Name: Kenkoku University and the Experience of Pan-Asianism
Brand: Kishida Yuka Hiruma
Price: 30.0 USD
Availability: InStock

Kishida Yuka Hiruma

Kenkoku University and the Experience of Pan-Asianism

$30.00

ENG: Kenkoku University and the Experience of Pan-Asianism makes a fresh contribution to the recent effort to re-examine the Japanese wartime ideology of Pan-Asianism by focusing on the experiences of students at Kenkoku University or “Nation-Building University,” abbreviated as Kendai (1938-1945). Located in the northeastern provinces of China commonly designated Manchuria, the university proclaimed to realize the goal of minzoku kyowa (“ethnic harmony”). It recruited students of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Mongolian and Russian backgrounds and aimed to foster a generation of leaders for the state of Manchukuo. Distinguishing itself from other colonial schools within the Japanese Empire, Kendai promised ethnic equality to its diverse student body, while at the same time imposing Japanese customs and beliefs on all students.

RUS: Во время Второй мировой войны расположенный в оккупированной Маньчжурии университет Кенкоку провозгласил своей целью достижение «этнической гармонии». В него набирали студентов японского, китайского, корейского, тайваньского, монгольского и русского происхождения, а целью обучения было воспитание лидеров для марионеточного государства Маньчжоу-Го. В отличие от других колониальных школ Японской империи, этот университет обещал этническое равенство разнородному контингенту учащихся, но в то же время навязывал всем студентам японские обычаи и верования. В книге предпринята попытка переосмыслить японскую идеологию паназиатского движения, опираясь на свидетельства студентов университета Кенкоку.

Joan Cashin

War Stuff

$30.00

In this prize-winning work on the American Civil War, Joan E. Cashin explores the struggle between armies and civilians over the human and environmental resources necessary to wage war. This war “stuff” included the skills of white Southern civilians, as well as such material resources as food, timber, and housing. At first, civilians were willing to help Confederate or Union forces, but the war took such a toll that all civilians, regardless of politics, began focusing on their own survival. Both armies took whatever they needed from human beings and the material world, which eventually destroyed the region’s ability to wage war. Cashin draws on a wide range of documents, as well as the perspectives of food studies, environmental history, architectural history, and material culture studies. This book provides an entirely new perspective on the war era.

Kristoffer Neville

The Art and Culture of Scandinavian Central Europe

$30.00

Politically and militarily powerful, early modern Scandinavia played an essential role in the development of Central European culture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In this volume, Kristoffer Neville shows how the cultural ambitions of Denmark and Sweden were inextricably bound to those of other Central European kingdoms. Tracing the visual culture of the Danish and Swedish courts from the Reformation to their eventual decline in the eighteenth century, Neville explains how and why they developed into important artistic centers. He examines major projects by figures largely unknown outside of Northern Europe alongside other, more canonical artists ― including Cornelis Floris, Adriaen de Vries, and Johann Bernhard Fischervon Erlach ― to propose a more coherent view of this part of Europe, one that rightly includes Scandinavia as a vital component. The seventeenth century has long seemed a bleak moment in Central European culture. Neville’s authoritative and unprecedented study does much to change this perception, showing that the arts did not die in the Reformation and Thirty Years’ War but rather flourished in the Baltic region.

The Art and Culture of Scandinavian Central Europe

Ian Helfant

That Savage Gaze

$30.00

Imperial Russia’s large wolf populations were demonized, persecuted, tormented, and sometimes admired. That Savage Gaze explores the significance of wolves in pre-revolutionary Russia utilizing the perspectives of cultural studies, ecocriticism, and human-animal studies. It examines the ways in which hunters, writers, conservationists, members of animal protection societies, scientists, doctors, government officials and others contested Russia’s “Wolf Problem” and the particular threat posed by rabid wolves. It elucidates the ways in which wolves became intertwined with Russian identity both domestically and abroad. It argues that wolves played a foundational role in Russians’ conceptions of the natural world in ways that reverberated throughout Russian society, providing insights into broader aspects of Russian culture and history as well as the opportunities and challenges that modernity posed for the Russian empire.

David Engerman

Modernization from the Other Shore

$45.00

From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, America’s experts on Russia watched as Russia and the Soviet Union embarked on a course of rapid industrialization. Captivated by the idea of modernization, diplomats, journalists, and scholars across the political spectrum rationalized the enormous human cost of this path to progress. In a fascinating examination of this crucial era, David Engerman underscores the key role economic development played in America’s understanding of Russia and explores its profound effects on U.S. policy. American intellectuals from George Kennan to Samuel Harper to Calvin Hoover understood Russian events in terms of national character. Many of them used stereotypes of Russian passivity, backwardness, and fatalism to explain the need for—and the costs of—Soviet economic development. These costs included devastating famines that left millions starving while the government still exported grain. This book is a stellar example of the new international history that seamlessly blends cultural and intellectual currents with policymaking and foreign relations. It offers valuable insights into the role of cultural differences and the shaping of economic policy for developing nations even today.

Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter

From Victory to Peace

$30.00

From Victory to Peace: Russian Diplomacy After Napoleon explores how Russia’s diplomats understood European security as they worked to implement the edifice of pacification and peace constructed in 1814, 1815, and 1818. In response to developments across Europe and in Spanish America, Emperor Alexander I’s hopes for peace, pragmatic adaptability, and commitment to act in concert with the other great powers came fully into focus. Based on sources of Russian provenance, the book challenges characterizations of Alexander’s behavior as erratic and his foreign policy as heavy-handed and expansionist. Indeed, as historians assimilate the Russian perspective on European order (as well as the perspectives of other less well-studied countries), they encounter a multifaceted Restoration built upon practices of enlightened reformism and direct experience of revolution and war.

Paul Gladston

Avant-garde' Art Groups in China

$30.00

Avant-garde' Art Groups in China 1979-1989 gives a critical polylogic (multi-voiced) account of four of the most significant Chinese avant-garde art groups of the late 1970s and 1980s: The Stars, The Northern Art Group, The Pond Association and Xiamen Dada. The book includes extended conversations with members of those groups that provide detailed insights into the shifting, culturally complex and regionally diverse conditions of artistic production in mainland China during the decade leading up to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The conversations are supported by an introduction situating Chinese avant-garde art groups of the 1970s and 1980s as part of the wider development of post-revolutionary Chinese modern and contemporary art as well as comprehensive notes addressing questions of historical fact and localised socio-cultural meaning. This rigorously researched and highly accessible book is essential reading for anyone interested in China's cultural, social and political development after the death of Mao Zedong.

