Alone in the Trenches by
As a dirt-poor Samoan immigrant, Tuaolo won a football scholarship to Oregon State, was drafted by the Green Bay Packers, and played for the Atlanta Falcons in the 1999 Super Bowl. But Tuaolo carried with him an agonizing secret: he is gay. Now he shares his life story.
The Best We Could Do by
The national bestseller and American Book Award Winner, The Best We Could Do, is an intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family's journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui. 2017 National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Finalist ABA Indies Introduce Winter / Spring 2017 Selection ALA 2018 Notable Books Selection This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui's story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent--the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home. In what Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls "a book to break your heart and heal it," The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui's journey of understanding and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.
Citizen 13660 by
Mine Okubo was one of over one hundred thousand people of Japanese descent - nearly two-thirds of whom were American citizens - who were forced into ?protective custody? shortly after Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660, Okubo's graphic memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah, illuminates this experience with poignant illustrations and witty, candid text. Now available with a new introduction by Christine Hong and in a wide-format artist edition, this graphic novel can reach a new generation of readers and scholars. Read more about Mine Okubo in Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road, edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef. http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/ROBMIN.html
Conversations with Nasreen Munni Kabir by
Interview with the Indian music composer and director, A. R. Rahman
Futureface by
An acclaimed journalist travels the globe to solve the mystery of her ancestry, confronting the question at the heart of the American experience of immigration, race, and identity: Who are my people? "A thoughtful, beautiful meditation on what makes us who we are . . . and the values and ideals that bind us together as Americans."--Barack Obama "A rich and revealing memoir . . . Futureface raises urgent questions having to do with history and complicity."--The New York Times The daughter of a Burmese mother and a white American father, Alex Wagner grew up thinking of herself as a "futureface"--an avatar of a mixed-race future when all races would merge into a brown singularity. But when one family mystery leads to another, Wagner's post-racial ideals fray as she becomes obsessed with the specifics of her own family's racial and ethnic history. Drawn into the wild world of ancestry, she embarks upon a quest around the world--and into her own DNA--to answer the ultimate questions of who she really is and where she belongs. The journey takes her from Burma to Luxembourg, from ruined colonial capitals with records written on banana leaves to Mormon databases, genetic labs, and the rest of the twenty-first-century genealogy complex. But soon she begins to grapple with a deeper question: Does it matter? Is our enduring obsession with blood and land, race and identity, worth all the trouble it's caused us? Wagner weaves together fascinating history, genetic science, and sociology but is really after deeper stuff than her own ancestry: in a time of conflict over who we are as a country, she tries to find the story where we all belong. Praise for Futureface "Smart, searching . . . Meditating on our ancestors, as Wagner's own story shows, can suggest better ways of being ourselves."--Maud Newton, The New York Times Book Review "Sincere and instructive . . . This timely reflection on American identity, with a bonus exposé of DNA ancestry testing, deserves a wide audience."--Library Journal "The narrative is part Mary Roach-style participation-heavy research, part family history, and part exploration of existential loneliness. . . . The journey is worth taking."--Kirkus Reviews "[A] ruminative exploration of ethnicity and identity . . . Wagner's odyssey is an effective riposte to anti-immigrant politics."--Publishers Weekly
The Good Immigrant by
By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, troubling and uplifting, these "electric" essays come together to create a provocative, conversation-sparking, multivocal portrait of modern America (The Washington Post). From Trump's proposed border wall and travel ban to the marching of white supremacists in Charlottesville, America is consumed by tensions over immigration and the question of which bodies are welcome. In this much-anticipated follow-up to the bestselling UK edition, hailed by Zadie Smith as "lively and vital," editors Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman hand the microphone to an incredible range of writers whose humanity and right to be here is under attack. Chigozie Obioma unpacks an Igbo proverb that helped him navigate his journey to America from Nigeria. Jenny Zhang analyzes cultural appropriation in 90s fashion, recalling her own pain and confusion as a teenager trying to fit in. Fatimah Asghar describes the flood of memory and emotion triggered by an encounter with an Uber driver from Kashmir. Alexander Chee writes of a visit to Korea that changed his relationship to his heritage. These writers, and the many others in this urgent collection, share powerful personal stories of living between cultures and languages while struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong.
Good Talk by
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A "beautiful and eye-opening" (Jacqueline Woodson), "hilarious and heart-rending" (Celeste Ng) graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, BuzzFeed, Esquire, Literary Journal, Kirkus Reviews "How brown is too brown?" "Can Indians be racist?" "What does real love between really different people look like?" Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation--and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD "Jacob's earnest recollections are often heartbreaking, but also infused with levity and humor. What stands out most is the fierce compassion with which she parses the complexities of family and love."--Time "Good Talk uses a masterful mix of pictures and words to speak on life's most uncomfortable conversations."--io9 "Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage. Her new book changes everything."--Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy
Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen by
Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (1898) is an autobiography by Lili'uokalani. Published in 1898, the book was written in the aftermath of Lili'uokalani's attempt to appeal on behalf of her people to President Grover Cleveland, a personal friend. Although it inspired Cleveland to demand her reinstatement, the United States Congress published the Morgan Report in 1894, which denied U.S. involvement in the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen appeared four years later as a final effort by Lili'uokalani to advocate on behalf of Hawaiian sovereignty, but it unfortunately came too late. That same year, President McKinley and the United States Congress approved the annexation of Hawaii. In Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen, Lili'uokalani reflects on her experiences as a young girl growing up on Oahu, where she was raised as a member of the extended royal family of King Kamehameha III. Born in Honolulu, she was educated and groomed to one day ascend to the throne. Lili'uokalani developed an artistic sensibility early on, and was fond of both writing and music, crafting the lyrics to the popular song "Aloha 'Oe" (1878). Although her book was unsuccessful as an attempt to advocate for Hawaiian sovereignty and the restoration of the monarchy, it has since been recognized as a moving personal portrait of a girl who grew up to become Hawaii's first and only queen, a beloved monarch who fought for the rights of her people. This edition of Lili'uokalani's Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen is a classic of Hawaiian literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
He/She/They by
Go-to expert on gender identity, Schuyler Bailar, offers an essential, urgent guide that changes the conversation. Anti-transgender legislation is being introduced in state governments around the United States in record-breaking numbers. Trans people are under attack in sports, healthcare, school curriculum, bathrooms, bars, and nearly every walk of life. He/She/They clearly and compassionately addresses fundamental topics, from why being transgender is not a choice and why pronouns are important, to more complex issues including how gender-affirming healthcare can be lifesaving and why allowing trans youth to play sports is good for all kids. With a relatable narrative rooted in facts, science, and history, Schuyler helps restore common sense and humanity to a discussion that continues to be divisively coopted and deceptively politicized. Schuyler Bailar didn't set out to be an activist, but his very public transition to the Harvard men's swim team put him in the spotlight. His choice to be open about his transition and share his experience has touched people around the world. His plain-spoken education has evolved into tireless advocacy for inclusion and collective liberation. In He/She/They, Schuyler uses storytelling and the art of conversation to give us the essential language and context of gender, meeting everyone where they are and paving the way for understanding, acceptance, and, most importantly: connection. He/She/They is more than a book on allyship; it also speaks to trans folks directly, answering the question, "does it get better?" with a resounding yes, celebrating radical trans joy. Myth-busting, affirming, compassionate, and fierce, He/She/They is a crucial, urgent--and lifesaving--book that forever changes the conversation about gender.
I Am Malala by
When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive. Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize. This is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons. This story will make you believe in the power of one person's voice to inspire change in the world.
Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's Facing Future by
Even at four in the morning, the strip clubs and watering holes surrounding the Honolulu studio were still hopping. The recording engineer heard a car pull into the lot, and soon the biggest man he had ever seen walked in. When he stepped into the studio, the floated floor shifted beneath the engineer's feet. Israel Kamakawiwo'ole engulfed the engineer's hand in his and said, "Hi, bruddah." The product of that impromptu recording session, a delicate medley of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World," has driven sales of Facing Future to nearly two million copies. Each time the medley is licensed to appear in advertisements, in movies, even on American Idol, Mainlanders embrace it anew as a touch of the unfamiliar in their otherwise staid record collections. But in Hawai'i, a state struggling with the responsibility of its native heritage, Facing Future is much more. Gaining unprecedented access to Israel's family, friends, and colleagues, Dan Kois tells the remarkable story of Bruddah Iz and the album that changed his life-and his death.
Rock and Roll Jihad by
"The story you are about to read is the story of a light-bringer....Salman Ahmad inspires me to reach always for the greatest heights and never to fear....Know that his story is a part of our history." -- Melissa Etheridge, from the Introduction With 30 million record sales under his belt, and with fans including Bono and Al Gore, Pakistanborn Salman Ahmad is renowned for being the first rock & roll star to destroy the wall that divides the West and the Muslim world. Rock & Roll Jihad is the story of his incredible journey. Facing down angry mullahs and oppressive dictators who wanted all music to be banned from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Salman Ahmad rocketed to the top of the music charts, bringing Westernstyle rock and pop to Pakistani teenagers for the first time. His band Junoon became the U2 of Asia, a sufi - rock group that broke boundaries and sold a record number of albums. But Salman's story began in New York, where he spent his teen years learning to play guitar, listening to Led Zeppelin, hanging out at rock clubs and Beatles Fests, making American friends, and dreaming of rock-star fame. That dream seemed destined to die when his family returned to Pakistan and Salman was forced to follow the strictures of a newly religious -- and stratified -- society. He finished medical school, met his soul mate, and watched his beloved funkytown of Lahore transform with the rest of Pakistan under the rule of Zia into a fundamentalist dictatorship: morality police arrested couples holding hands in public, Little House on the Prairie and Live Aid were banned from television broadcasts, and Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers proliferated on college campuses via the Afghani resistance to Soviet occupation in the north. Undeterred, the teenage Salman created his own underground jihad: his mission was to bring his beloved rock music to an enthusiastic new audience in South Asia and beyond. He started a traveling guitar club that met in private Lahore spaces, mixing Urdu love poems with Casio synthesizers, tablas with Fender Stratocasters, and ragas with power chords, eventually joining his first pop band, Vital Signs. Later, he founded Junoon, South Asia's biggest rock band, which was followed to every corner of the world by a loyal legion of fans called Junoonis. As his music climbed the charts, Salman found himself the target of religious fanatics and power-mad politicians desperate to take him and his band down. But in the center of a new generation of young Pakistanis who go to mosques as well as McDonald's, whose religion gives them compassion for and not fear of the West, and who see modern music as a "rainbow bridge" that links their lives to the rest of the world, nothing could stop Salman's star from rising. Today, Salman continues to play music and is also a UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador, traveling the world as a spokesperson and using the lessons he learned as a musical pioneer to help heal the wounds between East and West -- lessons he shares in this illuminating memoir.
