Books published by University of California Press

"World Socialist Cinema narrates a film history beyond received canons, explicitly decentering and dewesternizing the way that we approach cinema's past. Masha Salazkina's scholarship is breathtaking, using hitherto unexplored archives and primary sources to complicate what we understand by terms like 'world cinema, ' 'global cinema, ' or 'cinemas of solidarity.' I know of nothing comparable."--Peter Limbrick, author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi "Through the prism of the Tashkent Film Festival, this extraordinary study offers a kaleidoscopic view of what Salazkina terms 'world socialist cinema.' Deftly tessellating a dazzling array of institutions, films, languages, and geopolitical, formal, and theoretical questions, World Socialist Cinema is a field-changing book, and a model for future scholarship."--Alice Lovejoy, author of Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military

"Victoria Duckett reveals the innovation and acumen of three turn-of-the-century French actresses, once dismissed as old-fashioned and theatrical, in reshaping both theater and cinema--Bernhardt, Réjane, and Mistinguett. Réjane, a trailblazing comic actress, is a particular revelation. Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema demonstrates the power of transnational history, in all its surprises and contradictions."--Laura Horak, author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 "Theater and cinema history have for too long been separate and even antagonistic. Victoria Duckett has already shown her prowess in navigating both, and in this new study she marshals formidable amounts of evidence to compare the transnational careers of three legendary French actresses who triumphantly crossed from stage to screen by different routes. In doing so, they brought immense prestige to the new medium and to French cinema. Star studies should never be the same."--Ian Christie, author of Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema "Victoria Duckett provides a remarkably detailed analysis of the underappreciated contribution made to early film by three celebrated French performers. Her book conclusively demonstrates how closely intertwined the inherited techniques of nineteenth-century theater and the innovative possibilities of twentieth-century cinema were in practice. This is a major reassessment of a significant moment in transnational culture that casts aside disciplinary boundaries to discover a creative and complicated historical process."--John Stokes, Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature, King's College London "From Belle Époque Paris and Victorian London to cosmopolitan New York, Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema takes us on an exhilarating transatlantic and transdisciplinary voyage. Archival, intertextual, and historiographic, Victoria Duckett's three eloquent case studies dislodge preconceptions to enlarge our vision of the international and intermedial impact of the actress-entrepreneur, from transmedial networks of performance and celebrity culture to emerging film markets and business models, demonstrating theater's vital and intrinsic role in early cinema and culture."--Tami Williams, author of Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations

"There is no such thing as a voice without an accent, yet theories of voice ranging from philosophy to media studies to machine learning still treat accents as the exception rather than the rule. Thinking with an Accent teaches us how to begin from accented voices and provides a panoply of tools for imagining, working with, building on, analyzing, and desiring accents."--Jonathan Sterne, author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment "Thinking with an Accent is a creative and ambitious multidisciplinary collection of essays that clearly captures the academic and popular zeitgeist about race, listening, and power. Together, these essays advance our theoretical understandings of accent as methodology, accent as epistemology, and accent, in general, as a multifaceted cultural source of wealth. Thinking with an Accent encourages scholars and the public alike to reconsider our own accented lives and how they work to structure our social, digital, and literary worlds. I already consider it to be an essential book."--Dolores Inés Casillas, author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy "This book teaches us that the accent must be understood not as an ontological reality but as a co-constituted happening between bodies, people, objects, and space. The result is that the reader learns to think freely about accent, and accent becomes something to think with, not just to study. Straightforward, well argued, and a pleasure to read."--Kareem Khubchandani, author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife "This is, without a doubt, a very timely study, given how accent increasingly intersects with migration policy, employment, culture, digital technologies, and (identity) politics. The chapters illustrate the complexities of accent, at both personal and structural levels, and testify to accent's role in negotiations of power and desire. The collection does very important work and is likely to set an important agenda for how accent is studied and taught in the future."--Jennifer O'Meara, author of Women's Voices in Digital Media: The Sonic Screen from Film to Meme "This work is fascinating and extremely valuable, brought to life through multiple case studies and contexts. The collection gives space to difference, alterity, intersectionality, and marginalization through nuanced thinking that also works to question and destabilize subject positions, labels, and constructs."--Tessa Dwyer, author of Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation

"A perceptive and original analysis of the field from a world-leading authority. This is a condensation of a lifetime's outstanding and innovative scholarly research into the historical and cultural relations between Jews and Russia."--William F. Ryan, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Fellow at the Warburg Institute in the School of Advanced Study, University of London

"What does it mean to 'see' theater? This ambitious and wonderfully engaging book turns the spotlight on the theater spectator, finding the drama hidden away in the very act(s) of watching Greek drama. Weiss's phenomenological approach foregrounds the multisensory nature of theatrical performance. Reading the tragedians--especially Aeschylus and Sophocles--will never feel quite the same again."--Melissa Mueller, author of Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy "Naomi Weiss breaks new ground, powerfully reconceptualizing theatrical visuality on a phenomenological basis. Informed by the fluidity of roles and positions in vase paintings' views of viewing, her fresh, engaging, and sophisticated analyses not just from the genre of tragedy but also from comedy and satyr drama, bring much-needed emphasis to the aesthetic. Seeing Theater is poised to become a classic that will shape performative criticism of ancient Greek drama for many years to come."--Mario Telò, author of Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy "An original and outstanding contribution, Seeing Theater opens up an entirely new approach to ancient drama and related artifacts, yielding conclusions that are of fundamental interest to Greek drama and art."--Eric Csapo, coauthor of A Social and Economic History of the Theatre to 300 BC

