Category Archives: African American Studies

Civil Rights under the Northern Lights: Excerpt from Black Lives in Alaska

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest maps the trials and challenges African Americans have encountered in the forty-ninth state. The earliest arrivals, many of whom worked as whalers, prospectors, and service members, did not always stay long. Others put down roots and lived full lives in Alaska. These Black individuals fought for greater inclusion and helped establish Alaska’s modern civic institutions, contributing to the political and social life of the state even as they endured racism and fought injustice.

The excerpt below touches on Alaska’s history of race relations and civil rights. This history reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses—self-activity, activism, and perseverance—are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places. Even as it reveals the specific context of the state’s complex history, Alaska’s Black history encompasses the themes of the larger nationwide freedom struggle and enriches the history of people of African descent in North America. —Ian C. Hartman

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest by Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer

In the summer of 1962, African Americans and other area activists joined together to picket Carrs, Alaska’s largest grocery store chain. Clarence Coleman, branch president of the Anchorage NAACP, wrote to Roy Wilkins at the national office in New York City: “The first picket line in the history of the Anchorage NAACP began its task of protesting the hiring policies of Carrs Food Center here in Anchorage today 31 July 10 am Alaska Standard Time.”1 Coleman’s statement was not quite true. Five years earlier, Joseph M. Jackson and James E. Owens organized area workers and set up a picket outside of the Local 341 Laborers and Hod Carrier Union Hall. They and others sought an inclusive union for African American and Alaska Native workers and called for greater transparency in promotion guidelines. Owens stated that direct action “was the only way we’re going to get equality.”2

The picket of Carrs in Anchorage’s Fairview neighborhood was a watershed moment in the history of civil rights in Alaska. Many in the Black community took issue with the grocery store’s apparent refusal to hire African Americans to work in any capacity beyond sanitation and other so-called menial, low-level jobs. In one correspondence Bernard J. Carr Sr., an owner of the grocery store chain, conceded he had “two Negro employees,” a garbage collector and a janitor. But he continued, “The time is not right to hire a Negro checker.” Activist Pat Berkley recollected, “They [Carrs] didn’t want to hire any Blacks. And of course, Pop Carr…wasn’t to hire any Blacks because he had hired one [who] became very friendly with a white girl that worked there, so that was the end of that.”3 Still, the NAACP suggested the grocer benefited from a base of African American patrons and, as such, should hire and promote a few as employees. At its Fairview store, over 30 percent of the clientele was Black, yet not a single African American worked in management or any position that interfaced with the public.4

In response, men and women took to the picket line outside of Carrs to raise awareness. Though she was seven months pregnant, Anchorage resident and activist Pat Berkley helped organize the picket and led the women to march on the line during the day; the men walked in the evening. Cars and pedestrians “booed and laughed at [us],” Berkley remembered.5 Despite some negative reaction, the picket seemingly worked; owners agreed to hire a more diverse workforce. Organizer Joseph Kline summarized the terms of the agreement: Carrs grocery would “hire one person immediately. The second within thirty days and the third sixty days after the first.” These positions were supposed to include a clerk, cashier, or grocery checkers, all of which afforded a greater possibility for advancement than the menial positions that the picketers accused Carrs of reserving for Black workers.6

Unfortunately, Carrs failed to hire three African Americans within the agreed-upon sixty days, but the NAACP kept up its pressure, and the grocery store eventually complied. Richard Watts was the first man Carrs hired as a result of the picket. He became the first African American bagger at the store and stayed with the grocer for over forty-five years. In accordance with what the activists envisioned, Watts did not remain a bagger for long. He ascended the chain of management; by the end of a long and distinguished career, Watts had become a district manager and participated in the local business community as a member of the board of directors for the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce.7

The picket of Carrs in Anchorage’s Fairview neighborhood was a watershed moment in the history of civil rights in Alaska.

The Carrs boycott anticipated more extensive changes in Fairview that had come about by the middle of the 1960s. During this decade the neighborhood emerged as a center of activism and civic engagement in Anchorage. Its reputation as one of Anchorage’s most diverse communities only grew, as did the fear that city leadership might continue to neglect the needs of its residents. After the redevelopment and so-called urban renewal of Eastchester Flats, roughly the southern tier of Fairview, men and women on the community council grew more determined to ensure the existing neighborhood would not be left out as Anchorage leadership plotted new recreational outlets for residents. Olivia Holland, Ben Humphries, and John Parks, all active on the neighborhood council, led an effort to set aside land for a park and later spearheaded an effort to deliver public transportation throughout Anchorage. These efforts took considerable effort but would yield tangible results for the residents of Fairview in the decades to follow.8

