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. Moorings follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings that are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from the dhow, the book examines the social worlds of Muslim seafarers who have been rendered invisible even as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life, navigating colonialism, neoliberalism, the rise of Hindutva, insurgency, climate change, and border regimes across the Indian Ocean. Based on historical and ethnographic research aboard ships, at ports and religious shrines, and in homes, Moorings shows how capitalism derives value from historically sedimented practices grounded in caste, gender, and transregional community-based forms of regulation.

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. Undead examines the visual culture of war, broadly understood, through the lens of animation. Focusing on works in which relational, intermedial, and variably paced practices of "inter/in/animation" generate aesthetic tactics for thinking about, feeling, and reframing war, Karen Redrobe analyzes works by artists including Yael Bartana, Nancy Davenport, Kelly Dolak and Wazhmah Osman, Gesiye, David Hartt, Helen Hill, Onyeka Igwe, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Mary Reid Kelley, and Patrick Kelley. Deftly moving between cinema and media studies, peace and conflict studies, and art history, Undead is an interdisciplinary feminist meditation on the complex relationship between states of war and the discourses, infrastructures, and institutions through which memory, change, and understanding are made.

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. Today, Morocco's hip hop artists are vital to their country's reputation as diverse, creative, and modern. But in the 1990s and 2000s, teenage amateurs shaped their craft and ideals together as the profound socioeconomic changes of neoliberalization swept through their neighborhoods. Values That Pay traces Moroccan hip hop's trajectory from sidewalk cyphers and bedroom studios to royal commendations and international festivals. Kendra Salois draws from more than ten years of research into her interlocutors' music and moral reasoning to frame this institutionalization around the constitutive tensions of hip hop aesthetics and neoliberal life. Entrepreneurial artists respond to their unavoidable complicity with an extractive state through aesthetic and interpersonal sincerity, educating their fans on the risks and responsibilities of contemporary citizenship. Salois argues that over the past forty years, Moroccan hip hop practitioners have transformed not only themselves but also what it means to be an ethical citizen in a deeply unequal nation.

Though Luis Bunuel, one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century, spent his most productive years as a director in Mexico, film histories and criticism invariably pay little attention to his work during this period. The only book-length English-language study of Bunuel's Mexican films, this book is the first to explore a significant but neglected area of this filmmaker's distinguished career and thus to fill a gap in our appreciation and understanding of both Bunuel's achievement and the history of Mexican film. Ernesto Acevedo-Munoz considers Bunuel's Mexican films-made between 1947 and 1965-within the context of a national and nationalist film industry, comparing the filmmaker's employment of styles, genres, character types, themes, and techniques to those most characteristic of Mexican cinema. In this study Bunuel's films emerge as a link between the Classical Mexican cinema of the 1930s through the 1950s and the "e;new"e; Cinema of the 1960s, flourishing in a time of crisis for the national film industry and introducing some of the stylistic and conceptual changes that would revitalize Mexican cinema.

Preaching Bondage introduces and investigates the novel concept of doulology, the discourse of slavery, in the homilies of John Chrysostom, the late fourth-century priest and bishop. Chris L. de Wet examines the dynamics of enslavement in Chrysostom's theology, virtue ethics, and biblical interpretation and shows that human bondage as a metaphorical and theological construct had a profound effect on the lives of institutional slaves. The highly corporeal and gendered discourse associated with slavery was necessarily central in Chrysostom's discussions of the household, property, education, discipline, and sexuality. De Wet explores the impact of doulology in these contexts and disseminates the results in a new and highly anticipated language, bringing to light the more pervasive fissures between ancient Roman slaveholding and early Christianity. The corpus of Chrysostom's public addresses provides much of the literary evidence for slavery in the fourth century, and De Wet's convincing analysis is a groundbreaking contribution to studies of the social world in late antiquity.

Explores Wayne Thiebaud's career as a self-described "thief" who appropriated and reinterpreted old and new European and American artworks. Although artist Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) earned acclaim for his poetic renderings of the prosaic particulars of American life, he openly admitted that "it's hard for me to think of artists who weren't influential on me, because I'm such a blatant thief." Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art features the artist's virtuosic appropriations and reinterpretations of old and new European and American artworks, spanning from Andrea Mantegna to Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn, offering crucial insights into his creative process. Thiebaud's exploration of art, artists, and art history--along with the practices of copying, appropriation, and reinterpretation--allowed him not only to see through the eyes of other artists but also to commune with them through their work, expanding his own vision. This career-long engagement with the concept of appropriation illustrates his perception of art history as an encyclopedic "bureau of standards"--a rich repository and resource that offers working artists community with their predecessors and communion with their artworks. Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Exhibition dates: Legion of Honor: March 22-August 17, 2025

The 15,000-year story of how grass seduced humanity into being its unwitting labor force-and the science behind it.   Domesticated crops were not human creations, and agriculture was not simply invented. As Robert N. Spengler shows, domestication was the result of an evolutionary process in which people played a role only unwittingly and as actors in a numberless cast that spanned the plant and animal kingdoms. Nature's Greatest Success is the first book to bring together recent scientific discoveries and fascinating ongoing research to provide a systematic account of not only how agriculture really developed but why.   Through fifteen chapters, this book dives deep into the complex processes that drove domestication and the various roles that plants and animals, including humans, played in bringing about those changes. At the intersection of popular history, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, Nature's Greatest Success offers a revolutionary account of humanity not at the apex of nature but deeply embedded in the natural world and the evolutionary processes that continue to guide it even today.

