Books published by University of California Press

"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

"In 16th-century Mughal India, warrior groups across the subcontinent rose in rebellion, causing great political disruptions to the existing order. During this period, the Sikh community transformed from a relatively insignificant religious minority to an elevated position of kingship and empire. Under the leadership of Guru Gobind Singh, Sikh elites and peasants began to align themselves with discourses of power and authority, and within a few decades Khalsa warriors conquered some of the wealthiest provinces of the Mughal and Afghan empires. In this book, Satnam Singh argues that the Sikhs' increasing self-assertion was not simply a reaction to Mughal persecution but also a result of an active program initiated by the Guru to pursue larger visions of scholarship, conquest, and political sovereignty. Using a vast trove of understudied court literature, Singh shows how Sikhs grappled with Indo-Islamic traditions to forge their own ideas of governance and kingship with the aim to establish an independent Sikh polity. The Road to Empire offers an impressive intellectual history of the early modern Sikh world"--

"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

"This book is truly groundbreaking in its focus, theoretical contributions, and methodological innovations. Stephanie Balkwill's deft treatment of Buddhism, gender, and ethnic difference in the Northern Wei court of Empress Dowager Ling will surely serve as a model for other scholars."--Megan Bryson, author of Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China "Balkwill's penetrating scholarship greatly enlarges our understanding of two often-ignored and deeply intertwined aspects of rulership in East Asia: women and Buddhism. This book explores the powerful role that women played in Northern Wei politics and how Buddhism provided a new repertoire for enlarging their roles, especially in the more populist forms favored by the Empress Dowager. A revealing, thought-provoking read."--Andrew Chittick, author of The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History "Employing a wide range of sources, Balkwill persuasively argues that Dowager Empress Hu paved the way for Wu Zetian to become China's only female emperor. Both pastoral nomadic customs, which respected female agency and authority, and Buddhism, which provided women with autonomy and leadership opportunities, created this new path to power."--Keith N. Knapp, Professor of East Asian History at The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina

"This brilliant book shows how colonial logics of extraction reach into the present, while also illuminating how Indigenous world-making ideas of time, space, and history shape contemporary resistance to megaprojects. Its deep and careful collaboration with Mayan communities in Guatemala is a model for scholars and activists alike."--Elizabeth Oglesby, coeditor of The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics

In Being Another Way, Dustin D. Klinger recounts the history of how medieval Arabic philosophers in the Islamic East grappled with the logical role of the copula "to be," an ambiguity that has bedeviled Western philosophy from Parmenides to the analytic philosophers of today. Working from within a language that has no copula, a group of increasingly independent Arabic philosophers began to critically investigate the semantic role that Aristotle, for many centuries their philosophical authority, invested in the copula as the basis of his logic. Drawing on extensive manuscript research, Klinger breaks through the thicket of unstudied philosophical works to demonstrate the creativity of postclassical Islamic scholarship as it explored the consequences of its intellectual break with the past. Against the still widespread view that intellectual ferment all but disappeared during the period, Klinger shows how these intellectuals over the centuries developed and refined a sophisticated philosophy of language that speaks to core concerns of contemporary linguistics and philosophy.

"With characteristic elegance and humor, Paul Binski powerfully reinserts human subjectivity into medieval architectural history and addresses the profound aesthetic effect of the great cathedrals, halls, and mosques of the Middle Ages on the men and women who used them."--Matthew Reeve, author of Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole "Binski shifts attention from the design of medieval buildings to their affects, drawing on a formidable range of Greek, Latin, and medieval sources to retrieve a historically authentic vocabulary to describe Gothic architecture's emotional power. Crucially, he shows how these affects--from fear to joy or wonder--were shaped by rhetorical, ethical, philosophical, and even musical traditions and how they diverge from post-Romantic responses to Gothic churches."--Tom Nickson, author of Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile "This book provides a cultural analysis of architecture that weaves together philology, anthropology, and reception theory, among other approaches, with insight and erudition unique to Binski, who illuminates in clear and flowing prose just why great Gothic churches have the power to move individuals and societies."--Meredith Cohen, author of The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy

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. Emergency in Transit responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights. Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Eleanor Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research-alongside literature, film, and visual art-to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea.