Beyond the Carrs boycott in Fairview, activists protested and organized against mistreatment and discrimination elsewhere during the early and mid-1960s. In Anchorage and Fairbanks, residents established employment workshops to organize letter writing campaigns and rallies and to reach out to area businesses to connect minority job candidates with desirable employment. The workshops in Anchorage organized pickets at Caribou-Wards and Woolworths; one woman in Anchorage, Lillian Morris, took a lead role in the Woolworths pickets and led the area employment workshop. Fairbanks activists also organized a picket of Woolworths in their hometown. The efforts paid off, at least to some extent. Sears, Roebuck and Company agreed to interview and hire qualified African American, Native, Filipinx, and Mexican applicants. The Spenard Caribou-Wards hired two Black salesclerks and agreed to file and retain applications for a longer period, a concession to the employment workshop. The Anchorage Woolworths hired a Black employee for the first time. These efforts did not approach the level of equity that the Employment Workshop ultimately desired, but they represented a small measure of progress.9

Ian C. Hartman is associate professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

David Reamer is a public historian and journalist who writes for the Anchorage Daily News.

Notes

1 Clarence V. Coleman to Roy Wilkins via Western Union Telegram, August 1, 1962, Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, 1956–1965, Series D: The West, ed. John H. Bracey Jr., Sharon Harley, and August Meier. Available on microfilm at the Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

2 For reference to the picket on the Local 341 Laborers and Hod Carrier Union, see Papers of the NAACP, Supplement to Part 13, the NAACP and Labor, 1956–1965, edited by John H. Bracey Jr. and August Meier (folder 14), available on microfilm at the University of Alaska Anchorage. For additional reference, see Meier Randall Keenan, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Vintage, 2000), 284.

3 Charlie Mae “Pat” Berkley, interview by Bruce Melzer, c. 1982–1983, Bruce Melzer oral history interviews, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

4 NAACP News Letter, Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, 1956–1965, Series D: The West, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

5 Charlie Mae “Pat” Berkley, interview by Bruce Melzer, c. 1982–1983.

6 Joseph H. Kline Jr. to Roy Wilkins, March 3, 1963. Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, available on microfilm at the Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

7 For a brief report on Richard Watts’s career at Carrs, see Christine Kim, “Carrs’ First Black Worker Recalls His Rise through the Ranks,” February 19, 2010 on KTUU. For the announcement of Watts on the board of directors for the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, see “Anchorage Chamber’s 2013–14 Board of Directors Announced,” Alaska Dispatch News, September 12, 2013.

8 “City officials tour Fairview neighborhood park,” Anchorage Times, August 2, 1967, 1.

9 Dianne Anderson, “Protest Group Gets Results, With and Without Picketing,” Anchorage Daily Times, August 13, 1968, 3.

Black History Month Book List

In celebration of Black History Month, we invite you to check out recent books as well as select titles from our backlist in Pacific Northwest, African American, and Black Diaspora historical studies that speak to the profound legacy of Black Americans and this year’s theme of Black resistance.

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest

Centering the agency and diversity of Black Alaskans, this book chronicles how Alaska’s Black population, though small, has had an outsized impact on the culture and civic life of the region. Alaska’s history of race relations and civil rights reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses—determination, activism, and perseverance—are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places.

The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era

University of Washington Emeritus Professor of American History Quintard Taylor’s meticulously researched account is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest. The second edition features a new foreword and afterword.

Revolution to Evolution: The Story of the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity at the University of Washington

Born from a national movement in the late 1960s seeking to address structural and cultural racism, the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity (OMA&D) started as a core group of Black Student Union leaders at the UW who demanded changes in how the school served students of color. In a new book releasing February 21, legendary founding member Emile Pitre shares deep insight into the making of the institution through candid interviews, letters, and reflections of those who participated across decades.

Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle

In this rich narrative, Daudi Abe draws on interviews with artists and journalists to trace how hip hop flourished in the Seattle scene. He shows how Seattle hip-hop culture goes beyond art and music, influencing politics, the relationships between communities of color and law enforcement, the changing media scene, and youth outreach and educational programs.

The Portland Black Panthers: Empowering Albina and Remaking a City

Combining histories of the city and its African American community with interviews with former Portland Panthers and other key players, this long-overdue account adds complexity to our understanding of the protracted civil rights movement throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime

Beginning with the 1971 appearance of the first Black female superheroine in a comic book—the Skywald Publications character “the Butterfly”—artist, curator, and writer Deborah Elizabeth Waley examines the representation, production, and transnational circulation of women of African descent in the sequential art world.

Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture

How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora.

Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

Through interviews with activists, extensive archival research, and media analysis, Robin Hayes reveals how Black Power and African independence activists created a diaspora underground, characterized by collaboration and reciprocal empowerment. Together, they redefined racial discrimination as an international human rights issue and laid the groundwork for future transnational racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, this volume explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure.

Barbara Earl Thomas: The Geography of Innocence

Artist Barbara Earl Thomas’s body of work collected here offers a reexamination of Black portraiture and the preconceived dichotomies of innocence and guilt and sin and redemption, and the ways in which these notions are assigned and distorted along cultural and racial lines.

Black Independence by Robin J. Hayes

“What, to the [enslaved and colonized], is your Fourth of July?”

— Frederick Douglass

On US Independence Day, for years it has been an African American custom to circulate the poignant speech—widely known as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”—by self-emancipated abolitionist Frederick Douglass.* His iconic oratory points out the stark contrast between America’s exaltation of self-determination through words and its actions of violence, false imprisonment, cultural imperialism, and other human rights violations to block African Americans from having the power necessary to shape their own destinies. Since before Douglass’s time, Black people in the United States and Africa have rebelled against the infantilizing nature of White supremacy by fighting to claim a fair share of the wealth their labor and cultures produce. As revealed in my new book, Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground, part of what unites Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic is a consensus that the key to protecting Black lives is Black autonomy.

In his speech to a predominately White audience in 1852, Douglass stated plainly that the “rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not me . . . I shall see this day from the [enslaved’s] point of view.” While slyly pointing out the intersection between patriarchy, capitalism, and racism in America, he also highlighted a recurring theme in Black cultures throughout the diaspora: authenticity’s valor versus hypocrisy’s disgrace. American, British, and French empires have all waved the flags of self-determination in public while, for example, turning a blind eye to the mass rape of Black women during slavery. Douglass’s assertion that a nation’s democratic self-image can only be validated by its most marginalized community members became a core belief of the Black freedom struggle in the United States and abroad. 

Just over a hundred years after Douglass confronted his audience, anti-colonial activist and former political prisoner Kwame Nkrumah celebrated the hard-won independence of his country, Ghana. During the festivities, which were attended by prominent African Americans, including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, Nkrumah encouraged the Ashanti, Ewe, and other tribes in his homeland to see themselves as a shining example of a new era in the diaspora: “From now on there is a new African in the world [who] is ready to fight his own battle and show that, after all, the Black man is capable of managing his own affairs.”

The wave of African independence in the mid-twentieth century—and its accompanying critique of the two-faced nature of colonizing White supremacist institutions—profoundly influenced an upstart generation of African American activists. Malcolm X, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) were just a few of the Black Power movement leaders who were frustrated by the slow pace of progress toward racial equality. At the heart of their exasperation was the glaring divergence between American institutions’ stated values of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and their willingness to enable the lynching, disenfranchisement, and economic exploitation of African Americans. As a result, Black Power activists began to seek alternatives to the changing hearts-and-minds strategy advanced by Dr. King.

Reaching out across borders, Black Power and African independence activists connected within a diaspora underground. A diaspora underground consists of the physical emancipated spaces in which activists engage and the shared understandings of the past, present, and future that are created in such spaces. This kind of international engagement helps Black activists dismantle dominant gaslighting myths about the benevolence of White supremacy and colonialism. In this diaspora underground, Black Power and African independence leaders were able to ground themselves in an authentic vision of paths toward autonomy and full enjoyment of human rights that they themselves could construct. They discovered a deeper understanding of their roots as well as routes toward liberation that did not depend on changing White hearts and minds.

During his speech, Douglass asked the rhetorical question, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” He responded, “A thin veil to cover up crimes.” Revealing the truth about White supremacist aggression has been part of the continuous work of the Black freedom struggle from Douglass, to African independence and Black Power, to Black Lives Matter. Through the affirmation of authenticity’s valor over hypocrisy’s disgrace, the Fourth of July has also become an opportunity to reflect on the rights Black communities have to assert autonomy over their own bodies, relationships, neighborhoods, and nations. This kind of Black self-determination, which can be nurtured from within, remains the true meaning of independence. 

*The original title of this speech is “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro.”

Robin J. Hayes, PhD, is a contributor to the Atlantic, writer and director of the award-winning documentary Black and Cuba, and creative director of Progressive Pupil.

March 2018 News, Reviews, and Events

News

The University of Washington Press has an outstanding opening for an Editorial Assistant (job number 153892). Please help us get the word out to excellent candidates who are interested in getting into acquisitions!