Edited by Roman Katsman & Maxim D. Shrayer

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

$30.00

This collection of essays covers a hundred-year history of Russian-language literature in Israel, including the pre-state period. Some of the studies are devoted to an overview of the literary process and the activities of its participants, others—to individual genres and movements. As a result, a complex and multifaceted picture emerges of a not quite fully defined, but very lively and dynamic community that develops in the most difficult conditions. The contributors trace the paths of Russian-Israeli prose, poetry and drama, various waves of avant-garde, fantasy, and critical thought. Today, in Russian-Israeli literature, the voices of writers of various generations and waves of repatriation are intertwined: from the "seventies" to the "war aliyah" of the recent times. Both the Russian-Israeli authors and their critics often hold different opinions of their respective roles in Israel’s historical and literary storms. While disagreeing on the definition of their place on the map of modern culture, Russian-Israeli writers are united by a shared bond with the fate of the Jewish state.

Studies in the History of Russian-Israeli Literature

Hyunhee Park

Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds

$30.00

Long before Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope en route to India, the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia engaged in vigorous cross-cultural exchanges across the Indian Ocean. This book focuses on the years 700 to 1500, a period when powerful dynasties governed both regions, to document the relationship between the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the arrival of the Europeans. Through a close analysis of the maps, geographic accounts, and travelogues compiled by both Chinese and Islamic writers, the book traces the development of major contacts between people in China and the Islamic world and explores their interactions on matters as varied as diplomacy, commerce, mutual understanding, world geography, navigation, shipbuilding, and scientific exploration. When the Mongols ruled both China and Iran in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, their geographic understanding of each other’s society increased markedly. This rich, engaging, and pioneering study offers glimpses into the worlds of Asian geographers and mapmakers, whose accumulated wisdom underpinned the celebrated voyages of European explorers like Vasco da Gama.

Lingzhen Wang

Revisiting Women's Cinema

$30.00

In Revisiting Women’s Cinema, Lingzhen Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China. She foregrounds their sociopolitical engagements, critical interventions, and popular artistic experiments, offering a new conception of socialist and postsocialist feminisms, mainstream culture, and women’s cinema. Wang highlights the films of Wang Ping and Dong Kena in the 1950s and 1960s and Zhang Nuanxin and Huang Shuqin in the 1980s and 1990s to unveil how they have been profoundly misread through extant research paradigms entrenched in Western Cold War ideology, post-second-wave cultural feminism, and post-Mao intellectual discourses. Challenging received interpretations, she elucidates how socialist feminism and culture were conceptualized and practiced in relation to China’s search not only for national independence and economic development but also for social emancipation, proletarian culture, and socialist internationalism. Wang calls for a critical reevaluation of historical materialism, socialist feminism, and popular culture to forge an integrated emancipatory vision for future transnational feminist and cultural practices.

Julie Hemment

Empowering Women in Russia

$30.00

Originally published in 2007, based on research conducted during 1996-1998, Julie Hemment’s engrossing study traces the development encounter through interactions between international foundation and Russian women’s groups during a decade of transformation. Prohibited from organizing independently under state socialism, women’s groups became a focus of attention in the post-Soviet period for foundations eager to promote participatory democracy, but the vision of the civil society that emerged (the “third sector”) was far from what Russian activists envisioned or what donor agencies promised. Drawing on ethnographic methods and participatory action research (PAR), Hemment tells the story of her introduction to and growing collaboration with members of the group Zhenskii Svet in the provincial city of Tver’. Her account offers an ethnographic perspective on the decade of the 1990s and the terrain of women’s independent organizing at that time – the openings, the sense of possibility these activists experienced, as well as the challenges they encountered.

Brian R. Roberts

Borderwaters

$45.00

Conventional narratives describe the United States as a continental country bordered by Canada and Mexico. Yet, since the late twentieth century the United States has claimed more water space than land space, and more water space than perhaps any other country in the world. This watery version of the United States borders some twenty-one countries, particularly in the archipelagoes of the Pacific and the Caribbean. In Borderwaters Brian Russell Roberts dispels continental national mythologies to advance an alternative image of the United States as an archipelagic nation. Drawing on literature, visual art, and other expressive forms that range from novels by Mark Twain and Zora Neale Hurston to Indigenous testimonies against nuclear testing and Miguel Covarrubias's visual representations of Indonesia and the Caribbean, Roberts remaps both the fundamentals of US geography and the foundations of how we discuss US culture.

Maria Taroutina

The Icon and the Square

$30.00

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists.

Karl Gerth

Unending Capitalism

$30.00

What forces shaped the twentieth-century world? Capitalism and communism are usually seen as engaged in a fight-to-the-death during the Cold War. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party aimed to end capitalism. Karl Gerth argues that despite the socialist rhetoric of class warfare and egalitarianism, Communist Party policies actually developed a variety of capitalism and expanded consumerism. This negated the goals of the Communist Revolution across the Mao era (1949–1976) down to the present. Through topics related to state attempts to manage what people began to desire - wristwatches and bicycles, films and fashion, leisure travel and Mao badges - Gerth challenges fundamental assumptions about capitalism, communism, and countries conventionally labeled as socialist. In so doing, his provocative history of China suggests how larger forces related to the desire for mass-produced consumer goods reshaped the twentieth-century world and remade people's lives.

Ed. by O. Belova

Professionals and Marginals in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Traditions

$30.00

Professionals and Marginals in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Traditions is the annual publication of the Slavic&Jewish Cultures: Dialogue, Similarities, Differences’s project for 2022. It includes papers from the international conference of the same name held in Moscow on December 1–3, 2021. The book includes twelve articles by Russian and Israeli scholars who work on the social and cultural role of professionals and marginals in various ethno-confessional traditions. The question of the perception of professionals in culture falls under the opposition “one’s own/another’s,” where belonging to “one’s own” or a “foreign community or class” becomes a defining marker. Traditionally, “social strangers,” to which representatives of various professions belong, were assigned a special role in calendar, magical, and occasional rites. Thus, professionals and social marginals were not considered outcasts: society assigned them a particular place and role, delegating special cultural functions to them. Like previous publications in this series, Professionals and Marginals in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Traditions is notable for the large amount of field and archival material that it makes publically available for the first time.

Erik Mueggler

The Age of Wild Ghosts

$45.00

In Erik Mueggler’s powerful and imaginative ethnography, an Indigenous community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the period that began with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continued through the 1990s as the “age of wild ghosts.” Their stories of this age converged on a dream of community—a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and spectral reawakening of a local political and ritual system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language of this community, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including of the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that came to haunt it. To exorcise “wild ghosts,” he shows, is nothing less than to re-imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to articulate demands for justice and longings for reconciliation.

Andrew Walder

China under Мао

$45.00

China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long guerilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the revolution was just beginning. China under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao’s greatest achievements—victory in the civil war, the creation of China’s first unified modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life—also generated his worst failures: industrial depression and rural famine during the Great Leap Forward and the violent destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution. Misdiagnosing China’s problems as capitalist restoration and prescribing continuing class struggle against imaginary enemies as the solution, Mao destroyed much of what he had built and left China backward and deeply divided.

