Browse

Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network

Sangjoon Lee

This book explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War politics. ... More

This book explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War politics. The book adopts a simultaneously global and regional approach when analyzing the region's film cultures and industries. New economic conditions in the Asian region and shared postwar experiences among the early cinema entrepreneurs were influenced by Cold War politics, US cultural diplomacy, and intensified cultural flows during the 1950s and 1960s. The book reconstructs Asian film history in light of the international relationships forged, broken, and re-established as the influence of the non-aligned movement grew across the Cold War. The book elucidates how motion picture executives, creative personnel, policy makers, and intellectuals in East and Southeast Asia aspired to industrialize their Hollywood-inspired system in order to expand the market and raise the competitiveness of their cultural products. They did this by forming the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia, co-hosting the Asian Film Festival, and co-producing films. The book demonstrates that the emergence of the first intensive postwar film producers' network in Asia was, in large part, the offspring of Cold War cultural politics and the product of American hegemony. Film festivals that took place in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur were annual showcases of cinematic talent as well as opportunities for the Central Intelligence Agency to establish and maintain cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the United States and Asia during the Cold War. This book reanimates this almost-forgotten history of cinema and the film industry in Asia.Less

Constructive Feminism: Women's Spaces and Women's Rights in the American City

Daphne Spain

This book examines the deliberate and unintended spatial consequences of feminism’s second wave, a social movement dedicated to reconfiguring power relations between women and men. Placing the ... More

This book examines the deliberate and unintended spatial consequences of feminism’s second wave, a social movement dedicated to reconfiguring power relations between women and men. Placing the women’s movement of the 1970s in the context of other social movements that have changed the use of urban space, this book argues that reform feminists used the legal system to end the mandatory segregation of women and men in public institutions, while radical activists created small-scale places that gave women the confidence to claim their rights to the public sphere. Women’s centers, bookstores, health clinics, and domestic violence shelters established feminist places for women’s liberation in Boston, Los Angeles, and many other cities. Unable to afford their own buildings, radicals adapted existing structures to serve as women’s centers that fostered autonomy, health clinics that promoted reproductive rights, bookstores that connected women to feminist thought, and domestic violence shelters that protected their bodily integrity. Legal equal opportunity reforms and daily practices of liberation enhanced women’s choices in education and occupations. Once the majority of wives and mothers had joined the labor force, by the mid-1980s, new buildings began to emerge that substituted for the unpaid domestic tasks once performed in the home. Fast food franchises, childcare facilities, adult day centers, and hospices were among the inadvertent spatial consequences of the second wave.Less

Creating the Suburban School Advantage: Race, Localism, and Inequality in an American Metropolis

John L. Rury

This book explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. It focuses on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of ... More

This book explains how American suburban school districts gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts. It focuses on the period between 1950 and 1980, and presents a detailed study of metropolitan Kansas City, a region representative of trends elsewhere. While big-city districts once were widely seen as superior and attracted families seeking the best educational opportunities for their children, suburban school systems grew rapidly in the post-World War II era as middle-class and more affluent families moved to those communities. At the same time, economically dislocated African Americans migrated from the South to center-city neighborhoods, testing the capacity of urban institutions. As demographic trends drove this urban–suburban divide, a suburban ethos of localism contributed to the socioeconomic exclusion that became a hallmark of outlying school systems. As the book demonstrates, struggles to achieve greater educational equity and desegregation in urban centers contributed to so-called white flight and what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan considered to be a crisis of urban education in 1965. Despite the often valiant efforts made to serve inner city children and bolster urban school districts, this exodus, the book argues, created a new metropolitan educational hierarchy—a mirror image of the urban-centric model that had prevailed before World War II. The stubborn perception that suburban schools are superior, based on test scores and budgets, has persisted into the twenty-first century and instantiates today's metropolitan landscape of social, economic, and educational inequality.Less

Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial

Somdeep Sen

This book rejects the notion that liberation from colonialization exists as a singular moment in history when the colonizer is ousted by the colonized. Instead, it considers the case of the ... More