We were thrilled to announce that starting March 1, 2018, the University of Washington Press joins the UW Libraries and reports to the vice provost of digital initiatives and dean of University Libraries, Lizabeth (Betsy) Wilson. The Press and the Libraries currently collaborate on a number of joint initiatives, and the Press has also published a number of books in association with the Libraries. Read the full press release on the UW Press Blog and more at Shelf Awareness Pro.

Monthly Giveaways

Reviews and Interviews

The Spokesman-Review publishes an opinion piece by The Spokane River editor Paul Lindholdt.

The Indian Express features an article by High-Tech Housewives author Amy Bhatt about how US immigration policy is impacting Indian families.

The Seattle Times mentions Seattle Walks by David B. Williams in a Lit Life column about the Seattle Public Library’s Peak Picks program.

Light reviews Nasty Women Poets edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane (dist. Lost Horse Press): “This anthology is the burn, the salve on the burn, and the funny story you make up years later to explain the scar.”—Barbara Egel

Kotaku Australia includes Black Women in Sequence by Deborah Elizabeth Whaley in a round-up of comics-related Black History Month reads (2/15/18). The author also gets a mention in a New York Times opinion piece (no book mention; 2/16/18), which is syndicated and translated at Gazeta do Povo.

UW Today / UW News highlights news that UW professor emeritus and UW Press author Quintard Taylor has been awarded the lifetime achievement award from the Washington State Historical Society. The Forging of a Black Community gets a mention.

Redmond Reporter features Looking for Betty MacDonald by Paula Becker.

The Forbes Science / #WhoaScience stream features the second edition of The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 by Brian F. Atwater, Satoko Musumi-Rokkaku, Kenji Satake, Yoshinobu Tsuji, Kazue Ueda, and David K. Yamaguchi (published with US Geological Survey, Department of the Interior): “A rather beautifully illustrated account.”—Robin Andrews

Above & Beyond publishes an article about ptarmigans by Michael Engelhard. Ice Bear gets a byline mention.

University of Montana News features Douglas H. MacDonald and Before Yellowstone.

The Fil-Am Magazine and Inquirer.net US review A Time to Rise edited by Rene Ciria Cruz, Cindy Domingo, and Bruce Occena: “For anyone looking to engage in the issues they believe in or find inspiration amid today’s discouraging headlines, the lessons shared by former KDP members in A Time to Rise are deeply impactful. . . . Detailed and informative, the memoirs in A Time to Rise hash out the struggles that made the difficult road to justice possible. . . . More than a list of achievements, A Time to Rise is personal.”—Renee Macalino Rutledge

Association of King County Historical Organization (AKCHO) Heritage Advisor / News features Frederick L. Brown and his 2017 AKCHO Virginia Marie Folkins Award-winning book The City Is More Than Human.

The Art Newspaper reviews No Idols by Thomas Crow (dist. for Power Publications):”The greatest value of No Idols is in its widest implication: that even if we try, we cannot rid ourselves of the past. Art, stripped of its religious foundations, lives on in a secular world, but ghostly remnants will always remain.”—Pac Pobric

International Examiner mentions Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter and Yoshiko Uchida’s Desert Exile in a review of Jeanette Arakawa’s The Little Exile.

Live Science mentions Ancient Ink edited by Lars Krutak and Aaron Deter-Wolf in an article about newly published research on prehistoric tattooing. The article interviews lead researcher and book contributor Renée Friedman, and her team’s original article is published in the March 2018 issue of Journal of Archaeological Science.

Ethnic Seattle features Monica Sone and Nisei Daughter in a Women’s History Month round-up of women of color writers from Seattle.

Diplomacy’s Public Dimension reviews Mediating Islam by Janet Steele: “Steele brings the strengths of an accomplished journalism and media scholar and twenty years of field research in Southeast Asia to a book that explores important questions. . . . Not least among many contributions in this important study is the way the author, a self-described Western, secular, female scholar, has engaged in sustained, productive cross-cultural dialogue with journalists in majority Muslim countries, many of whom are not liberal or secular.”—Bruce Gregory

Panorama Television (PCTV) “Now Where Were We?” interviews Lorraine McConaghy about Free Boy. Stream the segment on YouTube.

Food Politics blogger Marion Nestle features The Organic Profit by Andrew N. Case.

The New York Times Lens section’s latest Race Stories piece by Maurice Berger features Al Smith’s life, work, and Seattle on the Spot (dist. for Museum of History and Industry).

Cool Green Science (the conservation science blog of The Nature Conservancy) reviews Razor Clams by David Berger: “An entertaining account, and guide, to the real fun of digging your own food in the beach. . . . Berger’s book is an excellent testimony that gathering is still an enriching, fun and tasty pursuit. Long may it be so.”—Matthew L. Miller

Science interviews Ted Pietsch, coauthor of the forthcoming Fishes of the Salish Sea, about first-ever footage of living anglerfish. More via UW News.