Swan Dive by
"Don't expect just tulle and toe shoes. In this fascinating insider's tale, NYCB dancer Pazcoguin reveals her world. . . . A striking debut." --People Award-winning New York City Ballet soloist Georgina Pazcoguin, aka the Rogue Ballerina, gives readers a backstage tour of the real world of elite ballet--the gritty, hilarious, sometimes shocking truth you don't see from the orchestra circle. In this love letter to the art of dance and the sport that has been her livelihood, NYCB's first Asian American female soloist Georgina Pazcoguin lays bare her unfiltered story of leaving small-town Pennsylvania for New York City and training amid the unique demands of being a hybrid professional athlete/artist, all before finishing high school. She pitches us into the fascinating, whirling shoes of dancers in one of the most revered ballet companies in the world with an unapologetic sense of humor about the cutthroat, survival-of-the-fittest mentality at NYCB. Some swan dives are literal: even in the ballet, there are plenty of face-plants, backstage fights, late-night parties, and raucous company bonding sessions. Rocked by scandal in the wake of the #MeToo movement, NYCB sits at an inflection point, inching toward progress in a strictly traditional culture, and Pazcoguin doesn't shy away from ballet's dark side. She continues to be one of the few dancers openly speaking up against the sexual harassment, mental abuse, and racism that in the past went unrecognized or was tacitly accepted as par for the course--all of which she has painfully experienced firsthand. Tying together Pazcoguin's fight for equality in the ballet with her infectious and deeply moving passion for her craft, Swan Dive is a page-turning, one-of-a-kind account that guarantees you'll never view a ballerina or a ballet the same way again.
They Called Us Enemy by
New York Times Bestseller! A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love. George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard. They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.
We Have Always Been Here by
Samra Habib has spent most of her life searching for the safety to be herself. The men in her life wanted to police her, the women had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body was a problem to be solved. A triumphant memoir of forgiveness and family, both chosen and not, We Have Always Been Here is a rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt out of place and a testament to the power of fearlessly inhabiting one's truest self.
Where the Past Begins by
In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Through spontaneous storytelling, she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels. Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia--the real reason behind an IQ test she took at age six, why her parents lied about their education, mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother--and, for the first time publicly, writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen. Supplied with candor and characteristic humor, Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer's mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth, with fiction serving as both her divining rod and link to meaning.&
The Woman Warrior by
"A classic, for a reason" - Celeste Ng via Twitter In her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form--an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities--immigrant, female, Chinese, American. As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother's "talk stories." The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother's tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston's sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family's past and her own present.
Yell-Oh Girls! by
"In this fine book, Asian American girls speak up and speak out. They speak for themselves, to each other, and to the world. This honest, engaging anthology is important. It allows new voices to be heard and new stories to become part of our great American story." -- Mary Pipher, Ph.D, author of Reviving Opehlia "A must-read for anyone who's ever felt like an outsider looking in." --Teen People In this groundbreaking collection of personal writings, young Asian American girls come together for the first time and engage in a dynamic converstions about the unique challenges they face in their lives. Promoted by a variety of pressing questions from editor Vickie Nam and culled from hundreds of submission from all over the country, these revelatory essays, poems, and stories tackle such complex issues as dual identities, culture clashes, family matters, body image, and the need to find one's voice. With a foreword by Phoebe Eng, as well as contributions from accomplished Asian American women mentors Janice Mirikitani, Helen Zia, Nora Okja Keller, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Elaine Kim, Patsy Mink, and Wendy Mink, Yell-Oh Girls! is an inspiring and much-needed resource for young Asian American girls.
Yellow Power, Yellow Soul by
This dynamic collection explores the life, work, and persona of saxophonist Fred Ho, an unabashedly revolutionary artist whose illuminating and daring work redefines the relationship between art and politics. Scholars, artists, and friends give their unique takes on Ho's career, articulating his artistic contributions, their joint projects, and personal stories. Exploring his musical and theatrical work, his political theory and activism, and his personal life as it relates to politics, Yellow Power, Yellow Soul offers an intimate appreciation of Fred Ho's irrepressible and truly original creative spirit. Contributors are Roger N. Buckley, Peggy Myo-Young Choy, Jayne Cortez, Kevin Fellezs, Diane C. Fujino, Magdalena Gómez, Richard Hamasaki, Esther Iverem, Robert Kocik, Genny Lim, Ruth Margraff, Bill V. Mullen, Tamara Roberts, Arthur J. Sabatini, Kalamu ya Salaam, Miyoshi Smith, Arthur Song, and Salim Washington.
Crying in H Mart by
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR * NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
The Good Immigrant by
How does it feel to be constantly regarded as a potential threat, strip-searched at every airport? Or be told that, as an actress, the part you're most fitted to play is `wife of a terrorist'? How does it feel to have words from your native language misused, misappropriated and used aggressively towards you? How does it feel to hear a child of colour say in a classroom that stories can only be about white people? How does it feel to go `home' to India when your home is really London? What is it like to feel you always have to be an ambassador for your race? How does it feel to always tick `Other'? Bringing together 21 exciting black, Asian and minority ethnic voices emerging in Britain today, The Good Immigrant explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay and what it means to be `other' in a country that doesn't seem to want you, doesn't truly accept you - however many generations you've been here - but still needs you for its diversity monitoring forms. Inspired by discussion around why society appears to deem people of colour as bad immigrants - job stealers, benefit scroungers, undeserving refugees - until, by winning Olympic races or baking good cakes, or being conscientious doctors, they cross over and become good immigrants, editor Nikesh Shukla has compiled a collection of essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreaking, polemic, weary and - most importantly - real.
The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority by
Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, Madeline Hsu looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from US policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness.
National Abjection by
National Abjection explores the vexed relationship between "Asian Americanness" and "Americanness" through a focus on drama and performance art. Karen Shimakawa argues that the forms of Asian Americanness that appear in U.S. culture are a function of national abjection--a process that demands that Americanness be defined by the exclusion of Asian Americans, who are either cast as symbolic foreigners incapable of integration or Americanization or distorted into an "honorary" whiteness. She examines how Asian Americans become culturally visible on and off stage, revealing the ways Asian American theater companies and artists respond to the cultural implications of this abjection. Shimakawa looks at the origins of Asian American theater, particularly through the memories of some of its pioneers. Her examination of the emergence of Asian American theater companies illuminates their strategies for countering the stereotypes of Asian Americans and the lack of visibility of Asian American performers within the theater world. She shows how some plays--Wakako Yamauchi's 12-1-A, Frank Chin's Chickencoop Chinaman, and The Year of the Dragon--have both directly and indirectly addressed the displacement of Asian Americans. She analyzes works attempting to negate the process of abjection--such as the 1988 Broadway production of M. Butterfly as well as Miss Saigon, a mainstream production that enacted the process of cultural displacement both onstage and off. Finally, Shimakawa considers Asian Americanness in the context of globalization by meditating on the work of Ping Chong, particularly his East-West Quartet.
No Family Is an Island by
Government bureaucracies across the globe have become increasingly attuned in recent years to cultural diversity within their populations. Using culture as a category to process people and dispense services, however, can create its own problems and unintended consequences. In No Family Is an Island, a comparative ethnography of Samoan migrants living in the United States and New Zealand, Ilana Gershon investigates how and when the categories "cultural" and "acultural" become relevant for Samoans as they encounter cultural differences in churches, ritual exchanges, welfare offices, and community-based organizations. In both New Zealand and the United States, Samoan migrants are minor minorities in an ethnic constellation dominated by other minority groups. As a result, they often find themselves in contexts where the challenge is not to establish the terms of the debate but to rewrite them. To navigate complicated and often unyielding bureaucracies, they must become skilled in what Gershon calls "reflexive engagement" with the multiple social orders they inhabit. Those who are successful are able to parlay their own cultural expertise (their "Samoanness") into an ability to subtly alter the institutions with which they interact in their everyday lives. Just as the "cultural" is sometimes constrained by the forces exerted by acultural institutions, so too can migrant culture reshape the bureaucracies of their new countries. Theoretically sophisticated yet highly readable, No Family Is an Island contributes significantly to our understanding of the modern immigrant experience of making homes abroad.
Poppies, Politics, and Power by
Historians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, argues Bradford, drugs, especially opium, were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state. In this history of drugs and drug control in Afghanistan, Bradford shows us how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the outside force of the United States.
Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech by
"Tell This Silence" by Patti Duncan explores multiple meanings of speech and silence in Asian American women's writings in order to explore relationships among race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Duncan argues that contemporary definitions of U.S. feminism must be expanded to recognize the ways in which Asian American women have resisted and continue to challenge the various forms of oppression in their lives. There has not yet been adequate discussion of the multiple meanings of silence and speech, especially in relation to activism and social-justice movements in the U.S. In particular, the very notion of silence continues to invoke assumptions of passivity, submissiveness, and avoidance, while speech is equated with action and empowerment. However, as the writers discussed in "Tell This Silence" suggest, silence too has multiple meanings especially in contexts like the U.S., where speech has never been a guaranteed right for all citizens. Duncan argues that writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Mitsuye Yamada, Joy Kogawa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nora Okja Keller, and Anchee Min deploy silence as a means of resistance. Juxtaposing their OC unofficial narrativesOCO against other historiesOCoofficial U.S. histories that have excluded them and American feminist narratives that have stereotyped them or distorted their participationOCothey argue for recognition of their cultural participation and offer analyses of the intersections among gender, race, nation, and sexuality. "Tell This Silence" offers innovative ways to consider Asian American gender politics, feminism, and issues of immigration and language. This exciting new study will be of interest to literary theorists and scholars in women's, American, and Asian American studies."