"Refined Material is a groundbreaking study that situates Venezuela's midcentury art and architecture in light of the modern nation-state's myriad ties to petroleum extraction, processing, and petrodollars."⏤Rachel Price, Princeton University "There is no study in the English language to date that investigates and contextualizes petroculture in midcentury Venezuela, certainly not with the rigorous research and keen analysis of Refined Material. I would venture to say that there is no such book available in any language that so thoroughly contextualizes artistic production in Venezuela within this high-stakes historical moment and global economic interests."⏤Ana María Reyes, author of The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics

"Practicing Asylum is nothing short of groundbreaking. Asylum cases increasingly rest on the quality of country-condition experts' work."--Hayden Rodarte, immigrant rights attorney "It is rare to read a book that has been written with so much heart and so many insights for academics, attorneys, and advocates alike."--S. Deborah Kang, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia "Practicing Asylum is a call to action that comes amid an unfolding humanitarian disaster met by a system cruelly stacked against asylum seekers."--J. T. Way, Associate Professor of Latin American History, Georgia State University

"For anyone interested in the quirks and turns taken by postwar music in the twentieth century, it wasn't so much a big bang/bhang as it was a collective hummmmmm. Was it somehow a reaction to the absolute bleak blankness of the atom bomb? Was it gazing East to find a spiritual purity and stillness? Was the paring away of harmony and motion a reaction to the ever more complex complications of the modern world? Whatever it was, musicians from all sorts of wide-ranging backgrounds, jazz players, contemporary composers, inventors, scientists, tricksters and seekers, men and women (not to mention filmmakers, dancers, painters, writers) were seeking new forms and demanding that new experiences be brought forth from their compositions, seeking a suspension of time, an expanding NOW--like a river, ever changing yet ever the same. They were seeking to quiet the madness of modern life and refocus the thought process, to examine one single flower rather than the field, to strike one single note and understand how it related to the many, to turn off their minds and float downstream. On Minimalism is the story of this music, from its brave beginnings through to underpinning so much of what we listen to today. Turn the pages and witness this revelatory process unfold in a myriad of inventions and directions. Boom went the bomb and hummmmmm came the revolutionary response."--Lee Ranaldo, founding member of Sonic Youth "Kerry O'Brien and William Robin's riveting documentary collection clears away myths of minimalist history without minimizing the significance of the movement. Indeed, minimalism emerges as a wider, deeper, more inclusive, and more radical phenomenon than we had known."--Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker and author of Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music "On Minimalism is a brilliant work of research and most addictive to read. Music is a practical art, so it is a delight to dig into the specific details of how these most influential musicians worked with their materials and with one another--conveyed in their own words, not retrospectively but in the moment. The breadth of perspective and structural clarity with which these rich sources are presented is refreshing, the connections illuminating."--Annea Lockwood, composer "A wild collection of documents formed around a more dimensional and pleasingly meandering conception of 'minimalism' than we'd been told about. There's something in here for anyone with a sensitive ear, anyone seeking creative inspiration and a glimpse into how artists have zoomed-deep-in to their sound sources, producing fruitful collectives of generative energy that radiate from the past to the future, giving rise to ever new ones."--Julia Holter, singer-songwriter and producer "With this wide-ranging collection of original texts by familiar and lesser-known key figures, O'Brien and Robin present a richer, more inclusive view of what we have come to define as 'minimalism' in music of the last century--a deep well of sounds and ideas from which younger generations of musicians and listeners (myself included) continue to draw inspiration."--Tashi Wada, composer and founder of the label Saltern "A tremendous success. O'Brien and Robin bring a freshness and vitality to even the most familiar material, while centering lesser-known figures pushed to the margins of existing scholarship. On Minimalism will delight general readers and scholars alike with fresh perspectives on experimental and mainstream musics of the past sixty years."--Sarah Hill, author of San Francisco and the Long 60s "Outstanding. A major contribution to music studies that will be used and referenced for years to come. Never has there been such an expansive yet incisive collection of texts on this topic."--Benjamin Piekut, author of Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem

"A pathbreaking book that explodes essentialist views of the construction of Hindu and Muslim identities in pre-colonial India. Divya Cherian provocatively argues that the category of 'Hindu' was the primary locus for a system of radical othering that excluded Untouchables (and Muslims as Untouchables) through mechanisms of state, law, and everyday life."--Christian Lee Novetzke, Professor of South Asian and Religious Studies, University of Washington "Cherian offers a refreshingly different perspective on the history of caste and untouchability in India, enlarging the field of scholarship from its focus on the colonial era by telling us how pre-colonial configurations of power in the locality shaped the everyday experience of caste."--Gopal Guru, Political Theorist and Co-author of The Cracked Mirror and Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social "This provocative and empirically rich study offers a plenitude of fascinating insights into aspects of western Indian history ca. 1800, ranging from kingship and caste hierarchy to punishments for crimes like abortion and alcohol consumption. Particularly significant and innovative is its focus on the critical role played by merchants in articulating social identities that became widespread in modern times. Mandating practices such as vegetarianism, non-violence toward animals, and the regulation of female chastity, increasingly influential Marwari merchants enhanced their status as Hindus by differentiating themselves from Untouchables more so than from Muslims."--Cynthia Talbot, author of The Last Hindu Emperor "Caste is the world's oldest and most resilient form of organized inequality, and the Outcaste represents its extreme expression. Through astute analysis of a unique state archive, Cherian acutely traces the linkages among caste, faith, law, merchant capitalism, and politics in eighteenth-century Marwar (today's Rajasthan). She shows how these lead to a reinforcement of Outcaste oppression, to mandating their quotidian humiliations, even to creating, against their 'specter, ' a new form of 'Hindu' identity. She has produced a punctiliously researched, powerfully argued, and beautifully constructed account of one chapter in a most painful--and ongoing--history of social oppression."--Sheldon Pollock, Raghunathan Professor Emeritus of South Asian Studies, Columbia University