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A grippingly personal analysis of J. K. Rowling’s rise as an anti-trans activist, its media and pop cultural context, and trans resistance to the moral panic she has stoked.

In J. K. Rowling and the Anti-Trans Panic, Gina Gwenffrewi weaves her own experience as a trans woman living in Edinburgh, Scotland, with analysis of political and pop cultural discourses and artifacts to deliver a trenchant study of how fellow Edinburgh resident J. K. Rowling’s emergence as a major anti-trans campaigner and the years-long entrenchment of existing anti-trans forces have converged. Analyzing Rowling’s output since 2020, a series of anti-trans events at the University of Edinburgh, the transphobic comedy of Ricky Gervais within the British media landscape, YouTube commentaries, and more, Gwenffrewi creates a potent taxonomy of the rhetorical devices and foundational assumptions of anti-trans discourse. While the 2020s UK has proved fertile ground for “gender-critical” feminism, she argues, it has also provided the foundation for sites of resistance and for bolstering transgender voices worldwide. In celebrating trans activism and trans joy amid adversity, Gwenffrewi beautifully captures the light and dark of being out as trans in the city that—if it can fairly be called ground zero for anti-trans fervor—also embodies liberatory possibilities for trans people worldwide.

In September 2003 the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, confirming his reputation as one of the most influential writers of our time. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies. Taking the author’s ethical writing as its theme, the volume is an important addition to understanding Coetzee’s fiction and critical thinking. While taking stock of Coetzee’s singular, modernist response to the apartheid and postapartheid situations in his early fiction, the volume is the first to engage at length with the later works, Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual explores Coetzee’s roles as a South African intellectual and a novelist; his stance on matters of allegory and his evasion of the apartheid censor; his tacit critique of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; his performance of public lectures of his alter ego, Elizabeth Costello; and his explorations into ecofeminism and animal rights. The essays collected here, which include an interview with the Nobel Laureate, provide new vantages from which to consider Coetzee’s writing.

From swift steeds to ritually slaughtered deer to symbolic serpents, nonhuman animals of every stripe have participated from the earliest of times in the construction of the cultural community that we know as Japan. Yet the historical accounts that have hitherto prevailed, claim the authors of this innovative volume, relegate our fellow animals to a silent and benign “nature” that lies beyond the realm of narrative and agency. What happens when we restore nonhuman creatures to the field of historical vision?

This book challenges many of the fundamental assumptions that have shaped contemporary scholarship on Japan, engaging from new perspectives questions of economic growth, isolation from and interaction with the outside world, the tools of conquest and empire, and the character of modernity. Essay by essay, this provocative collection compels readers to acknowledge the diversity of living beings who exist at the ragged edges of our human, as well as our historical, horizons.

At age twenty-three, Jack London (1876–1916) sold his first story, and within six years he was the highest paid and most widely read writer in America. To account for his success, he created a fiction of himself as the quintessential self-made man. But as Clarice Stasz demonstrates in this absorbing collective biography, London always relied on a circle of women who nurtured him, sheltered him, and fostered his legacy.

Using newly available letters and diaries from private collections, Stasz brings this diverse constellation of women to life. London was the son of freethinking Flora Wellman, yet found more maternal comfort from freed slave Jennie Prentiss and his stepsister Eliza. His early loves included a British-born consumptive, a Jewish socialist, and an African American. His first wife, Bess Maddern, was a teacher and devoted mother to daughters Bess and Joan, while his second wife, Charmian Kittredge, shared his passion for adventure and served as a model for many characters in his writings. Following his death, the various women who survived him both promoted his legacy and suffered the consequences of being constantly identified with a famous man.

In recasting London's life through the eyes of three generations of women, Stasz manages to untangle his seemingly contradictory attitudes and actions. She also reveals the struggle that ensued, after his death, among family members and scholars over how he should be remembered. What emerges from this well-researched book is a new understanding of London and a compelling portrayal of the women who knew him best.

