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Title: On the edge of America: California modernist art, 1900-1950 
Author: Karlstrom, Paul J
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Art History | California and the West | United States History | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: To many, California's social and cultural identity has set it apart from the rest of the nation. Identified almost exclusively with Hollywood and popular culture, the entire region has been denied a meaningful relationship to mainstream twentieth-century modernism. This groundbreaking collection emphatically challenges that assumption. In essays about California art during the first half of the century, the contributors evoke a culture, now recognizable as modernist, that reflects the actual circumstances of contemporary West Coast artistic experience in all its richness. The subjects include painting, murals, sculpture, film, photography, and architecture.The issue of regionalism is central to this remarkable collection. How do we build a cultural portrait of an area that reveals its distinctive character while recognizing its participation in the larger art historical framework? Through the essays runs the theme of an alternative culture that transformed modernism to suit its own regional imperatives. Compelled by a sense of distance and the need for reinvention, California artists created traditions for a new cultural landscape and society. On the Edge of America is an enlightening and visually exciting addition to the growing literature on California art and culture. Through its fresh and expanded view of modernism, it is also well suited to the formulation of a truly national cultural narrative, one that embraces the edges as well as the center of American creative life.   [brief]
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Title: On the margins of modernism: decentering literary dynamics 
Author: Kronfeld, Chana
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Comparative Literature | Language and Linguistics | Literary Theory and Criticism | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: Modernism valorizes the marginal, the exile, the "other" - yet we tend to use writing from the most commonly read European languages (English, French, German) as examples of this marginality. Chana Kronfeld counters these dominant models of marginality by looking instead at modernist poetry written in two decentered languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. What results is a bold new model of literary dynamics, one less tied to canonical norms, less limited geographically, and less in danger of universalizing the experience of minority writers.Kronfeld examines the interpenetrations of modernist groupings through examples of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry in Europe, the U.S., and Israel. Her discussions of Amichai, Fogel, Raab, Halpern, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Sutskever will be welcomed by students of modernism in general and Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in particular.   [brief]
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Title: On the postcolony
Author: Mbembé, J.-A 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Postcolonial Studies | Political Theory | African History | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of postcolonial studies writing today. In On the Postcolony he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of postcolonial theory. This thought-provoking and groundbreaking collection of essays - his first book to be published in English - develops and extends debates first ignited by his well-known 1992 article "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony," in which he developed his notion of the "banality of power" in contemporary Africa. Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia, and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity - violence, wonder, and laughter - to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century. This provocative book will surely attract attention with its signal contribution to the rich interdisciplinary arena of scholarship on colonial and postcolonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.   [brief]
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Title: On the road to tribal extinction: depopulation, deculuration, and adaptive well-being among the Batak of the Philippines 
Author: Eder, James F
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Southeast Asia
Publisher's Description: The cultural and even physical extinction of the world's remaining tribal people is a disturbing phenomenon of our time. In his study of the Batak of the Philippines, James Eder explores the adaptive limits of small human populations facing the ecological changes, social stresses, and cultural disru . . . [more]
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Title: One king, one faith: the Parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century 
Author: Roelker, Nancy L. (Nancy Lyman)
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | European History | Christianity | European Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: This book, the culmination of a lifelong career in French history, tackles head-on the central question of the French Religious Wars: Why did France prove so consistently hostile and resistant to Protestantism? Distinguished scholar Nancy Lyman Roelker claims that what ultimately motivated the passion and violence of the civil wars was religion. She demonstrates that not only the body politic but also the body social was defined by Gallican Catholicism.Roelker underscores the role the Parlement played in shaping and safeguarding the social, as well as the political, order. Her study is based on extensive research in the correspondence, memoirs, and tracts of mainstream Catholic magistrates as well as dissenters. It creates an overview of the mentalitè s of the Parlement, analyzes religious attitudes toward major events of the period, and examines the Parlement's role in the triumph of Henri IV. Along the way, it sheds light on the inner workings of the Parlement and other political institutions, on social structures, and on collective ideas. And above all, this distinguished work brilliantly illuminates the role of religion in society and the state. It will be the definitive work on the subject for many years to come.   [brief]
