archaeological remains, and art-historical evidence. . . . Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face is an exhilarating display of Sinological erudition.” —H-Buddhism
May 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3411-1 / $20.00 (PAPER)
Beijing Opera Costumes Short-listed for Costume Society of America Award
Beijing Opera Costumes: The Visual Communication of Character and Culture, by Alexandra B. Bonds, was short-listed for this year’s Milla Davenport Publication Award from the
Costume Society of America. The award is given “to a published book or exhibition catalog that makes a significant contribution to the study of costume, reflects original thought and exceptional creativity, and draws on appropriate research methods and techniques.”
The journal Theatre Design & Technology called Beijing Opera Costumes “one of the most useful costume books on Beijing (Jingju) opera in the English language. . . . Alexandra Bonds has done a huge service to those who strive to learn more about twentieth- and twenty-first-century Jingju style and how it came to be. It is a beautifully detailed book that historians and novices alike will find invaluable.”
UH Press Authors at the 2009 Ka Palapala Award Ceremony
Jon Van Dyke (right) receiving one of three awards for Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘i?
Carlos Andrade with Maenette Benham, dean of the Hawai‘inuiakea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, UHM
Jon Van Dyke (second from left) and his wife, Sherry Broder, with Divorce with Decency author Brad Coates and his wife, Sachi Braden
For more on the 2009 Ka Palapala Awards, view our 13 May 2009 post below.
UH Press Titles Honored at the 2009 Ka Palapala Award Ceremony
University of Hawai‘i Press books were among the winners at this year’s Ka Palapala Po‘okela Awards Ceremony, held on May 9, 2009, at the Bishop Museum. The awards are presented by the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association to recognize the finest books published during the previous year.
Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘i, by Jon M. Van Dyke, took three top honors: Excellence in Hawaiian Culture, Text/Reference, and Nonfiction. The Nation calls Van Dyke’s book “definitive. Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawaii? [is] certain to become the standard reference for that question.”
Ha‘ena: Through the Eyes of the Ancestors, by Carlos Andrade, received Honorable Mentions for Excellence in Hawaiian Culture and Nonfiction. Andrade’s work is an ambitious attempt to provide a unique perspective in the complex story of the ahupua‘a of Ha‘ena.
Dying in a Strange Land, by Milton Murayama, received an Honorable Mention for Excellence in Literature. Familiar faces from All I Asking For Is My Body, Five Years on a Rock, and Plantation Boy return to advance the story of the Oyama family from the years immediately following World War II to the 1980s.
Haena Now Available in Paperback
Ha‘ena: Through the Eyes of the Ancestors, by Carlos Andrade, is now available in paperback. Ha‘ena received Honorable Mentions for Excellence in Hawaiian Culture and Nonfiction at the 2009 Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award Ceremony, sponsored annually by the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association.
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). This work is an ambitious attempt to provide a unique perspective in the complex story of the ahupua‘a of Ha‘ena.
May 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3410-4 / $18.00 (PAPER)
Carlos Andrade will discuss Ha‘ena and moderate the panel “Holding Fast to the Land” at the Hawai‘i Book and Music Festival, May 16-17, 2009, at Honolulu Hale. Click here for more details.
Cambodge Wins Major SEA Studies Book Award
Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945, by Penny Edwards, was awarded the Harry J. Benda Prize at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting in March 2009.
“In Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, Penny Edwards examines brilliantly the metamorphosis of the kingdom of Cambodia into the French-Khmer colonial entity of Cambodge—the chrysalis from which today’s Cambodia has emerged. Demonstrating a masterful command of scholarship and of archival, literary, and popular sources, Edwards reveals not a simple dance of colonial domination and resistance but an array of complex collaborations through which Khmer subjects adapted, and embraced as their own, processes set in train by the French: to iconize and secularize Angkor Vat; to promote a Khmer Buddhism separate from Thai influence and free of hoary superstitions; and to root ‘Khmerness’ both in a romanticized antiquity and France-led modernity.
In a narrative that is elegantly crafted and ultimately gripping, Edwards links the colonial world of schools, research institutes, and print culture and of museums, monuments, and tourism to the post-colonial nation-building projects of Sihanouk, Lon Nol, and Pol Pot. In doing so, she brings legibility to highly theorized subjects such as hybridity, authenticity, and nationalism and both complicates and enriches our understanding of the colonial era and its legacies in modern Southeast Asia—demonstrating, as Harry J. Benda did, how rigorous historical scholarship can expose surprising ways in which the past is complicit in the present.”
Begin Here Receives Honorable Mention for AAAS Book Award
Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood, by Rocío G. Davis, will receive an Honorable Mention for the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) 2007 Literacy Studies Book Award. The award will be presented at this week’s AAAS Annual Meeting in Honolulu.
“Informed by the latest developments in postmodern and postcolonial autobiography theory, this vital work focuses on 50 autobiographies of childhood written by Asian Americans in North America. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice
Colonial Legacies Longlisted for 2009 ICAS Book Prize
The International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Book Prize is a global competition that provides an international focus for publications on Asia while at the same time increasing their visibility worldwide. The coveted book prizes are awarded for best studies in the humanities and the social sciences.
Colonial Legacies: Economic and Social Development in East and Southeast Asia, by Anne E. Booth, has been longlisted in the social sciences category. Winners will be announced at ICAS 6, which will be held in August 2009 in Daejeon, Korea.
Being Dutch in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500-1920, by Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, distributed by UH Press for NUS Press (Singapore) has been longlisted in the humanities category.