At a time of few opportunities for women in general and even fewer for African American women, Jackie Ormes (1911–85) blazed a trail as a popular cartoonist with the major black newspapers of the day. Her cartoon characters (including Torchy Brown, Candy, Patty-Jo, and Ginger) delighted readers and spawned other products, including an elegant doll with a stylish wardrobe and “Torchy Togs” paper dolls. Ormes was a member of Chicago’s black elite, with a social circle that included the leading political figures and entertainers of the day. Her cartoons and comic strips provide an invaluable glimpse into American culture and history, with topics that include racial segregation, U.S. foreign policy, educational equality, the atom bomb, and environmental pollution, among other pressing issues of the times—and of today’s world as well. This celebrated biography features a large sampling of Ormes’s cartoons and comic strips, and a new preface.

 

The life of Jacob Schiff (1847 - 1920), banker, financier, and leader of the American Jewish community from 1880 to 1920, is in many ways the quintessential story of an immigrant's success in America. Born in Frankfurt in 1847, Schiff worked in several financial firms in Germany and the US before accepting a position at the New York banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company in 1875 and settling for good in America. Part of a wealthy and powerful German Jewish circle that included the Warburgs and Rothschilds, Schiff played a central role in shaping American and European Jewish history. From his base on Wall Street, he was the foremost Jewish leader in what became known as the "Schiff era," grappling with all major issues and problems of the day, including the plight of Russian Jews under the czar, American and international anti-Semitism, care of needy Jewish immigrants, and the rise of Zionism. Based on a broad range of primary sources, Naomi W. Cohen's study emphasizes the role Schiff played as the preeminent leader of American Jewry at the turn of the century.

 
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has been a major influence on a wide range of twentieth-century thought, even as the breadth, complexity, and obscurity of his work has intimidated students and deterred casual readers. That situation hasn’t been helped by uneven translations into English that have led to a popular conception of his intellectual enterprise that can at times be profoundly mistaken.
 
In this brief, clearly written introduction to Lacan and his work, Martin Murray presents an up-to-date survey of his key concepts, their development, and their influence on fields such as anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy. Arguing strongly that we should move beyond the traditional focus on Lacan’s early work, which favored a linguistic approach, Murray offers instead a more comprehensive overview of the whole arc of Lacan’s thought. The result is a rigorous, yet accessible, account of one of the key intellectual figures of the twentieth century.

Issa Boureima is a young, hip African street vendor who sells knock-off designer bags and hats in an open-air market on 125th street in Harlem. His goal is to become a "Jaguar"—a West African term for a keen entrepreneur able to spot trends and turn a profit in any marketplace. This dynamic world, largely invisible to mainstream culture, is the backdrop of this timely novel.

Faced with economic hardship in Africa, Issa has left his home in Niger and his new wife, Khadija, to seek his fortune in America. Devout Muslims, the couple has entered into a "modern" marriage: Khadija is permitted to run her own business, and Issa has agreed not to take additional wives. Issa quickly adapts to his new surroundings, however, and soon attracts several girlfriends. Aided by a network of immigrants, he easily slips through gaps in the "system" and extends his stay in America indefinitely. Following a circuit of African-American cultural festivals across America, he marvels at African-Americans' attitudes toward Africa, and wonders if he'll ever return to Niger. Meanwhile, Khadija also struggles to make it—to become a "Jaguar"—as she combats loneliness, hostile in-laws, and a traditional, male-dominated society. The eventual success of her dry goods shop and her growing affection for a helpful Arab merchant make her wonder if she'll ever join Issa in America.

Drawing on his own decades of experience among Africans both in Niger and in New York, Paul Stoller offers enormous insight into the complexities of contemporary Africa. Alive with detail, Jaguar is a story of triumph and disappointment, of dislocation and longing, and of life lived in a world that no longer recognizes boundaries.

“Call me what you want—corrections officer, C.O., guard, jailcop, turnkey—I helped keep people there against their will. For this, the jail rewarded me with food.”

When Ben Langston took a job at the State Correctional Institute at Rockview, it was because there were few other options. At his previous job—putting labels on water bottles—he did not have cups of human waste thrown in his face. He did not have to finger sweaty armpits in search of weapons. There were no threats against his life. But the jail paid better.