This book rejects the notion that liberation from colonialization exists as a singular moment in history when the colonizer is ousted by the colonized. Instead, it considers the case of the Palestinian struggle for liberation from its settler colonial condition as a complex psychological and empirical mix of the colonial and the postcolonial. Specifically, the book examines the two seemingly contradictory, yet coexistent, anticolonial and postcolonial modes of politics adopted by Hamas following the organization's unexpected victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council election. Despite the expectations of experts, Hamas has persisted as both an armed resistance to Israeli settler colonial rule and as a governing body. Based on ethnographic material collected in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Israel, and Egypt, the book argues that the puzzle Hamas presents is not rooted in predicting the timing or process of its abandonment of either role. The challenge instead lies in explaining how and why it maintains both, and what this implies for the study of liberation movements and postcolonial studies more generally.Less

Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Paul B. Moyer

This book places early New England's battle against black magic in a transatlantic perspective. The book provides an accessible and comprehensive examination of witch prosecutions in the Puritan ... More

This book places early New England's battle against black magic in a transatlantic perspective. The book provides an accessible and comprehensive examination of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies that discusses how their English inhabitants understood the crime of witchcraft, why some people ran a greater risk of being accused of occult misdeeds, and how gender intersected with witch-hunting. Focusing on witchcraft cases in New England between roughly 1640 and 1670, the book highlights ties between witch-hunting in the New and Old Worlds. Informed by studies on witchcraft in early modern Europe, it presents a useful synthesis of scholarship on occult crime in New England and makes new and valuable contributions to the field.Less

Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston (ed.)

This book's author is one of contemporary Germany's leading intellectuals and artists. A key architect of the New German Cinema and a pioneer of auteur television programming, who has also written ... More

This book's author is one of contemporary Germany's leading intellectuals and artists. A key architect of the New German Cinema and a pioneer of auteur television programming, who has also written books and articles, and continues to make films. However, his reputation outside of the German-speaking world still largely rests on his films of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This book assembles thirty of the author's essays, speeches, glossaries, and interviews, revolving around the capacity for differentiation and the need for orientation toward ways out of catastrophic modernity. The volume brings together some of the author's most fundamental statements on literature, film, pre- and post-cinematic media, and social theory, nearly all for the first time in English translation. Together, these works highlight a career-spanning commitment to unorthodox, essayistic thinking.Less

Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World

Arthur M. Mitchell

This book explores the mass-media landscape of the early twentieth cspecific authorsentury to uncover the subversive societal impact of four major Japanese authors: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu ... More

This book explores the mass-media landscape of the early twentieth cspecific authorsentury to uncover the subversive societal impact of four major Japanese authors: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. The book examines the literature against global realities through a modernist lens, studying an alternative modernism that challenges the Western European model. Through broad surveys of discussions surrounding Japanese life in the 1920s, the book locates and examines flourishing divergent ideologies of the early twentieth century, such as gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. It unravels how the narrative and linguistic strategies of modernist texts interrogated the innocence of this language, disrupting their hold on people's imagined relationship to daily life. These modernist works often discursively displaced the authority of their own claims by inadvertently exposing the global epistemology of East versus West. The book expands modernism studies into a more translational dialogue by locating subversions within the local historical culture and allowing readers to make connections to the time and place in which the texts were written. In highlighting the unbreakable link between literature and society, it reaffirms the value of modernist fiction and its ability to make us aware of how realities are constructed — and how those realities can be changed.Less

Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia

Nurfadzilah Yahaya

This book tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community's ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. The ... More

This book tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community's ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. The book looks at colonial legal infrastructure and discusses how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more important, it follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests. The book explains why Arab minorities in the region helped to fuel the entrenchment of European colonial legalities: their itinerant lives made institutional records necessary. Securely stored in centralized repositories, such records could be presented as evidence in legal disputes. To ensure accountability down the line, Arab merchants valued notarial attestation land deeds, inheritance papers, and marriage certificates by recognized state officials. Colonial subjects continually played one jurisdiction against another, sometimes preferring that colonial legal authorities administer Islamic law — even against fellow Muslims. The book demonstrates the interplay between colonial projections of order and their realities, Arab navigation of legally plural systems in Southeast Asia and beyond, and the fraught and deeply human struggles that played out between family, religious, contract, and commercial legal orders.Less

Food for All in Africa: Sustainable Intensification for African Farmers

Gordon Conway, Ousmane Badiane, and Katrin Glatzel

Africa requires a new agricultural transformation that is appropriate for Africa, that recognizes the continent's diverse environments and climates, and that takes into account its histories and ... More