Santa Fe Council on International Relations interviews Janet Steele about Mediating Islam.

The Seattle Times Outdoors section features two (out of six) spring hikes from Seattle Walks by David B. Williams.

Humboldt State Now interviews Cutcha Risling Baldy and mentions We Are Dancing for You in a news release about the 32nd Annual California Indian Conference to be held at Humboldt State University on April 5 and April 6. She is chair of the conference organizing committee.

Science to the People rebroadcasts their interview with Dawn Day Biehler about Pests in the City.

New Books Network interviews Frederick L. Brown about The City Is More Than Human (posted on the NBn American Studies, American West, Environmental Studies, History, and Native American Studies channels).

The Booklist Reader features Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and recommends additional contemporary Filipino-American fiction: “Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart is a cornerstone of classic Asian-American literature.”—Terry Hong

New Books

A Family History of Illness: Memory as Medicine
By Brett L. Walker

While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, “Do you have a family history of illness?”—a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on additional meaning and spurred him to investigate his family’s medical past. In this deeply personal narrative, he constructs a history of his body to understand his diagnosis with a serious immunological disorder, weaving together his dying grandfather’s sneaking a cigarette in a shed on the family’s Montana farm, blood fractionation experiments in Europe during World War II, and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks that ravaged small American towns as his ancestors were making their way west.


Firebrand Feminism: The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore
By Breanne Fahs

Breanne Fahs brings together ten years of dialogue with four founders of the radical feminist movement and provides a timely and historically rich account of these audacious women and the lasting impact of their words and work.


Before Yellowstone: Native American Archaeology in the National Park
By Douglas H. MacDonald

Douglas MacDonald tells the long history of human presence in Yellowstone National Park as revealed by archaeological research into nearly 2,000 sites — many of which he helped survey and excavate. He describes and explains the significance of archaeological areas and helps readers understand the archaeological methods used and the limits of archaeological knowledge.


Olympic National Park: A Natural History, Fourth Edition
By Tim McNulty

In this updated classic guide to the park, Tim McNulty invites us into the natural and human history of thesenearly million acres and offers a detailed look at Elwha River restoration after the dam removal, inspiring descriptions of endangered species recovery, and practical advice on how to make the most of your visit.


The Spokane River
Edited by Paul Lindholdt

From Lake Coeur d’Alene to its confluence with the Columbia, the Spokane River travels 111 miles of varied and often spectacular terrain — rural, urban, in places wild. The twenty-eight contributors to this collection — including activists, storytellers, and scientists — profile this living river through personal reflection, history, science, and poetry.


Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going
By Ana Maria Spagna

These engaging, reflective essays muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, and wonder, and remind us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.


Cultivating Nature: The Conservation of a Valencian Working Landscape
By Sarah R. Hamilton
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Shifting between local struggles and global debates, this fascinating environmental history reveals how Franco’s dictatorship, Spain’s integration with Europe, and the crisis in European agriculture have shaped the Albufera Natural Park, its users, and its inhabitants.


Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan
By Jakobina K. Arch
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

In this vivid and nuanced study of how the Japanese people brought whales ashore during the Tokugawa period, Arch makes important contributions to both environmental and Japanese history by connecting Japanese whaling to marine environmental history in the Pacific, including the devastating impact of American whaling in the nineteenth century.


Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic
By Hongmei Sun

In this far-ranging study Hongmei Sun discusses the thousand-year evolution of Sun Wukong (aka Monkey or the Monkey King) in imperial China and multimedia adaptations in Republican, Maoist, and post-socialist China and the United States.


Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform
By Theresia Hofer

Medicine and Memory in Tibet examines medical revivalism on the geographic and sociopolitical margins both of China and of Tibet’s medical establishment in Lhasa, exploring the work of medical practitioners, or amchi, and of Medical Houses in the west-central region of Tsang.


Making New Nepal: From Student Activism to Mainstream Politics
By Amanda Thérèse Snellinger

Based on extensive ethnographic research between 2003 and 2015, Making New Nepal provides a snapshot of an activist generation’s political coming-of-age during a decade of civil war and ongoing democratic street protests.


Mediating Islam: Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia
By Janet Steele

Broadening an overly narrow definition of Islamic journalism, Janet Steele examines day-to-day reporting practices of Muslim professionals, from conservative scripturalists to pluralist cosmopolitans, at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia.


Buddhism Illuminated: Manuscript Art from South-East Asia
By San San May and Jana Igunma
Published with British Library

Buddhism Illuminated includes over one hundred examples of Buddhist art from the British Library’s rich collection, relating each manuscript to Theravada tradition and beliefs, and introducing the historical, artistic, and religious contexts of their production. It is the first book in English to showcase the beauty and variety of Buddhist manuscript art and reproduces many works that have never before been photographed.


