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Archipelagic cinemas : screening southeast asian modernity
Yngvesson, Dag S.
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 297 Pages
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. Archipelagic Cinemas compares trajectories of cinematic and political development across Southeast Asia from the mid-twentieth century to the present, taking the Indonesian island of Java as a key point of departure. Its "archipelagic" approach reflects a region of tanah air (land-water) where strategies of communication are shaped by the inevitability of difference and constant change. Archipelagic Cinemas foregrounds the outgrowth of local motion pictures from established regional modes of expression, such as touring vernacular theaters, known for their improvised assemblies of narratives and aesthetics from diverse places and times. Similarly, Southeast Asian movies have distinguished themselves by rejecting the imposition of a single, sovereign, or necessarily masculine point of reference. Filmmakers respond to political and social shifts with populist shows of unruliness, mockery, and often horror while challenging binary interpretations of good and evil, self and other, and on- and off-screen space. A common cinematic "matrifocal gaze" takes the blurring of women's and men's roles in the region as a tool of engagement with nationalist contests over gender and power. Together, regional cinemas set the stage for a multifarious modern visuality rooted in the unique, intertwined histories of Southeast Asian nations
Yngvesson, Dag S.
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 297 Pages
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. Archipelagic Cinemas compares trajectories of cinematic and political development across Southeast Asia from the mid-twentieth century to the present, taking the Indonesian island of Java as a key point of departure. Its "archipelagic" approach reflects a region of tanah air (land-water) where strategies of communication are shaped by the inevitability of difference and constant change. Archipelagic Cinemas foregrounds the outgrowth of local motion pictures from established regional modes of expression, such as touring vernacular theaters, known for their improvised assemblies of narratives and aesthetics from diverse places and times. Similarly, Southeast Asian movies have distinguished themselves by rejecting the imposition of a single, sovereign, or necessarily masculine point of reference. Filmmakers respond to political and social shifts with populist shows of unruliness, mockery, and often horror while challenging binary interpretations of good and evil, self and other, and on- and off-screen space. A common cinematic "matrifocal gaze" takes the blurring of women's and men's roles in the region as a tool of engagement with nationalist contests over gender and power. Together, regional cinemas set the stage for a multifarious modern visuality rooted in the unique, intertwined histories of Southeast Asian nations
eBook
Things unseen : essays on evidence, knowledge, and the late ancient world
Muehlberger, Ellen
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 198 Pages
"How do you know the nature of another person: who she is, or what she is capable of? In four exploratory essays, a seasoned historian examines the mechanisms by which ancient people came to have knowledge--not of the world and its myriad processes but about something more intimate, namely the individuals they encountered in close quarters, those they knew in everyday life. Tracing previously unfathomed structures beneath the surface of late ancient Christianity, Ellen Muehlberger reveals surprising insights about the ancient world and, by extension, the modern. Things Unseen holds treasures for scholars of early Christian studies, for historians in general, and for all those who wonder about how we know what we seem to know"-- Provided by publisher
Muehlberger, Ellen
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 198 Pages
"How do you know the nature of another person: who she is, or what she is capable of? In four exploratory essays, a seasoned historian examines the mechanisms by which ancient people came to have knowledge--not of the world and its myriad processes but about something more intimate, namely the individuals they encountered in close quarters, those they knew in everyday life. Tracing previously unfathomed structures beneath the surface of late ancient Christianity, Ellen Muehlberger reveals surprising insights about the ancient world and, by extension, the modern. Things Unseen holds treasures for scholars of early Christian studies, for historians in general, and for all those who wonder about how we know what we seem to know"-- Provided by publisher
eBook
Kigali : a new city for the end of the world
Shearer, Samuel
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 240 Pages
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the government of Rwanda hired U.S. and Singaporean design firms to transform the image of Kigali from a wounded city into a competitive destination for foreign investment. The results were promotional images of a post-conflict tabula rasa waiting to be rebuilt by foreign investors as an urban solution to climate change. To make this marketing image real, much of the actual city would need to be destroyed, its residents converted into consumer markets for green housing and service delivery systems. Kigali is an ethnography of a city that is being destroyed so that it can be rebuilt for the end of the world. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with Kigali residents as they navigate the catastrophes induced by sustainable urbanism, this book offers a searing critique of capitalist solutions to climate change and an account of the city's popular alternatives to sustainable urbanism"-- Provided by publisher
Shearer, Samuel
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 240 Pages
