Books Books Press imprint: 2592 books
The Modern Girl Around the World
Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization
Language: English
Release Date: December 24, 2008
During the 1920s and 1930s, in cities from Beijing to Bombay, Tokyo to Berlin, Johannesburg to New York, the Modern Girl made her sometimes flashy, always fashionable appearance in city streets and cafes, in films, advertisements, and illustrated magazines. Modern Girls wore sexy clothes and high...
Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory
Reimagining a Field
Language: English
Release Date: January 4, 2001
These groundbreaking essays use critical theory to reflect on issues pertaining to modern Chinese literature and culture and, in the process, transform the definition and conceptualization of the field of modern Chinese studies itself. The wide range of topics addressed by this international group...
Staying with the Trouble
Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Language: English
Release Date: August 25, 2016
In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she...
Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer
Ambivalence and Autobiography
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2012
Throughout the twentieth century, Chinese writers have confronted the problem of creating a new literary tradition that both maintains the culturally unique aspects of a rich heritage and succeeds in promoting a new modernity. In the first book-length treatment of the topic, Wendy Larson examines...
Depression
A Public Feeling
Language: English
Release Date: November 5, 2012
In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political...
National Abjection
The Asian American Body Onstage
Language: English
Release Date: December 5, 2002
National Abjection explores the vexed relationship between "Asian Americanness" and "Americanness” through a focus on drama and performance art. Karen Shimakawa argues that the forms of Asian Americanness that appear in U.S. culture are a function of national abjection—a process...
The Irish in Us
Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture
Language: English
Release Date: February 22, 2006
Over the past decade or so, Irishness has emerged as an idealized ethnicity, one with which large numbers of people around the world, and particularly in the United States, choose to identify. Seeking to explain the widespread appeal of all things Irish, the contributors to this collection show that...
Birds of Fire
Jazz, Rock, Funk, and the Creation of Fusion
Language: English
Release Date: August 8, 2011
Birds of Fire brings overdue critical attention to fusion, a musical idiom that emerged as young musicians blended elements of jazz, rock, and funk in the late 1960s and 1970s. At the time, fusion was disparaged by jazz writers and ignored by rock critics. In the years since, it has come to be seen...
The Palm at the End of the Mind
Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2009
In many societies and for many people, religiosity is only incidentally connected with texts or theologies, church or mosque, temple or monastery. Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic work among people for whom religion is not principally a matter of faith, doctrine, or definition, Michael Jackson...
Traveling Heavy
A Memoir in between Journeys
Language: English
Release Date: April 24, 2013
Traveling Heavy is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by the master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories, she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart,...
by Aaron Abeyta
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2014
Through epistolary essays and poems, American Book Award- and Colorado Book Award-winning author and poet Aaron A. Abeyta captures the soul of the cultural and geographical crossroads of the driest quadrant in the nation, the Colorado headwaters, source to all the rivers in the southwestern and mid-western...
The Life and Traditions of the Red Man
A rediscovered treasure of Native American literature
Language: English
Release Date: February 28, 2007
Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man tells the story of his people from the first moments of creation to the earliest arrivals and eventual settlement of Europeans. Self-published by Nicolar in 1893, this is one of the few sustained narratives in English composed by a member of...
The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development
Rights, Culture, Strategy
Language: English
Release Date: September 17, 2010
Around the world, indigenous peoples use international law to make claims for heritage, territory, and economic development. Karen Engle traces the history of these claims, considering the prevalence of particular legal frameworks and their costs and benefits for indigenous groups. Her vivid account...
Beyond the Lettered City
Indigenous Literacies in the Andes
Language: English
Release Date: December 30, 2011
In Beyond the Lettered City, the anthropologist Joanne Rappaport and the art historian Tom Cummins examine the colonial imposition of alphabetic and visual literacy on indigenous groups in the northern Andes. They consider how the Andean peoples received, maintained, and subverted the conventions...