We Are Here to Stay: Voices of Undocumented Young Adults by
The Stonewall Honor-winning author of Beyond Magenta shares the intimate, eye-opening stories of nine undocumented young adults living in America. "Maybe next time they hear someone railing about how terrible immigrants are, they'll think about me. I'm a real person." Meet nine courageous young adults who have lived in the United States with a secret for much of their lives: they are not U.S. citizens. They came from Colombia, Mexico, Ghana, Independent Samoa, and Korea. They came seeking education, fleeing violence, and escaping poverty. All have heartbreaking and hopeful stories about leaving their homelands and starting a new life in America. And all are weary of living in the shadows. We Are Here to Stay is a very different book than it was intended to be when originally slated for a 2017 release, illustrated with Susan Kuklin's gorgeous full-color portraits. Since the last presidential election and the repeal of DACA, it is no longer safe for these young adults to be identified in photographs or by name. Their photographs have been replaced with empty frames, and their names are represented by first initials. We are honored to publish these enlightening, honest, and brave accounts that encourage open, thoughtful conversation about the complexities of immigration -- and the uncertain future of immigrants in America.
Yellow by
In the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and other public intellectuals who confronted the "color line" of the twentieth century, journalist, law professor, and activist Frank H. Wu offers a unique perspective on how changing ideas of racial identity will affect race relations in the new century.Often provocative and always thoughtful, this book addresses some of the most controversial contemporary issues: discrimination, immigration, diversity, globalization, and the mixed-race movement, introducing the example of Asian Americans to shed new light on the current debates. Combining personal anecdotes, social-science research, legal cases, history, and original journalistic reporting, Wu discusses damaging Asian American stereotypes such as "the model minority" and "the perpetual foreigner." By offering new ways of thinking about race in American society, Wu's work challenges us to make good on our great democratic experiment.
Only What We Could Carry by
The definitive anthology of Japanese American internment. "In these stories are lifted up our humanity, our indomitable spirit and dignity, an implacable quest for justice"--Janice Mirikitani Shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States government uprooted 120,000 people of Japanese descent from their homes and banished them to remote internment camps. This collection of reminiscences, stories, poems, photographs, and graphic art expresses the range of powerful and sometimes conflicting emotions that arose from the internment experience. Also included are propaganda, government documents, and stories of those outside the camps whose lives were interwoven with those of the internees.
Asian American X by
"This diverse collection, like Asian America itself, adds up to something far more vibrant than the sum of its voices." -Eric Liu, author of The Accidental Asian "There's fury, dignity, and self-awareness in these essays. I found the voices to be energetic and the ideas exciting." -Diana Son, playwright (Stop Kiss) and co-producer (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) This refreshing and timely collection of coming-of-age essays, edited and written by young Asian Americans, powerfully captures the joys and struggles of their evolving identities as one of the fastest-growing groups in the nation and poignantly depicts the many oft-conflicting ties they feel to both American and Asian cultures. The essays also highlight the vast cultural diversity within the category of Asian American, yet ultimately reveal how these young people are truly American in their ideals and dreams. Asian American X is more than a book on identity; it is required reading both for young Asian Americans who seek to understand themselves and their social group, and for all who are interested in keeping abreast of the changing American social terrain.
Caste (eBook) by
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
The Art of East/Southeast Asia (Vol 1 &2) by
Beautifully illustrated. Two volume set, with slipcase. Volumes measure 11x12.5 inches. Volume 1 topics include China, Calligraphy, Jade, Indonesia, and the Champa Kingdoms. Volume 2 topics include The Khmer, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Vietnam, Textiles, Japan, and Korea. An illustrated glossary and extensive bibliography.
Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture by
This book offers an incisive and ambitious critique of Asian Diaspora culture, looking specifically at literature and visual popular culture. Sheng-mei Ma's engaging text discusses issues of self and its relationship with Asian Diaspora culture in the global twenty-first century. Using examples from Asia, Asian America, and Asian Diaspora from the West, the book weaves a narrative that challenges the twenty-first century triumphal discourse of Asia and argues that given the long shadow cast across modern film and literature, this upward mobility is inescapably escapist, a flight from itself; Asia's stunning self-transformation is haunted by self-alienation. The chapters discuss a wealth of topics, including Asianness, Orientalism, and Asian American identity, drawing on a variety of pop culture sources from The Matrix Trilogy to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This book forms an analysis of the new idea of Asian Diaspora that cuts across area, ethnicity, and nation, incorporating itself into the contemporary global culture whilst retaining a distinct Asian flavor. Covering the mediums of literature, film, and visual cultures, this book will be of immense interest to scholars and students of Asian studies and literature, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and film.
Making Asian American Film and Video by
The words "Asian American film" might evoke a painfully earnest, low-budget documentary or family drama, destined to be seen only in small film festivals or on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). In her groundbreaking study of the past fifty years of Asian American film and video, Jun Okada demonstrates that although this stereotype is not entirely unfounded, a remarkably diverse range of Asian American filmmaking has emerged. Yet Okada also reveals how the legacy of institutional funding and the "PBS style" unites these filmmakers, whether they are working within that system or setting themselves in opposition to its conventions. Making Asian American Film and Video explores how the genre has served as a flashpoint for debates about what constitutes Asian American identity. Tracing a history of how Asian American film was initially conceived as a form of public-interest media, part of a broader effort to give voice to underrepresented American minorities, Okada shows why this seemingly well-intentioned project inspired deeply ambivalent responses. In addition, she considers a number of Asian American filmmakers who have opted out of producing state-funded films, from Wayne Wang to Gregg Araki to Justin Lin. Okada gives us a unique behind-the-scenes look at the various institutions that have bankrolled and distributed Asian American films, revealing the dynamic interplay between commercial and state-run media. More than just a history of Asian Americans in film, Making Asian American Film and Video is an insightful meditation on both the achievements and the limitations of institutionalized multiculturalism.
Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia by
Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media. Judith Farquhar examines how health magazines serve as sources of both medical information and erotic titillation to readers in urban China. Tom Boellstorff analyzes how queer zines produced in Indonesia construct the relationship between same-sex desire and citizenship. Purnima Mankekar examines the rearticulation of commodity affect, erotics, and nation on Indian television. Louisa Schein describes how portrayals of Hmong women in videos shot in Laos create desires for the homeland among viewers in the diaspora. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived. Contributors. Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang
Music and Cultural Rights by
Framing timely and pressing questions concerning music and cultural rights, this collection illustrates the ways in which music--as a cultural practice, a commercial product, and an aesthetic form--has become enmeshed in debates about human rights, international law, and struggles for social justice. The essays in this volume examine how interpretations of cultural rights vary across societies; how definitions of rights have evolved; and how rights have been invoked in relation to social struggles over cultural access, use, representation, and ownership. The individual case studies, many of them based on ethnographic field research, demonstrate how musical aspects of cultural rights play out in specific cultural contexts, including the Philippines, China, Hawaii, Peru, Ukraine, and Brazil. Contributors are Nimrod Baranovitch, Adriana Helbig, Javier F. Leon, Ana María Ochoa, Silvia Ramos, Helen Rees, Felicia Sandler, Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, Ricardo D. Trimillos, Andrew N. Weintraub, and Bell Yung.
Philosophic Classics: Asian Philosophy, Volume VI by
Accessible to today's readers, this anthology of readings is a survey of Asian thought-in India and China. It strikes a balance between major and minor figures, and features the best available translations of texts-complete works or complete sections of works-which are both central to each thinker or school and are widely accepted to be part of the emerging Asian canon. Introductions to each historical period and to each thinker, photographs, and a timeline help to keep learners focused throughout. For individuals interested in learning about World Religions, Asian thought, or Chinese and Indian philosophy.
Race in Mind by
These essays analyze how race affects people's lives and relationships in all settings, from the United States to Great Britain and from Hawaiʻi to Chinese Central Asia. They contemplate the racial positions in various societies of people called Black and people called White, of Asians and Pacific Islanders, and especially of those people whose racial ancestries and identifications are multiple. Here for the first time are Spickard's trenchant analyses of the creation of race in the South Pacific, of DNA testing for racial ancestry, and of the meaning of multiplicity in the age of Barack Obama.
Recovered Legacies by
Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature employs contemporary and traditional readings of representative works in prose, poetry, and drama to suggest new ways of understanding and appreciating the critically fertile but underexamined body of Asian American writing from the late 1800s to the early 1960s. The essays in this volume engage this corpus--composed of multiple genres from different periods and by authors of different ethnicities--with a strong awareness of historical context and a keen sensitivity to literary form. As a collection, Recovered Legacies re-establishes the rich and diverse literary heritage of Asian America and argues persuasively for the significance of these works to the American literary canon.
The Semblance of Identity by
This book examines how Asian American fiction reveals with the limitations of identity while continuing to rely on its theoretical logic as the basis of oppositional knowledge and political practices.
The Whole Picture by
"Probing, jargon-free and written with the pace of a detective story... [Procter] dissects western museum culture with such forensic fury that it might be difficult for the reader ever to view those institutions in the same way again. " Financial Times 'A smart, accessible and brilliantly structured work that encourages readers to go beyond the grand architecture of cultural institutions and see the problematic colonial histories behind them.' - Sumaya Kassim Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonize' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall? How to deal with the colonial history of art in museums and monuments in the public realm is a thorny issue that we are only just beginning to address. Alice Procter, creator of the Uncomfortable Art Tours, provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art history and tells the stories that have been left out of the canon. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space: The Palace, The Classroom, The Memorial and The Playground. Each section tackles the fascinating, enlightening and often shocking stories of a selection of art pieces, including the propaganda painting the East India Company used to justify its rule in India; the tattooed Maori skulls collected as 'art objects' by Europeans; and works by contemporary artists who are taking on colonial history in their work and activism today. The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.
Audition Speeches for Black, South Asian and Middle Eastern Actors: Monologues for Men by
Audition Speeches for Black, South Asian and Middle Eastern Actors: Monologues for Men aims to provide new and exciting audition and showcase material for actors of black, African American, South Asian and Middle Eastern heritage. Categorized by age-range, the monologues are collected in groups of characters playable by actors in their teens, twenties, thirties and forties+, and include work from over 25 top-class dramatists including Lemn Sissay, Katori Hall, Rajiv Joseph, Philip Ridley and Naomi Wallace.
Growing up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction by
Often referred to as the model minority, Asian American children and adolescents feel pressured to perform academically and be disinterested in sports, with the exception of martial arts. Boys are often stereotyped as physically unattractive nerds and girls as petite and beautiful. Many Americans remain unaware of the diversity of ethnicities and races the term Asian American comprises, with Asian American adolescents proving to be more invisible than adults. As a result, Asian American adolescents are continually searching for their identity and own place in American society. For these kids, being or considered to be American becomes a challenge in itself as they assert their Asian and American identities; claim their own ethnic identity, be they immigrant or American-born; and negotiate their ethnic communities. The contributors to Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction focus on moving beyond stereotypes to examine how Asian American children and adolescents define their unique identities. Chapters focus on primary texts from many ethnicities, such as Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Hawaiian. Individual chapters, crossing cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries, negotiate the complex terrain of Asian American children's and teenagers' identities. Chapters cover such topics as internalized racism and self-loathing; hyper-sexualization of Asian American females in graphic novels; interracial friendships; transnational adoptions and birth searches; food as a means of assimilation and resistance; commodity racism and the tourist gaze; the hostile and alienating environment generated by the War on Terror; and many other topics.
