Category: theater

New Journal Issues: “Contagious Magic” in Japanese Theatre, Logistics of the Natural History Trade, Hawai‘i’s Toxic Plants + More

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New Journal Issues: Schooling Journeys in the Southwestern Pacific, #KuToo Online Feminist Movement in Japan, Geographic Analysis of COVID-19 in L.A. + More

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Chinoperl: Journal of Chinese Oral & Performing Literature

Volume 40, Number 2 (2021)

The new issue includes the following articles and reviews:

“Making History”: Metatheatre in the Peach Blossom Fan
Allison Bernard

Passionate Space of a Beijing Theater: Annotated Translation of an Excerpt from The Precious Mirror of Ranking Flowers (Pinhua Baojian)
Naixi Feng

Wu Song Kills the Tiger: Transcription and Translation of a Cantonese Narrative Song from a Live Performance, with an Introduction
Bell Yung

Find more research articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

The Contemporary Pacific

Volume 22, Issue 2 (2021)

Special Issue: Schooling Journeys in the Southwestern Pacific

From the Guest Editors Rachel Emerine Hicks, Debra McDougall, and David Oakeshott in The Promise of Education: Schooling Journeys in the Southwester Pacific:

“Schooling journeys” is more than a metaphor in the southwestern Pacific. To step into a classroom, children and youth often travel hours each day or live for months at a time away from their families. The journey of schooling is rarely direct; it often winds between formal and informal learning and in and out of school, work, and home life. And the journey is expensive; many families struggle mightily to gather the money for fees, school supplies, uniforms, and transportation. Young people embark on these precarious journeys, and their families make sacrifices to support them, because schooling promises a better life—a move away from the backbreaking labor of subsistence agriculture toward a reliable salary that will better support their family and community. Because of the structural inequalities in school and a lack of jobs for those who complete schooling, however, few experience the socioeconomic advancement schooling promises. Still, students and their families continue to hope that schooling will lead to well-paid work. Even more important, though, going to school is seen as key to being a competent and effective person in society—increasingly for both women and men.

Hawaiian Journal of History

Volume 55 (2021)

The new issue includes the following articles, reviews, notes, and queries:

Aloha Space Age: NASA and the Hawaiian Islands, 1957—1970
David A. Smith

The First Attempt to Overthrow Liliʻuokalani
Ralph Thomas Kam

Dr. Richard You and the Golden Age of Hawaiʻi’s Athletics
John D. Fair

Incarcerating a Nation: The Arrest and Imprisonment of Political Prisoners by the Republic of Hawaiʻi, 1895
Ronald Williams Jr.

Hawaiian Women’s Fashions: Kapa, Cotton and Silk by Agnes Terao-Guiala (review)
Linda Arthur Bradley


Find more research articles, reviews, bibliographies, notes and queries at Project MUSE.

U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal

Volume 60 (2021)

The new issue includes the following articles and reviews:

Yosano Akiko in Belle Époque Paris / ベル・エポックのパリの与謝野晶子
Scott Mehl

Wound as Allegory: Forced Incestuous Rape on the Battlefield and Takeda Taijun’s Androcentric Sekai / アレゴリーとしての傷：戦場における近親レイプと武田泰淳の男性中心 的「世界」
Junliang Huang

Painful Connections: The “Making” of the #KuToo Online Feminist Movement in Japan / 苦痛なつながり：日本における#KuTooオンラインフェミニスト運動の 「形成」
Leng Junxiao

Raising Awareness of Cassandra Syndrome through Manga: Nonami Tsuna’s My Husband, Akira, Has Asperger’s Syndrome / 漫画で語るカサンドラ症候群：野波ツナの「旦那（アキラ）さんはアス ペルガー」
Yoshiko Okuyama

Find more research articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers

Volume 83 (2021)

Editor Craig S. Revels reflects over the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has affected geographers and members as he states:

Last year’s volume was published in a time of great uncertainty as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, and this year’s unfortunately arrives under similar conditions, slowly improving though they may be. The tragedies, disruptions, and general state of societal affairs during the pandemic will not soon be forgotten…

Geographers have been at the forefront of research into the spread of COVID-19 since the earliest days of the pandemic, and Steve Graves and Petra Nichols contribute an analytical perspective on infection rates in Los Angeles County. In particular, they statistically identify a causal relationship between infection and a range of key socioeconomic and demographic variables, a relationship influencing the location and rate of spread for the disease. They leave us to consider how those factors must be addressed in any preparations for future public health crises.

