Books published by University of California Press

Thanks to improved food, medicine, and living conditions, the average age of the population is increasing throughout the modern industrialized world. Yet, despite the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in the lives of older people and the blossoming of historical demography, little historical demographic attention has been paid to the lives of the elderly. A landmark volume, Aging in the Past marks the emergence of the historical demographic study of aging. Following a masterly explication of the new field by Peter Laslett, leading scholars in family history and historical demography offer new research results and fresh analyses that greatly increase our understanding of aging, historically and across cultures. Focusing primarily on post-Industrial Europe and the United States, they explore a range of issues under the broad topics of living arrangements, widowhood, and retirement and mortality. This important work provides a much-needed historical perspective on and suggests possible alternative solutions to the problems of the aged. Contributors: George Alter, Rudolf Andorka, Allen C. Goodman, Myron P. Gutmann, Michael R. Haines, E. A. Hammel, Tamara K. Hareven, Nancy Karweit, David I. Kertzer, Peter Laslett, Andrejs Plakans, Roger L. Ransom, Daniel Scott Smith, Richard Sutch, Peter Uhlenberg, Richard Wall, Charles WetherellThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

In the early 1820s, the acclaimed Victorian philosopher, social critic, and essayist Thomas Carlyle achieved a level of expertise in German language and literature that prompted editors to seek him out as a reviewer and launched his career as an essayist. Carlyle has long been credited with establishing the importance of new German writing in Britain at the time, and Essays on German Literature brings together his complete writings on the topic. This volume will be published in two parts.   In keeping with the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, these essays are accompanied by a thorough historical introduction to the material, extensive notes providing historical and cultural context while expanding on references and allusions, and a textual apparatus that carefully details and explains the editorial decisions made in reconciling the editions of each essay.

"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why systems meant to save our lives end up killing us instead. Camilo Sanz's heartbreaking account of the harm of profit-driven medicine in Colombia is full of insights for health systems everywhere."--Scott Stonington, author of The Spirit Ambulance: Choreographing the End of Life in Thailand "A richly detailed and theoretically innovative ethnography, Cancer Intersections illuminates how neoliberal health care systems can undermine a legally guaranteed right to health care."--Amy Cooper, author of State of Health: Pleasure and Politics in Venezuelan Health Care under Chávez "Beautifully narrated, Cancer Intersections shows how universal health insurance in Colombia has exacerbated rather than resolved class-based inequalities in access to health care. While the rich receive a kind of care that is 'in sync' with cancer protocols, the poor waste whatever remaining months or years they have fighting the system's bureaucracy. As untreated or inadequately treated cancers become untreatable, pharmaceutical and insurance companies secure exponential profits and physicians struggle with how to best care for their patients even when it is too late. This book has much to offer to anthropologists, clinicians, bioethicists, philosophers, and policymakers who want to understand how inequities are remade and reframed by market-based health care reforms."--César E. Abadía-Barrero, author of Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital

"The thoughtful and thought-provoking chapters of Derivative Media feel like cave paintings that future generations will read long after we've perished in the flames of greed. A must-read for anyone working in the arts wanting to help humanity change course quickly!"--Martin Starr, actor, Freaks and Geeks and Silicon Valley "Broadly accessible to readers inside and outside the academy, Derivative Media should be the go-to account of our contemporary financialized culture. Andrew deWaard puts it all in place: the new economics, the private equity players, the dominant talent agencies, the hot studios, the crucial artists, the blockbusters, and the earworms. The insights and concepts in this book will reshape media studies and give activists new tools to understand the dynamics of the now."--J. D. Connor, author of Hollywood Math and Aftermath: The Economic Image and the Digital Recession "DeWaard has written an incisive, brilliant analysis of twenty-first-century capital, media, and power. Derivative Media is a tour-de-force breakdown of financialization in the culture industries, and essential reading for scholars and creative workers alike."--Jennifer Holt, author of Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980-1996 "Elegantly explains the pervasive and destructive role of finance capital in media industries. If you care about media, this book is essential reading: a generational advance in the political economy of communication. I have been waiting for a book like this."--Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format "In this compelling and captivating breakthrough study, deWaard assesses the financial forces that are reshaping popular entertainment in the new millennium. And he supports his analysis with data crunching and graphics that put his research in a class by itself."--Thomas Schatz, author of The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era "A tour-de-force synthesis of critical, qualitative, and quantitative research, that offers a frightening look at the calculated but opaque ways that shadow banking, hedge funds, and private equity buy firms using debt to overleverage music, media, and film studios. The sobering takeaway: all of a media text's intertextual references are rendered as fungible assets, as interchangeable goods that can be leveraged in a culture-to-capital stock exchange. Who knew our prized twenty-first-century vanguard forms could align this seamlessly with Wall Street's creator-killing profit schemes?"--John Thornton Caldwell, author of Specworld: Folds, Faults, and Fractures in Embedded Creator Industries