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Title: One of the children: gay black men in Harlem 
Author: Hawkeswood, William G d. 1992
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | African American Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Gay black men, a thriving subculture of the black and gay communities, are doubly marginalized. Along with other black men, they are typically portrayed in the media and literature as "street corner men" - unemployed drifters, absentee fathers, substance abusers. In the larger gay community, they are an invisible minority. One of the Children , the first formal cultural study of gay black men in Harlem, not only illuminates this segment of America's gay population but presents a far richer, more diverse portrait of black men's lives than is commonly perceived.Based on two years' intensive research - during which the author lived in Harlem's gay community - including extensive interviews with fifty-seven community members, this book depicts gay black men's lives in all their social, economic, and cultural complexity. William Hawkeswood takes us from the street into the homes and lives of his subjects. He describes the elaborate network of friends, called "family," that supports these men emotionally and financially, and the community's two-tiered economic structure, comprising gay men and "boys," or hustlers.Hawkeswood also explores what it means for these men to be both gay and black. In the process, he makes the surprising discovery that while the AIDS virus looms all around them, it has not yet significantly affected the community of gay blacks who choose their sexual partners exclusively from among Harlem's other gay black men.   [brief]
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Title: One step from the White House: the rise and fall of Senator William F. Knowland 
Author: Montgomery, Gayle B 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Politics | Autobiographies and Biographies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: During the Cold War years of the 1950s, William F. Knowland was one of the most important figures in American politics. As the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate, the wealthy California newspaper heir was recognized and respected by millions. His influence with President Eisenhower led to Earl Warren's appointment as chief justice, and Knowland set in motion a U.S.-China policy that remains part of our international direction today. Yet he committed suicide in 1974, following a personal decline that included political humiliation, a ruined marriage, and the loss of his family fortune.This is the first full-scale biography of Bill Knowland, written by two journalists who came to know him after he left Washington in 1958. Gayle B. Montgomery was a political editor at the Oakland Tribune , the newspaper owned by Knowland's father, the power-wielding Joseph R. Knowland. James W. Johnson was a Tribune editorial writer. Both men worked with Knowland when he returned to the newspaper after giving up his Senate seat in a failed bid to become governor of California. Knowland lost the governorship race to Edmund G. (Pat) Brown; had he won, many observers felt Knowland would have had a clear shot at the White House.This is a book not only about Mr. Republican, but also one that illuminates the strengths and deficiencies of Republican party politics during the years when the party was at its zenith. In portraying the life of Bill Knowland, the authors cast a glaring light both on the machinations of political power and on the Republican establishment's aspirations in the Warren-Eisenhower era.   [brief]
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Title: The ones that are wanted: communication and the politics of representation in a photographic exhibition
Author: Kratz, Corinne Ann 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | African Studies | Photography | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: The Okiek people of Kenya's forested highlands have a long history of hunting, honey gathering, and trading with their Maasai and Kipsigis neighbors; several decades ago, they also began farming and herding. This book follows a traveling exhibition of anthropologist Corinne Kratz's photographs of the Okiek through showings at seven venues, including the National Museum in Nairobi and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Kratz tells the story of the exhibition--the stereotypes it sought to challenge, how commentaries by Okiek people were incorporated, and different ways that viewers in Kenya and the United States understood it. In addition to presenting wonderful images of a little-known people, this inviting book explores the exhibition medium itself, focusing on the complexities and possibilities of cultural representation. Walking a fine line between the photographic intimacy of a family album and the ethnographic distance of documentary photography, The Ones That Are Wanted reproduces the exhibition in full, with its vibrant color photographs, multilingual captions, and lively commentary. Throughout, Kratz incorporates insightful reflections on her changing involvement with the exhibition as anthropologist, photographer, and curator, and she provides perceptive discussions of such topics as photography in Kenya, stereotypes, and the post-1970s proliferation of the politics of representation.   [brief]