Captive Light: The Life and Photography of Ella E. McBride
By Margaret E. Bullock and David F. Martin
Distributed for Tacoma Art Museum
Exhibition on view through July 8, 2018

Internationally acclaimed fine-art photographer Ella McBride (1862–1965) played an important role in the Northwest’s photography community and was a key figure in the national and international pictorialist photography movements. Despite her many accomplishments, which include managing the photography studio of Edward S. Curtis for many years and being an early member of the Seattle Camera Club, McBride is little known today. Captive Light reconsiders her career and the larger pictorialist movement in the Northwest. Captive Light is part of the Tacoma Art Museum’s Northwest Perspective Series on significant Northwest artists.


Julie Speidel: The Center Holds
By Matthew Kangas
Foreword by Rock Hushka
Distributed for Speidel Studio LLC

In this richly-illustrated monograph, the art of Julie Speidel is seen as one of myth and materiality, encompassing the creation more than four decades of numerous objects that inhabit a variety of locales and fulfill a wide variety of purposes. She has created sculpture in many different media and a variety of scale, as well as an impressive body of prints.

Events

MARCH

March 30, A Time to Rise edited by Rene Ciria Cruz, Cindy Domingo, and Bruce Occena, Bayanihan Community Center with Arkipelago Books, San Francisco, CA

March 30 at noon, Janet Steele, Mediating Islam, New York Southeast Asia Network and NYU Wagner’s Office of International Programs, New York, NY

APRIL

April 2 at 7 p.m., Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass Amherst), History of Art & Architecture, Amherst, MA

April 2 at 7 p.m., Ingrid Walker, High, King County Library System – Des Moines Library, Des Moines, WA

April 5 at 7 p.m., Ana Maria Spagna, Uplake, Whitman College, Reid Ballroom, Walla Walla, WA

April 6 at 6 p.m., Bruce Guenther, Michael C. Spafford (dist. for Lucia | Marquand), Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, WA

April 7 at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., Quin’Nita Cobbins, Paul de Barros, Howard Giske, Jacqueline E. A. Lawson, and Al “Butch” Smith, Jr., Seattle on the Spot (dist. for Museum of History and Industry), On the Spot Gallery Talk, Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), Seattle, WA

April 7 at 10 a.m., Stevan Harrell, Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China, Saturday University: Textiles of Southwest China, Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas, University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies and Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle Art Museum, Plestcheeff Auditorium, Seattle, WA

April 8 at 3 p.m., Ana Maria Spagna, Uplake, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA

April 9 at 4:30 p.m., Sylvanna Falcón, Power Interrupted, Wellesley College, 2018 Domna Stanton Lecture in Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley, MA

April 11 at 12:30 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Garfield Senior Center, Pomeroy, WA

April 11 at noon, Janet Steele, Mediating Islam, George Washington University, Sigur Center for Asian Studies, Washington, DC

April 11 at 7 p.m., Nasty Women Poets edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane (dist. Lost Horse Press), GA Nasty Women Poets, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA

April 13 at 7:30 p.m., Kathleen Alcalá, The Deepest Roots, with Donna Miscolta, Town Hall Seattle and Phinney Neighborhood Association, In Residence—History Is an Act of the Imagination, Taproot Theatre, Seattle, WA

April 14 at 10:30 a.m., Jennifer Ott, Waterway (dist. for HistoryLink), Redmond Historical Society, Old Redmond Schoolhouse, Redmond, WA ($5 suggested donation for Non-Members)

April 14, Eileen A. Bjorkman, The Propeller under the Bed, Oregon Aviation Historical Society, Cottage Grove, OR

April 17 at noon, Jakobina K. Arch, Bringing Whales Ashore, Whitman College, Whitman College Bookstore at Reid Campus Center, Young Ballroom, Walla Walla, WA

April 18 at 3 p.m., Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, Suffolk University, Boston, MA

April 19 at 3:30 p.m., Brett L. Walker, A Family History of Illness, University of Oregon, Department of History, Eugene, OR

April 21 at 3:30 p.m., Douglas H. MacDonald, Before Yellowstone, Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, Missoula, MT

April 23 at 5 p.m., Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

April 26 at 3:30 p.m., Dorothy Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones, University of Washington, Seattle Campus, The East Asia Center and China Studies Program at the Jackson School of International Studies with the Seattle Art Museum, Thomson Hall,  Seattle, WA

April 26 at 7:30 p.m., Dorothy Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones, Asia Talks, Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas, Seattle Art Museum, Nordstrom Lecture Hall, Seattle, WA (Free with RSVP; Doors at 7 p.m., Talk begins at 7:30 p.m.)