Dominic Sachsenmaier

Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled

$30.00

Born into a low-level literati family in the port city of Ningbo, the seventeenth-century Chinese Christian convert Zhu Zongyuan likely never left his home province. Yet Zhu nonetheless led a remarkably globally connected life. His relations with the outside world, ranging from scholarly activities to involvement with globalizing Catholicism, put him in contact with a complex and contradictory set of foreign and domestic forces. In Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled, Dominic Sachsenmaier explores the mid-seventeenth-century world and the worldwide flows of ideas through the lens of Zhu‘s life, combining the local, regional, and global. Taking particular aspects of Zhu‘s multiple belongings as a starting point, Sachsenmaier analyzes the contexts that framed his worlds as he balanced a local life and his border-crossing faith. At the local level, the book pays attention to the intellectual, political, and social environments of late Ming and early Qing society, including Confucian learning and the Manchu conquest, questioning the role of ethnic and religious identities. At the global level, it considers how individuals like Zhu were situated within the history of organizations and power structures such as the Catholic Church and early modern empires amid larger transformations and encounters. A strikingly original work, this book is a major contribution to East Asian, transnational, and global history, with important implications for historical approaches and methodologies.

Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled

Justin Weir

The Author as Hero

$30.00

An original reading of three famous novels reveals a significant shift in the Russian tradition of psychological prose; Justin Weir develops a persuasive analysis of the complex relationship between authorial self-reflection and literary tradition in three of the most famous Russian novels of the first half of the twentieth century: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift. All three novelists respond to a dual crisis, according to Weir: the general modernist destabilization of identity, and the estrangement from literary tradition that followed the Russian Revolution. Using various self-reflexive literary devices (such as the mise en abyme), these authors reincorporate literary tradition into their works and, in the process, generate a distinctive view of identity. Character, in these novels, is neither the outcome of a continuous process of Building, nor a direct function of the individual’s relation to larger historical events. Rather, character is defined in the act of writing itself, so that every hero must be a sort of author. The outcome is a new novelistic art that focuses on the identity of the artist as revealed through his writing. With its innovative interpretation of these novels and its compelling historical, cultural, and theoretical insights, The Author as Hero offers a new view of an important moment in the evolution of Russian literature.

Eliyana R. Adler

In Her Hands

$30.00

Though over one hundred private schools for Jewish girls thrived in the Russian empire between 1831 and 1881, their story has been largely overlooked. In Her Hands: The Education of Girls in Tsarist Russia restores these schools to their rightful place of prominence in training thousands of Jewish girls in secular and Judaic subjects and also paving the way for the modern schools that followed them. Through extensive archival research, author Eliyana R. Adler examines the schools’ curriculum, teachers, financing, students, and educational innovation and demonstrates how each of these aspects evolved over time. In telling the story of Russia’s private schools for Jewish girls, Adler argues that these schools were crucibles of educational experimentation that merit serious examination. Students and scholars of Jewish history, educational history, and women’s studies will enjoy this pathbreaking study.

Guram Odisharia

Two Novels from the Caucasus

$30.00

In this joint volume of Caucausian fiction, two friends from opposing sides of the unresolved Georgian-Abkhaz conflict join forces to craft a poignant anti-war narrative that spans borders and transcends political divides.

After finding themselves on opposing sides of a war-torn region, Guram Odisharia and Daur Nachkebia, once comrades in the Writers' Union, chose to collaborate and publish their respective novels under one cover in a powerful literary endeavor that’s now available in English.

The President’s Cat from Georgian writer Guram Odisharia paints a vivid picture of Sukhumi, a once-exotic city-resort marred by the horrors of war. Against the backdrop of this surreal conflict, Odisharia's characters navigate the chaos with raw, palpable humanity.

In Daur Nachkebia’s The Shore of Night, the novel’s protagonist begins a soul-searching journey to understand the profound impact of conflict on human life after finding the diary of a friend who died in the war. Delving into the human experience and psyche against the backdrop of the Soviet empire’s collapse and the brutal war in Abkhazia, it explores the struggle to maintain individuality and expand personal horizons despite the confines of society.

Exploring real tragedies of individuals caught in the zone of conflict, the nuances of peace and war in the South Caucasus, and the prospects of reconciliation in post-conflict regions, the collection Two Novels from the Caucasus is a testament to the enduring power of literature to bridge divides and illuminate universal truths.

Guram Odisharia

Two Novels from the Caucasus

$150.00

In this joint volume of Caucausian fiction, two friends from opposing sides of the unresolved Georgian-Abkhaz conflict join forces to craft a poignant anti-war narrative that spans borders and transcends political divides.

After finding themselves on opposing sides of a war-torn region, Guram Odisharia and Daur Nachkebia, once comrades in the Writers' Union, chose to collaborate and publish their respective novels under one cover in a powerful literary endeavor that’s now available in English.

The President’s Cat from Georgian writer Guram Odisharia paints a vivid picture of Sukhumi, a once-exotic city-resort marred by the horrors of war. Against the backdrop of this surreal conflict, Odisharia's characters navigate the chaos with raw, palpable humanity.

In Daur Nachkebia’s The Shore of Night, the novel’s protagonist begins a soul-searching journey to understand the profound impact of conflict on human life after finding the diary of a friend who died in the war. Delving into the human experience and psyche against the backdrop of the Soviet empire’s collapse and the brutal war in Abkhazia, it explores the struggle to maintain individuality and expand personal horizons despite the confines of society.

Exploring real tragedies of individuals caught in the zone of conflict, the nuances of peace and war in the South Caucasus, and the prospects of reconciliation in post-conflict regions, the collection Two Novels from the Caucasus is a testament to the enduring power of literature to bridge divides and illuminate universal truths.

Klara Moricz

In Stravinsky’s Orbit

$30.00

The Bolshevik’s 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian culture migrated West, where it was transformed by interactions with new cultural environment and clashed with exported Russian trends. In this book, Klára Móricz explores the transnational emigrant space of Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Lourié in interwar Paris. Their music reflected the conflict between a modernist narrative demanding innovation, and a narrative of exile wedded to the preservation of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The emigrants’ and the Bolsheviks’ contrasting visions of Russia and its past collided frequently in the French capital, where the Soviets displayed their political and artistic products. Russian composers in Paris also had to reckon with Stravinsky’s disproportionate influence:if they succumbed to fashions dictated by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if they kept to their old ways, they risked becoming irrelevant. Although Stravinsky’s neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle ground between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the exilic experience. Móricz offers this unexplored context for Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely elusive term.

Emily D. Johnson

How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself

$30.00

How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie considers the origins and evolutions of kraevedenie, looking specifically at the role that movements and institutions that emerged in early twentieth-century St. Petersburg played in the formation of this discipline. Based on extensive work in archives in St. Petersburg, it looks at the historical preservation movement that was spearheaded by participants in the World of Art circle and contributors to the journal Starye gody. It considers the pedagogical excursion movement and specifically the influence of Ivans Grevs and Nikolai Antsiferov. It also discusses the operations and role of the Central Bureau of Kraevedenie in the 1920s.The original English-language edition of this book (Penn State University Press, 2006) received both the South Central MLA book award and the Nikolai Antsiferov Prize for the best work on St. Petersburg by a foreign author.

Bożena Shallcross

The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture

$30.00

In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, Bożena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects―pots, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, kitchen utensils―tangible vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here as cultural texts. Shallcross delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, Władysław Szlengel, Zofia Nałkowska, Czesław Miłosz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Tadeusz Borowski. Combining close readings of selected texts with critical interrogations of a wide range of philosophical and theoretical approaches to the nature of matter, Shallcross's study broadens the current discourse on the Holocaust by embracing humble and overlooked material objects as they were perceived by writers of that time.

The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture

Bloch Alexia

Sex, Love, and Migration

$30.00

ENG: Sex, Love, and Migration complicates a narrative of women’s exploitation as a feature of migration in the twenty-first century, to argue that women’s mobility is marked not only by risks but also by personal and social transformation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork spanning a decade (2002-2011), Alexia Bloch shows how women moving between the former Soviet Union and Turkey forged new forms of relationships in their households in Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia, but also in Istanbul, where they often worked for years on end. The lives and aspirations of post-Soviet migrant women employed in three spheres in Istanbul—sex work, the garment trade, and domestic work—are featured, challenging us to decouple images of women on the move from simple assumptions about danger, victimization, and trafficking.

RUS: Исследование Алексии Блок выходит за рамки общепринятого представления об эксплуатации женщин как характерной черте миграции начала XXI века, в котором фигурируют молодые женщины из бедных стран, пересекающие границы, чтобы заниматься низкооплачиваемым и зачастую интимным трудом. Автор утверждает, что мобильность женщин связана не только с рисками, но и с личными и социальными преобразованиями, поскольку миграция в корне меняет эмоциональный мир и устремления женщин. Блок описывает, как с начала 1990-хгодов женщины пересекали границы бывшего Советского Союза, создавая новые формы интимности в своих семьях. В книге рассматривается жизнь постсоветских женщин-мигранток, занятых в трех различных сферах: секс-работе, торговле одеждой и домашнем хозяйстве.

Howlett Zachary M.

Meritocracy and Its Discontents

$45.00

ENG: Meritocracy and Its Discontents investigates the wider social, political, religious, and economic dimensions of the Gaokao, China's national college entrance exam, as well as the complications that arise from its existence. Each year, some nine million high school seniors in China take the Gaokao, which determines college admission and provides a direct but difficult route to an urban lifestyle for China's hundreds of millions of rural residents. But with college graduates struggling to find good jobs, some are questioning the exam's legitimacy—and, by extension, the fairness of Chinese society. Chronicling the experiences of underprivileged youth, Zachary M. Howlett's research illuminates how people remain captivated by the exam because they regard it as fateful—an event both consequential and undetermined. He finds that the exam enables people both to rebel against the social hierarchy and to achieve recognition within it.

RUS: В своей книге Закари Хоулетт исследует социальные, политические, религиозные и экономические аспекты гаокао — государственного вступительного экзамена в высшие учебные заведения Китая. Ежегодно его сдают около девяти миллионов старшеклассников. Для сотен миллионов сельских жителей Китая это один из немногих путей к городскому образу жизни. Книга Хоулетта, в которой он описывает опыт молодежи из малообеспеченных слоев населения, показывает, что тема экзамена продолжает присутствовать в жизни людей и после его сдачи. Его считают судьбоносным событием — значительным и определяющим некоторые жизненные перспективы. Автор приходит к выводу, что экзамен позволяет тем, кто проходит через это испытание, как восстать против социальной иерархии, так и добиться признания внутри нее.

Timothy Harte

Fast Forward

$30.00

Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and motion pictures, among other technological advances, proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, speed transformed contemporary reality, generating new possibilities not only for everyday existence, but also for modernist culture. From Manhattan to Milan to Moscow, the rise of modernism coincided with a precipitous acceleration in the pace of human experience that may artists celebrated. Speed was soon aestheticized and converted from an ordinary, physical concept into a unique source of inspiration. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia’s avant-garde movement with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for its revolutionary experimentation. Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930 presents a detailed examination of the ideas and images of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, painting, and cinema. In probing this cultural phenomenon, which began in the early 1910s and continued to the late 1920s when formal innovation in the arts was overtaken by Stalin’s Five-Year Plans for rapid Soviet industrialization, Fast Forward explores how the idea of speed propelled the nation’s arts toward abstraction as well as toward the ideal of a dynamic, streamlined future. Speed, used as a powerful conceptual means for breaking down the figurative stasis of traditional representational art, provided the basis for a comprehensive reevaluation of everyday reality. Fostering a broad understanding of velocity, Russian avant-garde poets, painters, and filmmakers raced to establish a new artistic and social reality.

Robin Feuer Miller

Dostoevsky's Unfinished Journey

$30.00

Words, silences, and narratives as vehicles are always in flux, always fueling us, precipitating actions both virtuous and criminal, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, sublime and ridiculous. Dostoevsky, more than any other writer except perhaps Shakespeare, supplies an unending source of inspiration for the full sweep of human action, thought, emotion, and belief in all their contradictory manifestations and combinations. Dostoevsky’s journeys onto these terrains are without exception unfinished, always in process, alive and precariously so, even as those inspired by him may find for themselves completion, rationales, and answers. His readers have given various names to the quality of completion embedded within uncertainty that his oeuvre conveys and which can then serve to engender religious, philosophical, or nakedly political discourses and responses, some of which would no doubt surprise, even horrify him. Dostoevsky, however, continues to stand apart; his written words, silences, and narratives expressing, through their embodiment in characters, his own unfinished journey. Ivan Karamazov’s rebellious philosopher maybe have walked his quadrillion kilometers in the dark, but their mutual creator still travels on.

Drieu Cloé

Fictions Nationales

$45.00

ENG: Between the founding of Soviet Uzbekistan in 1924 and the Stalinist Terror of the late 1930s, a nationalist cinema emerged in Uzbekistan giving rise to the first wave of national film production and an Uzbek cinematographic elite. In Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan Cloé Drieu uses Uzbek films as a lens to explore the creation of the Soviet State in Central Asia, starting from the collapse of the Russian Empire up through the eve of WWII. Drieu argues that cinema provides a perfect angle for viewing the complex history of domination, nationalism, and empire (here used to denote the centralization of power) within the Soviet sphere. By exploring all of film's dimensions as a socio-political phenomenon-including film production, film reception, and filmic discourse-Drieu reveals how nation and empire were built up as institutional realities and as imaginary constructs.