Comparison of Learning Classical Singing Between European and Chinese Singers by 
Guide to Chinese Poetry and Drama by 
Himalayan Voices by
While the natural splendor of Nepal has been celebrated in many books, very little of the substantial body of Nepali literature has appeared in English translation. Himalayan Voices provides admirers of Nepal and lovers of literature with their first glimpse of the vibrant literary scene in Nepal today. An introduction to the two most developed genres of modern Nepali literature--poetry and the short story--this work profiles eleven of Nepal's most distinguished poets and offers translations of more than eighty poems written from 1916 to 1986. Twenty of the most interesting and best-known examples of the Nepali short story are translated into English for the first time by Michael Hutt. All provide vivid descriptions of life in twentieth-century Nepal. Although the days when Nepali poets were regularly jailed for their writings have passed, until 1990 the strictures of various laws governing public security and partisan political activity still required writers and publishers to exercise a certain caution. In spite of these conditions, poetry in Nepal remained the most vital and innovative genre, in which sentiments and opinions on contemporary social and political issues were frequently expressed. While the Nepali short story adapted its present form only during the early 1930s, it has rapidly developed a surprisingly high degree of sophistication. These stories offer insights into the workings of Nepali society: into caste, agrarian relations, social change, the status of women, and so on. Such insights are more immediate than those offered by scholarly works and are conveyed by implication and assumption rather than analysis and exposition. This book should appeal not only to admirers of Nepal, but to all readers with an interest in non-Western literatures. Himalayan Voices establishes for the first time the existence of a sophisticated literary tradition in Nepal and the eastern Himalaya.
Language for a New Century by
Language for a New Century celebrates the artistic and cultural forces flourishing today in the East, bringing together an unprecedented selection of works by South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian poets as well as poets living in the Diaspora. Some poets, such as Bei Dao and Mahmoud Darwish, are acclaimed worldwide, but many more will be new to the reader. The collection includes 400 unique voices--political and apolitical, monastic and erotic--that represent a wider artistic movement that challenges thousand-year-old traditions, broadening our notion of contemporary literature. Each section of the anthology--organized by theme rather than by national affiliation--is preceded by a personal essay from the editors that introduces the poetry and exhorts readers to examine their own identities in light of these powerful poems. In an age of violence and terrorism, often predicated by cultural ignorance, this anthology is a bold declaration of shared humanity and devotion to the transformative power of art.
Minor Feelings by
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity.
Singing in Mandarin by
Access audio files at:https://soundcloud.com/k-chu-j-petrus/sets/singing-in-mandarin-recorded The success of Chinese artists internationally across many art forms has focused the world's attention on the developing cultural phenomenon in China, an emerging stage for the vocal arts. As one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, Mandarin is poised to become the next addition to lyric languages. Singing in Mandarin: A Guide to Chinese Lyric Diction and Vocal Repertoire is a comprehensive guide to unlocking the mysteries of Chinese contemporary vocal literature. In part one, Chu and Petrus focus on diction and language, providing detailed descriptions and exercises for creating the sounds of the language. They take a uniquely systematic approach, fusing together best practices from international music conservatories for diction study, with those for Chinese language learning. Part two outlines the historical context of Chinese vocal literature, chronicling the development of the language and its repertoire over the last one hundred years. Audio files narrated by native speakers demonstrating the sounds are also included. Singing in Mandarin provides guidance for both novices and those with previous experience singing or speaking Mandarin and is the first book of its kind to help bring the fascinating and previously inaccessible treasure of Chinese vocal music to Western audiences. e learning. Part two outlines the historical context of Chinese vocal literature, chronicling the development of the language and its repertoire over the last one hundred years. Audio files narrated by native speakers demonstrating the sounds are also included. Singing in Mandarin provides guidance for both novices and those with previous experience singing or speaking Mandarin and is the first book of its kind to help bring the fascinating and previously inaccessible treasure of Chinese vocal music to Western audiences. e learning. Part two outlines the historical context of Chinese vocal literature, chronicling the development of the language and its repertoire over the last one hundred years. Audio files narrated by native speakers demonstrating the sounds are also included. Singing in Mandarin provides guidance for both novices and those with previous experience singing or speaking Mandarin and is the first book of its kind to help bring the fascinating and previously inaccessible treasure of Chinese vocal music to Western audiences. e learning. Part two outlines the historical context of Chinese vocal literature, chronicling the development of the language and its repertoire over the last one hundred years. Audio files narrated by native speakers demonstrating the sounds are also included. Singing in Mandarin provides guidance for both novices and those with previous experience singing or speaking Mandarin and is the first book of its kind to help bring the fascinating and previously inaccessible treasure of Chinese vocal music to Western audiences. of Chinese vocal music to Western audiences.
Sing Without Shame by
This study of literary themes, linguistic practice and cultural traditions analyzes the oral traditions of Indo-Portugese creole verse, as a synthesis from European, African and Asian sources. This musical, dramatic and textual syncretism defines tradition within the group and maintains the identity of the creole community. References are primarily to Indian and Sri Lankan materials collected in the late nineteenth century and to data in the H. Nevill collection, an extensive manuscript of Sri Lankan Creole texts from the 1870s or 1880s, housed in the British Museum. The importance of these texts is linguistic, anthropological and sociological. They are persistent in their ability to give definition to creole culture, surviving in South Asia from the seventeenth century to the present.
Tenth Rasa by
Welcome to the carnival of nonsense where hankies turn into mischievous cats, a messiah is born with her feet in her mouth, you can fave hun by socking on the ree-raw and your favourite corn cakes are made of . . . are you sure you want to know? For the last eighteen hundred years Indian arts have been seen in terms of strictly classified emotional effects known as the nine rasas. The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense celebrates, for the very first time, what Sukumar Ray called the spirit of whimsy , or the tenth rasa, through the topsy-turvy, irreverent, melodic genre of nonsense literature. This fabulous selection of poetry and prose, brilliantly translated from seventeen Indian languages across India, includes works by Rabindranath Tagore, Sukumar Ray, Vinda Karandikar, Gulzar, Dash Benhur, Manoj Das, Navakanta Barua, Mangesh Padgavkar, Sri Sri, Vaikom Mohammad Basheer, Kunjunni and other known, lesser-known and previously unpublished authors. In forms as varied as stories and songs for children and adults, lullabies, folk tales, Bollywood song lyrics and medieval court verse, the writers open doors to wildly imaginative worlds populated by peculiar characters and fantastical creatures, where only nonsense makes perfect sense. Crackling with wit, wordplay and riotous rhymes, and frequently revelling in pure gibberish, this immensely entertaining collection will delight you from start to finish.
After the Quake by
Set at the time of the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake, the mesmerizing stories in After the Quake are as haunting as dreams and as potent as oracles. An electronics salesman who has been deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package-- and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. A man who views himself as the son of God pursues a stranger who may be his human father. A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction. The six stories in this collection come from the deep and mysterious place where the human meets the inhuman--and are further proof that Murakami is one of the most visionary writers at work today.
Camp Zero by
In a near-future northern settlement, the fate of a young woman intertwines with those of a college professor and a collective of women soldiers in this mesmerizing and transportive novel in the vein of Station Eleven and The Power. In the far north of Canada, a team led by a visionary American architect is building a project called Camp Zero. With its fresh, clean air and cold climate, it's intended to be the beginning of a new community and a new way of life. A brilliant and determined young woman employed as a sex worker to the elite is offered a chance to join the Blooms, a group meant to service the men in camp--but her mission is to secretly monitor the mercurial architect in charge. In return, she'll receive a home for her displaced Korean immigrant mother and herself. Upon arrival at Camp Zero, she is named Rose. Rose quickly secures the trust of her target, but in the camp, everyone has an agenda, and her alliances begin to shift. Through skillfully braided perspectives, including those of a young professor longing to escape his wealthy family and an all-woman military brigade struggling for survival at a climate research station, the fate of Camp Zero and its inhabitants reaches a stunning crescendo. An electrifying page-turner where nothing is as it seems, Camp Zero cleverly explores how the intersection of gender, class, and migration will impact who and what will survive in a warming world
Excuse Me, Is This India? by
Illustrated with rich quilts put together with Indian textiles, this whimsical story in verse is an unusual book of travel-through a child's imagination. Brilliant nonsense verse and exquisite textile art together plot a blithe, philosophic journey through the surreal mixture of places, people and times that is India.
The Flower Drum Song by
Originally published in 1957, The Flower Drum Song was a groundbreaking work of popular literature. An immediate bestseller, it inspired the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. This charming, bittersweet tale of romance and the powerful bonds of family tells the story of Wang Ta, who wants what every young American man wants: a great career and a woman to love. Living in San Francisco's Chinatown-with his widowed father, Old Master Wang, who misses the old way of life in China, and his younger brother, who just wants to be a normal American teenager-Wang Ta becomes involved with a series of women as he searches for love and the American dream. Comic, poignant, and sexy, The Flower Drum Song is an astute portrayal of immigrants struggling with assimilation. This edition features a new introduction by David Henry Hwang.
The Fortunes by
The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience. Inhabiting four lives--a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor; Hollywood's first Chinese movie star; a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes the Asian American community; and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption--this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive--as much through love as blood.
Ichiro by
Ichiro lives in New York City with his Japanese mother. His father, an American soldier, was killed in Iraq. Now, Ichi's mom has decided they should move back to Japan to live with Ichi's grandfather. Grandfather becomes Ichi's tour guide, taking him to temples as well as the Hiroshima Peace Park, where Ichi starts to question the nature of war. After a supernatural encounter with the gods and creatures of Japanese mythology, Ichi must face his fears if he is to get back home. In doing so, he learns about the nature of man, of gods, and of war. He also learns there are no easy answers--for gods or men.
