New Journal Issues: Aloha Shirt Aesthetics, Patterns of Mortuary Practice in Vanuatu, Taiwan Sugar in the 1600s + More

Asian Perspectives

Volume 61, Number 1 (2022)

The new issue includes the following articles and reviews:

Lakheen-Jo-Daro, an Indus Civilization Settlement at Sukkur
in Upper Sindh (Pakistan): A Scrap Copper Hoard and
Human Figurine from a Dated Context

Paolo Biagi and Massimo Vidale

The Hamin Mangha Site: Mass Deaths and Abandonment
of a Late Neolithic Settlement in Northeastern China

Yawei Zhou, Xiaohui Niu, Ping Ji, Yonggang Zhu, Hong Zhu, and
Meng Zhang

Early Metal Age Settlement at the Site of Palemba, Kalumpang,
Karama Valley, West Sulawesi

Anggrreani

Patterns of Mortuary Practice over Millennia in Southern Vanuatu,
South Melanesia

Frédérique Valentin, Wanda Zinger, Alison Fenwick, Stuart Bedford,
James Flexner, Edson Willie, and Takaronga Kuautonga

Find more research articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

Biography

Volume 44, Issues 2 & 3 (2021)

Special Double Issue: Graphic Medicine

Graphic Medicine’s Possible Futures: Reconsidering Poetics and Reading
Erin La Cour and Anna Poletti

Conflict or Compromise?: An Imagined Conversation
with John Hicklenton and Lindsay Cooper about
Living with Multiple Sclerosis

John Miers

Out of Sync: Chronic Illness, Time, and Comics Memoir
Jared Gardner

Face as Landscape: Refiguring Illness, Disability,
and Disorders in David B.’s Epileptic

Erin La Cour

Graphic Confessions and the Vulnerability Hangover
from Hell

Safdar Ahmed

Drawn to History: Healing, Dementia, and the Armenian
Genocide in the Intertextual Collage of Aliceheimer’s

Crystal Yin Lie

Find more at Project MUSE.

Biography

Volume 44, Issue 4 (2021)

Open Forum Articles
Reviews

Editor Craig Howes embraces this volume as he explains:
“The latest issue of Biography qualifies as special because of its ordinariness. After a four-installment run featuring two special issues, an inaugural Forum, and the Annual Bibliography and International Year in Review, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming. Articles and book reviews—that’s all!
But the table of contents for this issue speaks to what has distinguished Biography for decades as a quarterly. First, the articles. Their geographic, historic, linguistic, and generic range is in keeping with our international and interdisciplinary profile. American celebrity biographies and philosophy, twentieth-century Indian regional autobiography, modernist Austrian psychoanalytic biography, post-WWII German-Romanian autofiction, contemporary Palestinian auto/biographical texts—our pages map out and tell the stories of the field.”

Find more articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

The Contemporary Pacific

Volume 34, Issue 1 (2022)

The new issue includes the following articles, dialogues, political, media, and book reviews.

One Salt Water: The Storied Work of Trans-Indigenous Decolonial Imagining with West Papua
Bonnie Etherington

Making Sartorial Sense of Empire: Contested Meanings
of Aloha Shirt Aesthetics

Christen T Sasaki

The Compensation Page: News Narratives of Public Kinship in Papua New Guinea Print Journalism
Ryan Schram

“We Are So Happy EPF Came”: Transformations of Gender in Port Moresby Schools
Ceridwen Spark and Martha Macintyre

Pacific People Navigating the Sacred Vā to Frame Relational Care: A Conversation between Friends across Space and Time
Silia Pa‘usisi Finau, Mele Katea Paea, and Martyn Reynolds

Find more articles, dialogues, political, media, and book reviews at Project MUSE.

New Journal Special Issues: We Are Maunakea, Contemporary Japanese Theatre + Digital Methods, Empire Histories

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Asian Theatre Journal

Volume 38, Number 1, (2021)

From the Editor Siyuan Liu:

This issue starts with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s appreciation of Leonard Pronko (1927–2019), noted kabuki scholar and teacher who passed away late 2019. Building on her profile of Pronko for Asian Theatre Journal’s “founders of the fields” series (28: 2, 2011), Sorgenfrei offers a touching personal profile of her former professor as an extraordinary human being.
As evidence to the flourishing field of Japanese theatre studies pioneered by Pronko and his peers, this issue continues with a special section on contemporary Japanese theatre with a combination of articles, reports, a translation, and a performance review essay.

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biography

Volume 43, Number 3 (2020)


We Are Maunakea: Aloha ʻĀina Narratives of Protest, Protection, and Place
Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada and Noʻu Revilla

From the guest editors’ introduction:

In the summer of 2019, kiaʻi (protectors) gathered at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu to defend Maunakea, a sacred mountain, against desecration by the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). Thousands gathered at Ala Hulu Kupuna, or Mauna Kea Access Road. Daily protocols were led by cultural practitioners and long-time protectors of Maunakea, intergenerational Native Hawaiian leadership was developed and empowered on Hawaiian terms, a community kitchen was organized, Puʻuhuluhulu University was established as an actual Hawaiian place of learning, and a collective commitment to ʻāina and kapu aloha rooted all who arrived and all who continue to stay in this movement.
The 2019 stand was also an unprecedented opportunity to witness the battle of narratives, as mainstream media and highly paid public relations firms were outmaneuvered by Kanaka- and ally-authored life writing. This special issue features first-hand accounts, academic reflections, creative works, photography, and interviews with kiaʻi from the 2019 front lines and members of the media team.

