Search results for ""University of Washington Press""

Without a recognized reservation or homeland, what keeps an Indian tribe together? How can members of the tribe understand their heritage and pass it on to younger generations? For Christine Dupres, a member of the Cowlitz tribe of southwestern Washington State, these questions were personal as well as academic. In Being Cowlitz: How One Tribe Renewed and Sustained Its Identity, what began as the author’s search for her own history opened a window into the practices and narratives that sustained her tribe’s identity even as its people were scattered over several states. Dupres argues that the best way to understand a tribe is through its stories. From myths and spiritual traditions defining the people’s relationship to the land to the more recent history of cultural survival and engagement with the U.S. government, Dupres shows how stories are central to the ongoing process of forming a Cowlitz identity. Through interviews and profiles of political leaders, Dupres reveals the narrative and rhetorical strategies that protect and preserve the memory and culture of the tribe. In the process, she creates a blueprint for cultural preservation that current and future Cowlitz tribal leaders--as well as other indigenous activists--can use to keep tribal memories alive.

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Elizabeth Catlett, born in Washington, DC, in 1915, is widely acknowledged as a major presence in African American art, and her work is celebrated as a visually eloquent expression of African American identity and pride in cultural heritage. But this is not the whole story. She has lived in Mexico for 50 years, as a citizen of that country since 1962, and she and her husband, artist Francisco Mora, have raised their children there. For 20 years she was a member of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphic Arts Workshop) and she was the first woman professor of sculpture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her extraordinary career has stretched from her years as a student at Howard University during the 1930s through various political and social movements—including the Chicago Renaissance of the 1940s, the Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Mexican Public Art Movement, and feminism—which have informed her art. This richly illustrated and informative monograph is the first to document the full range of Catlett’s life and work. In addition to thoroughly researching primary source materials and to critiquing individual art works with sensitivity and erudition, the author has conducted numerous interviews with Catlett and has analyzed with clarity the political context of her work and her diverse sympathies and allegiances. Herzog examines key artistic influences and shows how Catlett transformed an extraordinary stylistic vocabulary into a socially charged statement. In tracing Catlett’s long and continuing career as a graphic artist and sculptor in Mexico, Herzog explores an important period in Catlett’s life between the 1950s and the 1970s about which almost nothing is known in the United States. She examines the “Mexicanness” in Catlett’s work in its fluent relationship to the underlying and constant sense of African American identity she brought with her to Mexico. Herzog’s solidly grounded interpretation offers a new way to understand Catlett’s work and reveals this artist as a fascinating and pivotal intercultural figure whose powerful art manifests her firm belief that the visual arts can play a role in the construction of a meaningful identity, both transnational and ethnically grounded.

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In the Ottoman Empire, many members of the ruling elite were legally slaves of the sultan and therefore could, technically, be ordered to surrender their labor, their property, or their lives at any moment. Nevertheless, slavery provided a means of social mobility, conferring status and political power within the military, the bureaucracy, or the domestic household and formed an essential part of patronage networks. Ehud R. Toledano’s exploration of slavery from the Ottoman viewpoint is based on extensive research in British, French, and Turkish archives and offers rich, original, and important insights into Ottoman life and thought. In an attempt to humanize the narrative and take it beyond the plane of numbers, tables and charts, Toledano examines the situations of individuals representing the principal realms of Ottoman slavery, female harem slaves, the sultan’s military and civilian kuls, court and elite eunuchs, domestic slaves, Circassian agricaultural slaves, slave dealers, and slave owners. Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East makes available new and significantly revised studies on nineteenth-century Middle Eastern slavery and suggests general approaches to the study of slavery in different cultures.