"In God's Other Book: The Qur'an between History and Ideology, Mohammad Salama presents a powerful critique of the ways we study and analyze early Islam and its sacred text, filling a glaring hole in our understanding of this formative environment. Interrogating the ideological framework of late antiquity, Salama exposes hidden assumptions that prevent scholars from truly placing Islam in its socio-historical and cultural milieu. He also offers an alternative theoretical and practical model focused on pre-Islamic Arabic cultural production. Foregrounding the indigenous Arab community of seventh-century Hijaz, Salama demonstrates how the Qur'an played an organic role in commenting on, interacting with, and taking sides concerning matters of ethnicity, ethics, dress codes, and social habits. While the study delves into the past, it carries implications for the future: only with renewed attention to the Qur'an itself, in all of its splendor and intricacy, can Western readers engage thoughtfully and ethically not only with Islamic studies but also with the cultures and traditions of those who live according to another book"--

"The history of dining is a story that cannot be told without archaeology. Surviving texts tell of the opulent banquets of the wealthy elite, but little attention is given to the simpler, more intimate social gatherings of domestic invitation dinners. This is especially true of the lower classes who are largely ignored by our sources. We can, however, provide a voice for the underprivileged by turning to the material detritus of ancient cultures that reflects their social history. Dining at the End of Antiquity brings together the material culture and literary traditions of Romans at the table to reimagine dining culture as an integral part of Roman social order. Through a careful analysis of the tools and equipment of dining, Nicholas Hudson uncovers significant changes to the way different classes came together to share food and wine between the fourth and sixth centuries. Reconstructing the practices of Roman dining culture, Hudson explores the depths of new social distances between the powerful and the dependent at the end of antiquity"--

Beyond Reasonrelates Wagner's works to the philosophical and cultural ideas of his time, centering on the four music dramas he created in the second half of his career:Der Ring des Nibelungen,Tristan und Isolde,Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, andParsifal. Karol Berger seeks to penetrate the ';secret' of large-scale form in Wagner's music dramas and to answer those critics, most prominently Nietzsche, who condemned Wagner for his putative inability to weld small expressive gestures into larger wholes. Organized by individual opera, this is essential reading for both musicologists and Wagner experts.

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. At once theoretically sophisticated and poignantly written, Constructed Movements centers stories from communities in Mexico profoundly affected by emigration to the United States to show how migration extracts resources along racial lines. Ragini Shah chronicles how three interrelated dynamics-the maldistribution of public resources, the exploitation of migrant labor, and the US immigration enforcement regime-entrench the necessity of migration as a strategy for survival in Mexico. She also highlights the alternative visions elaborated by migrant community organizations that seek to end the conditions that force migration. Recognizing that reform without recompense will never right an unjust migratory system, Shah concludes with a forceful call for the US and Mexican governments to make abolitionist investments and reparative compensation to directly counteract this legacy of extraction.

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. Mal-Nutrition documents how maternal health interventions in Guatemala are complicit in reproducing poverty. Policymakers speak about how a critical window of biological growth around the time of pregnancy-called the "first 1,000 days of life"-determines health and wealth across the life course. They argue that fetal development is the key to global development. In this thought-provoking and timely book, Emily Yates-Doerr shows that a focus on prenatal health is a paradigmatic technique of American violence through which the control of mothering serves to control the reproduction of privilege and power. Presenting the powerful stories of Guatemalan scientists, midwives, and mothers, she illustrates their efforts to counter the harms of mal-nutrition, offering a window into a form of nutrition science and policy that encourages collective nourishment and fosters reproductive cycles in which women, children, and their entire communities can flourish.

"Macfarlane provocatively upends the standard myth that Group f.64 was uninterested in the political. By showing how the photographers' ethos of 'purity' constituted a deeply political stance, she reveals just how much the photographs were embedded in the politics of their day. An archivally rich, beautifully written, groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the era's photography."--Cara A. Finnegan, author of Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs "The account of the influential Group f.64 we've been waiting for! In a compelling, complex study of modernism that expands our understanding of photography and the political, Macfarlane captures the texture of the interwar era, examining the seemingly mundane affairs of artists--Edward Weston's diet, Imogen Cunningham's fertilizer chemistry--as they intersect with debates on race, labor, settler colonization, technology's role, and human subjectivity, which resonate into the present."--Lauren Kroiz, author of Cultivating Citizens: The Work of Art in the New Deal Era and Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle "Politics Unseen is an important and timely volume, with lessons for our age. Ellen Macfarlane challenges us to reconsider the political possibilities of form. How might an image of hard-won artistic beauty strengthen and soften our entry into social and ecological worlds? How might aesthetically improved vision encourage our moral transformation, and do so without anesthetizing our outrage? These concerns feel as urgent as ever in Macfarlane's account of 1930s California photography, told with vibrant new detail, sensitivity, and nuance."--Jennifer Jane Marshall, author of Machine Art, 1934 "Ellen Macfarlane's excellent new book is a must-read for anyone interested in Depression-era photography in the United States. Group f.64 is almost always described in terms of art photography and technique, but as Macfarlane points out, f.64 members were deeply engaged politically, and in fact understood their work as providing a way to see politics. This analysis, smart and cogent, opens up a whole new way to think about what socially engaged photography means in the United States--never has it been more important to understand how politics can be pictured and, at the same time, remain unseen."--Terri Weissman, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