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Title: The opening of the Apartheid mind: options for the new South Africa 
Author: Adam, Heribert
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: African Studies | Politics | African History
Publisher's Description: Refusing to be governed by what is fashionable or inoffensive, Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley frankly address the passions and rationalities that drive politics in post-apartheid South Africa. They argue that the country's quest for democracy is widely misunderstood and that public opinion abroad relies on stereotypes of violent tribalism and false colonial analogies.Adam and Moodley criticize the personality cult surrounding Nelson Mandela and the accolades accorded F. W. de Klerk. They reject the black-versus-white conflict and substitute sober analysis and strategic pragmatism for the moral outrage that typifies so much writing about South Africa. Believing that the best expression of solidarity emanates from sympathetic but candid criticism, they pose challenging questions for the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela. They give in-depth coverage to political violence, the ANC-South African Communist Party alliance, Inkatha, and other controversial topics as well.The authors do not propose a solution that will guarantee a genuinely democratic South Africa. What they offer is an understanding of the country's social conditions and political constraints, and they sketch options for both a new South Africa and a new post-Cold War foreign policy for the whole of southern Africa. The importance of this book is as immediate as today's headlines.   [brief]
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Title: Opera in seventeenth-century Venice: the creation of a genre 
Author: Rosand, Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Opera | European History
Publisher's Description: Ellen Rosand shows how opera, born of courtly entertainment, took root in the special social and economic environment of seventeenth-century Venice and there developed the stylistic and aesthetic characteristics we recognize as opera today. With ninety-one music examples, most of them complete pieces nowhere else in print, and enlivened by twenty-eight illustrations, this landmark study will be essential for all students of opera, amateur and professional, and for students of European cultural history in general.Because opera was new in the seventeenth century, the composers (most notably Monteverdi and Cavalli), librettists, impresarios, singers, and designers were especially aware of dealing with aesthetic issues as they worked. Rosand examines critically for the first time the voluminous literary and musical documentation left by the Venetian makers of opera. She determines how these pioneers viewed their art and explains the mechanics of the proliferation of opera, within only four decades, to stages across Europe. Rosand isolates two features of particular importance to this proliferation: the emergence of conventions - musical, dramatic, practical - that facilitated replication; and the acute self-consciousness of the creators who, in their scores, librettos, letters, and other documents, have left us a running commentary on the origins of a genre.   [brief]
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Title: Opium regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952
Author: Brook, Timothy 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | China | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Opium is more than just a drug extracted from poppies. Over the past two centuries it has been a palliative medicine, an addictive substance, a powerful mechanism for concentrating and transferring wealth and power between nations, and the anchor for a now vanished sociocultural world in and around China. Opium Regimes integrates the pioneering research of sixteen scholars to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation but involved Chinese merchants, Chinese state agents, and Japanese imperialists as well. The book presents a coherent historical arc that moves from British imperialism in the nineteenth century, to Chinese capital formation and state making at the turn of the century, to Japanese imperialism through the 1930s and 1940s, and finally to the apparent resolution of China's opium problem in the early 1950s. Together these essays show that the complex interweaving of commodity trading, addiction, and state intervention in opium's history refigured the historical face of East Asia more profoundly than any other commodity.   [brief]
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Title: Ordering the world: approaches to state and society in Sung Dynasty China 
Author: Hymes, Robert P
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: These essays examine the relation of society and the state or, more broadly, the place of political action in society and in the history of Sung China. Connections between intellectual change and sociopolitical change are a consistent focus; attitudes toward history and problems of authority are a recurrent concern. The authors suggest new kinds of continuity between the disparate intellectual worlds of Northern and Southern Sung China. Their findings have important implications for our understanding of the neo-Confucian movement in Sung history and of the Sung in the history of Chinese ideas about politics and social action.   [brief]
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Title: Orientalist aesthetics: art, colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930
