Books published by University of California Press

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Making Sense explores the experiential, ethical, and intellectual stakes of living in, and thinking with, worlds wherein language cannot be taken for granted. In Nepal, many deaf signers use Nepali Sign Language (NSL), a young, conventional signed language. The majority of deaf Nepalis, however, use what NSL signers call natural sign. Natural sign involves conventional and improvisatory signs, many of which recruit semiotic relations immanent in the social and material world. These features make conversation in natural sign both possible and precarious. Sense-making in natural sign depends on signers' skillful use of resources and on addressees' willingness to engage. Natural sign reveals the labor of sense-making that in more conventional language is carried by shared grammar. Ultimately, this highly original book shows that emergent language is an ethical endeavor, challenging readers to consider what it means, and what it takes, to understand and to be understood.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Ritual Boundaries, Joseph E. Sanzo transforms our understanding of how early Christians experienced religion in lived practice through the study of magical objects, such as amulets and grimoires. Against the prevailing view of late antiquity as a time when only so-called elites were interested in religious and ritual differentiation, the magical evidence reveals that the desire to distinguish between religious and ritual insiders and outsiders cut across diverse social strata. The magical evidence also offers unique insight into early biblical reception, exposing a textual world in which scriptural reading was multisensory and multitraditional. As they addressed sickness, demonic struggle, and interpersonal conflicts, Mediterranean people thus acted in ways that challenge our conceptual boundaries between the Christian and non-Christian; elites and non-elites; and words, materials, and images. Sanzo helps us rethink how early Christians imagined similarity and difference among texts, traditions, groups, and rituals as they went about their daily lives.

"Saadia Yacoob delves deeply into the categories and logic of her primary sources, contextualizes them within the relevant social history, and probingly explores their ethical and political implications. Beyond the Binary marries philological depth with theoretical sophistication while remaining surprisingly accessible and engaging."--Marion Holmes Katz, author of Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics before Modernity "In this field-changing book, Yacoob shows that for classical Muslim jurists, legal personhood was intersectional, relational, and situational. She pushes back against modern conservative insistence on an Islamic femininity defined in binary opposition to masculinity while also challenging feminist analyses that overemphasize gender as a stable component of identity."--Kecia Ali, author of Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam

"Sidney Robertson was a pioneering folksong documentarian every bit as accomplished as the legendary Alan Lomax. Focusing on Robertson's late 1930s adventures in Northern California, Catherine Hiebert Kerst's vivid study reveals a brilliant woman and gritty field researcher able to overcome prejudice, win scarce funds from grudging bureaucrats, charm wary working-class immigrant performers, and illuminate the unforgettable singing voices of diverse cultural communities essential to the American experience."--James P. Leary, author of Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946 "Combining biography, detailed descriptions of the recording process, and access to the original audio recordings, Kerst's pioneering book on Sidney Robertson is a model for presenting archival material and the motivations of those who recorded the diversity of music in America in the twentieth century."--Anthony Seeger, Director Emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Smithsonian Institution "By mining a disorganized and neglected treasure trove of Sidney Robertson's recordings, photographs, and papers, Kerst--archivist and ethnomusicologist at the Library of Congress--has produced a critical intervention into the narratives of ethnomusicology and folklore that privilege the 'founding fathers.' Shining a long overdue spotlight on the 'Lady on Wheels, ' one of the founding mothers of music research and recording, this book brings us onto the stage of American politics and culture during the 1930s, highlighting issues of gender, technology, ethics, immigration, and artistic labor, demonstrating the formative impact of the New Deal and the WPA on the realization and creation of American culture."--Anne K. Rasmussen, coeditor of The Music of Multicultural America

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Feminist Cyberlaw reimagines the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens. Essays crafted for this volume by emerging and established scholars and practitioners explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. This vibrant and visionary volume promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. For more than four decades, socially disadvantaged Israeli Mizrahim--descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern communities--have continuously supported right-wing political parties. Sociologists, NGOs, and left-wing politicians tend to view Mizrahim as acting against their own interests, but Nissim Mizrachi locates the problem within the limitations of the liberal grammar by which their behavior is read. In Beyond Suspicion, Mizrachi turns the direction of inquiry upon itself, contrasting liberal grammar--which values autonomy, equality, and universal reason and morality--with the grammar of Mizrahi rootedness, in which the self is experienced through a web of relational commitments, temporal ties, and codes of collective identity. Recognizing rootedness as a fundamental need for belonging is necessary to understand both scholarly and political rifts in Israel and throughout the world.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinized due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong--a defiant misfit--innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. In this critical study of Wong's cross-media and transnational career, Yiman Wang marshals extraordinary archival research and a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, To Be an Actress adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her as an interlocutor while inviting a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.

"An excellent tour through the contemporary right-wing media comedy complex, an area many of us know too little about and have resisted investigating on our own. I praise the authors for how beautifully they weave analysis into their descriptions of comedic performances and texts."--Viveca S. Greene, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Hampshire College "A lively tour of the menagerie of sad right-wing comedy tryhards who wield a surprising amount of power in today's media ecosystem."--Ken Klippenstein, investigative journalist, The Intercept "Looking directly at a partial eclipse, the authors of That's Not Funny push our critical considerations of humor beyond questions of taste, value, or political allegiance. They confront far-right laughter so we don't have to in their most engaging, timely, and evocative study."--Maggie Hennefeld, author Specters of Slapstick & Silent Film Comediennes