"Expanding Verse is original in terms of the selection of the corpus; timely in terms of the interdisciplinary scope; and substantial, in terms of the extent of research and the wealth of knowledge imparted. Andrew Campana demonstrates the genre's importance through careful consideration of each poet whose experimental creativity is eloquently introduced and assessed. Warm and inviting--readers will be left feeling much informed about the poets' respective lives, challenges, and adventures."--Atsuko Sakaki, author of Train Travel as Embodied Space-Time in Narrative Theory "Expanding Verse impresses on every page as a stunning work of scholarly rigor and innovative thinking about a complex problem at the core of humanities. Campana's brilliant understanding of the materiality of poetry rethinks the literary form, challenging us to reconfigure literary and media studies."--Jonathan E. Abel, author of The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji

"A model for future film scholars. The decade-long research that went into making this book is evident in its rich historical details, insightful conversations, and multisited fieldwork. Perhaps even more impressive is Darshana Sreedhar Mini's ability to pull together such vast and diverse material in a riveting story, so absorbing and beautifully written that I often felt like I was reading a novel. This exemplary work will produce lively discussions about film historiography, diaspora, stardom, authorship, and sexuality."--Monika Mehta, author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema "Don't be tempted to think you know porn if you see it. Mini's analysis invites us to see soft-core porn as a social construction that has reflected the borders of sexual agency and gendered respectability in Indian society for more than fifty years. Through a mosaic of methods, Mini strips down layers of mediated meanings, precarious labor, urban politics, and transnational consumption flows. Mini's work is exemplary of how soft-porn is a part of people's lived experiences. Her own confessions about the research process unfold as a subplot to a story of frustrated desires, circuitous pathways, and patient perseverance."--Vicki Mayer, author of Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy "Mini delivers a deeply impressive, groundbreaking historical analysis of the Malayalam-language soft-core pornography that emerged in Kerala, India, during the transformative decades of the 1990s and 2000s. This comprehensive study explores industrial processes and regulatory challenges, traces production intricacies, foregrounds the lived experiences of performers, and highlights exhibition dynamics and audience responses, shedding light on a rich but previously unexamined subject. In doing so it immediately joins the ranks of essential porn-studies texts."--Peter Alilunas, author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video "This remarkable book on the Malayalam-language soft-core porn industry of Kerala arrives as a bold feminist and 'southern' intervention in porn studies. Its mesmerizing mapping of evolving social relations and gendered aspirations, dueling economies of desire and regulatory regimes, emergent transnational media circuits, and piratical publics is bound to animate conversations across disciplines."--Bhaskar Sarkar, author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition "A formidably researched counterhistory of Indian cinema through the regional mode of the sex film and a brilliantly synthetic work of adult-film history. Rated A dazzles with insight, relaying how Malayalam soft-porn produced complexly mobile and contested media publics. Exploring films that center female sexual autonomy and rely on the bounteous allure and non-normative sexuality of their stars, Rated A is a deeply feminist account of an era's cultural productions, its stars and makers, and the networks and economies of their often invisible labor. Committed to examining the ways precarity, class, and caste politics inflect the unruly circulations of sexually coded media forms, this is a fascinating, vital, and essential work of film and cultural history."--Elena Gorfinkel, author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s "Mini takes readers on a truly fascinating exploration of Malayalam soft-porn cinema, which emerged in the 1980s and has captivated millions of viewers across India and the Middle East. Extensive archival and ethnographic research reveals the local and global influences that shaped the genre, the social and gendered dynamics of the industry, and the complex politics of sexuality and censorship in contemporary India. By challenging the dominant narratives of pornography as a Western phenomenon, this book provides a new model for studying soft-core film genres in diverse cultural contexts."--Clarissa Smith, author of One for the Girls!: The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women's Porn and coeditor of Porn Studies "Rated A is a captivating cultural history of Malayalam soft-porn cinema, and moreover of its afterlives--how it is remediated across a range of sites, reverberating in the cultural imagination. In the unfolding of that history, Mini shows how soft-porn and the debates and desires that it provokes are entangled with the building of gender, sexuality, politics, and social life. A major new contribution to the study of pornographies."--Feona Attwood, author of Sex Media and coeditor of Porn Studies "Rated A delivers a richly layered account of the precarious and often invisible world of Malayalam soft-porn cinema. Employing creative and tenacious research strategies, Mini adroitly delineates the textual logics and quotidian practices of a popular film industry that perseveres as Bollywood's forsaken other."--Michael Curtin, coeditor of Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood