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Books Recently Published
The books are organized by year:
2008
HEIMDURCHSUCHUNGEN: DEUTSCHSCHWEIZER LITERATUR, GESCHICHTSPOLITIK UND ERINNERUNGSKULTUR SEIT 1965
Charlotte Schallié
(University of British Columbia, Vancouver)
Seit 1965 gibt es eine Reihe von Autoren, welche die Rolle der Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg kritisch ausleuchteten, ohne dass dieses Schreiben im öffentlichen Geschichtsbewusstsein etwas bewirkt hätte. Wenn man die Verknüpfung von Geschichts- und Sprachbewusstsein als Hypothese aufrechterhält, könnte somit behauptet werden, dass es der Literatur nicht gelang, für die Vergangenheit eine Sprache zu finden, die in der breiten Öffentlichkeit eine Erinnerungsarbeit freisetzen konnte.1996 entbrannte in den Schweizer Tageszeitungen eine Debatte, die zu einem beinahe schlagartigen Anschwellen in der öffentlichen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Verhalten der Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg führte. Erstmals in der Schweizer Nachkriegsgeschichte erfolgte die massenmediale Verbreitung der kollektiven Erinnerungen so intensiv, dass eine Breitenwirkung nicht ausblieb. Die Kriminalisierung der jüngsten Vergangenheit wurde zum integralen Bestandteil des Tagesgeschehens und erregte die Gemüter der Journalisten, Politiker, Historiker und der allgemeinen Leserschaft. Gerade in der individuellen Auseinandersetzung mit einer nationalen Schuld, persönlicher Verantwortlichkeit und in der Suche nach moralischer Entlastung zeigte sich aber auch, dass für den Umgang mit einer schwierigen Vergangenheit kein sprachliches Repertoire vorhanden war, das diese Thematik zu bewältigen vermochte. Die Realisierung, dass es an der sprachlichen Souveränität fehlte und dass die schweizerischen Gedächtnisdiskurse eine eigene Diskurssprache benötigten, führte dazu, die Vergangenheitsdebatten auf neue Fragestellungen auszuweiten, unter anderem auf die Suche nach früheren Formen der Erinnerungsarbeit, deren Modelle sprachlicher Bewältigung für die Gegenwart aufschlussreich sein könnten.
Die Autorin untersucht, was die Deutschschweizer Nachkriegsliteratur historiographisch und gedächtnispolitisch leistet und wo ihre Möglichkeiten und Grenzen liegen. Dabei geht es nicht darum, diese Literatur zu rehabilitieren. Vielmehr geht es um die Frage, wie diese Literatur die in die Zeit des Zweiten Weltkrieges zurückführenden Erinnerungsspuren weiterverfolgt und sichtbar macht, was im kollektiven Gedächtnis in der Nachkriegszeit marginalisiert blieb.
COMING TO TERMS WITH THE QUR'AN
Khaleel Mohammed and Andrew Rippin
(Islamic Publications International, 2008)
This collection of essays, organized as part of the celebration of the seventy-fifth birthday of Professor Issa J. Boullata of the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, is devoted to elucidating the many dimensions of understanding the Qur'an. Issa Boullata has spent his scholarly career teaching and writing prolifically on Arabic Literature - especially the Qur'an, inspiring a generation of scholars in their reflections and analyses of the qualities of the Muslim sacred test.
Many of those students, along with a group of friends, have contributed essays to this collection. They constitute a tribute to the way in which Issa Boullata has affected the academic study of the Qur'an in Canada, the United States, Indonesia, and around the world. When the Middle East Studies Association awarded its 2004 Mentoring Award to Boullata, he was commended for being "an outstanding mentor who has introduced so many to the joys of scholarship and who has, through his generous sharing of knowledge, encouraged the careers of generations of students and colleagues." The fourteen essays of this volume are testimony to that, each of them devoted to explicating the Qur'an in its historical and contemporary contexts.
THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD
John Peter Oleson
(Oxford University Press, 2008)
Nearly every aspect of daily life in the Mediterranean world and Europe during the florescence of the Greek and Roman cultures is relevant to the topics of engineering and technology. This volume highlights both the accomplishments of the ancient societies and the remaining research problems, and stimulates further progress in the history of ancient technology. The subject matter of the book is the technological framework of the Greek and Roman cultures from ca. 800 B.C. through ca. A.D. 500 in the circum-Mediterranean world and Northern Europe. Each chapter discusses a technology or family of technologies from an analytical rather than descriptive point of view, providing a critical summation of our present knowledge of the Greek and Roman accomplishments in the technology concerned and the evolution of their technical capabilities over the chronological period. Each presentation reviews the issues and recent contributions, and defines the capacities and accomplishments of the technology in the context of the society that used it, the available "technological shelf," and the resources consumed. These studies introduce and synthesize the results of excavation or specialized studies. The chapters are organized in sections progressing from sources (written and representational) to primary (e.g., mining, metallurgy, agriculture) and secondary (e.g., woodworking, glass production, food preparation, textile production and leather-working) production, to technologies of social organization and interaction (e.g., roads, bridges, ships, harbors, warfare and fortification), and finally to studies of general social issues (e.g., writing, timekeeping, measurement, scientific instruments, attitudes toward technology and innovation) and the relevance of ethnographic methods to the study of classical technology. The unrivalled breadth and depth of this volume make it the definitive reference work for students and academics across the spectrum of classical studies.
