Books published by University of Washington Press

The hugely popular Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884¿1934) is an emblematic figure of Japan¿s rapidly changing cultural milieu in the early twentieth century. His graphic works include leftist and antiwar illustrations in socialist bulletins, wrenching portrayals of Tokyo after the Great Kant¿ Earthquake of 1923, and fashionable images of beautiful women¿referred to as ¿Yumeji-style beauties¿¿in books and magazines that targeted a new demographic of young female consumers. Yumeji also played a key role in the reinvention of the woodblock medium. As his art and designs proliferated in Japan¿s mass media, Yumeji became a recognizable brand.In the first full-length English-language study of Yumeji¿s work, Nozomi Naoi examines the artist¿s role in shaping modern Japanese identity. Addressing his output from the start of his career in 1905 to the 1920s, when his productivity peaked, Yumeji Modern introduces for the first time in English translation a substantial body of Yumeji¿s texts, including diary entries, poetry, essays, and commentary, alongside his illustrations. Naoi situates Yumeji¿s graphic art within the emerging media landscape from 1900s through the 1910s, when novel forms of reprographic communication helped create new spaces of visual culture and image circulation. Yumeji¿s legacy and his present-day following speak to the broader, ongoing implications of his work with respect to commercial art, visual culture, and print media.

Naomi B. Sokoloff is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of Washington. She is the author of Imagining the Child in Modern Jewish Fiction and coeditor of Boundaries of Jewish Identity. Nancy E. Berg is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at Washington University and the author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq.

Reframes standard accounts of American history based on the simple but radical premise that historical events are shaped by natural circumstances. From the natural philosophy of the founding fathers to environmental forces behind Brown v Board of Education, this book focuses on nature that reveals a perspective on the familiar icons of US history.

This reexamination of the controversial role Emperor Hirohito played during the Pacific War gives particular attention to the question: If the emperor could not stop Japan from going to war with the Allied Powers in 1941, why was he able to play a crucial role in ending the war in 1945? Drawing on previously unavailable primary sources, Noriko Kawamura traces Hirohito's actions from the late 1920s to the end of the war, analyzing the role Hirohito played in Japan's expansion. Emperor Hirohito emerges as a conflicted man who struggled throughout the war to deal with the undefined powers bestowed upon him as a monarch, often juggling the contradictory positions and irreconcilable differences advocated by his subordinates. Kawamura shows that he was by no means a pacifist, but neither did he favor the reckless wars advocated by Japan's military leaders.

Spotlights innovative design,makes use of environmentally friendly technologies, and looks at projects that aim to achieve social as well as aesthetic goals

Includes full-page illustrations of works by more than fifty internationally recognized photographers

Takes a fresh look at Orientalism by shifting its centre from Europe to Ottoman Istanbul and thinking about art in terms of exchange, reciprocity, and comparative imperialisms

In recent years, discussion of the colonial period in Korea has centered mostly on the degree of exploitation or development that took place domestically, while international aspects have been relatively neglected. Colonial discourse, such as characterization of Korea as a ¿hermit nation,¿ was promulgated around the world by Japan and haunts us today. The colonization of Korea also transformed Japan and has had long-term consequences for post¿World War II Northeast Asia as a whole.Through sections that explore Japan¿s images of Korea, colonial Koreans¿ perceptions of foreign societies and foreign relations, and international perceptions of colonial Korea, the essays in this volume show the broad influence of Japanese colonialism not simply on the Korean peninsula, but on how the world understood Japan and how Japan understood itself. When initially incorporated into the Japanese empire, Korea seemed lost to Japan¿s designs, yet Korean resistance to colonial rule, along with later international fear of Japanese expansion, led the world to rethink the importance of Korea as a future sovereign nation.

As China struggled to redefine itself at the turn of the twentieth century, nationalism, religion, and material culture intertwined in revealing ways. This phenomenon is evident in the twin biographies of North Chinäs leading Catholic bishop of the time, Alphonse Favier (1837¿1905), and the Beitang cathedral, epicenter of the Roman Catholic mission in China through incarnations that began in 1701. After its relocation and reconstruction under Favier¿s supervision, the cathedral¿and Favier¿miraculously survived a two-month siege in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Featuring a French Gothic Revival design augmented by Chinese dragon¿shaped gargoyles, marble balustrades in the style of Daoist and Buddhist temples, and other Chinese aesthetic flourishes, Beitang remains an icon of Sino-Western interaction.Anthony Clark draws on archival materials from the Vatican and collections in France, Italy, China, Poland, and the United States to trace the prominent role of French architecture in introducing Western culture and Catholicism to China. A principal device was the aesthetic imagined by the Gothic Revival movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the premier example of this in China being the Beitang cathedral. Bishop Favier¿s biography is a lens through which to examine Western missionaries¿ role in colonial endeavors and their complex relationship with the Chinese communities in which they lived and worked.