"This groundbreaking collection of essays from leading film historians features original research on movie magazines published in China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Latin America, South Korea, the U.S., and beyond. Vital resources for the study of film history and culture, movie magazines are frequently cited as ources, but rarely centered as objects of study. Global Movie Magazine Networks does precisely that, revealing the hybridity, heterogeneity, and connectivity of movie magazines and the important role they play in the intercontinental exchange of information and ideas about cinema. Uniquely, the contributors in this book have developed their critical analysis alongside the collaborative work of building digital resources, facilitating the digitization of more than a dozen of these historic magazines on an open-access basis"--

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. The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents-a narrative that is especially pervasive with regard to transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit Myers comparatively examines the transracial and transnational adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. Showing how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures-in contrast to others that are not-he argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomfiting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.

"After the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Rome finally took control of Egypt. This occupation simultaneously facilitated and circumscribed the exchange of goods, people, and ideas along the paths carved by Rome's burgeoning empire. In this book, Edward Kelting sets out to recapture one of these systems of exchange: the vibrant literary tradition known as Aegyptiaca--or 'Egyptian Things'--in which culturally mixed authors wrote about Egypt for a Greek and Roman audience. These authors have been dismissed as not really 'Egyptian,' and their contemporary popularity has been ignored, but as the author powerfully argues, this genre in fact constitutes a vibrant intellectual tradition, developed from heterogenous influences but deeply engaged with Egypt's pharaonic past. In contrast to usual narratives of Roman domination, Kelting uncovers a complex project of political engagement and cultural translation in which Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all participated"

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. Unprecedented numbers of young people are in crisis today, and our health care systems are set up to fail them. Breaking Points explores the stories of a diverse group of American young adults experiencing psychiatric hospitalization for psychotic symptoms for the first time and documents how patients and their families make decisions about treatment after their release. Approximately half of young people refuse mental-health care after their initial hospitalization even though we know that better outcomes depend on early support for youth and families. In attempting to determine why this is the case, Neely Laurenzo Myers identifies what matters most to young people in crisis, passionately arguing that health care providers must attend not only to the medical and material dimensions of care but also to a patient's moral agency.

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. Over the past few decades, scholars have traced how Indian Ocean merchants forged transregional networks into a world of global connections. East Africa's crucial role in this Indian Ocean world has primarily been understood through the influence of coastal trading centers like Mombasa. In Inland from Mombasa, David P. Bresnahan looks anew at this Swahili port city from the vantage point of the communities that lived on its rural edges. By reconstructing the deep history of these Mijikenda-speaking societies over the past two millennia, he shows how profoundly they influenced global trade even as they rejected many of the cosmopolitan practices that historians have claimed are critical to creating global connections, choosing smaller communities over urbanism, local ritual practices over Islam, and inland trade over maritime commerce. Inland from Mombasa makes the compelling case that the seemingly isolating alternative social pursuits selected by Mijikenda speakers were in fact key to their active role in global commerce and politics.

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. Japan is a nation saddled with centuries of accumulated stereotypes and loaded assumptions about suicide. Many pronouncements have been made about those who have died by their own hand, without careful attention to the words of the dead themselves. Drawing upon far-ranging creations by famous twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese artists and little-known amateurs alike-such as death poems, suicide notes, memorials, suicide maps and manuals, works of literature, photography, film, and manga-Kirsten Cather interrogates how suicide is scripted and to what end. Entering the orbit of suicidal writers and readers with care, she shows that through close readings these works can reveal fundamental beliefs about suicide and, just as crucially, about acts of writing. These are not scripts set in stone but graven images and words nonetheless that serve to mourn the dead, straddling two impulses: to put the dead to rest and to keep them alive forever. These words reach out to us to initiate a dialogue with the dead, one that can reveal why it matters to write into and from the void.