RUS: Основываясь на исследованиях, проведенных в узбекских и российских государственных архивах, и на глубоком анализе четырнадцати полнометражных фильмов, Хлоя Дрийе описывает дискуссии о процессах государственного и национального строительства Узбекистана, а также о возникновении национализма в целом. Книга «Кино, нация, империя. Узбекистан, 1919–1937» помогает нам понять, как Центральная Азия, входившая в состав Российской империи, сначала была деколонизирована, а затем вновь оказалась под давлением Москвы.

Koikari Mire

Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post–3.11 Japan

$30.00

ENG: The Great East Japan Disaster – a compound catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that began on March 11, 2011 – has ushered in a new era of cultural production dominated by discussions on safety and security, risk and vulnerability, and recovery and refortification. Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan re-frames post-disaster national reconstruction as a social project imbued with dynamics of gender, race, and empire and in doing so Mire Koikari offers an innovative approach to resilience building in contemporary Japan.

RUS: Великое восточнояпонское землетрясение 2011 года — глобальная катастрофа, открывшая новую культурную эру, в которой доминируют дискуссии о безопасности, рисках и уязвимости, восстановлении и реорганизации. В книге Мирэ Коикари национальное возрождение после катастрофы рассматривается как социальный проект, опирающийся на дискурсы гендера, расы и империи.

Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post–3.11 Japan

Fenggang Yang

Religion in China

$30.00

Religion in China survived the most radical suppression in the human history—a total ban of any religion during the Cultural Revolution. All churches, temples, and mosques were closed down, converted for secular uses, or turned into museums for the purpose of atheist education. Since the 1970s, however, religion has thrived even though China remains under Communist rule. Christianity ranks among the fastest-growing religions throughout the vast land while many Buddhist and Daoist temples have been restored. The Communist authorities have carried out waves of atheist propaganda, anti-superstition campaigns, and severe crackdowns on Christian churches and new religious movements. How do we explain the resilience and vitality of religion in modernizing China? How did religion survive the eradication measures in the 1950s to 1970s? How have various religious groups managed to revive despite strict regulations? Why have some religions grown fast? Why have some forms of spirituality gone through dramatic turns? This book provides a comprehensive overview of the religious change in China under сommunist rule, and it also offers a set of theoretical tools for studying religious vitality in modernizing societies.

Molly Brunson

Russian Realisms

$30.00

One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converged to form the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, a tradition that spanned almost half a century — from the youthful projects of the Natural School and the critical realism of the age of reform to the mature masterpieces of Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the paintings of the Wanderers, Repin chief among them. By examining the classics of the tradition, Brunson explores the emergence of multiple realisms from the gaps, disruptions, and doubts that accompany the self-conscious project of representing reality. These manifestations of realism are united not by how they look or what they describe, but by their shared awareness of the fraught yet critical task of representation. By tracing the engagement of literature and painting with aesthetic debates on the sister arts, Brunson argues for a conceptualization of realism that transcends artistic media. Russian Realisms integrates the lesser-known tradition of Russian painting with the familiar masterpieces of Russia's great novelists, highlighting both the common ground in their struggles for artistic realism and their cultural autonomy and legitimacy. This erudite study will appeal to scholars interested in Russian literature and art, comparative literature, art history, and nineteenth-century realist movements.

Ed. by Oleg Budnitskii

Archive of Jewish History. Vol. 12

$30.00

The 12th volume of the Archive opens with a study by Yefim Melamed (Kyiv) on the history of Stalinist secret services' surveillance of Jewish writers in the late 1930s and early 1950s, which resulted in repression and the physical destruction of many of them. In the appendix to his article, a unique material is published - reports of a secret agent who reported on the activities of the fellow-writers: Grigory Khan (Moscow) makes another contribution to the study of the ""endless"" topic: the Jews and the Russian revolution. His research is dedicated to Aaron Zundelevich (1852-1923), a prominent figure in the narodnik movement, a member of the Executive Committee of the Narodnaya Volya organization (lit. People's Will). Roberta de Giorgi (Udine, Italy) devoted her extensive research to the history of translations and publication of Leo Tolstoy's Three Tales, which, at the request of Sholom Aleichem, gave him for publication in a collection in favor of the Jews who suffered from the pogrom in Chișinău. The story turned out to be extremely intricate and fascinating, and it adds additional touches to the biography of Leo Tolstoy, Sholom Aleichem, as well as to the history of literary life and publishing in the early twentieth century. Maria Gulakova (St. Petersburg) publishes a letter from the ethnographer and public figure Moses Krol (1862-1942) to Chaim Zhitlowsky. Information contained in a letter from Krol (then an émigré in Paris) dated March 26, 1936, sheds light on a little-known attempt to organize the resettlement of European Jews in the 1930s in Ecuador. The published materials are based on documents extracted from various archives in Moscow, Kyiv, New York, Jerusalem and Leeds.

Yossie Goldman

Let My People Grow

$30.00

When the Soviet Union collapsed, much of its Jewish population emigrated, but those who remained were often disconnected from Judaism. It was into this vacuum that Hillel stepped, gradually building a network of Hillel centers across the Former Soviet Union, serving tens of thousands of Jewish students and creating a Jewish future in the FSU. Rabbi Yossie Goldman led Hillel’s efforts to rebuild Jewish identity among university students in the FSU. In Let My People Grow, Goldman tells the story of Hillel in the FSU from its humble beginnings in Moscow and its first steps and missteps in the chaos that followed the fall of communism through to nourishing an indigenous Jewish leadership that sustains the community to this day. In a journey in time across the breath of the FSU with its myriad languages, cultures and Jewish communities, Goldman tells this amazing story. As Goldman tells us: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Dirk Uffelmann

Der erniedrigte Christus (Volume II)

$30.00

EN

This three-volume book investigates the Russian transformations of one of the central concepts of Greek Christology, the self-humiliation or kenosis of Christ. The author applies rhetoric (paradox, metaphor, metonymy) as a means to elucidate mechanisms of theological persuasion and to trace the representations of the humiliated Christ and his imitations in various media from liturgy and iconology to everyday practice and literary fiction. The exploration of post-Christian literature of the 19th and 20th century (N. Chernyshevskii, M. Gor’kii, N. Ostrovskii, Ven. Erofeev, Vl. Sorokin) demonstrates the existence of a kenotic Christology after Christianity.