Africa requires a new agricultural transformation that is appropriate for Africa, that recognizes the continent's diverse environments and climates, and that takes into account its histories and cultures while benefiting rural smallholder farmers and their families. This book describes the key challenges faced by Africa's smallholder farmers and presents the concepts and practices of sustainable intensification as opportunities to sustainably transform Africa's agriculture sector and the livelihoods of millions of smallholders. The way forward, the book indicates, will be an agriculture sector deeply rooted within sustainable intensification: producing more with less, using fertilizers and pesticides more prudently, adapting to climate change, improving natural capital, adopting new technologies, and building resilience at every stage of the agriculture value chain. This book envisions a virtuous circle generated through agricultural development rooted in sustainable intensification that results in greater yields, healthier diets, improved livelihoods for farmers, and sustainable economic opportunities for the rural poor that in turn generate further investment. It describes the benefits of digital technologies for farmers and the challenges of transforming African agricultural policies and creating effective and inspiring leadership. The book demonstrates why we should take on the challenge and provides ideas and methods through which it can be met.Less

Imperial Romance: Fictions of Colonial Intimacy in Korea, 1905-1945

Su Yun Kim

This book argues that the idea of colonial intimacy within the Japanese empire of the early twentieth century had a far broader and more popular influence on discourse makers, social leaders, and ... More

This book argues that the idea of colonial intimacy within the Japanese empire of the early twentieth century had a far broader and more popular influence on discourse makers, social leaders, and intellectuals than previously understood. The book investigates representations of Korean–Japanese intimate and familial relationships — including romance, marriage, and kinship — in literature, media, and cinema, alongside documents that discuss colonial policies during the Japanese protectorate period and colonial rule in Korea (1905–45). Focusing on Korean perspectives, the book uncovers political meaning in the representation of intimacy and emotion between Koreans and Japanese portrayed in print media and films. It disrupts the conventional reading of colonial-period texts as the result of either coercion or the disavowal of colonialism, thereby expanding our understanding of colonial writing practices. The theme of intermarriage gave elite Korean writers and cultural producers opportunities to question their complicity with imperialism. Their fictions challenged expected colonial boundaries, creating tensions in identity and hierarchy, and also in narratives of the linear developmental trajectory of modernity. Examining a broad range of writings and films from this period, the book maps the colonized subjects' fascination with their colonizers and with moments that allowed them to become active participants in and agents of Japanese and global imperialism.Less

Lovesick Japan: Sex * Marriage * Romance * Law

Mark D. West

This book explores an official vision of love, sex, and marriage in contemporary Japan. A comprehensive body of evidence describes a society characterized by a presupposed absence of physical and ... More

This book explores an official vision of love, sex, and marriage in contemporary Japan. A comprehensive body of evidence describes a society characterized by a presupposed absence of physical and emotional intimacy, affection, and personal connections. The book finds that Japanese judges frequently opine on whether a person is in love, what other emotions a person is feeling, and whether those emotions are appropriate for the situation. Sometimes judges' views about love, sex, and marriage emerge from their presentation of the facts of cases. Among the recurring elements are abortions forced by men, compensated dating, late-life divorces, termination fees to end affairs, sexless couples, Valentine's Day heartbreak, “soapland” bath-brothels, and home-wrecking hostesses. Sometimes the judges' analysis, decisions, and commentary are as revealing as the facts. Sex in the cases is a choice among private “normal” sex, which is male-dominated, conservative, dispassionate, or nonexistent; commercial sex, which caters to every fetish but is said to lead to rape, murder, and general social depravity; and a hybrid of the two, which commodifies private sexual relationships. Marriage is contractual; judges express the ideal of love in marriage and proclaim its importance, but virtually no one in the court cases achieves it. Love usually appears as a tragic, overwhelming emotion associated with jealousy, suffering, heartache, and death.Less

Paradox and Representation: Silenced Voices in the Narratives of Nakagami Kenji

Machiko Ishikawa

How can the “voiceless” voice be represented? This primary question underpins this book's analysis of selected works by Buraku writer, Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992). In spite of his Buraku background, ... More