THE ISLAMIC WORLD
Edited by Andrew Rippin
(Routledge, 2008)
The Islamic World is an outstanding guide to Islamic faith and culture in all its geographical and historical diversity. Written by a distinguished international team of Islamic scholars, it elucidates the history, philosophy and practice of one of the world's great religious traditions. Its grounding in contemporary scholarship makes it an ideal reference source for students and scholars alike.
Edited by Andrew Rippin, a leading scholar of Islam, the volume covers the political, geographical, religious, intellectual, cultural and social worlds of Islam, and offers insight into all aspects of Muslim life including the Qur’an and law, philosophy, science and technology, art, literature, and film and much else. It explores the concept of an ‘Islamic’ world: what makes it distinctive and how uniform is that distinctiveness across Muslim geographical regions and through history?
DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS
Greg Blue, Timothy Brook and Jerome Bourgon
(Harvard University Press, 2008)
In a public square in Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin was executed before a crowd of onlookers. He was among the last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi. Called by Western observers "death by a thousand cuts" or "death by slicing," this penalty was reserved for the very worst crimes in imperial China. A unique interdisciplinary history, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal contexts of Chinese tortures and executions from the tenth century until lingchis abolition in 1905. The authors then turn their attention to an in-depth investigation of "oriental" tortures in the Western imagination. While early modern Europeans often depicted Chinese institutions as rational, nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers consumed pictures of lingchi executions as titillating curiosities and evidence of moral inferiority. By examining these works in light of European conventions associated with despotic government, Christian martyrdom, and ecstatic suffering, the authors unpack the stereotype of innate Chinese cruelty and explore the mixture of fascination and revulsion that has long characterized the Wests encounter with "other" civilizations. Compelling and thought-provoking, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" questions the logic by which states justify tormenting individuals and the varied ways by which human beings have exploited the symbolism of bodily degradation for political aims.
A SILENT REVOLUTION?: GENDER AND WEALTH IN ENGLISH CANADA, 1860-1930
Peter Baskerville
(McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008)
Peter Baskerville situates women in their immediate gendered and familial environments as well as within broader legal, financial, spatial, temporal, and historiographical contexts. He analyses women's probates, wills, land ownership, holdings of real and chattel mortgages, investment in stocks and bonds, and self employment, revealing that women controlled wealth to an extent similar to that of most men and invested and managed wealth in increasingly similar, and in some cases more aggressive, ways.
Traditional historiography has highlighted women's fight to acquire cultural and political rights during this period, but it is less well known that women acquired and exercised many economic rights as well. In doing so they put pressure on men to reconceptualize the notion of middle class and women's proper place.
MODERNISM AND THEORY: A CRITICAL DEBATE
Edited by Stephen Ross
Modernism and Theory boldly asks what – if any – role theory has to play in the new modernist studies. Separated into three sections, each with a clear introduction, this collection of new essays from leading critics outlines ongoing debates on the nature of modernist culture.
This collection
- Examines aesthetic and methodological links between modernist literature and theory.
- Addresses questions of the importance of theory to our understanding of ‘modernism’ and modernism as a literary category.
- Considers intersections of modernism and theory within ethics, ecocriticism and the avant-garde.
Concluding with an afterword from Fredric Jameson, the book makes use of an innovative dialogic format, offering a direct and engaging experience of the current debate in modernist studies.
Contributors include: Charles F. Altieri, C.D. Blanton, Ian Buchanan, Pamela Caughie, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Thomas S. Davis, Oleg Gelikman, Jane Goldman, Ben Highmore, Fredric Jameson, Martin Jay, Bonnie Kime Scott, Neil Levi, Anneleen Masschelein, Scott McCracken, Andrew John Miller, Stephen Ross, Roger Rothman, Morag Shiach, Susan Stanford Friedman, Allan Stoekl, Hilary Thompson and Glenn Willmott.
