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. DNA, Race, and Reproduction helps readers inside and outside of academia evaluate and engage with the current genomic landscape. It brings together expertise in law, medicine, religion, history, anthropology, philosophy, and genetics to examine how scientists, medical professionals, and laypeople use genomic concepts to construct racial identity and make or advise reproductive decisions, often at the same moment. It critically and accessibly interrogates how DNA figures in the reproduction of racialized bodies and the racialization of reproduction and examines the privileged position from which genomic knowledge claims to speak about human bodies, societies, and activities. The volume begins from the premise that reproduction, regardless of the means, forces a confrontation between biomedical, scientific, and popular understandings of genetics, and that those understandings are often racialized. It therefore centers reproduction as both a site of analysis and an analytic lens.

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. Why are the small and unimportant relics of Roman antiquity often the most enduring, in both material form and our affections? Through close encounters with minor things such as insects, brief lives, quibbles, irritants, and jokes, Emily Gowers provocatively argues that much of what the Romans dismissed as superfluous or peripheral in fact took up immense imaginative space. There is much to learn from what didn't or shouldn't matter. It was often through the small stuff that the Romans most acutely probed and challenged their society's overarching values and priorities and its sense of proportion and justice. By marking the spots where the apparently pointless becomes significant, this book radically adjusts our understanding of the Romans and their world, as well as  our own minor feelings and intimate preoccupations.

We are continually trying to make sense of our world through the stories we tell and are told, but in our search for coherence, we often sacrifice our freedom and the rich randomness of life. In this passionate and lucid book, Michael André Bernstein challenges our practice of "foreshadowing," in which we see our lives as moving toward a predetermined goal or as controlled by fate. Foreshadowing, he argues, demeans the variety and openness that exist in even the most ordinary moments of life. And it is precisely ordinary life, with its random, haphazard, and contradictory choices, that Bernstein celebrates in his call for "sideshadowing"-an alternative practice that reminds us that every present is dense with possible futures.   Bernstein sees the Holocaust as the prime example of how our tendency to "foreshadow" and "backshadow" misrepresents history. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who posit the Holocaust as foreordained and who depict its victims as somehow complicit with a fate that they should have been able to foresee. Instead, Bernstein proposes a radically new understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier Jewish experience, transforming how we read and write both individual and communal history.  Foregone Conclusions is an extraordinarily wide-ranging book, both in its scope and in its broader intellectual and moral implications. From the latest biographies of Kafka to the peace accords between Israel and the PLO, from the role of cultural diversity in universities to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns us against passively accepting our identities as being shaped primarily by historical or personal victimization. His book liberates us from stereotyped patterns of understanding the relationship between our lives as individuals and as members of racial, sexual, and historic/ethnic communities.   Berstein ultimately opens a powerful new way to understand the principles governing how we read and write narratives--whether historical, personal, or literary. In striking original juxtapositions and critical evaluations of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Aharon Appelfeld, Bernstein sugests the need for a new literary model based on the prosaics of daily life. Bernstein speaks directly and persuasively to many of the most pressing issues in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, literary criticism, and cultural history. Foregone Conclusions is a provocative and poignant attempt to find coherence in our world without accepting either ineluctable destiny of pure coincidence.   This 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 1994.

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.

"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. 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