RU

This three-volume book investigates the Russian transformations of one of the central concepts of Greek Christology, the self-humiliation or kenosis of Christ. The author applies rhetoric (paradox, metaphor, metonymy) as a means to elucidate mechanisms of theological persuasion and to trace the representations of the humiliated Christ and his imitations in various media from liturgy and iconology to everyday practice and literary fiction. The exploration of post-Christian literature of the 19th and 20th century (N. Chernyshevskii, M. Gor’kii, N. Ostrovskii, Ven. Erofeev, Vl. Sorokin) demonstrates the existence of a kenotic Christology after Christianity.

Barbara Walker

Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle

$30.00

Barbara Walker examines the Russian literary circle, a feature of Russian intellectual and cultural life from tsarist times into the early Soviet period, through the life story of one of its liveliest and most adored figures, the poet Maximilian Voloshin (1877–1932). From 1911 until his death, Voloshin led a circle in the Crimean village of Koktebel' that was a haven for such literary luminaries as Marina Tsvetaeva, Nikolai Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam. Drawing upon the anthropological theories of Victor Turner, Walker depicts the literary circle of late Imperial Russia as a contradictory mix of idealism and "communitas," on the one hand, and traditional Russian patterns of patronage and networking, on the other. While detailing the colorful history of Voloshinov's circle in the pre- and postrevolutionary decades, the book demonstrates that the literary circle and its leaders played a key role in integrating the intelligentsia into the emerging ethos of the Soviet state.

Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle

Zsuzsa Hetényi

Shifts

$30.00

The book includes interpretations that offer an alternative reading of Nabokov's texts, looking for the inner connections of the writer's oeuvre, in the microstructures of motifs, nodes, and patterns. The concept of the erotext, combining the bliss of the textual and the sexual detaches analyses from reading literature as a copy of life. Nabokov's paths of initiation lead the reader to transcend boundaries: facets of Ego and of imaginary norms, the limits of space and time, to the threshold of the otherworldly -- towards ecstasy. Being a polyglot writer with synaesthesia, he savored words, knew their physics and music, visualized word forms, blended hybrid languages. By indulging in associations, he brought things to life, and exposed the vulgarity of ‘Communazist clowns’. Shifts reveal hidden layers, maintain tensions, and create new qualities. This shift can be understood in terms of the identity in the crisis of exile, multilinguality and synesthesia of the author, the provocation of ethics and eroticism, mirroring multiplications and dreams, and the loosening of the role of the author. In the shifts shattering the foundations of normativity Nabokov, the forerunner of the Postmodern is revealed.

Lyudmila Parts

In Search оf the True Russia

$30.00

Russia's provinces have long held a prominent place in the nation's cultural imagination. Lyudmila Parts looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russian literature and popular culture, addressing notions of nationalism, authenticity, Orientalism, Occidentalism, and postimperial identity. Surveying a largely unexplored body of Russian journalism, literature, and film from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Parts finds that the harshest portrayals of the provinces arise within "high" culture. Popular culture, however, has increasingly turned from the newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow to celebrate the hinterlands as repositories of national traditions and moral strength. This change, she argues, has directed debate about Russia's identity away from its loss of imperial might and global prestige and toward a hermetic national identity based on the opposition of "us vs. us" rather than "us vs. them." She offers an intriguing analysis of the contemporary debate over what it means to be Russian and where "true" Russians reside.

Oscar Sanchez-Sibony

"Red Globalization.

$30.00

Was the Soviet Union a superpower? Red Globalization is a significant rereading of the Cold War as an economic struggle shaped by the global economy. Oscar Sanchez-Sibony challenges the idea that the Soviet Union represented a parallel socio-economic construct to the liberal world economy. Instead he shows that the USSR, a middle-income country more often than not at the mercy of global economic forces, tracked the same path as other countries in the world, moving from 1930s autarky to the globalizing processes of the postwar period. In examining the constraints and opportunities afforded the Soviets in their engagement of the capitalist world, he questions the very foundations of the Cold War narrative as a contest between superpowers in a bipolar world. Far from an economic force in the world, the Soviets managed only to become dependent providers of energy to the rich world, and second-best partners to the global South.

Cristina Vatulescu

Police Aesthetics

$30.00

The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers. Police Aesthetics offers a revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Vatulescu focuses on their most infamous holdings―the personal files―as well as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored. Through the archives, she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises new questions about the ethics of reading. She shows how police files and films influenced literature and cinema, from autobiographies to novels, from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular blockbusters. In so doing, she opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century police states.

Catriona Kelly

St Petersburg

$45.00

Fragile, gritty, and vital to an extraordinary degree, St. Petersburg is one of the world’s most alluring cities—a place in which the past is at once ubiquitous and inescapably controversial. Yet outsiders are far more familiar with the city’s pre-1917 and Second World War history than with its recent past. In this beautifully illustrated and highly original book, Catriona Kelly shows how creative engagement with the past has always been fundamental to St. Petersburg’s residents. Weaving together oral history, personal observation, literary and artistic texts, journalism, and archival materials, she traces the at times paradoxical feelings of anxiety and pride that were inspired by living in the city, both when it was socialist Leningrad, and now. Ranging from rubbish dumps to promenades, from the city’s glamorous center to its grimy outskirts, this ambitious book offers a compelling and always unexpected panorama of an extraordinary and elusive place.

Henry W. Pickford

Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein

$30.00

In this highly original interdisciplinary study incorporating close readings of literary texts and philosophical argumentation, Henry W. Pickford develops a theory of meaning and expression in art intended to counter the meaning skepticism most commonly associated with the theories of Jacques Derrida. Pickford arrives at his theory by drawing on the writings of Wittgenstein to develop and modify the insights of Tolstoy’s philosophy of art. Pickford shows how Tolstoy’s encounter with Schopenhauer’s thought on the one hand provided support for his ethical views but on the other hand presented a problem, exemplified in the case of music, for his aesthetic theory, a problem that Tolstoy did not successfully resolve. Wittgenstein’s critical appreciation of Tolstoy’s thinking, however, not only recovers its viability but also constructs a formidable position within contemporary debates concerning theories of emotion, ethics, and aesthetic expression

Catherine Evtuhova

The Cross & the Sicle

$30.00

Catherine Evtuhov resurrects the brilliant and contradictory currents of turn-of-the-century Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg through an intellectual biography of Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), one of the central figures of the Silver Age. The son of a provincial priest, Bulgakov served first as one of Russia's most original and influential interpreters of Marx, and then went on to become the century's most important theologian of the Orthodox faith. As Evtuhov recounts the story of Bulgakov's spiritual evolution, she traces the impact of seemingly opposed philosophical and religious world views on one another and on the course of political events. In the first comprehensive analysis of Bulgakov's most important religious-philosophical work, Philosophy of Economy, Evtuhov identifies a "perceptual revolution" in Russian thinking about economy, a significant contribution to European modernist thought which both shaped and grew out of contemporary debates over land reforms. She reconstructs Bulgakov's vision of an Orthodox, constitutional Russia, shows how he tried to put it into practice in the wake of the February Revolution, and demonstrates its importance for a large and influential portion of Russian society.