April 27 at 11:15 a.m., Marisol Berríos-Miranda, Shannon Dudley, and Michelle Habell-Pallán, American Sabor, MoPOP, Pop Conference 2018, Roundtable: Making American Sabor, Seattle, WA

April 27 at 5 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Timberland Regional Library – Raymond Library, Raymond, WA

April 27 – September 2, Adman edited by Nicholas Chambers (dist. Art Gallery of New South Wales), Exhibition, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

April 27-28, Ana Maria Spagna, Uplake, Get Lit! Festival, Eastern Washington University, Spokane, WA (Tickets on sale March 27 at 10 a.m. PST)

April 28 at 10:30 a.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Timberland Regional Library – South Bend Library, South Bend, WA

April 28 at 2 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Timberland Regional Library – Naselle Library, Naselle, WA

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February 2018 News, Reviews, and Events

News

The 2018 Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize for Translation (China and Inner Asia) will be awarded to Steven Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg as co-translators of Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan. The 2018 Awards Ceremony will take place at the AAS conference in Washington, DC on Friday, March 23. The biennial prize was first awarded in 2016 – Xiaofei Tian won the inaugural Hanan Prize for Translation for The World of a Tiny Insect by Zhang Daye – so UW Press authors have won all prize rounds to date. Congratulations to the translators, series editors, UW Press executive editor Lorri Hagman, and all involved!

Please join us in welcoming a couple of new hires to the Press. Michael O. Campbell, most recently US sales manager at Lone Pine Publishing, is our new sales and marketing director. Neal Swain has joined us as contracts and intellectual property manager. She comes to us from Wales Literary Agency, where she will continue as assistant agent.

Monthly Giveaways

Reviews and Interviews

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner selects The Tao of Raven by Ernestine Hayes as one of their best Alaska books of 2017: “The Tao of Raven is likely the most thoughtful book you’ll read all year, memoir or otherwise.”—Addley Fannin


VICE interviews High author Ingrid Walker about drug policy and use.


UW News features a Q&A with American Sabor authors Marisol Berríos-Miranda, Shannon Dudley, and Michelle Habell-Pallán.


Northwest Asian Weekly features The Hope of Another Spring by Barbara Johns: “Her work puts us in Fujii’s time and place, a gift to those who lived through that time, and to those who have only a sketchy idea of the reality of the Issei experience as told through Fujii’s words and art.”—Laura Rehrmann


The Washington Post / Made By History publishes an op-ed by Emilie Raymond on the history of celebrity civil rights activism. Stars for Freedom, out in paperback this spring, gets a byline mention.


Reading Religion reviews The Jewish Bible by David Stern: “This is a fascinating, engaging, and instructive volume. The breadth of topics and traditions covered is vast, and Stern’s knowledge of and research on these issues is remarkable. Beyond the content, the volume is beautifully illustrated, with over 80 color images illuminating the various topics. A study on the materiality of the Jewish scriptures needed to be written, and we can all be thankful that it was Stern who took up the task.”—Bradford A. Anderson

KUOW interviews Kevin Craft about Vagrants & Accidentals. Poetry correspondent Elizabeth Austen and Bill Radke discuss “Matinee” and Craft reads “For the Climbers” and “Borders without Doctors.”


3rd Act Magazine reviews Walking Washington’s History by Judy Bentley (Winter 2018): “Even if you don’t leave your comfy chair, you’ll learn much more about Washington in this interesting book.”—Julie Fanselow


The Conversation features an article by Amy Bhatt, author of the forthcoming High-Tech Housewives, and UMBC colleague Dillon Mahmoudi about the likely effects of Amazon’s HQ2 on local diversity, equity, and quality of life.


Somatosphere publishes a book forum on Tracing Autism by Des Fitzgerald.

New Books

American Sabor: Latinos and Latinas in US Popular Music / Latinos y latinas en la musica popular estadounidense
By Marisol Berríos-Miranda, Shannon Dudley, and Michelle Habell-Pallán
Translated by Angie Berríos Miranda

With side-by-side Spanish and English text, this book traces the substantial musical contributions of Latinas and Latinos in American popular music between World War II and the present in five vibrant centers of Latin@ musical production: New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Miami.

Ancient Ink: The Archaeology of Tattooing
Edited by Lars Krutak and Aaron Deter-Wolf

This first book dedicated to the archaeological study of tattooing, presents new research from across the globe examining tattooed human remains, tattoo tools, and ancient art.  Ancient Ink connects ancient body art traditions to modern culture through Indigenous communities and the work of contemporary tattoo artists.