Author: Benjamin, Roger 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Art | Art History | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Lavishly illustrated with exotic images ranging from Renoir's forgotten Algerian oeuvre to the abstract vision of Matisse's Morocco and beyond, this book is the first history of Orientalist art during the period of high modernism. Roger Benjamin, drawing on a decade of research in untapped archives, introduces many unfamiliar paintings, posters, miniatures, and panoramas and discovers an art movement closely bound to French colonial expansion. Orientalist Aesthetics approaches the visual culture of exoticism by ranging across the decorative arts, colonial museums, traveling scholarships, and art criticism in the Salons of Paris and Algiers. Benjamin's rediscovery of the important Society of French Orientalist Painters provides a critical context for understanding a lush body of work, including that of indigenous Algerian artists never before discussed in English. The painter-critic Eugène Fromentin tackled the unfamiliar atmospheric conditions of the desert, Etienne Dinet sought a more truthful mode of ethnographic painting by converting to Islam, and Mohammed Racim melded the Persian miniature with Western perspective. Benjamin considers armchair Orientalists concocting dreams from studio bric-à-brac, naturalists who spent years living in the oases of the Sahara, and Fauve and Cubist travelers who transposed the discoveries of the Parisian Salons to create decors of indigenous figures and tropical plants. The network that linked these artists with writers and museum curators was influenced by a complex web of tourism, rapid travel across the Mediterranean, and the march of modernity into a colonized culture. Orientalist Aesthetics shows how colonial policy affected aesthetics, how Europeans visualized cultural difference, and how indigenous artists in turn manipulated Western visual languages.   [brief]
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Title: Origins of architectural pleasure
Author: Hildebrand, Grant 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Architecture | Environmental Studies | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Do survival instincts have anything to do with our architectural choices - our liking for a certain room, a special stairway, a plaza in a particular city? In this engaging study Grant Hildebrand discusses ways in which architectural forms emulate some archetypal settings that humans have found appealing - and useful to survival - from ancient times to the present.Speculating that nature has "designed" us to prefer certain conditions and experiences, Hildebrand is interested in how the characteristics of our most satisfying built environments mesh with Darwinian selection. In examining the appeal of such survival-based characteristics he cites architectural examples spanning five continents and five millennia. Among those included are the Palace of Minos, the Alhambra, Wells cathedral, the Shinto shrine at Ise, the Piazza San Marco, Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a Seattle condominium, and recent houses by Eric Owen Moss and Arne Bystrom.Just what characteristics bestow evolutionary benefits? "Refuge and prospect" offer a protective place of concealment close to a foraging and hunting ground. "Enticement" invites the safe exploration of an information-rich setting where worthwhile discoveries await. "Peril" elicits an emotion of pleasurable fear and so tests and increases our competence in the face of danger: thus the attraction of a skyscraper or a house poised over a vertiginous ravine. "Order and complexity" tease our intuitions for sorting complex information into survival-useful categories.Gracefully written, with excellent illustrations that complement the text, Origins of Architectural Pleasure will open the reader's eyes to new ways of seeing a home, a workplace, a vacation setting, even a particular table in a restaurant. It also suggests important design considerations for buildings with a more pressing mandate for human appeal, such as hospitals, retirement homes, and hospices.   [brief]
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Title: The origins of backwardness in Eastern Europe: economics and politics from the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century
Author: Chirot, Daniel
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Politics | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Reaching back centuries, this study makes a convincing case for very deep roots of current Eastern European backwardness. Its conclusions are suggestive for comparativists studying other parts of the world, and useful to those who want to understand contemporary Eastern Europe's past. Like the rest of the world except for that unique part of the West which has given us a false model of what was "normal," Eastern Europe developed slowly. The weight of established class relations, geography, lack of technological innovation, and wars kept the area from growing richer.In the nineteenth century the West exerted a powerful influence, but it was political more than economic. Nationalism and the creation of newly independent aspiring nation-states then began to shape national economies, often in unfavorable ways.One of this book's most important lessons is that while economics may limit the freedom of action of political players, it does not determine political outcomes. The authors offer no simple explanations but rather a theoretically complex synthesis that demonstrates the interaction of politics and economics.   [brief]
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Title: The origins of indigenism: human rights and the politics of identity
Author: Niezen, Ronald