How can the “voiceless” voice be represented? This primary question underpins this book's analysis of selected works by Buraku writer, Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992). In spite of his Buraku background, Nakagami's privilege as a writer made it difficult for him to “hear” and “represent” those voices silenced by mainstream social structures in Japan. This “paradox of representing the silenced voice” is the key theme of the book. Gayatri Spivak theorizes the (im)possibility of representing the voice of “subalterns,” those oppressed by imperialism, patriarchy, and heteronomativity. Arguing for Burakumin as Japan's “subalterns,” the book draws on Spivak to analyze Nakagami's texts. The first half of the book revisits the theme of the transgressive Burakumin man. This section includes analysis of a seldom discussed narrative of a violent man and his silenced wife. The second half of the book focuses on the rarely heard voices of Burakumin women from the Kiyuki trilogy. Satoko, the prostitute, unknowingly commits incest with her half-brother, Akiyuki. The aged Yuki sacrifices her youth in a brothel to feed her fatherless family. The mute Moyo remains traumatized by rape. The author's close reading of Nakagami's representation of the silenced voices of these sexually stigmatized women is this book's unique contribution to Nakagami scholarship.Less

Piercing the Structure of Tradition: Flute Performance, Continuity, and Freedom in the Music of Noh Drama

Mariko Anno

What does freedom sound like in the context of traditional Japanese theater? Where is the space for innovation, and where can this kind of innovation be located in the rigid instrumentation of the ... More

What does freedom sound like in the context of traditional Japanese theater? Where is the space for innovation, and where can this kind of innovation be located in the rigid instrumentation of the Noh drama? This book investigates flute performance as a space to explore the relationship between tradition and innovation. This first English-language monograph traces the characteristics of the Noh flute (nohkan), its music, and transmission methods and considers the instrument's potential for development in the modern world. The book examines the musical structure and nohkan melodic patterns of five traditional Noh plays and assesses the degree to which Issō School nohkan players maintain to this day the continuity of their musical traditions in three contemporary Noh plays influenced by William Butler Yeats. The book's ethnographic approach draws on interviews with performers and case studies, as well as the author's personal reflection as a nohkan performer and disciple under the tutelage of Noh masters. The book argues that traditions of musical style and usage remain influential in shaping contemporary Noh composition and performance practice, and the existing freedom within fixed patterns can be understood through a firm foundation in Noh tradition.Less

Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia

James Pickett

This book analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through to the ... More

This book analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century. The book demonstrates that Islamic scholars were simultaneously mystics and administrators, judges and occultists, physicians and poets. This integrated understanding of the world of Islamic scholarship unlocks a different way of thinking about transregional exchange networks. The book reveals a Persian-language cultural sphere that transcended state boundaries and integrated a spectacularly vibrant Eurasia that is invisible from published sources alone. Through a high-cultural complex that the book terms the “Persian cosmopolis” or “Persianate sphere,” it argues, an intersection of diverse disciplines shaped geographical trajectories across and between political states. The book paints a comprehensive, colorful, and often contradictory portrait of mosque and state in the age of empire.Less

Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China

Y. Yvon Wang

This book navigates an overlooked history of representation during the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese Republic — a time when older, hierarchical notions of licentiousness were ... More

This book navigates an overlooked history of representation during the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese Republic — a time when older, hierarchical notions of licentiousness were overlaid by a new, pornographic regime. The book draws on previously untapped archives to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world. The book emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed “proper” sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, the book's social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.Less

Stitching the 24-Hour City: Life, Labor, and the Problem of Speed in Seoul

Seo Young Park

This book reveals the intense speed of garment production and everyday life in Dongdaemun, a lively market in Seoul, South Korea. Once the site of uprisings against oppressive working conditions in ... More

This book reveals the intense speed of garment production and everyday life in Dongdaemun, a lively market in Seoul, South Korea. Once the site of uprisings against oppressive working conditions in the 1970s and 1980s, Dongdaemun has now become iconic for its creative economy, nightlife, fast-fashion factories, and shopping plazas. The book follows the work of people who witnessed and experienced the rapidly changing marketplace from the inside. Through this approach, it examines the meanings and politics of work in one of the world's most vibrant and dynamic global urban marketplaces. In doing so, it brings readers into close contact with the garment designers, workers, and traders who sustain the extraordinary speed of fast-fashion production and circulation, as well as the labor activists who challenge it. Attending to their narratives and practices of work, the book argues that speed, rather than being a singular drive of acceleration, is an entanglement of uneven paces of life, labor, the market, and the city itself. The book exposes the under-studied experiences with Dongdaemun fast fashion, peeling back layers of temporal politics of labor and urban space to record the human source of the speed that characterizes the never-ending movement of the 24-hour city.Less

