University of California Press
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Sails and Shadows
Kirkus Best Book of 2025How the early Portuguese Empire facilitated the modern slave trade. The Portuguese conquered the challenges of sailing the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean, extending their colonial empire along Africa's western shores. With their dedication to developing new sailing techniques and groundbreaking new knowledge of weather patterns and ocean currents, Portuguese mariners set the tone for the Age of Exploration. But their navigational achievements had horrific consequences for the people of western Africa: subjection to the slave trade. Patricia Seed examines the historical and climatic odds that Portuguese seafarers overcame to be the first Europeans to tame the Atlantic. Using insights from fields ranging from oceanography to ethnography, she recounts how the Portuguese rapidly innovated and achieved profound new understandings of the ocean and sailing. At the same time, she foregrounds the reality that these innovations enabled them to inflict unimaginable cruelty as, against sometimes violent resistance, they forged what became their spoils of empire: the lucrative trade in human cargo that enslaved millions across Africa and beyond. Sails and Shadows is a history of incredible ingenuity outweighed and overshadowed by the horrors it wrought.
The Middle-Class New Deal
New York Times bestsellerAs seen on The Daily Show“This book is music to my ears.”—Jon StewartA bold, accessible story about how the American middle class was built and what we can do to save it. The American middle class didn’t happen by accident—it was built through government action in the wake of the Great Depression. But over the past forty years, many of those policies have been rolled back or weakened, leaving working families with less security and fewer opportunities to get ahead. What would it take to reverse cours? n The Middle-Class New Deal, A. Mechele Dickerson breaks down the changes in education, labor, housing, and consumer-credit policy that have steadily eroded the economic stability of lower- and middle-income Americans—especially people of color and those without college degrees. Blending the latest research with personal stories from her own family, Dickerson shows how local and federal politicians have disingenuously used rhetoric to mask how their policies consistently favor the privileged class. Clear and compelling, the book lays out a bold path to meaningfully rebuild the middle class and expand opportunity for everyday Americans.
Archiving the Past
Archiving the Past uncovers the story of the women in France who, from the 1920s to the 1970s, played critical roles in the production of global cinema's history: as archivists charged with collecting films and other materials, as witnesses tasked with remembering their own film careers, and as activists committed to recovering women's contributions to film history. Reflecting on how gender politics informs the production of film history, Aurore Spiers recasts the film archive as a site of women's intervention, modeling strategies for inclusivity, recuperation, and liberation within feminist film historiography.
Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy
In June 1981 a squadron of Israeli military planes destroyed a nuclear reactor under construction near Baghdad. Until then, few observers had imagined that one nation might attack another by bombing its reactors. Since then, the strategic debate has had to admit a terrifying new fact: a nation with nuclear power plants on its territory places weapons of potential mass destruction in the hands of its enemies. A major nuclear power station or waste storage reservation bombed as the Iraqi reactor was bombed--that is, with conventional explosives--could contimate thousands of square iles and cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives. Nuclear power plants turn conventionally armed enemies into nuclear enemies and make nuclear hostages of entire populations. In this book, Bennett Ramberg explains clearly, for both the lay reader and the technical community, the vulnerabilities of different sorts of nuclear facilities and lists reasons why they are likely to be destroyed in war. In a case-by-case analysis of countries using or building nuclear power plants, Dr. Ramberg shows that the safety of thousands could depend on such volatile factors as the psychological sensitivity of national leders and the direction of the wind. A combination of engineering changes, civil defense, use of alternative forms of energy, and changes in international law could lessen these risks; but until the danger is recognized, no change is likely. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.