In a significantly different context, Ray Sumner and John Menary
demonstrate that taking students into the field, always a valuable exercise, is even more rewarding when it leads to unexpected discoveries and challenges our carefully laid plans. In this case, a straightforward field methods class oriented around the Los Angeles River instead became an open-ended, student-driven exploration into the social dimensions of heritage, ethnicity,
culture, and urban development.

New Journal Special Features: Gender Trouble in Korean Literature, Unsettling Korean Migration + Biography forum on Behrouz Boochani

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Asian Theatre Journal

Volume 38, Number 2 (2021)

The new issue includes the following articles and reports:

Harnessing Vitality in Kunming: The Intellectual Lineage
and Artistic Development in the Yi Compatriots Music and
Dance Performance of 1946
Ruby MacDougall

Raktim Pariwar’s Red Lanterns: Dance and Cultural
Revolution in Nepal
Anna Marie Stirr

The Terrible Beauty on the Stage: Narrative and
Performance Aesthetics of Kutiyattam Analyzed through
the Representation of Shurpanakha
Salini V G

The Tokyo Festival World Competition 2019
Cody Poulton

Find more research articles, reports, and reviews at Project MUSE.

Azalea 14 (2021)

Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture

Volume 14 (2021)

Special Feature: Korean Genre Fiction; O Chang-hwan; and Gender Trouble In Korean Literature

From the Editor Young Jung-Lee:

One of the most important recent shifts in Korean literature is found in gender conflict. This “Special Feature: Gender Trouble in Korean Literature and Society,” guest-edited by Hye-Ryoung Lee, shows a fundamentally new perspective through six scholars reading Korean Literature and Society. Over the past decade, the #MeToo Movement has shaken the world, and Korean society has been no exception, as can be seen in Choi Young-mi’s poem “En,”  introduced here with six critical essays. Even before its publication, “En” was the focus of media attention, and it remained a hot topic in Korean society for years due to Choi’s high-profile court battles.

biography

Volume 43, Number 4 (2020)

Special Feature: A Forum on Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains


From Coeditor Anna Poletti:

With this forum, we, the editors of Biography, inaugurate a new feature of the journal that aims to respond to and amplify specific examples of the power of life writing as a cultural, political, and social practice, and which document key moments in the evolution of that practice. In this forum, No Friend but the Mountains is discussed as both a profoundly localized text responding to, making knowledge about, and exposing a highly specific and complex set of conditions, and as a uniquely transnational text that speaks to and about a global phenomenon. Its highly innovative use of life writing as a narrative technique and epistemological practice warranted, in our minds, a concentrated response from the journal. Commissioning and editing this response has renewed my appreciation for the primary concerns of lifewriting scholarship: tracking the mercurial power of personal storytelling to crystalize the contemporary moment in such a way that new knowledge emerges from the entanglements it depicts, and the entanglements it drags its readers into.

The Journal of Burma Studies

Volume 25, Number 2 (2021)

The new issue includes the following articles:

Ethnocentrism or National Reconciliation: Rethinking
Ethnic Relations and the History of Karenni
Tadayuki Kubo

Nats in the Land of the Hintha: Village Religion
in Lower Myanmar
Keziah Wallis

Elephant Riders of the Hukawng Valley, Kachin State:
Evasive Mobility and Vadological Geography
Jacob Shell

Find more research articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

Korean Studies

Volume 45 (2021)

Special Section: Unsettling Korean Migration: Multiple Trajectories and Experiences

From the Editor Cheehyun Harrison Kim:

This analytic potency of migration is superbly demonstrated in this volume’s Special Section Unsettling Korean Migration: Multiple Trajectories and Experiences, guest edited by Sunhee Koo (The University of Auckland) and Jihye Kim (The University of Central Lancashire). Sunhee Koo and Jihye Kim have brought together papers on labor (Yonson Ahn and Jihye Kim), ritual life (Marcus Bell), cultural identity (Sunhee Koo), and artistic production (Hee-seung Irene Lee and Soojin Kim). The six engrossing articles deal with how the Korean diaspora—in Argentina, Germany, Japan, China, and the United States—have shaped and represented their particular situations through negotiation, resilience, and creativity. The authors are highly critical of any national framework, and they see diasporic life as contexts of not only sorrow and sacrifice but also innovation and regeneration. Sunhee Koo and Jihye Kim offer a detailed explanation in their Introduction.