Imagining America Revised Edition by
Thirty-seven short stories from 1900 to the present, written by some of our best authors--African, Asian, European, Jewish, Middle Eastern, and Native American--follow the waves of immigration into and migration within the United States. These stories are unique in time and circumstance, yet they address a common dilemma: how to reconcile America's mythologized "promise" with its more complex reality. New to the collection are Sherman Alexie, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Chitra Divakaruni, Jewelle Gomez, Thomas King, Bruce Morrow, Agnes Rossi, and David Wong Louie. They join Toni Cade Bambara, Richard Bausch, Marita Bonner, Nash Candelaria, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Mei Mei Evans, Oscar Hijuelos, Gish Jen, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Kim Yong Ik, Monfoon Leong, Bernard Malamud, Paule Marshall, Nicholasa Mohr, Toshio Mori, Bharati Mukherjee, Mikhail Naimy, Tahira Naqvi, Gregory Orfalea, Grace Paley, Jeanne Schinto, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Stephens, Sui Sin Far, Alice Walker, and Hisaye Yamamoto--making this, once again, the most authoritative and useful multicultural collection available.
Interpreter of Maladies by
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.
Jade War by
The Kaul siblings' battle with rival clans reaches new heights in the heart-pounding continuation of the Green Bone Saga, an epic trilogy about family, honor, and those who live and die by the ancient laws of blood and jade. On the island of Kekon, the Kaul family is locked in a violent feud for control of the capital city and the supply of magical jade that endows trained Green Bone warriors with supernatural powers they alone have possessed for hundreds of years. Beyond Kekon's borders, war is brewing. Powerful foreign governments and mercenary criminal kingpins alike turn their eyes on the island nation. Jade, Kekon's most prized resource, could make them rich - or give them the edge they'd need to topple their rivals. Faced with threats on all sides, the Kaul family is forced to form new and dangerous alliances, confront enemies in the darkest streets and the tallest office towers, and put honor aside in order to do whatever it takes to ensure their own survival--and that of all the Green Bones of Kekon. Praise for the Green Bone Saga: "A beautifully realized setting, a great cast of characters, and dramatic action scenes. What a fun, gripping read!" --Ann Leckie, Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author "Lee has upped her game in this novel, with deeper, more nail-biting intrigue and stunning, heart-pumping action scenes. Her character development is pitch-perfect."―Booklist "An instantly absorbing tale of blood, honor, family, and magic, spiced with unexpectedly tender character beats." --NPR The Green Bone Saga Jade City Jade War Jade Legacy
The Joy Luck Club by
"Brilliant....Each story is a fascinating vignette, and together they they weave the reader through a world where the Moon Lady can grant any wish, where a child, promised in marriage at two and delivered at 12, can, with cunning, free herself; where a rich man's concubine secures her daughter's future by killing herself, and where a woman can live on, knowing she has lost her entire life." WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD A stunning literary achievement, THE JOY LUCK CLUB explores the tender and tenacious bond between four daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken of lives in China. The mothers want love and obedience from their daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the daughters keep to themselves. Heartwarming and bittersweet, this is a novel for mother, daughters, and those that love them.
Men Without Women by
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Including the story "Drive My Car"--now an Academy Award-nominated film--this collection from the internationally acclaimed author "examines what happens to characters without important women in their lives; it'll move you and confuse you and sometimes leave you with more questions than answers" (Barack Obama). Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are lovesick doctors, students, ex-boyfriends, actors, bartenders, and even Kafka's Gregor Samsa, brought together to tell stories that speak to us all. In Men Without Women Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic, marked by the same wry humor and pathos that have defined his entire body of work.
Monkey by
The classic Chinese novel: "Imagine a combination of picaresque novel, fairy tale, fabliau, Mickey Mouse, Davy Crockett, and Pilgrim's Progress" (The Nation). Probably the most popular book in the history of the Far East, this classic sixteenth-century novel is a combination of picaresque novel and folk epic that mixes satire, allegory, and history into a rollicking adventure. It is the story of the roguish Monkey and his encounters with major and minor spirits, gods, demigods, demons, ogres, monsters, and fairies. This translation, by the distinguished scholar Arthur Waley, is the first accurate English version; it makes available to the Western reader a faithful reproduction of the spirit and meaning of the original. "Mr. Waley has done a remarkable job with this translation." --Helena Kuo, The New York Times "The irreverent spirit and exuberant vitality of it portraiture . . . make it an entertainment to which Mr. Waley's witty translation has obviously contributed not a little." --The Times (London) "Told with immense gusto, and quite apart from its deeper meaning and wise proverbial sayings it is full of entertainment." --The Guardian
The Namesake by
"Dazzling...An intimate, closely observed family portrait."--The New York Times "Hugely appealing."--People Magazine "An exquisitely detailed family saga."--Entertainment Weekly Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. InThe Namesake, the Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations.
Paradise Park by
Allegra Goodman has delighted readers with her critically acclaimed collections Total Immersion and The Family Markowitz, and her celebrated first novel, Kaaterskill Falls, which was a national bestseller and a National Book Award finalist. Abandoned by her folk-dancing partner, Gary, in a Honolulu hotel room, Sharon realizes she could return to Boston-and her estranged family-or listen to that little voice inside herself. The voice that asks- "How come Gary got to pursue his causes, while all I got to pursue was him?" Thus, with an open heart, a soul on fire, and her meager possessions (a guitar, two Indian gauze skirts, a macrame bikini, and her grandfather's silver watch) Sharon begins her own spiritual quest. Ever the optimist, she is sure at each stage that she has struck it rich "spiritually speaking"-until she comes up empty. Then, in a karmic convergence of events, Sharon starts on the path home to Judaism. Still, even as she embraces her tradition, Sharon's irrepressible self tugs at her sleeve. Especially when she meets Mikhail, falls truly in love at last, and discovers what even she could not imagine-her destiny.
Sour Heart by
A sly debut story collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City--for readers of Zadie Smith and Helen Oyeyemi. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction * Finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker * NPR * O: The Oprah Magazine * The Guardian * Esquire * New York * BuzzFeed A fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God. Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat--dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck--these seven stories showcase Zhang's compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy's Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again. Praise for Sour Heart "[Jenny Zhang's] coming-of-age tales are coarse and funny, sweet and sour, told in language that's rough-hewn yet pulsating with energy."--USA Today "One of the knockout fiction debuts of the year."--New York "Compelling writing about what it means to be a teenager . . . It's brilliant, it's dark, but it's also humorous and filled with love."--Isaac Fitzgerald, Today "[A] combustible collection . . . in a class of its own."--Booklist (starred review) "Gorgeous and grotesque . . . [a] tremendous debut."--Slate
The Strange Library by
From internationally acclaimed author Haruki Murakami--a fantastical illustrated short novel about a boy imprisoned in a nightmarish library. Opening the flaps on this unique little book, readers will find themselves immersed in the strange world of best-selling Haruki Murakami's wild imagination. The story of a lonely boy, a mysterious girl, and a tormented sheep man plotting their escape from a nightmarish library, the book is like nothing else Murakami has written. Designed by Chip Kidd and fully illustrated, in full color, throughout, this small format, 96 page volume is a treat for book lovers of all ages.
Super sad true love story by
Lenny's from a different century. He totally loves books (or printed bound media artifacts, as they are now known), but even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park. When riots break out in New York's Central Park, Lenny vows to convince his fickle new love that in times without standards, there is value in being a real human being.
The Tale of Genji by
The Tale of Genji was written in the eleventh century by Murasaki Shikibu, a lady of the Heian court. It is universally recognized as the greatest masterpiece of Japanese prose narrative, perhaps the earliest true novel in the history of the world. Until now there has been no translation that is both complete and scrupulously faithful to the original text. Edward G. Seidensticker's masterly rendering was first published in two volumes in 1976 and immediately hailed as a classic of the translator's art. It is here presented in one unabridged volume, illustrated throughout by woodcuts taken from a 1650 Japanese edition of The Tale of Genji.
The three-body problem by
967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind. Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns. This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.
Everything I Never Told You by
"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet." So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by
Winner of the National Book Award A New York Times Bestseller "The queer romance we've been waiting for."--Ms. Magazine Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the feeling took root--that desire to look, to move closer, to touch. Whenever it started growing, it definitely bloomed the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. Suddenly everything seemed possible. But America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father--despite his hard-won citizenship--Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day. (Cover image may vary.)
Akb48 by
Since its formation as a girl group in 2005, AKB48 has become a phenomenal success and institution in Japan. Having originally recruited fans with photocopied fliers and daily performances in the Akihabara area of Tokyo, AKB48 now saturates Japan. Its members--nearly 800 of them, including five sister groups and four so-called "rival groups" across Japan, as well as six sister groups in other Asian cities--appear in print, broadcast, online, and social media; in advertisements and on products; at home and on the train; on- and off-screen. AKB48's multi-platform omnipresence is characteristic of "idols," whose intimate relationship to fans and appeals to them for support have made the group dominant on the Oricon Yearly Singles Chart in the 2010s; they hold several records, including most consecutive million-selling singles sold in Japan. A unique business model relentlessly monetizes fans' affections through meet-and-greet events and elections, which maximize CD sales, and their saturated presence in the media. At a time when affect is more important than ever in economic, political, and social theory, this book explores the intersection of idols and affect in contemporary Japan and beyond.
China's Music Industry Unplugged by
This research book is the first of its kind to conduct an interdisciplinary research on the recent and dramatic developments in China's music industries with a particular focus on business models, copyright protection, and artist compensation. The monograph explores and discusses proper business models through which revenue can be generated and maintained in a changing copyright climate and transforming business environment. It also discusses how musicians can be fairly compensated in the online platform economy informed by social entrepreneurship. This book is distinctive in the sense that it explores the intersection of cultural and creative industries, legal studies, business studies, and new media. It uses a qualitative and mixed-method approach to study business innovations and institutions in the making in the second largest economy which is also gaining cultural and political significance around the world.
Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by
The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre “World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
Chinese Fans of Japanese and Korean Pop Culture by
How can Japanese popular culture gain numerous fans in China, despite pervasive anti-Japanese sentiment? How is it that there's such a strong anti-Korean sentiment in Chinese online fan communities when the official Sino-Korean relationship is quite stable before 2016? Avid fans in China are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding to make gifts to their idols in foreign countries. Tabloid reports on Japanese and Korean celebrities have been known to trigger nationalist protests in China. So, what is the relationship between Chinese fandom of Japanese and Korean popular culture and nationalist sentiment among Chinese youth? Chen discusses how Chinese fans of Japanese and Korean popular culture have formed their own nationalistic discourse since the 1990s. She argues that, as nationalism is constructed from various entangled ideologies, narratives, myths and collective memories, popular culture simply becomes another resource for the construction of nationalism. Fans thus actively select, interpret and reproduce the content of cultural products to suit their own ends. Unlike existing works, which focus on the content of transnational cultural flows in East Asia, this book focuses on the reception and interpretation of the Chinese audience.
Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance by
The definition of Asian American dance is as contested as the definition of "Asian American." The contributors to this volume address such topics as the role of the 1960s Asian American movement in creating Japanese American taiko groups, and the experience of internment during World War II influencing butoh dance in Canada. Essays about artists such as Jay Hirabayashi, Alvin Tolentino, Shen Wei, Kun-Yang Lin, Yasuko Yokoshi, Eiko & Koma, Sam Kim, Roko Kawai, and Denise Uyehara look closely at the politics of how Asian aesthetics are set into motion and marketed. The volume includes first-person narratives, interviews, ethnography, cultural studies, performance studies, and comparative ethnic studies.
Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow by
This work explores Mandopop's surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC, where it has established new gender roles, created a vocabulary to express individualism, and introduced transnational culture to a country that had closed its doors to the world for 20 years.
Extreme Exoticism by
To what extent can music be employed to shape one culture's understanding of another? In the American imagination, Japan has represented the "most alien" nation for over 150 years. This perceived difference has inspired fantasies - of both desire and repulsion - through which Japanese culture has profoundly impacted the arts and industry of the U.S. While the influence of Japan on American and European painting, architecture, design, theater, and literature has been celebrated in numerous books and exhibitions, the role of music has been virtually ignored until now. W. Anthony Sheppard's Extreme Exoticism offers a detailed documentation and wide-ranging investigation of music's role in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life. Presenting numerous American encounters with and representations of Japanese music and Japan, this book reveals how music functions in exotic representation across a variety of genres and media, and how Japanese music has at various times served as a sign of modernist experimentation, a sounding board for defining American music, and a tool for reshaping conceptions of race and gender. From the Tin Pan Alley songs of the Russo-Japanese war period to Weezer's Pinkerton album, music has continued to inscribe Japan as the land of extreme exoticism.
Jazz Journeys to Japan by
Part music history, part cultural meditation, part travel narrative, Jazz Journeys to Japan is the first book to address the experiences of individual players -- Japanese jazz greats such as Toshiko Akiyoshi, Masahiko Satoh, Makoto Ozone, and Yosuke Yamashita. William Minor navigates the converging streams of Western music and Eastern tradition, revealing through interviews with musicians, critics, and producers the unique synthesis that results from this convergence. And, turning conventional wisdom on its ear, he disproves the widely held notion that Japanese jazz artists don't "swing." Along the way, we experience Minor's growing appreciation of Japanese culture, which mirrors his subjects' discovery of American jazz. William Minor's previous books include Unzipped Souls: A Jazz Journey through the Soviet Union, and Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years. He has written for Downbeat, Jazz Times, Jazz Notes, Coda, and Swing Journal.
Resonances of Chindon-Ya by
An investigation of music, sound, and public space in contemporary Japan In this first book-length study of chindon-ya, Marié Abe investigates the intersection of sound, public space, and sociality in contemporary Japan. Chindon-ya, dating back to the 1840s, are ostentatiously costumed street musicians who publicize a business by parading through neighborhood streets. Historically not considered music, but part of the everyday soundscape, this vernacular performing art provides a window into shifting notions of musical labor, the politics of everyday listening and sounding, and street music at social protest in Japan. Against the background of long-term economic downturn, growing social precarity, and the visually and sonically saturated urban streets of Japan, this book examines how this seemingly outdated means of advertisement has recently gained traction as an aesthetic, economic, and political practice after decades of inactivity. Resonances of Chindon-ya challenges Western conceptions of listening that have normalized the way we think about the relationship between sound, space, and listening subjects, and advances a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the ways social fragmentation is experienced and negotiated in post-industrial societies. Hardcover is un-jacketed.
Sonic Multiplicities by
Through the lens of popular music in and from Hong Kong, Sonic Multiplicities examines the material, ideological, and geopolitical implications of music production and consumption. Yiu Fai Chow and Jeroen de Kloet draw on rich empirical research and industry experience to trace the worldwide flow of popular culture and the people who produce and consume it. In doing so, the authors make a significant contribution to our understanding of the political and social roles such circulation plays in today's world--and in a city under cultural threat in a country whose prominence is on the rise. Just as important, they clear a new path for the study of popular music.
Soul in Seoul by
K-pop (Korean popular music) reigns as one of the most popular music genres in the world today, a phenomenon that appeals to listeners of all ages and nationalities. In Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop, Crystal S. Anderson examines the most important and often overlooked aspect of K-pop: the music itself. She demonstrates how contemporary K-pop references and incorporates musical and performative elements of African American popular music culture as well as the ways that fans outside of Korea understand these references. K-pop emerged in the 1990s with immediate global aspirations, combining musical elements from Korean and foreign cultures, particularly rhythm and blues genres of black American popular music. Korean solo artists and groups borrow from and cite instrumentation and vocals of R&B genres, especially hip-hop. They also enhance the R&B tradition by utilizing Korean musical strategies. These musical citational practices are deemed authentic by global fans who function as part of K-pop's music press and promotional apparatus. K-pop artists also cite elements of African American performance in Korean music videos. These disrupt stereotyped representations of Asian and African American performers. Through this process K-pop has arguably become a branch of a global R&B tradition. Anderson argues that Korean pop groups participate in that tradition through cultural work that enacts a global form of crossover and by maintaining forms of authenticity that cannot be faked, and furthermore propel the R&B tradition beyond the black-white binary.
Soundtracks of Asian America by
In Soundtracks of Asian America, Grace Wang explores how Asian Americans use music to construct narratives of self, race, class, and belonging in national and transnational spaces. She highlights how they navigate racialization in different genres by considering the experiences of Asians and Asian Americans in Western classical music, U.S. popular music, and Mandopop (Mandarin-language popular music). Her study encompasses the perceptions and motivations of middle-class Chinese and Korean immigrant parents intensely involved in their children's classical music training, and of Asian and Asian American classical musicians whose prominence in their chosen profession is celebrated by some and undermined by others. Wang interviews young Asian American singer-songwriters who use YouTube to contest the limitations of a racialized U.S. media landscape, and she investigates the transnational modes of belonging forged by Asian American pop stars pursuing recording contracts and fame in East Asia. Foregrounding musical spaces where Asian Americans are particularly visible, Wang examines how race matters and operates in the practices and institutions of music making.
Tokyo Boogie-Woogie by
In this first English-language history of the origins and impact of the Japanese pop music industry, Hiromu Nagahara connects the rise of mass entertainment, epitomized by ryūkōka ("popular songs"), with Japan's transformation into a middle-class society in the years after World War II. With the arrival of major international recording companies like Columbia and Victor in the 1920s, Japan's pop music scene soon grew into a full-fledged culture industry that reached out to an avid consumer base through radio, cinema, and other media. The stream of songs that poured forth over the next four decades represented something new in the nation's cultural landscape. Emerging during some of the most volatile decades in Japan's history, popular songs struck a deep chord in Japanese society, gaining a devoted following but also galvanizing a vociferous band of opponents. A range of critics--intellectuals, journalists, government officials, self-appointed arbiters of taste--engaged in contentious debates on the merits of pop music. Many regarded it as a scandal, evidence of an increasingly debased and Americanized culture. For others, popular songs represented liberation from the oppressive political climate of the war years. Tokyo Boogie-Woogie is a tale of competing cultural dynamics coming to a head just as Japan's traditionally hierarchical society was shifting toward middle-class democracy. The pop soundscape of these years became the audible symbol of changing times.
Hanguk Hip Hop by
How has Hanguk (South Korean) hip hop developed over the last two decades as a musical, cultural, and artistic entity? How is hip hop understood within historical, sociocultural, and economic matrices of Korean society? How is hip hop represented in Korean media and popular culture? This book utilizes ethnographic methods, including fieldwork research and life timeline interviews with fifty-three influential hip hop artists, in order to answer these questions. It explores the nuanced meaning of hip hop in South Korea, outlining the local, global, and (trans)national flows of musical and cultural exchanges. Throughout the chapters, Korean hip hop is examined through the notion of buran--personal and societal anxiety or uncertainty--and how it manifests in the dimensions of space and place, economy, cultural production, and gender. Ultimately, buran serves as a metaphoric state for Hanguk hip hop in that it continuously evolves within the conditions of Korean society.
Jazz in China by
""Is there jazz in China?"" This is the question that sent author Eugene Marlow on his quest to uncover the history of jazz in China. Marlow traces China's introduction to jazz in the early 1920s, its interruption by Chinese leadership under Mao in 1949, and its rejuvenation in the early 1980s with the start of China's opening to the world under Premier Deng Xiaoping. Covering a span of almost one hundred years, Marlow focuses on a variety of subjects--the musicians who initiated jazz performances in China, the means by which jazz was incorporated into Chinese culture, and the musicians and venues that now present jazz performances. Featuring unique, face-to-face interviews with leading indigenous jazz musicians in Beijing and Shanghai, plus interviews with club owners, promoters, expatriates, and even diplomats, Marlow marks the evolution of jazz in China as it parallels China's social, economic, and political evolution through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Also featured is an interview with one of the extant members of the Jimmy King Big Band of the 1940s, one of the first major all-Chinese jazz big bands in Shanghai. Ultimately, Jazz in China: From Dance Hall Music to Individual Freedom of Expression is a cultural history that reveals the inexorable evolution of a democratic form of music in a Communist state.
Staging Feminisms: gender, violence and performance in contemporary India by
This book questions how feminist beliefs are enacted within an artistic context. It critically examines the intersection of violence, gender, performance and power through contemporary interventionist performances. The volume explores a host of key themes like feminism and folk epic, community theatre, performance as radical cultural intervention, volatile bodies and celebratory protests. Through analysing performances of theatre stalwarts like Usha Ganguly, Maya Krishna Rao, Sanjoy Ganguly, Shilpi Marwaha and Teejan Bai, the volume discusses the complexities and contradictions of a feminist reading of contemporary performances. A major intervention in the field of feminism and performance, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of gender studies, performance studies, theatre studies, women's studies, cultural studies, sociology of gender and literature.