Industrial Islamism
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. Industrial Islamism analyzes the relationship, since the end of the Cold War, between the rise of political Islamism in Muslim-majority countries and the rise of a new global "middle class" of industrial entrepreneurs. Challenging common assumptions, Utku Balaban questions the idea that political Islamism represents the antithesis of Western modernity and industrialization. On the contrary: the more enthusiastically a Muslim-majority country industrializes, the more "Islamized" its politics becomes. The book focuses on Turkey, historically the most industrialized Muslim-majority country in the world, with the most successful Islamist movement and a relatively competitive electoral system. It provides a fine-grained historical and ethnographic analysis at the local level of urban-industrial control over workers in sweatshops and working-class neighborhoods by this new global middle class, whom Balaban calls the faubourgeoisie. As the central actor behind Turkey's post–Cold War industrialization, the faubourgeoisie allies with the Islamist movement to control its workers and significantly influence national politics.
Nature's Greatest Success
The 15,000-year story of how grass seduced humanity into being its unwitting labor force—and the science behind it. Domesticated crops were not human creations, and agriculture was not simply invented. As Robert N. Spengler shows, domestication was the result of an evolutionary process in which people played a role only unwittingly and as actors in a numberless cast that spanned the plant and animal kingdoms. Nature's Greatest Success is the first book to bring together recent scientific discoveries and fascinating ongoing research to provide a systematic account of not only how agriculture really developed but why. Through fifteen chapters, this book dives deep into the complex processes that drove domestication and the various roles that plants and animals, including humans, played in bringing about those changes. At the intersection of popular history, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, Nature's Greatest Success offers a revolutionary account of humanity not at the apex of nature but deeply embedded in the natural world and the evolutionary processes that continue to guide it even today.
The Jew Who Would Be King
"Brings the nineteenth century to life, with its attendant disease, violence, and colonial machinations.”—Jewish Book Council “In Rovner's deeply researched biography, the adventurer's swashbuckling memoirs are. . . . a crowbar of sorts, used to pry open a window onto an era of possibility, prejudice and burgeoning colonial avarice.”—NPRThis vivid reconstruction of one man’s life reveals the harsh realities and moral ambiguities of colonial power. The Jew Who Would Be King tells the story of Nathaniel Isaacs—a nineteenth-century British Jew who helped establish the Zulu kingdom only to become a ruthless warlord and slaveholder. Isaacs’ thrilling journey begins with his shipwreck on the shores of Zululand and proceeds to ports across West Africa, including Freetown, Sierra Leone. There, tasked by the colonial governor to end the local slave trade, Isaacs brokered deals that reinforced his own power. Adam Rovner's meticulous archival research in England, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and St. Helena, coupled with his own travels to the remnants of Isaacs’ island stronghold in Guinea, brings this complex figure to life. Through Isaacs’ story, Rovner exposes the entangled forces of Jewish emancipation and antisemitism, slavery and abolition, the stark dichotomies of civilization and “savagery,” and the creation of whiteness versus Blackness.
Toward a More Perfect Rebellion
Toward a More Perfect Rebellion tells the riveting story of the socially engaged filmmakers of color who studied in the Ethno-Communications Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, between 1969 and 1973. While the program is best known for training the trailblazing group of Black directors known as the L.A. Rebellion, this book also includes the radical Asian American, Chicana/o, and Native American filmmakers who collaborated alongside their Black classmates to create one of the most expansive and groundbreaking bodies of work of any US university cohort. Through extensive interviews with the filmmakers and cross-racial analysis of their collective filmography, Josslyn Jeanine Luckett sheds light on a largely untold history of media activists working outside Hollywood yet firmly rooted in Los Angeles, aiming their cameras with urgency and tenderness to capture their communities' stories of power, struggle, and improvisational brilliance.
Humans
"Surekha Davies invites readers to imagine the lives of historical monsters and to empathize with their often-wretched treatment." - Science MagazineA history of how humans have created monsters out of one another—from our deepest fears—and what these monsters tell us about humanity's present and future. Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein's monster and E.T., Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal. In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making and charts a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.
