Category: History

Ghosts and Gender in Chinese Literature

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The “phantom heroine”—in particular the fantasy of her resurrection through sex with a living man—is one of the most striking features of traditional Chinese literature. Even today the hypersexual female ghost continues to be a source of fascination in East Asian media, much like the sexually predatory vampire in American and European movies, TV, and novels. But while vampires can be of either gender, erotic Chinese ghosts are almost exclusively female. The significance of this gender asymmetry in Chinese literary history is the subject of Judith Zeitlin’s elegantly written and meticulously researched new book, The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature.

“This is an accomplished book by a maverick thinker and writer. Zeitlin’s genius is to turn something hideous and freaky into the stuff of life. She adopts an archaeological approach, excavating motifs from and finding resonances in disparate genres and periods. An elegant book, it should attract readers from Chinese studies, gender studies, comparative literature, performance studies, and religion.” —Dorothy Ko, Columbia University

June 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3091-5 / $57.00 (CLOTH)

Judith T. Zeitlin is co-editor, with Charlotte Furth and Ping-chen Hsiung, of Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History, published by University of Hawai‘i Press.

Author Davianna McGregor to Guest on OHA Radio Talk Show

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UH professor Davianna McGregor, author of Na Kua‘aina: Living Hawaiian Culture, will be a guest on the Office of Hawaiian Affairs radio talk show Na Oiwi Olino, next Tuesday, June 12, 2007. The newly formatted show, hosted by Kimo Kahoano and Brickwood Galuteria, airs weekday mornings from 7 to 9 on KKNE 940AM and is streamed live on the internet at http://am940hawaii.com.

Professor McGregor is also featured in the June/July 2007 issue of Hawaiian Airline’s Hana Hou! magazine.

An Innovative Approach to the History of Colonialism

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Giving voice to the women who worked as maids—known as “house-girls” in the Pacific islands of Vanuatu—is the goal of House-Girls Remember: Domestic Workers in Vanuatu, edited by Margaret Rodman, Daniela Kraemer, Lissant Bolton, and Jean Tarisesei. This innovative work is a unique collaborative project with contributions from twenty-one indigenous and four expatriate women. Although women’s history is a popular topic globally, Pacific island women have had few opportunities to conduct research and publish in this field. House-Girls Remember is contextualized within literature on domestic workers and current anthropological theory, but the focus is on the words of the indigenous women themselves.

June 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3012-0 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

Houses Far from Home: British Colonial Space in the New Hebredies, by Margaret Rodman, and Unfolding the Moon: Enacting Women’s Kastom in Vanuatu, by Lissant Bolton, are both available from University of Hawai‘i Press.

Crisis in North Korea Now in Paperback

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Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956, by Andrei Lankov, is now available in paperback.

Hawai‘i Studies on Korea series, published in association with the Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawai‘i
May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3207-0 / $21.00 (PAPER)

“In this important new book, the Russian-trained scholar Andrei Lankov examines the critical historical period, the mid-1950s, when the shape of the North Korean political system was formed. This book is important for two reasons—because it is the first thorough discussion of the events leading up to the effective removal of any opposition to the Kim Il Sung group, and because it uses sources which until recently were not readily accessible. . . . These sources give us a far better historical and chronological understanding of the events and players during this crucial period than we could have had before. . . . This well-written book will be of value beyond the area of Korean Studies to anyone interested in the history of communism and political systems, as well as the history of current affairs.” —Asian Affairs

Broken Trust, Varua Tupu Win Awards

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University of Hawai‘i Press titles were among the winners at the 2007 Ka Palapala Po‘okela book awards ceremony, held on May 18, 2007. The awards are presented by the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association to recognize the finest books published during the previous year.

Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement, and Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust, by Samuel P. King and Randall W. Roth, was awarded the coveted Samuel M. Kamakau Award for Hawai‘i Book of the Year, as well as the certificate award in the nonfiction category and an honorable mention in Hawaiian Culture. This best-selling book by a federal judge and a UH law professor recounts the background and dramatic events surrounding the ouster of Bishop Estate trustees in the 1990s. According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (July 4, 2006), Broken Trust belongs at “the top of Hawaii’s must-read list.”