Jail Speak is a memoir written from a guard’s perspective. It’s about the grind, about dehumanization, drama, punishment, and the cycles of harm perpetrated by the prison industry. It’s about masculinity and conformity and emotional detachment. It’s a look at the inside that you didn’t want to know about, and it’s for mature audiences only. Know your limits.

How has Pentecostalism, a decidedly American form of Christian revivalism, managed to achieve such phenomenal religious ascendancy in a former British colony among people of predominately African descent? According to Diane J. Austin-Broos, Pentecostalism has flourished because it successfully mediates between two historically central yet often oppositional themes in Jamaican religious life—the characteristically African striving for personal freedom and happiness, and the Protestant struggle for atonement and salvation through rigorous ethical piety. With its emphasis on the individual experience of grace and on the ritual efficacy of spiritual healing, and with its vibrantly expressive worship, Jamaican Pentecostalism has become a powerful and compelling vehicle for the negotiation of such fundamental issues as gender, sexuality, race, and class. Jamaica Genesis is a work of signal importance to all those concerned not simply with Caribbean studies but with the ongoing transformation of religion andculture.

Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-depth exploration of Baldwin’s “Turkish decade,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwin’s life and thought. Turkey was a nurturing space for the author, who by 1961 had spent nearly ten years in France and Western Europe and failed to reestablish permanent residency in the United States. Zaborowska demonstrates how Baldwin’s Turkish sojourns enabled him to re-imagine himself as a black queer writer and to revise his views of American identity and U.S. race relations as the 1960s drew to a close.

Following Baldwin’s footsteps through Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum, Zaborowska presents many never published photographs, new information from Turkish archives, and original interviews with Turkish artists and intellectuals who knew Baldwin and collaborated with him on a play that he directed in 1969. She analyzes the effect of his experiences on his novel Another Country (1962) and on two volumes of his essays, The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), and she explains how Baldwin’s time in Turkey informed his ambivalent relationship to New York, his responses to the American South, and his decision to settle in southern France. James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade expands the knowledge of Baldwin’s role as a transnational African American intellectual, casts new light on his later works, and suggests ways of reassessing his earlier writing in relation to ideas of exile and migration.

Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary and cultural critics writing today. He is a theoretical innovator whose ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. Bringing together ten interviews conducted between 1982 and 2005, Jameson on Jameson is a compellingly candid introduction to his thought for those new to it, and a rich source of illumination and clarification for those seeking deeper understanding. Jameson discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, most prominently his commitment to Marxism as a way of critiquing capitalism and the culture it has engendered. He explains many of his key concepts, including postmodernism, the dialectic, metacommentary, the political unconscious, the utopian, cognitive mapping, and spatialization.

Jameson on Jameson displays Jameson’s extraordinary grasp of contemporary culture—architecture, art, cinema, literature, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and urban geography—as well as the challenge that the geographic reach of his thinking poses to the Eurocentricity of the West. Conducted by accomplished scholars from United States, Egypt, Korea, China, Sweden, and England, the interviews elicit Jameson’s reflections on the broad international significance of his ideas and their applicability and implications in different cultural and political contexts, including the present phase of globalization.

The volume includes an introduction by Jameson and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in all languages.

Interviewers: Mona Abousenna, Abbas Al-Tonsi, Srinivas Aravamudan, Jonathan Culler, Sara Danius, Leonard Green, Sabry Hafez, Stuart Hall, Stefan Jonsson, Ranjana Khanna, Richard Klein, Horacio Machin, Paik Nak-chung, Michael Speaks, Anders Stephanson, Xudong Zhang

Excavations of Maya burial vaults at Palenque, Mexico, half a century ago revealed what was then the most extraordinary tomb finding of the pre-Columbian world; its discovery has been crucial to an understanding of the dynastic history and ideology of the ancient Maya. Over the years, new analytical tools introduced uncertainties regarding earlier interpretations of the findings, and a reanalysis of the remains of the ruler Janaab’ Pakal using contemporary methodologies has led to new interpretations of former accounts of his life and death.