Linda J. Cook

Postcommunist Welfare States

$30.00

In the early 1990s, the countries of the former Soviet Bloc faced an urgent need to reform the systems by which they delivered broad, basic social welfare to their citizens. Inherited systems were inefficient and financially unsustainable. Linda J. Cook here explores the politics and policy of social welfare from 1990 to 2004 in the Russian Federation, Poland, Hungary, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Most of these countries, she shows, tried to institute reforms based on a liberal paradigm of reduced entitlements and subsidies, means-testing, and privatization. But these proposals provoked opposition from pro-welfare interests, and the politics of negotiating change varied substantially from one political arena to another. In Russia, for example, liberalizing reform was blocked for a decade. Only as Vladimir Putin rose to power did the country change its inherited welfare system. Cook finds that the impact of economic pressures on welfare was strongly mediated by domestic political factors, including the level of democratization and balance of pro- and anti-reform political forces. Postcommunist welfare politics throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, she shows, are marked by the large role played by bureaucratic welfare stakeholders who were left over from the communist period and, in weak states, by the development of informal processes in social sectors. In the early 1990s, the countries of the former Soviet Bloc faced an urgent need to reform the systems by which they delivered broad, basic social welfare to their citizens. Inherited systems were inefficient and financially unsustainable. Linda J. Cook here explores the politics and policy of social welfare from 1990 to 2004 in the Russian Federation, Poland, Hungary, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Most of these countries, she shows, tried to institute reforms based on a liberal paradigm of reduced entitlements and subsidies, means-testing, and privatization. But these proposals provoked opposition from pro-welfare interests, and the politics of negotiating change varied substantially from one political arena to another. In Russia, for example, liberalizing reform was blocked for a decade. Only as Vladimir Putin rose to power did the country change its inherited welfare system. Cook finds that the impact of economic pressures on welfare was strongly mediated by domestic political factors, including the level of democratization and balance of pro- and anti-reform political forces. Postcommunist welfare politics throughout Russia and Eastern Europe, she shows, are marked by the large role played by bureaucratic welfare stakeholders who were left over from the communist period and, in weak states, by the development of informal processes in social sectors.

John Givens

The Image of Christ in Russian Literature.

$30.00

Vladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky's characters "sinning their way to Jesus." In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky's novels, but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. If they affirmed Jesus too directly, writers paradoxically risked diminishing him, either by deploying faith explanations that no longer persuade in an age of skepticism or by reducing Christ to a mere argument in an ideological dispute. The writers at the heart of this study understood that to reimage Christ for their age, they had to make him known through indirect, even negative ways, lest what they say about him be mistaken for cliché, doctrine, or naïve apologetics. The Christology of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak is thus apophatic because they deploy negative formulations (saying what God is not) in their writings about Jesus. Professions of atheism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's non-divine Jesus are but separate negative paths toward truer discernment of Christ. This first study in English of the image of Christ in Russian literature highlights the importance of apophaticism as a theological practice and a literary method in understanding the Russian Christ. It also emphasizes the importance of skepticism in Russian literary attitudes toward Jesus on the part of writers whose private crucibles of doubt produced some of the most provocative and enduring images of Christ in world literature. This important study will appeal to scholars and students of Orthodox Christianity and Russian literature, as well as educated general readers interested in religion and nineteenth-century Russian novels.

The Image of Christ in Russian Literature.

Sam Hall Kaplan

An Urban Odyssey

$25.00

An evocative, candid reveal of the media and design worlds by an award-winning journalist and activist urban planner in search of the soul of cities and himself.

From the stoops of Brooklyn and the streets of East Harlem to the newsrooms of New York and Los Angeles, from the freeways of Southern California to the shores of Malibu, An Urban Odyssey traverses the award-winning author’s seven decades in the media and the public and private sectors, as well as his time teaching and advocating for a more, equitable, livable city. Here, Sam Hall Kaplan regales readers with personal tales of his time at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and Fox Television, among others, interspersed with anecdotes of a host of the famed and ill-famed. A rollicking reveal of the vainglorious media and design worlds, candid and compelling.

Blair Ann M.

Too Much to Know

$45.00

ENG: The internet and digital technologies have generated a flood of texts and widespread worries about information overload. But this phenomenon is not unique to our age. Already centuries ago scholars complained about an overabundance of books, especially in the wake of the invention of printing in mid-15th century Europe. Blair studies the remedies that the learned devised to cope with that explosion of texts, notably by making summaries and excerpts which could be sorted and accessed in reference books. First she traces methods of information management back to antiquity and the middle ages and across cultures with long textual traditions such the Islamic and Chinese worlds. Then she focuses on the tools and practices in use in early modern Europe, such as note-taking, alphabetical indexing, thematic diagramming, and large scale compiling. The result combines intellectual history with book history to emphasize long continuities between past and present.

RUS: Интернет и цифровые технологии порождают необозримый поток текстов, что вызывает особенного типа тревожность — по поводу информационной перегрузки. Но это явление не является уникальным для нашей эпохи. Уже столетия назад — и особенно после изобретения книгопечатания в Европе в середине XV века — ученые жаловались на переизбыток книг. Энн Блэр исследует те средства, которые ученые прошлого придумывали, чтобы справиться с этим шквалом текстов. В своей работе она прослеживает методы управления информацией в античности и средневековье, в традиционных исламской и китайской культурах. Другим фокусом книги становятся инструменты и практики, использовавшиеся в Европе раннего нового времени. В результате интеллектуальная история в ее исследовании сочетается с историей книги, что позволяет подчеркнуть преемственность между прошлым и настоящим.

Sam Hall Kaplan

An Urban Odyssey

$150.00

An evocative, candid reveal of the media and design worlds by an award-winning journalist and activist urban planner in search of the soul of cities and himself.

From the stoops of Brooklyn and the streets of East Harlem to the newsrooms of New York and Los Angeles, from the freeways of Southern California to the shores of Malibu, An Urban Odyssey traverses the award-winning author’s seven decades in the media and the public and private sectors, as well as his time teaching and advocating for a more, equitable, livable city. Here, Sam Hall Kaplan regales readers with personal tales of his time at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and Fox Television, among others, interspersed with anecdotes of a host of the famed and ill-famed. A rollicking reveal of the vainglorious media and design worlds, candid and compelling.

Gavin Slade

Reorganizing Crime.