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We know the shape of the world today because ships of the mid-fiftennth to mid-eighteenth centuries, driven by wind and human muscle, were navigated into every last bay and estuary on Earth searching for new riches. First the take was spices and other exotic products of the Orient, then gold and ivory from Africa, followed by beaver pelts, coffee, and goods from the Americas, and finally luxurious sea otter pelts from the Northwest Coast of North America. The ships that made these voyages evolved over time and their navigators benefited from centuries of accumulated experience. Voyages recounts the extraordinary feats of more than twenty of Europe's most daring maritime explorers as they ventured into the unknown and braved uncharted territory, including Christopher Columbus, Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama, John Cabot, Giovanni da Verrazzano, Jacques Cartier, Martin Frobisher, Ferdinand Magellan, Francis Drake, and James Cook. Exquisitely illustrated with almost 100 of Gordon Miller's paintings, many detailed maps, and ship drawings, Voyages reveals the evolution of maritime technologies, the rise and fall of maritime empires, the extreme dangers of sailing uncharted waters, the courage and brutality of life at sea, and the discovery of new continents, cultures, and products. Through their voyages, these ships and sailors defined the true dimensions of the oceans and coastlines of the world.

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In this important work, Frances Colpitt chronicles the Minimal art movement of the 1960s. Maintaining the original spirit of the period--enthusiasm for innovation and a passionate commitment to intellectual inquiry--Colpitt provides an excellent documentary history that is both thorough and nonpartisan. Using a metacritical approach that embraces critical writings of the artists themselves, interviews by herself and the others, and a generous sampling of illustrations, Colpitt sets foth the issues and arguments and identifies key concepts that are crucial to an understanding of Minimal art. These include the frequent use of industrial materials and techniques; nonrelational principles of composition; and theoretical issues of scale, presence and thatricality. Also discussed are issues of abstraction, illusion, and reductionism as revealed in the writing and artistic productions of such leading innovators as Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris, among others. An appendix lists major exhibitions and reviews.

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One of the most important political transitions to occur in South Asia in recent decades was the ouster of Nepal’s monarchy in 2006 and the institution of a democratic secular republic in 2008. Based on extensive ethnographic research between 2003 and 2015, Making New Nepal provides a snapshot of an activist generation’s political coming-of-age during a decade of civil war and ongoing democratic street protests. Amanda Snellinger illustrates this generation’s entrée into politics through the stories of five young revolutionary activists as they shift to working within the newly established party system. She explores youth in Nepali national politics as a social mechanism for political reproduction and change, demonstrating the dynamic nature of democracy as a radical ongoing process.

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From his youthful second ascent of the north ridge of Mount Kennedy in the Yukon’s Saint Elias Range, an in-and-out on skis for which he had not entirely learned how to ski, to a recent excursion across the Harding Icefield conceived under the influence of rain and whiskey, David Stevenson chronicles several decades of a life unified by a preoccupation with climbing. Reflective and literary, and also entertaining and funny, his accounts move across the great climbing locations of the western United States, with forays into the spires of the Alps, and slip freely in time from the author’s childhood, when he could not wait to head west, to his adulthood, with a wife and two sons, in which he still feels compelled by a longing to be on the heights.

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Key imperial and royal courts--in Han, Tang, and Song dynasty China; medieval and renaissance Europe; and Heian and Muromachi Japan--are examined in this comparative and interdisciplinary volume as loci of power and as entities that establish, influence, or counter the norms of a larger society. Contributions by twelve scholars are organized into sections on the rhetoric of persuasion, taste, communication, gender, and natural nobility. Writing from the perspectives of literature, history, and philosophy, the authors examine the use and purpose of rhetoric in their respective areas. In Rhetoric of Persuasion, we see that in both the third-century court of the last Han emperor and the fourteenth-century court of Edward II, rhetoric served to justify the deposition of a ruler and the establishment of a new regime. Rhetoric of Taste examines the court’s influence on aesthetic values in China and Japan, specifically literary tastes in ninth-century China, the melding of literary and historical texts into a sort of national history in fifteenth-century Japan, and the embrace of literati painting innovations in twelfth-century China during a time when the literati themselves were out of favor. Rhetoric of Communication considers official communications to the throne in third-century China, the importance of secret communications in Charlemagne’s court, and the implications of the use of classical Chinese in the Japanese court during the eighth and ninth centuries. Rhetoric of Gender offers the biography of a former Han emperor’s favorite consort and studies the metaphorical possibilities of Tang palace plaints. Rhetoric of Natural Nobility focuses on Dante’s efforts to confirm his nobility of soul as a poet, surmounting his non-noble ancestry, and the development of the texts that supported the political ideologies of the fifteenth-century Burgundian dukes Philip the Good and Charles the Bold.