This volume communicates the broad scope of applied interdisciplinary research conducted on the Pakal remains to provide answers to old disputes over the accuracy of both skeletal and epigraphic studies, along with new questions in the field of Maya dynastic research. Contributions by scholars in epigraphy, anthropology, and bioarchaeology bring to light new evidence regarding the ruler’s age, clarify his medical history and the identification of the remains found with him, reevaluate his role in life, and offer modern insights into ritual and sacrificial practices associated with Pakal.

The book leads readers through the history of Pakal’s discovery, skeletal analysis, and interpretation of Maya biographies, and also devotes considerable attention to the tomb of the “Red Queen” discovered at the site. Findings from the new Transition Analysis aging method, histomorphometric analysis, and taphonomic imagery are presented to shed new light on the perplexing question of Pakal’s age at death. Royal Maya life and death histories from the written record are also analyzed from a regional perspective to provide a broad panorama of the twisted power politics of rulers’ families and the entangled genealogies of the Maya Classic period.

A benchmark in biological anthropology, this volume reconsiders assumptions concerning the practices and lives of Maya rulers, posing the prospect that researchers too often find what they expect to find. In presenting an updated study of a well-known personage, it also offers innovative approaches to the biocultural and interdisciplinary re-creation of Maya dynastic history.

Contributors

Jesper K. Boldseh
Jane E. Buikstra
James H. Burton
Andrea Cucina
Nikolai Grube
Patricia Hernández
Lourdes Márquez
Simon Martin
George R. Milner
T. Douglas Price
Arturo Romano
Carlos Serrano
Sam D. Stout
Margaret Streeter
Vera Tiesler
John W. Verano

 

Central Asia became a forefront of international archaeological research early in the 1990s. Several respected archaeological teams gradually established their projects throughout post-Soviet republics of Central Asia, including Uzbekistan. In 2002 this effort was joined by a small Czech-Uzbekistani team aiming to begin an archaeological investigation of the northwestern part of ancient Bactria, particularly in the area of Sherabad oasis, with its major site Jandavlattepa.

The focus of this publication is to present some newly discovered data in the field of Bactrian archaeology of Pre-Islamic periods and to shed additional light on different aspects of an understanding of its material culture, primarily in the transitional period between the Kushan and early medieval times. The present title represents a pilot volume, which will be followed up with two additional volumes.

Using a rich array of newly available sources and contemporary methodologies from many disciplines, the ten original essays in this volume give a fresh appraisal of Addams as a theorist and practitioner of democracy. In an increasingly interdependent world, Addams's life work offers resources for activists, scholars, policy makers, and theorists alike. This volume demonstrates how scholars continue to interpret Addams as a model for transcending disciplinary boundaries, generating theory out of concrete experience, and keeping theory and practice in close and fruitful dialogue.

Contributors are Harriet Hyman Alonso, Victoria Bissell Brown, Wendy Chmielewski, Marilyn Fischer, Shannon Jackson, Louise W. Knight, Carol Nackenoff, Karen Pastorello, Wendy Sarvasay, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and Camilla Stivers.

Jane Addams, a Writer's Life is an expansive, revealing, and refreshing reexamination of the renowned reformer as an imaginative writer. Jane Addams is best known for her groundbreaking social work at Hull-House, the force of her efforts toward Progressive political and social reform, and the bravery of her commitment to pacifism, for which she received the Nobel Peace Prize. Katherine Joslin moves beyond this history to present Addams as a literary figure, one whose writing employed a synthesis of fictional and analytical prose that appealed to a wide audience.

Joslin traces Addams's style from her early works, Philanthropy and Social Progress and her contributions to Hull House Maps and Papers, influenced by Florence Kelley, to her modernist and experimental last books, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House and My Friend, Julia Lathrop, placing Addams in the context of other Chicago writers including Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Harriet Monroe, Frank Norris and James T. Farrell. Joslin's close readings showcase Addams's distinguishing literary devices, such as using stories about people rather than sociological argument to make moral points. As Joslin pursues the argument that Addams's power as a public figure stemmed from the success of her books and essays, Addams herself emerges as a literary woman.