Musicophilia in Mumbai by
In Musicophilia in Mumbai Tejaswini Niranjana traces the place of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai throughout the long twentieth century as the city moved from being a seat of British colonial power to a vibrant postcolonial metropolis. Drawing on historical archives, newspapers, oral histories, and interviews with musicians, critics, students, and instrument makers as well as her own personal experiences as a student of Hindustani classical music, Niranjana shows how the widespread love of music throughout the city created a culture of collective listening that brought together people of diverse social and linguistic backgrounds. This culture produced modern subjects Niranjana calls musicophiliacs, whose subjectivity was grounded in a social rather than an individualistic context. By attending concerts, learning instruments, and performing at home and in various urban environments, musicophiliacs embodied forms of modernity that were distinct from those found in the West. In tracing the relationship between musical practices and the formation of the social subject, Niranjana opens up new ways to think about urbanity, subjectivity, culture, and multiple modernities.
Inside Arabic Music by
What makes hundreds of listeners cheer ecstatically at the same instant during a live concert by Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum? What is the unspoken language behind a taqsim (traditional instrumental improvisation) that performers and listeners implicitly know? How can Arabic music be so rich anddiverse without resorting to harmony? Why is it so challenging to transcribe Arabic music from a recording? Inside Arabic Music answers these and many other questions from the perspective of two "insiders" to the practice of Arabic music, by documenting a performance culture and a know-how that islargely passed on orally.Arabic music has spread across the globe, influencing music from Greece all the way to India in the mid-20th century through radio and musical cinema, and global popular culture through Raqs Sharqi, known as "Bellydance" in the West. Yet despite its popularity and influence, Arabic music, and themaqam scale system at its heart, remain widely misunderstood. Inside Arabic Music de-mystifies maqam with an approach that draws theory directly from practice, and presents theoretical insights that will be useful to practitioners, from the beginner to the expert - as well as those interested in therelated Persian, Central Asian, and Turkish makam traditions. Inside Arabic Music's discussion of maqam and improvisation widens general understanding of music as well, by bringing in ideas from Saussurean linguistics, network theory, and Lakoff and Johnson's theory of cognition as metaphor, with anapproach parallel to Gjerdingen's analysis of Galant-period music - offering a lens into the deeper relationships among music, culture, and human community.
The Music Road by
The Music Road contains contributions on musical cultures from the Mediterranean to India which brings together historical research, philology and ethnographic fieldwork to revive the differentiated voices of this world region. It is here referred to as "the Music Road", to emphasize the musical traditions in this western half of the "Silk Road", and the transitional nature of its cultural migrations and coherences. Mobility in space, transmission in time and "the East-West imagination" are demonstrated in the following historical cultures: Ancient Gandhar? (N.W. India, first centuries CE) and the tradition of Alexander's conquest; sections on Intercultural Islam" from medieval Persia to modern Turkey; "Indian encounters" with the West - and vice versa - in music and dance (18th-20th centuries); Greek music and theatre as a bridge between East and West; and Gypsy musical styles in European nationalist music.
The Celnatic Experience by
This is a coffee table book depicting the cross culture collaboration in the Celtic and Carnatic music styles showcased in the compositions of Muthuswami Deekshithar titled "notuswara sahityas" composed during the British rule in India.
Musical Instruments of India by
Describes 59 instruments used in classical Indian music, with illustrations.
Mudras of India by
For thousands of years hand mudras have been used in India for healing, storytelling, emotional expression, and to evoke and convey elevated spiritual states. For the first time, the elaborate system of mudras-as applied in yoga and Indian dance-has been organized into a comprehensive, fully-indexed and cross-referenced format that allows readers access to this still esoteric body of knowledge. Mudras of India presents over 200 photographed hand mudras each with detailed instructions on technique, application, health and spiritual benefits and historical background. The authors have extensively researched the usage of mudras and their significance in the larger context of Indian spiritual systems, and taken painstaking efforts to ensure each mudra is rendered with correct Sanskrit name, transliteration and translation to English. A new chapter that comprehensively lists the benefits of hand mudras, covering major health concerns as well spiritual and psycho-energetic categories, has been added for the paperback edition. The book will appeal to spiritual seekers, students and teachers of yoga and Indian Dance, scholars and lay people, and anyone interested in the rich cultural heritage of Indian mudras, and the transformative effects of these powerful hand gestures.
Sufi Music of India and Pakistan by
For the Sufis of India and Pakistan, the Qawwali songs are 'food for the soul', a means of attaining union with God, the ecstatic culmination of mystical experience. Regula Burckhardt Qureshi's study carefully describes and documents the performance of this music in the traditional Sufi assembly, the ritual of sama', first presenting the rich musical repertoire of Qawwali song, and then exploring everything else that is relevant to an understanding of the ritual: the profound belief system and its powerful articulation through mystical poetry in three languages (Farsi, Hindi, Urdu), the social and economic relationships between Sufi listeners and musicians, and, finally, all the specific rules governing the making of and listening to Qawwali in the Sufi assembly. All this leads up to a moment-by-moment account of actual Qawwali performances where the interplay between the musical sound and the diverse and often dramatic audience responses is described and analysed by the author.
Music in South India: the Karnatak Concert Tradition and Beyond by
Music in South India is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional materials to accompany each study. Music in South India provides a vivid and focused introduction to the musical landscape of South India, discussing historical and contemporary performance, cultural history and geography, and the social organization of performance traditions. The book centers on Karnatak concert music, a unique performance practice that juxtaposes gorgeous musical compositions with many different types of improvisation. T. Viswanathan and Matthew Harp Allen first compare two types of song--bhajan, a structurally simple devotional genre, and kriti, the primary concert genre--and also analyze raga and tala, the basic elements underlying Karnatak music. They go on to examine the evolution of Karnatak music during the twentieth century, paying special attention to gender and caste and illuminating these issues through case studies and historical recordings (on the accompanying CD) of a small group of enormously influential musicians. In the final chapter, the authors move beyond Karnatak music to address other aspects of South India's rich musical environment, such as its thriving popular music scene (based on cinema music); regional traditions ranging from the sacred to the secular, many of which integrate elements from dance and drama; and contemporary composition. Featuring numerous listening activities, Music in South India is packaged with an 80-minute CD containing examples of the music discussed. The CD includes a full, uncut concert recording of a kriti performance, which shows how Karnatak musicians weave together composed and improvised elements to create extended performances.
Music in North India by
Music in North India is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional materials to accompany each study. North India is home to a wealth of musical traditions composed of many different styles, genres, and practices. Music in North India provides a representative overview of this music, discussing rhythm and drumming traditions, song composition and performance styles, and melodic and rhythmic instruments. Drawing on his experience as a sarod player, vocalist, and music teacher, author George Ruckert incorporates numerous musical exercises to demonstrate important concepts. The book ranges from the chants of the ancient Vedas to modern devotional singing and from the serious and meditative rendering of raga to the concert-hall excitement of the modern sitar, sarod, and tabla. It is framed around three major topics: the devotional component of North Indian music, the idea of fixity and spontaneity in the various styles of Indian music, and the importance of the verbal syllable to the expression of the musical aesthetic in North India. Featuring vivid eyewitness accounts of performances and descriptions of interviews with performers, Music in North India examines the form, structure, and expression of North Indian music while also illuminating its profound religious and cultural significance. A 70-minute CD containing examples of the music discussed in the text is packaged with the book.
Music of Nuristan by
Book & 3 CDs. Based on recordings made by the anthropologist Lennart Edelberg on expeditions to Nuristan from 1953 to 1955. The original music of Nuristan which is in the Eastern part of Afghanistan was rooted in animistic religion and quite unique in a Central Asian context. The rhythmic, polyphone song is based on the clash of clusters of notes as well as the four string harp, the wadzh. The animistic religion disappeared with the islamisation in 1895, but the musical tradition survived up until the 1990'ies when Taliban and the Wahhabis moved into Nuristan. This volume includes an introduction to the geography, culture and religion of Nuristan as well as song texts and Edelberg's diary notes. The music of the three valleys Waigal, Parun and Bashgal is described and analysed. Also includes notes for all the recorded music on the 3 CDs.
More Than Bollywood by
This is the first book to tackle the diverse styles and multiple histories of popular musics in India. It brings together fourteen of the world's leading scholars on Indian popular music to contribute chapters on a range of topics from the classic songs of Bollywood to contemporary remixes, summarized by a reflective afterword by popular music scholar Timothy Taylor. The chapters in this volume address the impact of media and technology on contemporary music, the variety of industrial developments and contexts for Indian popular music, and historical trends in popular music development both before and after the Indian Independence in 1947. The book identifies new ways of engaging popular music in India beyond the Bollywood musical canon, and offers several case studies of local and regional styles of music. The contributors address the subcontinent's historical relationships with colonialism, the transnational market economies, local governmental factors, international conventions, and a host of other circumstances to shed light on the development of popular music throughout India. To illustrate each chapter author's points, and to make available music not easily accessible in North America, the book features an Oxford web music companion website of audio and video tracks.
Hip Hop Desis by
Hip Hop Desis explores the aesthetics and politics of South Asian American (desi) hip hop artists. Nitasha Tamar Sharma argues that through their lives and lyrics, young "hip hop desis" express a global race consciousness that reflects both their sense of connection with Blacks as racialized minorities in the United States and their diasporic sensibility as part of a global community of South Asians. She emphasizes the role of appropriation and sampling in the ways that hip hop desis craft their identities, create art, and pursue social activism. Some desi artists produce what she calls "ethnic hip hop," incorporating South Asian languages, instruments, and immigrant themes. Through ethnic hip hop, artists, including KB, Sammy, and Deejay Bella, express "alternative desiness," challenging assumptions about their identities as South Asians, children of immigrants, minorities, and Americans. Hip hop desis also contest and seek to bridge perceived divisions between Blacks and South Asian Americans. By taking up themes considered irrelevant to many Asian Americans, desi performers, such as D'Lo, Chee Malabar of Himalayan Project, and Rawj of Feenom Circle, create a multiracial form of Black popular culture to fight racism and enact social change.