Journal of World History

Volume 32, Number 2 (2021)

Special Issue: Digital Methods, Empire Histories

Introduction from Guest Editor Antoinette Burton reads:

The technological evangelism of much of anglophone digital humanities discourse should sit uneasily with empire historians, who know what languages of discovery and “new frontiers” have meant in the context of world history, especially where data collection is concerned. To be sure, digitization has made myriad colonial archives, official and unofficial, available via open access platforms. This means that vast stores of knowledge are now at our fingertips—a proximity and immediacy that has reshaped the lived experience of archival research for many scholars, in this case bringing the imperial world not just closer to home but into the hands of anyone who has access to a cellphone. And the revolution in digital tools in the last twenty-five years has given rise to equally vast possibilities for gathering and visualizing evidence as well as for scaling and interpreting data: for worlding, mostly by aggregation and consolidation, what we aim to know about the kinds of colonial pasts that are available and capturable via text and image. Yet, this information empire is not exactly new. Digitization most often reassembles archival collections proper, sometimes remixing them with print and visual culture and typically organizing them through mechanisms and selection processes that are more or less visible depending on the commitment to transparency of the conglomerator. In some cases, those conglomerators are private individuals or government entities; in others, corporate sponsors; in still others, community-based activists. Inevitably perhaps, today’s digital imperial “data” are actually, more accurately, digitally transformed imperial sources. And for colonial subjects, as for the enslaved, data has more often than not meant terror at the scene of the crime.

Michael French Smith at the National Press Club’s Book Fair & Author Night

NatlPressClub-bookfair&authorsOn Tuesday, November 19, 5:30-8:30 p.m., the National Press Club will hold its 36th Annual Book Fair & Author Night at the NPC headquarters in Washington, D.C. (529 14th Street NW). UH Press author Michael French Smith will sign copies of his latest book, A Faraway, Familiar Place: An Anthropologist Returns to Papua New Guinea, joining more than 90 other writers, including national luminaries Alice McDermott, Jim Lehrer, Mark Leibovich, Gov. Bill Richardson, David Wiesner, and many others, in this exciting literary event.

The book fair is open to the public with ticket purchase and is a fundraiser for the NPC’s Journalism Institute. Books will be sold in partnership with independent D.C. bookstore Politics & Prose. For more details, click here.

Drinking Smoke: The Tobacco Syndemic in Oceania

Drinking Smoke: The Tobacco Syndemic in OceaniaTobacco kills 5 million people every year and that number is expected to double by the year 2020. Despite its enormous toll on human health, tobacco has been largely neglected by anthropologists. Drinking Smoke combines an exhaustive search of historical materials on the introduction and spread of tobacco in the Pacific with extensive anthropological accounts of the ways Islanders have incorporated this substance into their lives. In Drinking Smoke, the idea of a syndemic is applied to the current health crisis in the Pacific, where the number of deaths from coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease continues to rise, and the case is made that smoking tobacco in the form of industrially manufactured cigarettes is the keystone of the contemporary syndemic in Oceania.

Drinking Smoke is the first book-length examination of the damaging tobacco syndemic in a specific world region. It is a must-read for scholars and students of anthropology, Pacific studies, history, and economic globalization, as well as for public health practitioners and those working in allied health fields. More broadly the book will appeal to anyone concerned with disease interaction, the social context of disease production, and the full health consequences of the global promotional efforts of Big Tobacco.

2013, 312 pages, 21 illustrations, 4 maps; ISBN: 978-0-8248-3685-6, Cloth $54.00

New in the Writing Past Colonialism Series

Sustainable CommunitiesPapua New Guinea is going through a crisis: A concentration on conventional approaches to development, including an unsustainable reliance on mining, forestry, and foreign aid, has contributed to the country’s slow decline since independence in 1975. Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development: Other Paths for Papua New Guinea, by Paul James, Yaso Nadarajah, Karen Haive, and Victoria Stead, attempts to address problems and gaps in the literature on development and develop a new qualitative conception of community sustainability informed by substantial and innovative research in Papua New Guinea.

Sustainable Communities is an excellent work; remarkable. It manages to combine a sense of the complexity of its subject while remaining highly readable. I found it deeply probing, sustaining a sense of complexity across a multitude of terrains. Importantly, the book displays a belief in the possibilities of the village and displaced communities while retaining a sense of relevant problems.” —Dr. Nonie Sharo, author of Stars of Tagai: The Torres Strait Islanders

Writing Past Colonialism
July 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3640-5 / $27.00 (PAPER)