Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast

Russians’ dachas are regularly mentioned in a sentence or two in newspaper articles about life in Russia, and many of who have visited the lands of the former Soviet Union have visited dachas. Yet, just as Russians themselves treat dachas as an escape, outsiders tend to treat them as peripheral. Melissa Caldwell has stood that view on its head in her book Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside (University of California Press, 2010) by showing how even as dachas are a refuge from city life, they are central to Russian life. Not only do we learn about dachas and activities that fill days at the dacha like berry picking and mushrooming, we get a glimpse of Russian ideas of authenticity and the role of nature, as well as how the end of communism is changing Russian life. It is an engaging book, and it was a pleasure to speak with Melissa about dachas.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Taylor Atkins' recent book is both an important contribution to East Asian Studies and an absolute delight to read. Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945(University of California Press, 2010) opens with a movie theater commercial in 2004 and closes with a metaphorical decapitation. In the intervening chapters Atkins develops a series of sophisticated and masterfully defended arguments about the ways that colonial Japan was transformed by its engagement with Korean society and culture. Integrating critical literature on empire and colonialism, Japanese and Korean cultural history, and epistemological studies of loss and of observation, Primitive Selvesis a model of careful, elegant, and responsible historical work lightened by a wonderful sense of humor. It was my sincere pleasure both to read the book, and to talk with Atkins about it.

As Atkins mentions in the course of his book and our conversation, all of the proceeds of the book are donated to the Tahirih Justice Center, which can be found here.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matthew Delmont‘s The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (University of California Press, 2012) weaves a fascinating narrative in which the content of a popular television show is only one element of its phenomenal impact. Nor is American Bandstand‘s popularity the limit of Delmont’s interest. In The Nicest Kids in Town, American Bandstand marks the confluence of competing, contradictory, and even some complementary forces in 1950s Philadelphia: local civil rights activism, inter-ethnic tensions, defensive localism, housing discrimination, and concerns over youth behavior influenced the content and reception of the program.

Part of the book’s brilliance lies in its use of character to create a sense of the place and time. From smaller characters like Walter Palmer, a black teen who organized against the segregation of Bandstand, to earnest liberal anti-segregationists like Maurice Fagan, whose treatment is more extensive, to the television icon Dick Clark, Delmont makes the people in the book both historical agents and complex human beings.

Though it is most unusual as a piece of scholarship in so fully evoking a time and place filled with real people, The Nicest Kids in Town is equally a model for American Studies research. Delmont’s painstaking thoroughness yields incredible specificity, which is most useful to making major claims about the importance of popular culture and about particular cultural products.

Finally, the book offers a perspective on the major industrial shifts in the television and music industries of the period, revealing how the displacement and/or appropriation of local talent and culture through the giant apparatus of television both expanded TV’s possibilities and complicated (for better and worse) the potential for local change.

In addition to the book itself (which is available both in text and for Kindle) and its website, and the author’s website , check out The Nicest Kids in Town digital project which includes 100 related images and video clips including American Bandstand memorabilia, newspaper clippings regarding protests of American Bandstand, photographs from high school yearbooks, and video clips from American Bandstand.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Carol Benedict‘s Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 (University of California Press, 2011)is many things at the same time; among other things, it’s both an exceptionally rich account of an object (or set of objects) that were crucial to the history of China in the world, and...

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

First things first: this is an outstanding book. In the course of The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet (University of California Press, 2011), Erik Mueggler weaves together the stories of two botanists traveling through western China and Tibet in a lyrically-written...

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is the relationship between religion, secularization, and education? Parna Sengupta, Associate Director of Introductory Studies at Stanford University, explores their connections as she reexamines the categories religion, empire, and modernity. In her new book, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal (University of California Press, 2011), she challenges the myth that Western rule secularized non-Western societies. Pedagogy for Religion focuses on missionary schools and their influence in Bengal from roughly 1850 to the 1930s. Sengupta’s conclusions are drawn from reading what she calls the “mundane aspects of schooling,” rather than high religious discourse. The replication of religious, gender, and social identities, as they were established through textbooks, objects, language, and teachers, redefined modern definitions of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. Altogether, Sengupta demonstrates that modern education effectively deepened the place of religion in colonial South Asia. However, this contemporary return to religion was not a “backward” or “irrational” resurgence of religious beliefs and practices. Religion was transformed into the carrier of modernity and education became the means for recreating religious identity.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We tend to take for granted that we have bodies, that these bodies are knowable and measurable, and that we understand how to relate our own bodies to those of the people around us. To put it more simply: if I were to ask you how tall you were, how...

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In what must be one of the most well-organized and clearly-written books in the history of academic writing, Yi-Li Wu‘s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010), introduces readers to a rich history of women’s medicine (fuke) in the context of late...

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Cuisine in early modern Japan was experienced and negotiated through literature and ritual, and the uneaten or inedible was often as important as what was actually consumed. Eric Rath‘s recent book Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2010) is a rich study of the culture,...

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In his new book The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press, 2011), Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, takes a close look at the powerful influence Google has on our society. He believes that by valuing popularity over accuracy, Google dictates what information is most useful to users, thereby changing societal perceptions of what information is relevant. In our interview, we talked about how Vaidyanathan’s American Studies training informed his analysis of Google, the problem of Google’s use in authoritarian countries, and how Google emerged out of nowhere to defeat all other search competitors. Read all about it, and more, in Vaidhyanathan’s illuminating new book.

Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.