From Kara Walker¿s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty¿s bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead¿s literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele¿s body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary artistic works that present, like musical deep cuts, some challenging ¿alternate takes¿ on American slavery. These artists deliberately confront and negotiate the psychic and representational legacies of slavery to imagine possibilities and change. The essays in this volume explore the conceptions of freedom and blackness that undergird these narratives, critically examining how artists growing up in the post¿Civil Rights era have nuanced slavery in a way that is distinctly different from the first wave of neo-slave narratives that emerged from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination positions post-blackness as a productive category of analysis that brings into sharp focus recent developments in black cultural productions across various media. These ten essays investigate how millennial black cultural productions trouble long-held notions of blackness by challenging limiting scripts. They interrogate political as well as formal interventions into established discourses to demonstrate how explorations of black identities frequently go hand in hand with the purposeful refiguring of slavery¿s prevailing tropes, narratives, and images.A V Ethel Willis White Book

Tens of thousands of epitaphs, or funerary biographies, survive from imperial China. Engraved on stone and placed in a grave, they typically focus on the deceased's biography and exemplary words and deeds, expressing the survivors' longing for the dead. These epitaphs provide glimpses of the lives of women, men who did not leave a mark politically, and children--people who are not well documented in more conventional sources such as dynastic histories and local gazetteers.This anthology of translations makes available funerary biographies covering nearly two thousand years, from the Han dynasty through the nineteenth century, selected for their value as teaching material for courses in Chinese history, literature, and women's studies as well as world history. Because they include revealing details about personal conduct, families, local conditions, and social, cultural, and religious practices, these epitaphs illustrate ways of thinking and the realities of daily life. Most can be read and analyzed on multiple levels, and they stimulate investigation of topics such as the emotional tenor of family relations, rituals associated with death, Confucian values, women's lives as written about by men, and the use of sources assumed to be biased. These biographies will be especially effective when combined with more readily available primary sources such as official documents, religious and intellectual discourses, and anecdotal stories, promising to generate provocative discussion of literary genre, the ways historians use sources, and how writers shape their accounts.

Roger Sale (1932¿2017) came to Seattle in 1962 to teach at the University of Washington, where he was a literature professor for nearly forty years. A prolific writer for publications such as the New York Review of Books and Seattle Weekly, Sale was the author of thirteen books, including Modern Heroism: Essays on D. H. Lawrence, William Empson, and J. R. R. Tolkien; Fairy Tales and After; On Writing; and Seeing Seattle. Host of Mossback¿s Northwest on KCTS9, Knute Berger is an award-winning columnist for Crosscut and Seattle magazine and author of two books: Pugetopolis: A Mossback Takes on Growth Addicts, Weather Wimps, and the Myth of Seattle Nice and Space Needle: The Spirit of Seattle.

Lei Xue is associate professor of art history at Oregon State University.

Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--Columbia University, 2012, titled Making the modern slum: housing, mobility, and poverty in Bombay and its peripheries.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Christopher Howell is author of a dozen poetry collections, including Love¿s Last Number, Gaze, and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected. He has received numerous honors, including the Washington State Book Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust, and three Pushcart Prizes. A military journalist during the Vietnam War, he has been for many years director and principal editor for Lynx House Press and now lives in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches in Eastern Washington University¿s master of fine arts in creative writing program.

From fish and fiddleheads to salmonberries and Spam, Alaskan cuisine spans the two extremes of locally abundant wild foods and shelf-stable ingredients produced thousands of miles away. As immigration shapes Anchorage into one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the country, Alaskäs changing food culture continues to reflect the tension between self-reliance and longing for distant places or faraway homes. Alaska Native communities express their cultural resilience in gathering, processing, and sharing wild food; these seasonal food practices resonate with all Alaskans who come together to fish and stock their refrigerators in preparation for the long winter. In warm home kitchens and remote cafés, Alaskan food brings people together, creating community and excitement in canning salmon, slicing muktuk, and savoring fresh berry pies.This collection features interviews, photographs, and recipes by James Beard Award¿winning journalist and third-generation Alaskan Julia O¿Malley. Touching on issues of subsistence, climate change, cultural mixing and remixing, innovation, interdependence, and community, The Whale and the Cupcake reveals how Alaskans connect with the land and each other through food.