Johnson begins by exploring the most important monuments and portraits of Austen, considering how these artifacts point to an author who is invisible and yet whose image is inseparable from the characters and fictional worlds she created. She then passes through the four critical phases of Austen’s reception—the Victorian era, the First and Second World Wars, and the establishment of the Austen House and Museum in 1949—and ponders what the adoration of Austen has meant to readers over the past two centuries. For her fans, the very concept of “Jane Austen” encapsulates powerful ideas and feelings about history, class, manners, intimacy, language, and the everyday. By respecting the intelligence of past commentary about Austen, Johnson shows, we are able to revisit her work and unearth fresh insights and new critical possibilities.

 

An insightful look at how and why readers have cherished one of our most beloved authors, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures will be a valuable addition to the library of any fan of the divine Jane.

The prolonged downturn in the Japanese economy that began during the recessionary 1990s triggered a complex set of reactions both within Japan and abroad, reshaping not only the country’s economy but also its politics, society, and culture. In Japan After Japan, scholars of history, anthropology, literature, and film explore the profound transformations in Japan since the early 1990s, providing complex analyses of a nation in transition, linking its present to its past and connecting local situations to global developments.

Several of the essayists reflect on the politics of history, considering changes in the relationship between Japan and the United States, the complex legacy of Japanese colonialism, Japan’s chronic unease with its wartime history, and the postwar consolidation of an ethnocentric and racist nationalism. Others analyze anxieties related to the role of children in society and the weakening of the gendered divide between workplace and home. Turning to popular culture, contributors scrutinize the avid consumption of “real events” in formats including police shows, quiz shows, and live Web camera feeds; the creation, distribution, and reception of Pokémon, the game-based franchise that became a worldwide cultural phenomenon; and the ways that the behavior of zealous fans of anime both reinforces and clashes with corporate interests. Focusing on contemporary social and political movements, one essay relates how a local citizens’ group pressed the Japanese government to turn an international exposition, the Aichi Expo 2005, into a more environmentally conscious project. Another essay offers both a survey of emerging political movements and a manifesto identifying new possibilities for radical politics in Japan. Together the contributors to Japan After Japan present much-needed insight into the wide-ranging transformations of Japanese society that began in the 1990s.

Contributors. Anne Allison, Andrea G. Arai, Eric Cazdyn, Leo Ching, Harry Harootunian, Marilyn Ivy, Sabu Kohso, J. Victor Koschmann, Thomas LaMarre, Masao Miyoshi, Yutaka Nagahara, Naoki Sakai, Tomiko Yoda, Yoshimi Shunya, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

In the late nineteenth century, Japan's modernizing quest for empire transformed midwifery into a new woman's profession. With the rise of Japanese immigration to the United States, Japanese midwives (sanba) served as cultural brokers as well as birth attendants for Issei women. They actively participated in the creation of Japanese American community and culture as preservers of Japanese birthing customs and agents of cultural change. 

Japanese American Midwives reveals the dynamic relationship between this welfare state and the history of women and health. Susan L. Smith blends midwives' individual stories with astute analysis to demonstrate the impossibility of clearly separating domestic policy from foreign policy, public health from racial politics, medical care from women's caregiving, and the history of women and health from national and international politics. By setting the history of Japanese American midwives in this larger context, Smith reveals little-known ethnic, racial, and regional aspects of women's history and the history of medicine.

Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials, captures theexperiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate multiple social identities.

The essays by scholars both in the United States and Japan draw upon the Japanese American millennial experience to examine how they find self-expression in Youth Basketball Leagues or Christian youth camps as well as how they grapple with being mixed-race, bicultural, or queer. Featuring compelling interviews and observations, Japanese American Millennials dislodges the dominant generational framework toaddress absences in the current literature and suggests how we might alternatively study Japanese Americans as a whole.

Photographs by Hikaru C. IwasakiForeword by the Honorable Norman Y. Mineta
In Japanese American Resettlement through the Lens, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi gathers a unique collection of photographs by War Relocation Authority photographer Hikaru Iwasaki, the only full-time WRA photographer from the period still living.