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PAPERS AND BOOKS ON THE HISTORY OF THE LOWER YANGZI REGION, 1900-2000
Zhongping Chen
(Beijing Library Press,
2008)
This is a bibliography of Chinese papers and books that appeared in the twentieth century, constituting social scientific analyses of the history of the Lower Yangzi region. It provides a basic guide to scholarly works on the history, geography, society, economy, culture, regional politics and important persons of the heartland of China over a period of more than 5,000 years.
A NATIONAL HERO AND UPRIGHT OFFICIAL IN MING CHING
Zhongping Chen
(Zhejiang Classic Press,
2008)
This is a historical bibliography of Yu Qian (1398-1457), a statesman of Ming China (1368-1644). As an upright official, Yu always showed sincere concern for the well-being of the people, lived a frugal life himself, and refused to bribe powerful eunuchs. His defensive war around the imperial capital of Beijing in 1449 resulted in the defeat of another Mongol invasion and safeguarded national unification. But Yu eventually died a tragic death after a palace coup restored the Ming emperor he had helped save from the Mongol prison.
MAKING AND MOVING KNOWLEDGE
John Sutton Lutz and Barbara Neis, Editors
(McGill-Queen's University Press,
2008)
Whether the challenge is global warming, epidemic disease, poverty, environmental degradation, or social fragmentation, research efforts are wasted without efficient and understandable processes to create and transfer knowledge to policy makers, interested groups, and communities.
How to maximize the impact of scholarly research and find ways to combine it with practical knowledge already available in lay communities are key issues in a world threatened with social-ecological disasters. Making and Moving Knowledge focuses directly on how knowledge is either created and transferred or blocked and atrophied. Knowledge generated by universities and governments is placed beside practical knowledge from coastal aboriginal and non-aboriginal communities and authors analyze how different kinds of knowledge flow in different directions.
Concentrating on the intellectually fertile spaces at the edges of disciplines and the rich socio-ecological interfaces where land meets sea, authors demonstrate their commitment to knowledge transfer in their work, showing how knowledge transfer can be considered theoretically, methodologically, and practically.
MAKÚK: A NEW HISTORY OF ABORIGINAL-WHITE RELATIONS
John Sutton Lutz
(UBC Press, Vancouver,
2008)
The history of aboriginal-settler interactions in Canada continues to haunt the national imagination. Despite billions of dollars spent on the “Indian problem,” Aboriginal People remain the poorest in the country. Because the stereotype of the “lazy Indian” is never far from the surface, many Canadians wonder if the problem lay with the “Indians” themselves.
John Lutz traces Aboriginal People’s involvement in the new economy, and their displacement from it, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the 1970s. Drawing on an extensive array of oral histories, manuscripts, newspaper accounts, biographies, and statistical analysis, Lutz shows that Aboriginal people flocked to the workforce and prospered in the late nineteenth century. He argues that the roots of today’s widespread unemployment and “welfare dependency” date only from the 1950s, when deliberate and inadvertent policy choices – what Lutz terms the “white problem” – drove Aboriginal People out of the capitalist, wage, and subsistence economies, offering them welfare as “compensation.”
Makúk invites readers into a dialogue with the past with visual imagery and an engaging narrative that gives a voice to Aboriginal Peoples and other historical figures. It is a book for students, scholars, policymakers, and a wide public who care to bring the spectres of the past into the light of the present.
PIRATES: A HISTORY
Tim Travers
(Tempus Publishing,
2008)
The popular conception of piracy revolves around the swashbuckling adventures that took place in the Caribbean in the 1500s, as well as the so-called Golden Age of piracy that occurred from the 1660s to the 1720s. In fact, piracy has a much longer and broader history to its name. This comprehensive history covers piracy from its origins in the ancient and classical periods and follows its evolution through the Middle Ages before treating in fine detail the era of the Caribbean and the Golden Age. With sections also addressing the infamous Barbary corsairs, Chinese and Pacific Ocean pirates, and modern piracy, this is the most comprehensive history of high-seas banditry to date.