Varua Tupu: New Writing from French Polynesia, edited by Frank Stewart, Kareva Mateata-Allain, and Alexander Dale Mawyer, received the Excellence in Literature Award. The first anthology of its kind, Varua Tupu offers English-speaking readers the stories, memoirs, poetry, photography, and paintings of a French Polynesian artistic community that has been growing in strength since the 1960s.

Waikiki: A History of Forgetting & Remembering, by Gaye Chan and Andrea Feeser, received an honorable mention in Excellence in Design.

Also honored were UH Press author Caren Loebel-Fried and Iz: The Voice of the People (Bess Press) and The Seven Orchids (Bamboo Ridge Press), both distributed outside of Hawai‘i by University of Hawai‘i Press.

Significant University Press Titles for Undergraduates

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In the May 2007 issue of the American Library Association’s Choice magazine, the premier source for reviews of academic books of interest to those in higher education, three recently published University of Hawai‘i Press titles are included in a list of “most significant university press titles for undergraduates”:

Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China, by Beth E. Notar (now available in paperback)

Japanese Popular Prints: From Votive Slips to Playing Cards, by Rebecca Salter

Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection by Cheng Xiaoqing, translated by Timothy C. Wong

If you are an instructor interested in adopting these or other University of Hawai‘i Press books for classroom use, you may request an examination copy. For more information, please click here.

The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha Now in Paperback

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The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha: Monastic Warriors and Sohei in Japanese History, by Mikael S. Adolphson, is now available in paperback.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3123-3 / $24.00 (PAPER)

“Mikael Adolphson has presented the first cogent explanation of the role of violence in Japanese monasteries, interrogating the much-misunderstood role of the so-called warrior monks. Based on a wide and deep knowledge of primary sources, Adolphson has both advanced the scholarly understanding of the broader configurations of the samurai and has also done a fine job of dispelling many myths that persist in Japanese and Western popular culture. This is our first true picture of the various types of men who wielded arms on behalf of religious institutions—few of whom were actually monks.” —G. Cameron Hurst, University of Pennsylvania

Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures

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Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the “tidalectic” between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots.

“Elizabeth DeLoughrey invokes the cyclical model of the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean (‘tidalectics’) to destabilize the national, ethnic, and even regional frameworks that have been the mainstays of literary study. The result is a privileging of alter/native epistemologies whereby island cultures are positioned where they should have been all along—at the forefront of the world historical process of transoceanic migration and landfall. The research, determination, and intellectual dexterity that infuse this nuanced and meticulous reading of Pacific and Caribbean literature invigorate and deepen our interest in and appreciation of island literature.” —Vilsoni Hereniko, University of Hawai‘i

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3122-6 / $29.00 (PAPER)

U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the Pacific

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Worldwide supplies of sugar and cotton were impacted dramatically as the U.S. Civil War dragged on. New areas of production entered these lucrative markets, particularly in the South Pacific, and plantation agriculture grew substantially in disparate areas such as Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii. The increase in production required an increase in labor; in the rush to fill the vacuum, freebooters and other unsavory characters began a slave trade in Melanesians and Polynesians that continued into the twentieth century.

The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War, by Gerald Horne, ranges over the broad expanse of Oceania to reconstruct the history of “blackbirding” (slave trading) in the region. It examines the role of U.S. citizens (many of them ex-slaveholders and ex-confederates) in the trade and its roots in Civil War dislocations.

“Horne’s book is impressive in its research and compelling in its history and argument. It pieces together a marvelously suggestive story of the African American presence in the Pacific. . . .This is transnational history at its most ambitious and materially grounded best and includes superb comparative insights.” —David Roediger, Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History, University of Illinois

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3147-9 / $29.00 (PAPER)

Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey

Posted on by UH Press

For more than half of the twentieth century, the Korean peninsula has been divided between two hostile and competitive nation-states, each claiming to be the sole legitimate expression of the Korean nation. The division remains an unsolved problem dating to the beginnings of the Cold War and now projects the politics of that period into the twenty-first century.

Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson, is designed to provide readers with the historical essentials upon which to unravel the complex politics and contemporary crises that currently exist in the East Asian region. Beginning with a description of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, Michael Robinson shows how traditional Korean political culture shaped the response of Koreans to multiple threats to their sovereignty after being opened to the world economy by Japan in the 1870s. He locates the origins of both modern nationalism and the economic and cultural modernization of Korea in the twenty years preceding the fall of the traditional state to Japanese colonialism in 1910.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3174-5 / $19.00 (PAPER)

The Thought War Now in Paperback

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The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, by Barak Kushner, is now available in paperback.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3208-7 / $18.00 (PAPER)

Here’s what reviewers had to say about the cloth edition.

“Completely individual and very interesting. . . . Kushner’s book is, I think, the first to treat propaganda as a profession in wartime Japan. He follows it through its various stages and is particularly interested in its popular acceptance—wartime comedy, variety shows, how entertainers sought to bolster their careers by adopting the prewar message, which then filtered down into society and took hold. Using almost entirely primary materials, which have not before been translated, Barak re-creates the wartime world in which propaganda was the truth. In so doing, he has given us an eminently readable account of an unknown aspect of the war and has defined our understanding of it.” —Donald Richie, Japan Times (Read full review)

“[The Thought War] reveals a good deal more about Japan at war than has been available heretofore in Western languages. If propaganda is understood in its classic sense of truth or falsehood deliberately spread to promote a cause, [it] detects wide evidence of it in political ideology, public relations, advertising, hortatory admonitions to citizens, and even in the coercive tactics of the thought police. This soundly researched book highlights the multiple, often ill-coordinated sources of Japan’s wartime propaganda. . . . [It] should help considerably in advancing the urgent project of defining and assessing responsibility, not only for Japan but for all combatants, and not only for World War II but for all conflicts and modes of political violence.” —Journal of Japanese Studies

“Kushner discovers that, contrary to what is usually believed, Japan’s wartime propaganda was rational, depicting Japan as a modern state. It was effective because it appealed to reason rather than to mystical nationalism or to the cult of the emperor. It presented Japan as a progressive, scientific, and hygienic country, ‘the harbinger of civilization that Asia should strive to emulate’ (p. 11). As such, Japan shouldered the obligation to liberate and lead its less fortunate neighbors. This message had a great appeal to intellectuals, who supported the war as a campaign to liberate Asia.” —Monumenta Nipponica (Access full review at Project Muse)

“The emperor figured little, Kushner notes, in Japanese propaganda. What did figure, first and foremost, was ‘modernization.’ This was the overall theme, and it was intellectually respectable. Japan was a demonstrably ‘modern’ country, the only one in Asia. It was a ‘civilizing force,’ the natural leader of a pan-Asian modernity drive. Stalinist, Nazi and fascist propaganda depended upon dictatorial force on the one hand and, in the sense that its messages could scarcely withstand intelligent scrutiny, mass intellectual self-suppression on the other. Japanese propaganda was different. It was credible. Japan had modernized; Japan was more advanced than its Asian neighbors.” —International Herald Tribune

Na Kua‘aina: Living Hawaiian Culture

Posted on by UH Press

Due to high demand for the cloth edition, Na Kua‘aina: Living Hawaiian Culture, by Davianna Pomaika‘i McGregor has now been made available in paperback.

May 2007 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3212-4 / $20.00 (PAPER)

“A bold intervention in modern Hawaiian politics, a summoning to the barricades that by its end will have you cheering. Na Kua‘aina is the inspiring story of a culture that refuses to die, of a resurgent nation poised to reclaim its embattled heritage. . . . This is no dry-as-dust tome destined for library basements, but a solidly grounded set of political demands cast in historical mode. It is good research leading to intellectually honest conclusions with real-world applications.” —Honolulu Star-Bulletin

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