Aloha America by
Aloha America reveals the role of hula in legitimating U.S. imperial ambitions in Hawai'i. Hula performers began touring throughout the continental United States and Europe in the late nineteenth century. These "hula circuits" introduced hula, and Hawaiians, to U.S. audiences, establishing an "imagined intimacy," a powerful fantasy that enabled Americans to possess their colony physically and symbolically. Meanwhile, in the early years of American imperialism in the Pacific, touring hula performers incorporated veiled critiques of U.S. expansionism into their productions. At vaudeville theaters, international expositions, commercial nightclubs, and military bases, Hawaiian women acted as ambassadors of aloha, enabling Americans to imagine Hawai'i as feminine and benign, and the relation between colonizer and colonized as mutually desired. By the 1930s, Hawaiian culture, particularly its music and hula, had enormous promotional value. In the 1940s, thousands of U.S. soldiers and military personnel in Hawai'i were entertained by hula performances, many of which were filmed by military photographers. Yet, as Adria L. Imada shows, Hawaiians also used hula as a means of cultural survival and countercolonial political praxis. In Aloha America, Imada focuses on the years between the 1890s and the 1960s, examining little-known performances and films before turning to the present-day reappropriation of hula by the Hawaiian self-determination movement.
Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia by
Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia is an introduction to the familiar music from Southeast Asia's largest country - both as sound and cultural phenomenon. An archipelago of over 17,000 islands, Indonesia is a melting pot of Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Portuguese, Dutch, and British influences. Despite this diversity, it has forged a national culture, one in which music plays a significant role. Gamelan music, in particular, teaches us much about Indonesian values and modern-day life. Focus: Gamelan Music of Indonesia provides an introduction to present-day Javanese, Balinese, Cirebonese, and Sundanese gamelan music through ethnic, social, cultural, and global perspectives. Part One, Music and Southeast Asian History¸ provides introductory materials for the study of Southeast Asian music. Part Two, Gamelan Music in Java and Bali, moves to a more focused overview of Gamelan music in Indonesia. Part Three, Focusing In, takes an in-depth look at Sundanese gamelan traditions, as well modern developments in Sundanese music and dance. The accompanying CD offers vivid examples of traditional Indonesian gamelan music.
Gamelan Gong Kebyar by
The Balinese gamelan, with its shimmering tones, breathless pace, and compelling musical language, has long captivated musicians, composers, artists, and travelers. Here, Michael Tenzer offers a comprehensive and durable study of this sophisticated musical tradition, focusing on the preeminent twentieth-century genre, gamelan gong kebyar. Combining the tools of the anthropologist, composer, music theorist, and performer, Tenzer moves fluidly between ethnography and technical discussions of musical composition and structure. In an approach as intricate as one might expect in studies of Western classical music, Tenzer's rigorous application of music theory and analysis to a non-Western orchestral genre is wholly original. Illustrated throughout, the book also includes nearly 100 pages of musical transcription (in Western notation) that correlate with 55 separate tracks compiled on two accompanying compact discs. The most ambitious work on gamelan since Colin McPhee's classic Music in Bali, this book will interest musicians of all kinds and anyone interested in the art and culture of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Bali.
Making Scenes by
In 1996, Emma Baulch went to live in Bali to do research on youth culture. Her chats with young people led her to an enormously popular regular outdoor show dominated by local reggae, punk, and death metal bands. In this rich ethnography, she takes readers inside each scene: hanging out in the death metal scene among unemployed university graduates clad in black T-shirts and ragged jeans; in the punk scene among young men sporting mohawks, leather jackets, and hefty jackboots; and among the remnants of the local reggae scene in Kuta Beach, the island's most renowned tourist area. Baulch tracks how each music scene arrived and grew in Bali, looking at such influences as the global extreme metal underground, MTV Asia, and the internationalization of Indonesia's music industry. Making Scenes is an exploration of the subtle politics of identity that took place within and among these scenes throughout the course of the 1990s. Participants in the different scenes often explained their interest in death metal, punk, or reggae in relation to broader ideas about what it meant to be Balinese, which reflected views about Bali's tourism industry and the cultural dominance of Jakarta, Indonesia's capital and largest city. Through dance, dress, claims to public spaces, and onstage performances, participants and enthusiasts reworked "Balinese-ness" by synthesizing global media, ideas of national belonging, and local identity politics. Making Scenes chronicles the creation of subcultures at a historical moment when media globalization and the gradual demise of the authoritarian Suharto regime coincided with revitalized, essentialist formulations of the Balinese self.
Music in Bali by
Music in Bali is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional materials to accompany each study. Music in Bali introduces the ensemble tradition of Balinese music, reflecting cooperative aspects of the island's social organization. Drawing on many years of study with Balinese performers in the United States and extensive fieldwork in Bali, author Lisa Gold presents contemporary Balinese performance within its cultural and historical context, linking Bali's rich past to its current role in modern, globalized society. She illustrates how new compositions borrow material from earlier traditions while also allowing for individual expression and innovation in vibrant present-day culture. By describing various performances--from a temple ceremony, to a shadow puppet performance, to a masked dance drama--Music in Bali surveys a wide range of performance contexts, from the highly sacred to the secular. It looks at the interconnected layers of the Balinese musical tradition, showing how the island's music, dance, theater, and ritual are intertwined. Music in Bali is enhanced by eyewitness accounts of local performances, interviews with key performers, and vivid illustrations. Packaged with a 70-minute CD containing examples of the music discussed in the book, it features guided listening and hands-on activities that encourage readers to engage actively and critically with the music.
Music in Central Java by
Music in Central Java is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional materials to accompany each study. Music in Central Java offers a vivid introduction to the region's musical and cultural landscape, showing how three themes--flexibility, appropriateness, and interconnectedness--characterize Javanese musical practices and traditions. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork, author Benjamin Brinner takes an in-depth look at gamelan music--a traditional musical ensemble tradition that typically features metallophones, xylophones, drums, and gongs--providing readers with a sense of what it means to be a musician performing gamelan. Building from fundamental Javanese concepts of time and melody, the book covers gamelan's instruments, musical idioms, and central interactions and also surveys contrasting performance contexts. It examines both the theatrical and musical aspects of the vibrant tradition of shadow-puppet plays (Wayang kulit) and offers a broad survey of other music found in Central Java. In addition, Music in Central Java provides an engaging portrait of a leading Javenese musician, traces musical responses to radical social, political, and cultural changes over the past century, and considers Javanese music in relation to Indonesia and the rest of the world. Enhanced by eyewitness accounts of performances, interviews with key performers, vivid illustrations, and hands-on listening activities, this book is a captivating introduction to the music of Central Java. It is packaged with a 78-minute audio CD containing examples of the music discussed in the book.
Music in Pacific Island Cultures by
Music in Pacific Island Cultures is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, Second Edition, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. The islands of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia are steeped in diverse musical traditions that reach far beyond the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Music in Pacific Island Cultures is the first brief, single-volume text to provide a thematic, succinct introduction to the music of the Pacific Islands--a region of the world that has long been underrepresented in ethnomusicological studies. Based on the authors' extensive fieldwork and experiences in Pacific Island cultures, the text draws on interviews with performers, eyewitness accounts of performances, vivid illustrations, and insights gained from ongoing participation in Pacific music. The authors use four themes--colonialism, belief systems, musical flows, and the re/presentation of Pacific cultures--to survey the region and draw parallels and contrasts between its various musical traditions. Packaged with a 70-minute audio CD containing musical examples discussed in the book, Music in Pacific Island Cultures features numerous listening activities that engage students with the music. The companion website includes a comprehensive Instructor's Manual with suggested classroom activities. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of books in the Global Music Series. The website also includes instructional materials to accompany each volume.
Ukulele by
These days the ukulele is experiencing a revolution-both as a valid instrument that can sweetly transform pop music and rock and roll, and as the focus of dozens of clubs springing up across the world. Ukulele! brings the "uke" world to light, exposing its colorful history, quirky characters, and irresistible charm. Dozens of colorful photos and ephemera make Ukulele! as fun to look at as it is to read.
Ukulele Heroes by
Although the ukulele has always been popular - even when cast to the grass-skirt ghetto of luaus and limbo contests - the current craze for this instrument has put the four-string cousin of the guitar into the hands of veteran musicians and young hipsters alike. And while there are a handful of books feeding the current uke explosion, this is the first to detail the stage, screen, and recording stars who pioneered the uke - those who predated and made possible its current resurgence. The book begins with how the uke came to the mainland United States from Hawai'i, and the Hawai'ian song craze of 1916-17, fueled by Tim Pan Alley. Profiled stars include Ukulele Ike, Johnny Marvin, Wendell Hall, "Wizard of the Strings" Roy Smeck, George Formby, Arthur Godfrey, Tessie O'Shea, who was a guest along with the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and Tiny Tim. Author Ian Whitcomb also describes how, when a British teen idol coming off a Top Ten hit, he took out his secondhand Martin uke and recorded his version of a 1916 novelty called "Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?" scoring another hit that led him to appearances on Shindig!, Dick Clark's Where the Action Is, and The Pat Boone Show. Ukulele Heroes: The Golden Age is essential for any uke enthusiast, and features a detailed discography and filmography, essential for any student of the art.
Unplayed Melodies by
The gamelan music of Central Java is one of the world's great orchestral traditions. Its rich sonic texture is not based on Western-style harmony or counterpoint, but revolves around a single melody. The nature of that melody, however, is puzzling. In this book, Marc Perlman uses this puzzle as a key to both the art of the gamelan and the nature of musical knowledge in general. Some Javanese musicians have suggested that the gamelan's central melody is inaudible, an implicit or "inner" melody. Yet even musicians who agree on its existence may disagree about its shape. Drawing on the insights of Java's most respected musicians, Perlman shows how irregularities in the relationships between the melodic parts have suggested the existence of "unplayed melodies." To clarify the differences between these implicit-melody concepts, Unplayed Melodies tells the stories behind their formulation, identifying each as the creative contribution of an individual musician in a postcolonial context (sometimes in response to Western ethnomusicological theories). But these stories also contain evidence of the general cognitive processes through which musicians find new ways to conceptualize their music. Perlman's inquiry into these processes illuminates not only the gamelan's polyphonic art, but also the very sources of creative thinking about music.
The Queen's Songbook by
Queen Liliuokalani left two major legacies. The first, her lands, have benefited the Hawaiian people through the Liliuokalani Trust and Queen Liliuokalani Children's Center. The second, her music, has brought pleasure to many people of many cultures, and Hui Hanai hopes the publication of The Queen's Songbook will enable others, for generations to come, to draw readily on the musical treasury that the Queen created. Hui Hanai was organized in 1969 to assist in carrying out the objectives of the Queen Liliuokalani Children's Center and to perpetuate the memory of the Queen and her accomplishments. In 1973, it decided that the most meaningful contribution it could make would be to collect and publish the Queen's Songs, and a Songbook Committee authorized by the Hui Hanai Council embarked on the task.
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