HISTOIRES D’ENFANTS. REPRÉSENTATIONS ET DISCOURS DE L’ENFANCE SOUS L’ANCIEN RÉGIME
Hélène Cazes
(Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 2008)
Études réunies et éditées par Hélène Cazes
Parler d’enfance est un retour: retour personnel du souvenir à la recherche du temps révolu et, pour le discours historique touchant l’Ancien Régime, retour vers des représentations du monde où l’enfance ne porte pas encore le rêve d’une innocence originelle aux infinies promesses. Creusant la brèche ouverte en 1960 par Philippe Ariès, les études ici rassemblées ne prétendent pas donner la parole aux enfants de ces époques, dont seules les voix adultes nous parviennent; car, muet jusque dans son nom – infans signifie, littéralement, «sans parole»–, l’enfant n’apparaît que dans les miroirs que lui tendent les adultes. Hagiographes et biographes à l’affût de promesses annonciatrices, autobiographes et essayistes à la recherche de leur genèse, théologiens et pédagogues en quête d’une définition de l’humanité, médecins et polygraphes à la poursuite d’une classification des âges de la vie, les écrivains de l’enfance ici évoqués inventent et réinventent sans cesse cet amont de la raison. Déclinée dans ces représentations sur les modes de la faiblesse ou de l’animalité, mais aussi de la Grâce et de la Rédemption, l’enfance inscrit ainsi, au cœur des discours et des récits, la silencieuse et mystérieuse origine de la personne. Au point aveugle des kaléidoscopes de l’imaginaire, se lit alors non pas l’essence d’un enfant abstrait mais la multitude des «histoires» d’enfants.
THE CRISIS OF IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE FILM: PERSONAL, CULTURAL, NATIONAL
Timothy Iles
(Brill's Japanese Studies Library, 2008)
This study, from a variety of analytical approaches, examines ways in which contemporary Japanese film presents a critical engagement with Japan's project of modernity to demonstrate the 'crisis' in conceptions of identity. The work discusses gender, the family, travel, the 'everyday' as horror, and ways in which animated films can offer an ideal space in which an ideal conception of identity may emerge and thrive. It presents close, theoretically-informed textual analyses of the thematic issues contemporary Japanese films raise, through a wide range of genres, from comedy, family drama, and animation, to science fiction and horrror by directors such as Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Morita Yoshimitsu, Miike Takashi, Oshii Mamoru, Kon Satoshi, and Miyazaki Hayao, in language that is accessible but precise.
EXPRESSIONS CULTERELLES DES FRANCOPHONIES
Nicole
Côté, Ellen Chapco, Peter Dorrington et Sheila Petty. Introduction, Sada Niang.
(Editions Nota Bene, 2008)
Ce livre propose des texts portent sure des oeuvres contemporaines des francophonies canadienne, africaine et caribéenne. Sous des angles différents sont examinés des thèmes récurrents propres à ces cultures minoritaires francophones: prédominance de l’space, modalités de réécriture de l’histoire, choix et nature de la langue de creation, rapport de oeuvres de fabulation aux institutions politiques, polyphonie de ces oeuvres, rapports au père, la mére, mais aussi aux ancêtres et à soi-même.
Les formes étudiées sont aussi diverses que la photographie, la littérature, la peinture et le cinéma, de sorte qu’au-delà des genres et des styles, les analyses se font écho et entretiennent un dialogue. Toutes abordent des aspects de ce que François Paré désigne comme les littératures ou les formes artistiques de l’exiguïté, c’est-à-dire des oeuvres conçues dans une langue de creation, dans des formes canoniques qui servent à asseoir la supériorité de l’Autre. De fait, la principale unité de ce recueil réside dans les conditions particulières de production et de diffusion des oeuvres étudiées, qui toutes partagent, avec les institutions tant politiques que culturelles, des rapports équivoques.
Avec les texts de: Nicole Côté, Marine Delvaux, Peter Dorrington, Jeanne Garane, Lucie Lequin, Catherine Mavrikakis, Sada Niang, Ibio Nzunguba, François Ouellet, Françios Paré, Janusz Przychodzen, Christine Ramsay, Danielle Schaub et Alexie Tcheuyap.
ZHAO ZIYANG AND CHINA'S POLITICAL FUTURE
Guoguang Wu and Helen Lansdowne
(Routledge, 2008)
What legacies have previous reformers like Zhao Ziyang left to today’s China? Does China have feasible political alternatives to today’s repressive ‘market Leninism’ and corrupt ‘state capitalism’? Does Zhao’s legacy indicate an alternative to the past and for the future?
For those who are familiar with the development of Chinese politics since the reform years, Zhao is now widely regarded as a major architect of the nation’s profound transition. His contributions to China’s post-Mao development are rich and multi faceted, including those on rural and urban economic reforms extending to accountable governance, liberal policies concerning domestic affairs and China’s foreign relations.
Featuring contributions from leading experts in the field such as Richard Baum and Xiaonong Cheng this book explores the historical development of China’s political reform issues, and how his political legacies are relevant to China’s political development since the 1980s to the future. Using recently translated recollection articles by veteran reformers who worked with Zhao in the 1980s, like Du Runsheng, An Zhiwen, Li Rui, Bao Tong, Zhao Ziyang and China's Political Future is a valuable contribution for students and researchers interested in the Chinese politics, Asian politics and political development in Asia.
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