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the government of Rwanda hired U.S. and Singaporean design firms to transform the image of Kigali from a wounded city into a competitive destination for foreign investment. The results were promotional images of a post-conflict tabula rasa waiting to be rebuilt by foreign investors as an urban solution to climate change. To make this marketing image real, much of the actual city would need to be destroyed, its residents converted into consumer markets for green housing and service delivery systems. Kigali is an ethnography of a city that is being destroyed so that it can be rebuilt for the end of the world. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with Kigali residents as they navigate the catastrophes induced by sustainable urbanism, this book offers a searing critique of capitalist solutions to climate change and an account of the city's popular alternatives to sustainable urbanism"-- Provided by publisher
eBook
Music streaming around the world
Hesmondhalgh, David
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 272 Pages
"Music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and those offered by Chinese web giant Tencent are now central to everyday musical activity across much of the world, with enormous ramifications for musical culture in modern societies. Bringing together case studies from twelve countries, Music Streaming around the World provides the first international account of how streaming is shaping music culture today by considering the implications of streaming platforms for the production, distribution, and consumption of recorded music around the globe"-- Provided by publisher
Hesmondhalgh, David
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 272 Pages
"Music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and those offered by Chinese web giant Tencent are now central to everyday musical activity across much of the world, with enormous ramifications for musical culture in modern societies. Bringing together case studies from twelve countries, Music Streaming around the World provides the first international account of how streaming is shaping music culture today by considering the implications of streaming platforms for the production, distribution, and consumption of recorded music around the globe"-- Provided by publisher
eBook
No place like home in a new city : anti-urbanism and life in Nairobi
Ng'weno, Bettina
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 240 Pages
"Nairobi, named after the cool water that flows through it, started as a railway stop and became known as the Green City in the Sun. Yet the city has taken shape through a set of anti-urban ideologies and practices that insist that some people cannot, should not, and must not be permanent urban residents and that the city is not their home. Based on decades of experience in rapidly-changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in the New City traverses rivers, cemeteries, parks, railways, housing estates, roads and dancehalls to explore how policies of anti-urbanism manifest across time and space, shaping how people live in Nairobi. With deeply personal insights, Bettina Ng'weno highlights how people contest anti-urbanism through their insistence on building life in the city despite it, even in the current dynamic of ubiquitous demolition and reconstruction. Through quotidian practices and creative resistance, long-term residents imagine alternatives to displacement, create belonging, and build new urban futures"-- Provided by publisher
Ng'weno, Bettina
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 240 Pages
"Nairobi, named after the cool water that flows through it, started as a railway stop and became known as the Green City in the Sun. Yet the city has taken shape through a set of anti-urban ideologies and practices that insist that some people cannot, should not, and must not be permanent urban residents and that the city is not their home. Based on decades of experience in rapidly-changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in the New City traverses rivers, cemeteries, parks, railways, housing estates, roads and dancehalls to explore how policies of anti-urbanism manifest across time and space, shaping how people live in Nairobi. With deeply personal insights, Bettina Ng'weno highlights how people contest anti-urbanism through their insistence on building life in the city despite it, even in the current dynamic of ubiquitous demolition and reconstruction. Through quotidian practices and creative resistance, long-term residents imagine alternatives to displacement, create belonging, and build new urban futures"-- Provided by publisher
eBook
Atmospheric knowledge : environmentality, latency, and sonic multimodality
Abels, Birgit; Eisenlohr, Patrick
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 188 Pages
"How do we know through atmospheres? How can being affected by an atmosphere give rise to knowledge? What role does somatic, nonverbal knowledge play in how we belong to places? Atmospheric Knowledge takes up these questions through detailed analyses of practices that generate atmospheres and in which knowledge emerges through visceral intermingling with atmospheres. From combined musicological and anthropological perspectives, Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr investigate atmospheres as a compelling alternative to better-known analytics of affect by way of performative and sonic practices across a range of ethnographic settings. With particular focus on oceanic relations and sonic affectedness, Atmospheric Knowledge centers the rich affordances of sonic connections for knowing our environments"-- Provided by publisher
Abels, Birgit; Eisenlohr, Patrick
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 188 Pages
"How do we know through atmospheres? How can being affected by an atmosphere give rise to knowledge? What role does somatic, nonverbal knowledge play in how we belong to places? Atmospheric Knowledge takes up these questions through detailed analyses of practices that generate atmospheres and in which knowledge emerges through visceral intermingling with atmospheres. From combined musicological and anthropological perspectives, Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr investigate atmospheres as a compelling alternative to better-known analytics of affect by way of performative and sonic practices across a range of ethnographic settings. With particular focus on oceanic relations and sonic affectedness, Atmospheric Knowledge centers the rich affordances of sonic connections for knowing our environments"-- Provided by publisher
eBook
Local color : reckoning with blackness in the port city of Veracruz
Frierson, Karma F.