$30.00

Thieves-in-law' (vory-v-zakone in Russian) are career criminals belonging to a criminal fraternity that began in the 1930s in the Soviet prison camps. For reasons that the book attempts to explain, thieves-in-law became exceptionally prevalent in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Here, by the 1990s, they formed a mafia network—criminal associations that attempt to monopolize protection in legal and illegal sectors of the economy. At this time, the mafia was in many ways more powerful than the state. In 2005, however, anti-organized crime policy was transferred from Italy and America to Georgia. Legislation targeting the thieves-in-law directly was successful in causing a steep decline in mafia influence and organized criminal activity. This book asks how and why this occurred. In particular, why did the thieves-in-law not resist the attack on them successfully? Based on extensive fieldwork and utilizing unique access to primary sources of data, such as police files, court cases, archives, and expert interviews, the book provides a case study of varying organized criminal resilience to state attack. It studies the dynamics of changing mafia activities, recruitment practices, and organization as these relate to changes in the socio-economic environment and, in particular, anti-organized crime policy in what is the first sustained, directed anti-mafia policy implemented in a post-Soviet country.

Seth Moglen

Mourning Modernity

$45.00

In Mourning Modernity, Seth Moglen argues that American literary modernism is, at its heart, an effort to mourn for the injuries inflicted by modern capitalism. He demonstrates that the most celebrated literary movement of the 20th century is structured by a deep conflict between political hope and despair—between the fear that alienation and exploitation were irresistible facts of life and the yearning for a more just and liberated society. He traces this conflict in the works of a dozen novelists and poets – ranging from Eliot, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Hurston, Hughes, and Tillie Olsen. Taking John Dos Passos' neglected U.S.A. trilogy as a central case study, he demonstrates how the struggle between reparative social mourning and melancholic despair shaped the literary strategies of a major modernist writer and the political fate of the American Left. Mourning Modernity offers a bold new map of the modernist tradition, as well as an important contribution to the cultural history of American radicalism and to contemporary theoretical debates about mourning and trauma.

Hélène Jawhara Piñer

Matzah and Flour

$40.00

From Hélène Jawhara Piñer, Gourmand World Cookbook Award-winning author of Sephardi: Cooking the History, comes a collection of 125 meticulously crafted recipes showcasing the enduring flavors that define Sephardic culinary heritage.

Matzah and Flour: Recipes from the History of the Sephardic Jews offers a tantalizing exploration of the central role of matzah and flour in Sephardic cuisine. Journey through centuries of tradition as flour, from various grains like chickpea, corn, and barley, intertwines with cultural narratives and religious observance. Delve into the symbolism of matzah, from its origins in the Exodus story to its embodiment of resilience and identity. Each of this cookbook’s thoughtfully prepared recipes is a testament to the transformative power of flour in Sephardic culinary heritage. From savory delicacies to sweet delights, these timeless flavors have sustained Sephardic families through history. Matzah and Flour is a celebration of tradition, history, and the enduring legacy of Sephardic Jewish cuisine.

Karine Rashkovsky

An Improbable Life

$150.00

Just how improbable can one man's survival story be?

From evading the KGB and disassembling a downed American plane to narrowly escaping a life sentence in Siberia, Reuven Rashkovsky’s story is a gripping tale of coming of age, searching for belonging, and daring to escape the tightly controlled Soviet regime. Relayed in his point of view by his daughter, Dr. Karine Rashkovsky, An Improbable Life tells the story of a man who has been at the center of some of the most dramatic and tumultuous events in modern history, from World War II to the Six-Day War to the collapse of the USSR, providing insight into the world of Soviet Jewry and the almost insurmountable obstacles to getting out. Filled with quirky, revealing anecdotes, An Improbable Life is a valuable historical resource for anyone intrigued by culture and identity in the Soviet Union from the last days of Stalin to the Brezhnev era and the paradox and perils of being outcast—and possibly heroic—in that time and place. With the return of a totalitarian, imperialist Russia, Rashkovsky’s story is all too relevant to today’s struggles. Here is an improbable true story of what can indeed, be possible.

Sharon A. Kowalsky

Deviant Women

$30.00

Deviant Women, first examines the emergence of the discipline of criminology in early Soviet Russia, tracing the development of principles and theories—particularly that of female deviance—and highlighting the ways in which criminologists, a diverse cohort of jurists, doctors, sociologists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, statisticians, and forensic experts, conducted innovative social science research under the constraints of Bolshevik ideology. It then turns to criminologists’ analyses of female crime, exploring their attitudes concerning sexuality, geography, and class. Concluding with a close study of infanticide, the most “typical” crime committed by women, Deviant Women discusses the social attitudes revealed through the professional discussions of this crime. Throughout, Kowalsky focuses on the position of women in early Soviet society, revealing criminologists’ understandings of female crime and how their attitudes helped shape the development of social and behavioral norms in revolutionary Russia.

Lilia Kaganovsky

The voice of technology

$30.00

As cinema industries around the globe adjusted to the introduction of synch-sound technology, the Soviet Union was also shifting culturally, politically, and ideologically from the heterogeneous film industry of the 1920s to the centralized industry of the 1930s, and from the avant-garde to Socialist Realism. In The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928–1935, Lilya Kaganovsky explores the history, practice, technology, ideology, aesthetics, and politics of the transition to sound within the context of larger issues in Soviet media history. Industrialization and centralization of the cinema industry greatly altered the way movies in the Soviet Union were made, while the introduction of sound radically altered the way these movies were received. Kaganovsky argues that the coming of sound changed the Soviet cinema industry by making audible, for the first time, the voice of State power, directly addressing the Soviet viewer. By exploring numerous examples of films from this transitional period, Kaganovsky demonstrates the importance of the new technology of sound in producing and imposing the “Soviet Voice.”

Jillian Porter

Economies of Feeling

$30.00

Economies of Feeling offers new explanations for the fantastical plots of mad or blocked ambition that set the nineteenth-century Russian prose tradition in motion. Jillian Porter compares the conceptual history of social ambition in post-Napoleonic France and post-Decembrist Russia and argues that the dissonance between foreign and domestic understandings of this economic passion shaped the literature of Nicholas I’s reign (1825 —1855). Porter shows how, for Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Faddei Bulgarin, ambition became a staging ground for experiments with transnational literary exchange. In its encounters with the celebrated Russian cultural value of hospitality and the age-old vice of miserliness, ambition appears both timely and anachronistic, suspiciously foreign and disturbingly Russian—it challenges readers to question the equivalence of local and imported words, feelings, and forms. Economies of Feeling examines founding texts of nineteenth-century Russian prose alongside nonliterary materials from which they drew energy—from French clinical diagnoses of “ambitious monomania” to the various types of currency that proliferated under Nicholas I. It thus contributes fresh and fascinating insights into Russian characters’ impulses to attain rank and to squander, counterfeit, and hoard. Porter’s interdisciplinary approach will appeal to scholars of comparative as well as Russian literature.