Oceanic Linguistics

Volume 60, Number 1 (2021)

The new issue includes the following articles:

Avaipa, a Language of Central Bougainville
Jason Brown,Melissa Irvine

East Polynesian Subgrouping and Homeland Implications Within the Northern Outlier–East Polynesian Hypothesis
William H. Wilson

Toward a Comparative Typology of ‘Eating’ in Kanak Languages
Anne-Laure Dotte, Claire Moyse-Faurie

Find more research articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

Philosophy East and West

Volume 71, Number 4 (2021)

The new issue included the following articles and translations:

Jian’Ai: Considerations From the “Greater Selection”
Susan Blake

Patterning the Myriad Things: Holism, Harmony, and Anthropogenic Influence in the Huainanzi
Matthew Hamm

Confucianism and Totalitarianism: An Arendtian Reconsideration of Mencius versus Xunzi
Lee Wilson

“America’s National Character” by Watsuji Tetsurō: A Translation
Kyle Michael James Shuttleworth, Sayaka Shuttleworth, Watsuji Tetsurō

Find more research articles, translations, and reviews at Project MUSE.

Sounding Out Heritage: Cultural Politics and the Social Practice of Quan Họ Folk Song in Northern Vietnam

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Tang China in Multi-Polar Asia

Sounding Out Heritage explores the cultural politics that have shaped the recent history and practice of a unique style of folk song that originated in Bắc Ninh province, northern Vietnam. The book delves into the rich and complicated history of quan họ, showing the changes it has undergone over the last sixty years as it moved from village practice onto the professional stage. Interweaving an examination of folk music, cultural nationalism, and cultural heritage with an in-depth ethnographic account of the changing social practice of quan họ folk song, author Lauren Meeker presents a vivid and historically contextualized picture of the quan họ “soundscape.”

Village practitioners, ordinary people who love to sing quan họ, must now negotiate increased attention from those outside the village and their own designation as “living treasures.” Professional singers, with their different performance styles and representational practices, have been incorporated into the quan họ soundscape in an effort to highlight and popularize the culture of Bắc Ninh province in the national context. Sounding Out Heritage offers an in-depth account of the impact of cultural politics on the lives and practices of quan họ folk singers in Vietnam and shows compellingly how a tradition can mean many things to many people.

2013, 200 pages, 18 illustrations
$45.00 ISBN: 978-0-8248-3568-2, Cloth
Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory

Damien by Aldyth Morris Revisited

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Saint DamienThis weekend, July 28 and 29, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Outreach College presents two performances of DAMIEN, the award-winning one-man play by Aldyth Morris. The riveting drama of Saint Damien’s life in Hawai‘i will be performed by actor Dann Seki and directed by Tim Slaughter. The entire playscript is included in Almost Heaven: On the Human and Divine (Mānoa 23:2), which will be available for sale at the performances. The 1980 edition of the play is still available by order from UH Press.

Act One opens with a chant, written originally in Hawaiian by a composer and hula master who contracted leprosy and died at the Kalaupapa settlement on Moloka‘i. “Song of the Chanter Ka-‘ehu” begins:

What will become of Hawai‘i?
What will leprosy do to our land—
disease of the despised, dreaded alike
by white or brown or darker-skinned?

Strange when a man’s neighors
become less than acquaintances.
Seeing me they drew away.
They moved to sit elsewhere, whispering,
and a friend pointed a finger:
“He is a leper.”

Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres

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Communities of ImaginationAsian theatre is usually studied from the perspective of the major traditions of China, Japan, India, and Indonesia. Now, in Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres, a wide-ranging look at the contemporary theatre scene in Southeast Asia, Catherine Diamond shows that performance in some of the lesser known theatre traditions offers a vivid and fascinating picture of the rapidly changing societies in the region. Diamond examines how traditional, modern, and contemporary dramatic works, with their interconnected styles, stories, and ideas, are being presented for local audiences. She not only places performances in their historical and cultural contexts but also connects them to the social, political, linguistic, and religious movements of the last two decades.