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | International Relations | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: "International indigenism" may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it is indeed a global phenomenon and a growing form of activism. In his fluent and accessible narrative, Ronald Niezen examines the ways the relatively recent emergence of an internationally recognized identity - "indigenous peoples" - intersects with another relatively recent international movement - the development of universal human rights laws and principles. This movement makes use of human rights instruments and the international organizations of states to resist the political, cultural, and economic incursions of individual states. The concept "indigenous peoples" gained currency in the social reform efforts of the International Labor Organization in the 1950s, was taken up by indigenous nongovernmental organizations, and is now fully integrated into human rights initiatives and international organizations. Those who today call themselves indigenous peoples share significant similarities in their colonial and postcolonial experiences, such as loss of land and subsistence, abrogation of treaties, and the imposition of psychologically and socially destructive assimilation policies. Niezen shows how, from a new position of legitimacy and influence, they are striving for greater recognition of collective rights, in particular their rights to self-determination in international law. These efforts are influencing local politics in turn and encouraging more ambitious goals of autonomy in indigenous communities worldwide.   [brief]
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Title: The origins of modernism in Russian architecture 
Author: Brumfield, William Craft 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Architecture | Architectural History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The dramatic transformation of Russian architecture from the 1880s to the 1917 revolution reflected the profound changes in Russian society as it entered the modern industrial age. William Craft Brumfield examines the extraordinary diversity of architectural styles in this period and traces the search by architects and critics for a "unifying idea" that would define a new architecture. Generously illustrated with archival materials and with the author's own superb photographs, this is the first comprehensive study by a Western scholar of a neglected period in European architectural and cultural history.Brumfield explores the diverse styles of Russian modernism in part by analyzing the contemporary theoretical debate about them: the relation between technology and style, the obligation of architecture to society, and the role of architecture as an expression of national identity. Steeped in controversy, Russian modernism at the beginning of the century foreshadowed the radical restructuring of architectural form in the Soviet Union during the two decades after the revolution. This authoritative work provides a new understanding of Russian architecture's last brief entrepreneurial episode and offers insight on our own era, when individual freedom and initiative may once again find expression in Russian architecture.   [brief]
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Title: The origins of the Boxer Uprising
Author: Esherick, Joseph
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Asian Studies | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: In the summer of 1900, bands of peasant youths from the villages of north China streamed into Beijing to besiege the foreign legations, attracting the attention of the entire world. Joseph Esherick reconstructs the early history of the Boxers, challenging the traditional view that they grew from ear . . . [more]
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Title: Orphans of Petrarch: poetry and theory in the Spanish Renaissance 
Author: Navarrete, Ignacio Enrique 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Poetry | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: In Spain as elsewhere, Renaissance poets transformed the lyric tradition by using Petrarch as a source of poetic renewal. But political unity and military hegemony, coupled with a sense of cultural inferiority and an obsession with ethnic purity, made Spain different. Drawing on modern critical theory, Ignacio Navarrete offers a new exposition of the development of Spanish Renaissance poetics. Grounded in both philology and cultural theory, Orphans of Petrarch is the first book to integrate the "Spanish difference" into an understanding of Renaissance lyric as a European phenomenon.   [brief]
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Title: The other economy: pastoral husbandry on a medieval estate 
Author: Biddick, Kathleen
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: While the cereal agriculture of medieval Europe has been studied exhaustively, the pastoral resources and livestock husbandry of medieval estates have been seriously neglected. Kathleen Biddick's examination of one estate, Peterborough Abbey, during several decades before and after 1100 and the first decade after 1300, brings a new balance to the subject of the medieval economy. Her pioneering methodology and the conclusions she reaches will interest archaeologists and agricultural historians as well as anthropologists, economists, and historians of early European development.Drawing on the archival records of the abbey, an estate that straddled the "classic" open-field agriculture of the English Midlands and the more pastorally-oriented farming of the English peat fens, Biddick describes in great detail how these farmers managed their herds and consumed and marketed livestock products such as meat, wool, hides, milk, and cheese. Commitment to conserving consumption strategies did not mean that the Abbey resisted market involvement and technological innovation. Large numbers of work and cart horses indicate the estate's economic interest in speedy haulage. Cereal yields, where they are calculable, compare favorably to the high-yielding demesnes of parts of Norfolk, the most agriculturally advanced region of medieval England. By showing how the Abbey coordinated its resources to enhance diversity and flexibility, The Other Economy enlarges our understanding of agrarian lordship and political control over resources in the medieval economy.   [brief]
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