With substantive focus on resettlement - and in particular Iwasaki's photos of Japanese Americans following their release from WRA camps from 1943 to 1945 - Hirabayashi explores the WRA's use of photography in its mission not only to encourage "loyal" Japanese Americans to return to society at large as quickly as possible but also to convince Euro-Americans this was safe and advantageous. Hirabayashi also assesses the relative success of the WRA project, as well as the multiple uses of the photographs over time, first by the WRA and then by students, scholars, and community members in the present day.

Although the photos have been used to illustrate a number of publications, this book is the first sustained treatment addressing questions directly related to official WRA photographs. How and under what conditions were they taken? Where were they developed, selected, and stored? How were they used during the 1940s? What impact did they have during and following the war?

By focusing on the WRA's Photographic Section, Japanese American Resettlement through the Lens makes a unique contribution to the body of literature on Japanese Americans during World War II.

Japanese Brazilian Saudades explores the self-definition of Nikkei discourse in Portuguese-language cultural production by Brazilian authors of Japanese ancestry. Ignacio López-Calvo uses books and films by twentieth-century Nikkei authors as case studies to redefine the ideas of Brazilianness and Japaneseness from both a national and a transnational perspective. The result suggests an alternative model of postcoloniality, particularly as it pertains to the post–World War II experience of Nikkei people in Brazil.
 
López-Calvo addresses the complex creation of Japanese Brazilian identities and the history of immigration, showing how the community has used writing as a form of reconciliation and affirmation of their competing identities as Japanese, Brazilian, and Japanese Brazilian. Japanese in Brazil have employed a twofold strategic, rhetorical engineering: the affirmation of ethno-cultural difference on the one hand, and the collective assertion of citizenship and belonging to the Brazilian nation on the other. López-Calvo also grapples with the community’s inclusion and exclusion in Brazilian history and literature, using the concept of “epistemicide” to refer to the government’s attempt to impose a Western value system, Brazilian culture, and Portuguese language on the Nikkeijin, while at the same time trying to destroy Japanese language and culture in Brazil by prohibiting Japanese language instruction in schools, Japanese-language publications, and even speaking Japanese in public.
 
Japanese Brazilian Saudades contributes to the literature criticizing the “cognitive injustice” that fails to acknowledge the value of the global South and non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world. With important implications for both Latin American studies and Nikkei studies, it expands discourses of race, ethnicity, nationality, and communal belonging through art and narrative.
 

Japan is the world's second most powerful economy and one of the most urbanized nations on earth. Yet English-language literature contains remarkable little about cities in Japan. This collection of original essays on Japanese urban and industrial development covers a broad spectrum of city experiences. Leading Japanese and Western urbanists analyze Japan's largest metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya); proto-typical industrial cities (Kamaishi, Kitakyushu, Toyota); high technology urban satellites (Kanagawa); and smaller, more traditionally organized industrial districts (Tsubame). This book demonstrates how Japan's flexible economic growth strategies and changing relationship to the world economy have produced a uniquely Japanese pattern of urban development in this century.

Throughout the essays that describe individual cities, contributors provide commentary on each city's twentieth-century history and functional relations with other cities and focus on the dynamic linkage between global relations and local activities. They examine the role of government—central, prefectural, and local—in the restructuring of Japanese industrial and urban life. One essay is devoted to the urbanization process in pre-World War II Japan; another considers urban planning on the western Pacific Rim. This is the first book that analyzes how the economic transformation of Japan has restructured Japanese cities and how urban and regional development policies have kept pace with (and in some ways effected) changes in the economy.

This comprehensive study of Japanese cities provides interdisciplinary coverage of urban development issues of interest to the fields of economics, business, sociology, political science, history, Asian and Japanese studies, and urban planning.

S. N. Eisenstadt, one of the world's leading social theorists, provides a monumental synthesis of Japanese history, religion, culture, and social organization. Equipped with a thorough command of the literature, Eisenstadt explores the Japanese historical legacy and its impact on the Japanese experience of modernity. Eschewing the polemicism of structuralist or culturalist approaches, he expands his investigative framework to include a keenly systematic, broadly comparative analysis. What emerges is an innovative new construction, focusing on the nonideological character of Japanese civilization as well as its infinite capacity to recreate community through an ongoing past.