This vivid reconstruction of one man's life of adventure reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power. The Jew Who Would Be King tells the improbable true story of Nathaniel Isaacs-a nineteenth-century British Jew who helped establish the Zulu kingdom only to later become a ruthless warlord and slaveholder. Isaacs' thrilling journey begins with his shipwreck on the shores of Zululand and proceeds to ports across West Africa, including Freetown, Sierra Leone. There, tasked by the colonial governor to end the local slave trade, Isaacs brokered deals that reinforced his own power.  Adam Rovner's meticulous archival research in England, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and St. Helena, coupled with his own travels to the remnants of Isaacs' island stronghold in Guinea, brings this complex figure to life. The Jew Who Would Be King is a masterful narrative that intertwines Isaacs' personal ambition with the epic machinations of early globalization. Through Isaacs' story, Rovner exposes the entangled forces of Jewish emancipation and antisemitism, slavery and abolition, the stark dichotomies of civilization and "savagery," and the creation of whiteness versus Blackness.

Examining why society should pool and spread the financial risk that individual families now bear.   Over the past sixty years, businesses and government have increasingly offloaded financial risk onto US households. The toll has pushed tens of millions of people to the financial breaking point, worsened social inequity, and jeopardized US democracy. In Sharing Risk, consumer advocate and scholar Patricia A. McCoy draws on the nation's traditions of risk sharing to argue that society should lift up families by pooling and spreading the financial risks that they now must bear alone.    Most policy discussions of financial stress on households look at the milestones of economic well-being in isolation: making ends meet, homeownership, quality health care, financing college, and a secure retirement. McCoy offers the first integrated examination of how risk sharing can enable families to realistically achieve all five goals without sacrificing one for another. She makes specific policy recommendations and shows how risk sharing, with its long and venerable history that includes Social Security and the Affordable Care Act, would provide economic well-being for all.

"Nabel's The Arsacids of Rome represents a significant advance in both Roman and ancient Iranian history. A tour de force of source criticism, this work shrewdly reevaluates the classical literary sources, skillfully putting them into dialogue with the Iranian evidence to create a masterful work of political, diplomatic, and cultural history."--Matthew P. Canepa, author of The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Landscape, Architecture, and the Built Environment "This absorbing analysis of power and kinship emancipates misunderstanding as a vital conceptual tool for ancient historians. With theoretical ambition, Nabel leads the way towards a truly inclusive study of the ancient world. A transformative work."--Albert de Jong, Professor of Religion, Leiden University "Nabel presents a bold new vision of Parthian and Roman relations at the dawn of the first millennium, contending that creative misunderstanding lay at the heart of the international détente between the two superpowers of Europe and Western Asia. In a world in which human proxies continue to play an outsized role in international relations, The Arsacids of Rome offers lessons of value still for today."--John Bodel, W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of History, Brown University "Nabel's thesis of 'pragmatic misunderstanding, ' confirmed by historical comparison and stupendous criticism of the sources, places research on the political settlements of Roman-Parthian relations on an entirely new footing."--Josef Wiesehöfer, author of Ancient Persia "Jake Nabel's book is innovative, timely, and impressive--a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Parthian studies. It will be invaluable in shedding much-needed light on the agency of the Arsacids in their interactions with Rome."--Nikolaus Overtoom, author of Reign of Arrows: The Rise of the Parthian Empire in the Hellenistic Middle East

"Jason Cons's ethnography of Bangladesh's Sundarbans is filled with fascinating insights into the multiple and often contradictory entanglements of global warming, crime, politics, development, and projected 'climate solutions.' This important work presents a detailed, ground-level portrait of the region's ongoing transformation, examining the ways in which climate change, economic uncertainty, and historical legacies are shaping its future." Amitav Ghosh, author of Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories "Both synoptic and ethnographic, Delta Futures illustrates how the Bengal Delta and its inhabitants are being 'captured' by particular actors and imaginations, struggling to navigate the 'siltscape' with ever smaller margins between climate frontier futures. A very powerful book."--Franz Krause, author of Thinking Like a River: An Anthropology of Water and Its Uses along the Kemi River, Northern Finland "In this creative and original work, Cons makes the reader think more closely about how climate change is remaking a place that could be considered a 'sentinel space' for the planetary crisis, and how people are living through it."--Nayanika Mathur, author of Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene

"Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. This study represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were collaborating closely with anthropologists who admitted freely that they could not have done their work without them. And both parties brought colonial biases into their work. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories"--