“Covering the multifaceted, multicultural, multination swathe of Southeast Asia, Communities of Imagination brings to light changes and theatre innovations over the last twenty-five years by focusing on issues of gender, censorship, and national identity. The book gains its strength by diving into actual productions the author has seen in major urban hubs. Diamond places the work in an informed frame, interviewing major theatre makers. Those interested in Southeast Asia will encounter the themes, innovations, and heated debates that theatre is uniquely suited to amplify, making this book an important contribution.” —Kathy Foley, editor, Asian Theatre Journal

June 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3584-2 / $56.00 (CLOTH)

Discourses of Ch’angguk

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In Search of Traditional Korean OperaIn Search of Korean Traditional Opera: Discourses of Ch’angguk, by Andrew Killick, is the first book on Korean opera in a language other than Korean. Ch’angguk is a form of musical theater that has developed over the last hundred years from the older narrative singing tradition of p’ansori. Killick examines the history and current practice of ch’angguk as an ongoing attempt to invent a traditional Korean opera form to compare with those of neighboring China and Japan. In this, the work addresses a growing interest within the fields of ethnomusicology and Asian studies in the adaptation of traditional arts to conditions in the modern world.

August 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3290-2 / $48.00 (CLOTH)
A Study of the International Center for Korean Studies, Research Institute of Korean Studies, Korea University

Victoria Kneubuhl Thinking Out Loud

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Victoria KneubuhlVictoria Kneubuhl, author of Murder Casts a Shadow and Hawai‘i Nei: Island Plays, will be a guest on the Japanese Cultural Center’s Thinking Out Loud: Talking Issues, Taking Action (KZOO-AM 1210), Monday, July 26, 6:30-7:30 pm.

Kneubuhl is a winner of the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council’s Award for Literature. Her plays have been performed in Hawai‘i and elsewhere in the Pacific, the continental U.S., Britain, and Asia. She is currently the writer and co-producer for the television series Biography Hawaii.

Readings from Andha Yug

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Andha YugA readers theatre production of excerpts from Andha Yug, Dharamvir Bharati’s critically acclaimed play taken from the Indian epic Mahabharata, will be held on Saturday, June 26, at 7:30pm at Orvis Auditorium. For more information on this free event call 808-956-8246 or click here.

The reading will be accompanied by visual images from the Mahabharata and Gamelan music. Translator Alok Bhalla will introduce the performance and play a role as well. A question and answer session will follow the performance.

Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama

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A Beggar’s Art
In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. The plays were seen not simply as the emergence of a new literary form but as a manifestation of modernity itself, transforming the stage into a site for the exploration of new ideas and ways of being. A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900-1930, is the first book in English to examine the full range of early twentieth-century Japanese drama. Accompanying his study, M. Cody Poulton provides his translations of representative one-act plays. Poulton looks at the emergence of drama as a modern literary and artistic form and chronicles the creation of modern Japanese drama as a reaction to both traditional (particularly kabuki) dramaturgy and European drama. Translations and productions of the latter became the model for the so-called New Theater (shingeki), where the question of how to be both modern and Japanese at the same time was hotly contested.

June 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3452-4 / $29.00 (PAPER)

Choice Magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009 Announced

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Each year Choice Magazine, the official publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, compiles a distinguished list of Outstanding Academic Titles. The following two UH Press books were recognized for 2009. A complete list of titles will be available in Choice’s January 2010 issue.

Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan
by Constantine Nomikos Vaporis

“Vaporis has written a magnificent book on the sankin kotai, or alternate attendance system. . . . Long considered the central political control mechanism of the Tokugawa period, the system has received surprisingly little scholarly attention until now. Filling a major gap in the understanding of Japanese history, the author provides a detailed account of the mechanics of the system and demands placed on daimyo and retainers on tours of duty in Edo. Exploiting the latest archaeological and archival sources, Vaporis makes clear the economic burden of the system on the daimyo, as well as its role as an engine of cultural, intellectual, and material exchange, from the center in Edo and between regions. The author also provides intimate details of the lives of samurai, both on the road to and from Edo and while serving their time in Edo. For all interested in early modern history. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice (July 2009)

Kabuki’s Forgotten War: 1931-1945 by James R. Brandon

“Brandon offers new and intriguing research on the development of Kabuki through the turbulent 1930s and into the 1940s. . . . A vital addition to existing literature on what one thinks of as ‘traditional’ Kabuki, this book will be fascinating reading for those interested in Japanese theater, history, or politics. . . . Essential.” —Choice (April 2009)

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