Oni, ubiquitous supernatural figures in Japanese literature, lore, art, and religion, usually appear as demons or ogres. Characteristically threatening, monstrous creatures with ugly features and fearful habits, including cannibalism, they also can be harbingers of prosperity, beautiful and sexual, and especially in modern contexts, even cute and lovable. There has been much ambiguity in their character and identity over their long history. Usually male, their female manifestations convey distinctivly gendered social and cultural meanings.

Oni appear frequently in various arts and media, from Noh theater and picture scrolls to modern fiction and political propaganda, They remain common figures in popular Japanese anime, manga, and film and are becoming embedded in American and international popular culture through such media. Noriko Reiderýs book is the first in English devoted to oni. Reider fully examines their cultural history, multifaceted roles, and complex significance as "others" to the Japanese.

This book traces the development of feminist consciousness in Japan from 1871 to 1941. Taeko Shibahara uncovers some fascinating histories as she examines how middle-class women navigated between domestic and international influences to form ideologies and strategies for reform. They negotiated a humanitarian space as Japan expanded its nationalist, militarist, imperialist, and patriarchal power. 

 

Focusing on these women's political awakening and activism, Shibahara shows how Japanese feminists channeled and adapted ideas selected from international movements and from interactions with mainly American social activists. 

 

Japanese Women and the Transnational Feminist Movement before World War II also connects the development of international contacts with the particular contributions of Ichikawa Fusae to the suffrage movement, Ishimoto Shidzue to the birth control movement, and Gauntlett Tsune to the peace movement by touching on issues of poverty, prostitution, and temperance. The result provides a window through which to view the Japanese women's rights movement with a broader perspective.

Japanese and Chinese immigrants in the United States have traditionally been characterized as hard workers who are hesitant to involve themselves in labor disputes or radical activism. How then does one explain the labor and Communist organizations in the Asian immigrant communities that existed from coast to coast between 1919 and 1933? Their organizers and members have been, until now, largely absent from the history of the American Communist movement. In Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists, Josephine Fowler brings us the first in-depth account of Japanese and Chinese immigrant radicalism inside the United States and across the Pacific.

Drawing on multilingual correspondence between left-wing and party members and other primary sources, such as records from branches of the Japanese Workers Association and the Chinese Nationalist Party, Fowler shows how pressures from the Comintern for various sub-groups of the party to unite as an “American” working class were met with resistance. The book also challenges longstanding stereotypes about the relationships among the Communist Party in the United States, the Comintern, and the Soviet Party.

Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged as a genre in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe, and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise has captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience.

For its scattered listeners, Noise always seems to be new and to come from somewhere else: in North America, it was called "Japanoise." But does Noise really belong to Japan? Is it even music at all? And why has Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization and participatory media at the turn of the millennium?

In Japanoise, David Novak draws on more than a decade of research in Japan and the United States to trace the "cultural feedback" that generates and sustains Noise. He provides a rich ethnographic account of live performances, the circulation of recordings, and the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners. He explores the technologies of Noise and the productive distortions of its networks. Capturing the textures of feedback—its sonic and cultural layers and vibrations—Novak describes musical circulation through sound and listening, recording and performance, international exchange, and the social interpretations of media.

"'Garniss, lend me your knife for a second, will you,' I whispered." So begins Java Man, the inside story of how one discovery—a human skull found on the island of Java—by two geologists shook the foundations of science. By uncovering new evidence about the hominid known as Java man, Carl C. Swisher and Garniss H. Curtis were able to date his fossil remains at 1.7 million years, an age that stunned the scientific community because it pushed back the time when humans migrating out of Africa first reached Eurasia by nearly one million years. Cowritten by the popular science writer Roger Lewin, this is a gripping and informative account of the discovery that breathed new life into the human origins debate.

Originally published by Scribner
2000 ISBN: 0-684-80000-4