The Small Stuff of Roman Antiquity
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. Why are the small and unimportant relics of Roman antiquity often the most enduring, in material form and in our affections? Through close encounters with minor things such as insects, brief lives, quibbles, irritants, and jokes, Emily Gowers provocatively argues that much of what the Romans dismissed as superfluous or peripheral in fact took up immense imaginative space. It was often through the small stuff that the Romans most acutely probed and challenged their society’s overarching values and priorities and its sense of proportion and justice. There is much to learn from what didn’t or shouldn’t matter. By marking the spots where the apparently pointless becomes significant, this book radically adjusts our understanding of the Romans and their world, as well as our own minor feelings and intimate preoccupations.
Where Is Abbas Kiarostami?
When Abbas Kiarostami suddenly passed away in July 2016, he was already an iconic figure in world cinema—and his reputation as a master filmmaker has only grown since. In this book, celebrated scholar Hamid Dabashi offers a new way of looking at Kiarostami's artworld, one that questions the very idea of film philosophy. Dabashi's authoritative account of the philosophical resonances of Kiarostami's oeuvre offers an iconoclastic critique of the field's Eurocentrism and, in vivid prose, makes the case for a new method of appreciating the work of this essential figure. The result is a provocative perspective on the totality of Kiarostami's legacy that, with deep roots in Iranian aesthetic and Persian poetic and philosophical traditions, overcomes film's provincial preoccupation with its Western heritage and charts a new path forward for film-philosophy.
Migrants in the Digital Periphery
As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance industries. And when US Immigration Customs Enforcement aggressively reinforced its program of raids, detention, and family separation, it was powered by Silicon Valley corporations. In cities of refuge, where communities on the move once lived in anonymity and proximity to familial and diaspora networks, the possibility for escape is diminishing. As cities rely increasingly on tech companies to develop digital urban infrastructures for accessing information, identification, services, and socioeconomic life at large, they also invite the border to encroach further on migrant communities, networks, and bodies. In this book, Matt Mahmoudi unveils how the unsettling convergence of Silicon Valley logics, austere and xenophobic migration management practices, and racial capitalism has allowed tech companies to close in on the final frontiers of fugitivity—and suggests how we might counteract their machines through our own refusal.
Vypredané
33,49 €
David Park - A Retrospective
This generously illustrated volume is the first comprehensive publication devoted to the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911-60).
Best known as the founder of Bay Area Figurative art, Park moved from Boston to California at the age of seventeen and spent most of his adult life in and around San Francisco. In the immediate postwar years, like many avant-garde American artists, he engaged with Abstract Expressionism and painted non-objectively. In a moment of passion in 1949, he made the radical decision to abandon nearly all of his abstract canvases at the Berkeley city dump and return to the human figure, in so doing marking the beginning of the Bay Area Figurative movement.
The astonishingly powerful paintings he made in the decade that followed brought together his long-held interest in classic subjects such as portraiture, domestic interiors, musicians, rowers, and bathers with lush, gestural paint handling and an extraordinary sense of color. In 1958-59 Park reached his expressive peak, reveling in the sensuous qualities of paint to create intensely physical, psychologically charged, and deeply felt canvases. This fertile period cut short by illness in 1960, Park transferred his creative energy to other mediums when he could no longer work on canvas. In the last months of his life, bedridden, he produced an extraordinary thirty-foot-long felt-tip-pen scroll and a poignant series of gouaches.
Published to accompany the first major museum exhibition of Park's work in more than thirty years, David Park: A Retrospective traces the full arc of the artist's career, from his early social realist and cubist-inspired efforts of the 1930s to his mature figurative paintings of the 1950s and his astounding final works on paper. An overview of Park's full body of work by Janet Bishop, SFMOMA's Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture, will be joined by approximately ninety full-color plates of paintings and works on paper; an essay by Tara McDowell on the figure drawing sessions held by Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, and others in their studios starting in 1953; short essays on Park's scroll, his gouaches, and the portraits that Imogen Cunningham and Park made of each other; and an illustrated chronology.
Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Exhibition schedule:
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: June 2-September 8, 2019
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts: December 21, 2019-March 15, 2020
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: April 11-September 7, 2020
Vypredané
46,50 €
Nonstop Metropolis
"The maps themselves are things of beauty...a document of its time, of our time." -Sadie Stein, New York Times "One is invited to fathom the many New Yorks hidden from history's eye...thoroughly terrific." -Maria Popova, Brain Pickings Nonstop Metropolis, the culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts-from linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalists-amplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. We are invited to travel through Manhattan's playgrounds, from polyglot Queens to many-faceted Brooklyn, and from the resilient Bronx to the mystical kung fu hip-hop mecca of Staten Island. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York City's unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history, but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past.
Nonstop Metropolis allows us to excavate New York's buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more. Contributors: Sheerly Avni, Gaiutra Bahadur, Marshall Berman, Joe Boyd, Will Butler, Garnette Cadogan, Thomas J. Campanella, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Teju Cole, Joel Dinerstein, Paul La Farge, Francisco Goldman, Margo Jefferson, Lucy R. Lippard, Barry Lopez, Valeria Luiselli, Suketu Mehta, Emily Raboteau, Molly Roy, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Luc Sante, Heather Smith, Jonathan Tarleton, Astra Taylor, Alexandra T. Vazquez, Christina Zanfagna Interviews with: Valerie Capers, Peter Coyote, Grandmaster Caz, Grand Wizzard Theodore, Melle Mel, RZA
Vypredané
37,50 €
The Book of Yokai : Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore
Monsters, ghosts, fantastic beings, and supernatural phenomena of all sorts haunt the folklore and popular culture of Japan. Broadly labeled yokai, these creatures come in infinite shapes and sizes, from tengu mountain goblins and kappa water spirits to shape-shifting foxes and long-tongued ceiling-lickers. Currently popular in anime, manga, film, and computer games, many yokai originated in local legends, folktales, and regional ghost stories. Drawing on years of research in Japan, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the history and cultural context of yokai, tracing their roots, interpreting their meanings, and introducing people who have hunted them through the ages. In this delightful and accessible narrative, readers will explore the roles played by these mysterious beings within Japanese culture and will also learn of their abundance and variety through detailed entries, some with original illustrations, on more than fifty individual creatures. The Book of Yokai provides a lively excursion into Japanese folklore and its ever-expanding influence on global popular culture.
It also invites readers to examine how people create, transmit, and collect folklore, and how they make sense of the mysteries in the world around them. By exploring yokai as a concept, we can better understand broader processes of tradition, innovation, storytelling, and individual and communal creativity.
Vypredané
34,95 €
Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness
Long before e-mail and the Internet permeated society, Roy Ascott, a pioneering British artist and theorist, coined the term 'telematic art' to describe the use of online computer networks as an artistic medium. In "Telematic Embrace" Edward A. Shanken gathers, for the first time, an impressive compilation of more than three decades of Ascott's philosophies on aesthetics, interactivity, and the sense of self and community in the telematic world of cyberspace. This book explores Ascott's ideas on how networked communication has shaped behavior and consciousness within and beyond the realm of what is conventionally defined as art. Telematics, a powerful marriage of computers and telecommunication, made technologies we now take for granted - such as e-mail and automated teller machines (ATMs) - part of our daily life, and made art a more interactive form of expression. Telematic art challenges traditional relationships between artist, artwork, and audience by allowing nonlocal audiences to influence the emergent qualities of the artwork, which consists of the ebb and flow of electronic information.
These essays constitute a unique archaeology of ideas, tracing Ascott's meditations on the formation of consciousness through the intertwined cultural histories of art and technology from the 1960s to the present. Shanken's introduction situates Ascott's work within a history of ideas in art, technology, and philosophy. Given the increasing role of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the creation of commerce and community at the dawn of this new millennium, scholars, students, laypeople, policymakers, and artists will find this collection informative and thought-provoking.
Vypredané
54,50 €