Teen Spirit: How Adolescence Transformed the Adult World

Paul Howe

This book offers a novel and provocative perspective on how we came to be living in an age of political immaturity and social turmoil. The book argues it's because a teenage mentality has slowly ... More

This book offers a novel and provocative perspective on how we came to be living in an age of political immaturity and social turmoil. The book argues it's because a teenage mentality has slowly gripped the adult world. It contends that many features of how we live today — some regrettable, others beneficial — can be traced to the emergence of a more defined adolescent stage of life in the early twentieth century, when young people started spending their formative, developmental years with peers, particularly in formal school settings. The book shows how adolescent qualities have slowly seeped upward, where they have gradually reshaped the norms and habits of adulthood. The effects over the long haul, the book contends, have been profound, in both the private realm and in the public arena of political, economic, and social interaction. Our teenage traits remain part of us as we move into adulthood, so much so that some now need instruction manuals for adulting. This book challenges our assumptions about the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood. Yet despite a cultural system that seems to be built on the ethos of Generation Me, it's not all bad. In fact, there has been an equally impressive rise in creativity, diversity, and tolerance within society: all traits stemming from core components of the adolescent character. The book helps make sense of the impulsivity driving society and encourages us to think anew about civic reengagement.Less

That the People Might Live: Loss and Renewal in Native American Elegy

Arnold Krupat

The word “elegy” comes from the Ancient Greek elogos, meaning a mournful poem or song, in particular a song of grief in response to loss. Because mourning and memorialization are so deeply embedded ... More

The word “elegy” comes from the Ancient Greek elogos, meaning a mournful poem or song, in particular a song of grief in response to loss. Because mourning and memorialization are so deeply embedded in the human condition, all human societies have developed means for lamenting the dead, and, this book surveys the traditions of Native American elegiac expression over several centuries. The book covers a variety of oral performances of loss and renewal, including the Condolence Rites of the Iroquois and the memorial ceremony of the Tlingit people known as koo'eex, examining as well a number of Ghost Dance songs, which have been reinterpreted in culturally specific ways by many different tribal nations. The book treats elegiac “farewell” speeches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in considerable detail, and comments on retrospective autobiographies by Black Hawk and Black Elk. Among contemporary Native writers, it looks at elegiac work by Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, Maurice Kenny, and Ralph Salisbury, among others. Despite differences of language and culture, the book finds that death and loss are consistently felt by Native Americans both personally and socially: someone who had contributed to the People's well-being was now gone. Native American elegiac expression offered mourners consolation so that they might overcome their grief and renew their will to sustain communal life.Less

The Truth Society: Science, Disinformation, and Politics in Berlusconi's Italy

Noelle Molé Liston

This book seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific ... More

This book seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. The book scrutinizes Italy's late-twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, the book examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving. With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the “post-truth” world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. The book argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. This book offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.Less

Uneasy Military Encounters: The Imperial Politics of Counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand

Ruth Streicher

This book presents a historically and theoretically grounded political ethnography of the Thai military's counterinsurgency practices in the southern borderland, home to the greater part of the ... More

This book presents a historically and theoretically grounded political ethnography of the Thai military's counterinsurgency practices in the southern borderland, home to the greater part of the Malay-Muslim minority. The book argues that counterinsurgency practices mark the southern population as the racialized, religious, and gendered other of the Thai, which contributes to producing Thailand as an imperial formation: a state formation based on essentialized difference between the Thai and their others. Through a genealogical approach, the book addresses broad conceptual questions of imperial politics in a non-Western context: How can we understand imperial policing in a country that was never colonized? How is “Islam” constructed in a state that is officially secular and promotes Buddhist tolerance? What are the (historical) dynamics of imperial patriarchy in a context internationally known for its gender pluralism? The resulting ethnography excavates the imperial politics of concrete encounters between the military and the southern population in the ongoing conflict in southern Thailand.Less