Category: women's studies

An American Girl in the Hawaiian Islands Earns AAUP Outstanding Rating

Posted on by UH Press Marketing

Each year the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) compiles its University Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools Libraries, a bibliography of titles submitted by member presses as a tool for collection development. The books are rated by committees of public and secondary-school librarians from two divisions of the American Library Association.

An American Girl in the Hawaiian IslandsIn this year’s collection, An American Girl in the Hawaiian Islands: Letters of Carrie Prudence Winter, 1890–1893, edited by Sandra Bonura and Deborah Day, received a top “Outstanding” rating. As defined by the selection process, Outstanding titles have “exceptional editorial content and subject matter. They are essential additions to most library collections.”

The reviewer’s comments below can be viewed at the end of the listing (sorted by Dewey Decimal class) of the 2013 Outstanding Titles.

The use of Carrie Prudence Winter’s original letters is what allows this book to become a rare primary source on topics such as: women missionaries, the last days of Hawaii’s monarchy, and a long-distance 19th century courtship. Ms. Winter’s use of language paints a compelling picture, engaging a reader’s imagination while they learn of a world few knew so intimately.”—Stacey Hayman (CODES/RUSA)

Besides being available online, the print bibliography was distributed last month at the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago. General information on the bibliography and rating system, as well as how to order copies, can be found here.

An American Girl in the Hawaiian Islands also was one of three finalists in the biography category of this year’s San Diego Book Awards.

Honolulu Events with Leilani Holmes on Ancestry of Experience

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San Diego resident Leilani Holmes, author of Ancestry of Experience: A Journey Into Hawaiian Ways of Knowing, will visit Honolulu this month and appear at two public events.

On Saturday, May 11, 4:00 to 5:30 p.m., at Native Books/Nā Mea Hawai‘i, she will speak on her search to reclaim her origins, as well as discoveries of wider interest on Hawaiian identity and ancestry. Light refreshments will be provided at the free presentation. (She will start with a bit of hula, so come early!)Holmes-Ancestry_NativeBks

Leilani will also participate as one of the almost 200 presenters at the Hawai‘i Book & Music Festival, May 18-19, at the Frank F. Fasi Civic Grounds next to Honolulu Hale. On Saturday, May 18, she has two timeslots: At 12 noon, she will be a panelist at the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities tent pavilion; at 4:00 p.m., she will be the solo presenter at the Alana Hawaiian Culture pavilion.

The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan

Posted on by stephchun

Passing the LightThe term “revival” has been used to describe the resurgent vitality of Buddhism in Taiwan. Particularly impressive is the quality and size of the nun’s order: Taiwanese nuns today are highly educated and greatly outnumber monks. Both characteristics are unprecedented in the history of Chinese Buddhism and are evident in the Incense Light community (Xiangguang). Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan, by Chün-Fang Yü, is the first in-depth case study of the community, which was founded in 1974 and remains a small but influential order of highly educated nuns who dedicate themselves to teaching Buddhism to lay adults.

Topics in Contemporary Buddhism
May 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3812-6 / $29.00 (PAPER)

Women’s Movements and the Filipina

Posted on by stephchun

Women's Movements and the FilipinaWomen’s Movements and the Filipina: 1986–2008, by Mina Roces, is about a fundamental aspect of the feminist project in the Philippines: rethinking the Filipino woman. It focuses on how contemporary women’s organizations have represented and refashioned the Filipina in their campaigns to improve women’s status by locating her in history, society and politics; imagining her past, present and future; representing her in advocacy; and identifying strategies to transform her. The drive to alter the situation of women included a political aspect (lobbying and changing legislation) and a cultural one (modifying social attitudes and women’s own assessments of themselves). In this work the author examines the cultural side of the feminist agenda: how activists have critiqued Filipino womanhood and engaged in fashioning an alternative woman.

February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3499-9 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Hanoi

Posted on by stephchun

Luc XiWhat does it mean when a city of 180,000 people has more than 5,000 women working as prostitutes? This question frames Vu Trong Phung’s 1937 classic reportage Luc Xi. In the late 1930s, Hanoi had a burgeoning commercial sex industry that involved thousands of people and hundreds of businesses. It was the center of the city’s nightlife and the source of suffering, violence, exploitation, and a venereal disease epidemic. For Phung, a popular writer and intellectual, it also raised disturbing questions about the state of Vietnamese society and culture and whether his country really was “progressing” under French colonial rule. Translator Shaun Kingsley Malarney’s thoughtful and multifaceted introduction provides historical background on colonialism, prostitution, and venereal disease in Vietnam and discusses reportage as a literary genre, political tool, and historical source. A fully annotated translation of Luc Xi follows, in which Phung takes readers into the heart of colonial Hanoi’s sex industry, portraying its female workers, the officials who attempted to regulate it, the doctors who treated its victims, and the secretive medical facility known as the Nha Luc Xi (“The Dispensary”), which examined prostitutes for venereal diseases and held them for treatment.

“Among the most celebrated works of Vietnamese non-fiction reportage, Vu Trọng Phụng’s Luc Xi illuminates the culture of prostitution and the politics of venereal disease prevention in colonial Hanoi. Shaun Malarney’s translation of the text is both elegant and accurate and his detailed introduction provides useful historical context while advancing an important argument about social imbalances embedded within the institutions of colonial medicine. This is an exceptional work of historical scholarship.” —Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

Southeast Asia: Politics Meaning and Memory
November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3467-8 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific

Posted on by stephchun

Since its inception in 1928, the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) has witnessed and contributed to enormous changes in world and Pacific history. Operating out of Honolulu, this women’s network established a series of conferences that promoted social reform and an internationalist outlook through cultural exchange. For the many women attracted to the project—from China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, and the major settler colonies of the region—the association’s vision was enormously attractive, despite the fact that as individuals and national representatives they remained deeply divided by colonial histories. Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific, by Fiona Paisley, tells this multifaceted story by bringing together critical scholarship from across a wide range of fields, including cultural history, international relations and globalization, gender and empire, postcolonial studies, population and world health studies, world history, and transnational history.

“This book places at center stage an organization that embodies many of the crises of colonial modernity that scholars have been grappling with and refracts it through a set of actors and geographical locations that deserve to be better understood and taught widely. Paisley lays out her story in accessible yet analytically sophisticated ways that in turn make manifest the complex unfolding of cultural politics in the Pan-Pacific. The scholarship is extraordinarily impressive and represents the best kind of transnational research there is.” —Antoinette Burton, Bastian Professor of Transnational and Global Studies, University of Illinois

Perspectives on the Global Past
July 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3342-8 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

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