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 212 Pages
"The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico. It is a destination boasting the "happiest Carnival in the world," nightly live music, and public dancing. It is also where Blackness is an integral and celebrated part of local culture and history, but not of the individual self. In Local Color, anthropologist Karma F. Frierson follows Veracruzanos as they reckon with the Afro-Caribbean roots of their distinctive history, traditions, and culture. As residents learn to be more jarocho, or more local to Veracruz, Frierson examines how people both internalize and externalize the centrality of Blackness in their regional identity. Frierson provocatively asks readers to consider a manifestation of Mexican Blackness unconcerned with self-identification as Black in favor of the active pursuit and cultivation of a collective and regionalized Blackness"-- Provided by publisher
Frierson, Karma F.
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 212 Pages
"The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico. It is a destination boasting the "happiest Carnival in the world," nightly live music, and public dancing. It is also where Blackness is an integral and celebrated part of local culture and history, but not of the individual self. In Local Color, anthropologist Karma F. Frierson follows Veracruzanos as they reckon with the Afro-Caribbean roots of their distinctive history, traditions, and culture. As residents learn to be more jarocho, or more local to Veracruz, Frierson examines how people both internalize and externalize the centrality of Blackness in their regional identity. Frierson provocatively asks readers to consider a manifestation of Mexican Blackness unconcerned with self-identification as Black in favor of the active pursuit and cultivation of a collective and regionalized Blackness"-- Provided by publisher
eBook
The poetry of being and the prose of the world in early Greek philosophy
Wohl, Victoria
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 253 Pages
The Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, invented new ways of thinking about human life, the natural world, and structures of reality. They also developed novel ways of using language to express their thought. In this book, Victoria Wohl examines these innovations and the productive relation between them in the work of five figures: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus.
Bringing these thinkers into conversation with modern critical theorists on questions of shared concern, Wohl argues for the poetic sophistication of their work and the inextricable convergence of their aesthetic form and philosophical content. In addition to offering original readings of these fascinating figures and robust strategies for interpreting their fragmentary, rebarbative texts, this book invites readers to communicate across entrenched divisions between literature and philosophy and between antiquity and modernity.
Wohl, Victoria
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 253 Pages
The Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, invented new ways of thinking about human life, the natural world, and structures of reality. They also developed novel ways of using language to express their thought. In this book, Victoria Wohl examines these innovations and the productive relation between them in the work of five figures: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus.
Bringing these thinkers into conversation with modern critical theorists on questions of shared concern, Wohl argues for the poetic sophistication of their work and the inextricable convergence of their aesthetic form and philosophical content. In addition to offering original readings of these fascinating figures and robust strategies for interpreting their fragmentary, rebarbative texts, this book invites readers to communicate across entrenched divisions between literature and philosophy and between antiquity and modernity.
eBook
Ancient Mediterranean incarceration
Larsen, Matthew D.C.; Letteney, Mark
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 261 Pages
This book examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and economic fabric of ancient societies. Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration traces a long history of carceral practices, considering ways in which the institution of prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and imperialism. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the imprisoned, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time and call for a new historical consciousness around contemporary practices of incarceration.
Larsen, Matthew D.C.; Letteney, Mark
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 261 Pages
This book examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and economic fabric of ancient societies. Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration traces a long history of carceral practices, considering ways in which the institution of prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and imperialism. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the imprisoned, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time and call for a new historical consciousness around contemporary practices of incarceration.
eBook
The pierogi problem : cosmopolitan appetites and the reinvention of Polish food
Parasecoli, Fabio; Bachórz, Agata; Halawa, Mateusz
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 260 Pages
The culinary landscape of Poland is significantly changing, reshaped by a new generation of food producers, chefs, and media personalities. The Pierogi Problem examines people's networks, places, material culture, and media to explain how Polish tastemakers embrace context-specific strategies to localize discourses, practices, and values amid an increasingly globalized food culture. The decades following the end of Poland's socialist regime were marked by a rising interest in foreign cuisines and Western forms of consumption. Today, however, ingredients, cooking techniques, and dishes that were once considered ordinary or part of the country's uncomfortable past are being refashioned to reflect transformations in cultural hierarchies. The Pierogi Problem chronicles how and why local, traditional, and artisanal foods are reemerging for changing cosmopolitan appetites.
Parasecoli, Fabio; Bachórz, Agata; Halawa, Mateusz
University of California Press
, 2025
; English
; 260 Pages
The culinary landscape of Poland is significantly changing, reshaped by a new generation of food producers, chefs, and media personalities. The Pierogi Problem examines people's networks, places, material culture, and media to explain how Polish tastemakers embrace context-specific strategies to localize discourses, practices, and values amid an increasingly globalized food culture. The decades following the end of Poland's socialist regime were marked by a rising interest in foreign cuisines and Western forms of consumption. Today, however, ingredients, cooking techniques, and dishes that were once considered ordinary or part of the country's uncomfortable past are being refashioned to reflect transformations in cultural hierarchies. The Pierogi Problem chronicles how and why local, traditional, and artisanal foods are reemerging for changing cosmopolitan appetites.