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Lijiang, a once-sleepy market town in southwest China, has become a magnet for tourism since the mid-1990s. Drawing on stories about taxi drivers, reluctant brides, dogmeat, and shamanism, Emily Chao illustrates how biopolitics and the essentialization of difference shape the ways in which Naxi residents represent and interpret their social world. The vignettes presented here are lively examples of the cultural reverberations that have occurred throughout contemporary China in the wake of its emergence as a global giant. With particular attention to the politics of gender, ethnicity, and historical representation, Chao reveals how citizens strategically imagine, produce, and critique a new moral economy in which the market and neoliberal logic are preeminent.

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This volume continues the detailed examination of the British Library Kharosthi scrolls--extremely fragile and brittle fragments of manuscript on birch-bark rolls. Although their provenance is uncertain, there are strong indications that they came from Hadda in eastern Afghanistan and were most likely written in the early first century A.D. during the reign of the Saka rulers, making them the oldest known Buddhist manuscripts. Fragments 16 and 25 are two long, relatively narrow fragments that obviously belong to the same scroll. Two texts were written on the scroll, each by a different scribe. The first text, referred to as the Gandhari London Dharmapada, represents an anthology of verses well known in the Buddhist tradition. The second text is a series of stories concerning previous births of the Buddha and of some of his disciples. For more information go to the Early Buddhist Manuscript Project web site at http://www.ebmp.org/

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David Thompson (1770-1857) is considered by many to have been the most important surveyor of North America. His achievements -- mapping the Saskatchewan River, the great bend of the Missouri River, the Great Lakes and the headwaters of the Mississippi as well as the Columbia watershed -- are the stuff of legend. Late in life Thompson wrote a retrospective memoir of his explorations, but the best way to understand his years in the fur trade is by reading his journals. In her new Preface to the Bicentennial Edition of Columbia Journals, Barbara Belyea considers the fur-trade context of journals, reports, and memoirs that shaped both Thompson’s perception of contemporary people, places, and events and our own perception of Thompson’s historical importance. In Columbia Journals, the fur trader, explorer, and cartographer records his exploration of the Columbia River basin and his efforts on behalf of the North West Company to establish good trade routes across the Rocky Mountains. The journals provide a detailed picture of the fur business during its period of greatest expansion, offer a glimpse of Native culture at the moment of contact with Europeans, and describe landscapes that have since been transformed by settlement and industry. Thompson’s hand-drawn maps preserve a contemporary image of the country he explored.

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This volume explores major developments in Japanese law over the latter half of the twentieth century and looks ahead to the future. Modeled on the classic work Law in Japan: The Legal Order in a Changing Society (1963), edited by Arthur Taylor von Mehren, it features the work of thirty-five leading legal experts on most of the major fields of Japanese law, with special attention to the increasingly important areas of environmental law, health law, intellectual property, and insolvency. The contributors adopt a variety of theoretical approaches, including legal, economic, historical, and socio-legal. As Law and Japan: A Turning Point is the only volume to take inventory of the key areas of Japanese law and their development since the 1960s, it will be an important reference tool and starting point for research on the Japanese legal system. Topics addressed include the legal system (with chapters on legal history, the legal profession, the judiciary, the legislative and political process, and legal education); the individual and the state (with chapters on constitutional law, administrative law, criminal justice, environmental law, and health law); and the economy (with chapters on corporate law, contracts, labor and employment law, antimonopoly law, intellectual property, taxation, and insolvency). Japanese law is in the midst of a watershed period. This book captures the major trends by presenting views on important changes in the field and identifying catalysts for change in the twenty-first century.

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Reflecting varieties of theory and practice in both verse and prose from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, these essays by many of America's leading literary scholars call for a reinvigorated formalism that can enrich literary studies, open productive routes of commerce with cultural studies, and propel cultural theory out of its thematic ruts. This book reprints Modern Language Quarterly's highly acclaimed special issue Reading for Form, along with new essays by Marjorie Perloff, D. Vance Smith, and Susan Stewart, and a revised introduction by Susan Wolfson. With historical case studies and insightful explorations, Reading for Form offers invaluable material for literary critics in all specializations.

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