The Art of Resistance: Painting by Candlelight in Mao’s China
By Shelley Drake Hawks

Drawing on interviews with the artists and their families, this art history surveys the lives of seven fiercely independent painters during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a time when they were considered counterrevolutionary and were forbidden to paint.


Slapping the Table in Amazement: A Ming Dynasty Story Collection
By Ling Mengchu
Translated by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang
Introduction by Robert E. Hegel

The unabridged English translation of the famous story collection Pai’an jingqi by Ling Mengchu (1580-1644), originally published in 1628.


Many Faces of Mulian: The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China
By Rostislav Berezkin

The story of Mulian rescuing his mother’s soul from hell has evolved as a narrative over several centuries in China, especially in the baojuan (precious scrolls) genre. This exploration of the story’s evolution illuminates changes in the literary and religious characteristics of the genre.


Forming the Early Chinese Court: Rituals, Spaces, Roles
By Luke Habberstad

This pioneering study of early Chinese court culture shows that a large, but not necessarily cohesive, body of courtiers drove the consolidation, distribution, and representation of power in court institutions.


Down with Traitors: Justice and Nationalism in Wartime China
By Yun Xia

Built on previously unexamined documents, this history reveals how the hanjian (“traitors to the Han Chinese”) were punished in both legal and extralegal ways and how the anti-hanjian campaigns captured the national crisis, political struggle, roaring nationalism, and social tension of China’s eventful decades from the 1930s through the 1950s.


Christian Krohg’s Naturalism
By Oystein Sjastad

The definitive account of Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic Christian Krohg (1825-1925) and his art.  Sjastad examines the theories of Krohg and his fellow naturalists and their reception in Scandinavian intellectual circles, viewing Krohg from an international perspective and demonstrating how Krohg’s art made a striking contribution to European naturalism.


Sacred to the Touch: Nordic and Baltic Religious Wood Carving
By Thomas A. DuBois

This beautifully illustrated study of six twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists reveals the interplay of tradition with personal and communal identity that characterize modern religious carving in Northern Europe.


Gender before Birth: Sex Selection in a Transnational Context
By Rajani Bhatia

Based on extensive fieldwork, this book looks at how sex selective assisted reproduction technologies in the West and non-West are divergently named and framed. Bhatia’s resulting analysis extends both feminist theory on reproduction and feminist science and technology studies.


Seattle on the Spot: The Photographs of Al Smith
By Quin’Nita Cobbins, Paul de Barros, Howard Giske, Jacqueline E. A. Lawson, and Al “Butch” Smith, Jr.
Distributed for The Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI)
Exhibition on view through June 17, 2018

Al Smith’s photography chronicled the jazz clubs, family gatherings, neighborhood events, and individuals who made up Seattle’s African American community in the mid-twentieth century. This companion book to the exhibition at MOHAI features highlights from Smith’s legacy along with reflections from historians, scholars, friends, and family members.

Events

FEBRUARY

February 8 at 7 p.m., Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, Three Stones Gallery, Concord, MA (Snow date: February 9 at 7 p.m.)

February 8 at 7:30 p.m., Thomas Crow, No Idols (dist. Power Publications), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA

February 9 at 2 p.m., Heidi R. M. Pauwels, Mobilizing Krishna’s World, UW South Asia Center, Thomson 317, Seattle, WA

February 11 at 2 p.m., Frederica Bowcutt, The Tanoak Tree, Grace Hudson Museum and the Sanhedrin Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, Ukiah, CA

February 15 at 7 p.m., Nasty Women Poets edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane (dist. Lost Horse Press), SoulFood Poetry Night, Redmond, WA

February 18 at 3 p.m., Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, DIESEL, A Bookstore, Santa Monica, CA

February 23 at 7 p.m., Nasty Women Poets edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane (dist. Lost Horse Press), Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA

February 24 at 9 a.m., Ernestine Hayes, The Tao of Raven, 2018 Search for Meaning Festival, Seattle University with Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA

February 24 at 2;45 p.m., Lorraine K. Bannai, Enduring Conviction, 2018 Search for Meaning Festival, Seattle University with Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA

February 24 at 3:30 p.m., Eileen A. Bjorkman, The Propeller under the Bed, Northwest Aviation Conference, Puyallup, WA

February 25 at 1:30 p.m., Eileen A. Bjorkman, The Propeller under the Bed, Northwest Aviation Conference, Puyallup, WA

February 25 at 3 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Fairwood Library, Renton, WA

February 27 at 4 p.m., Amanda Thérèse Snellinger, Making New Nepal, UW South Asia Center, Seattle, WA

February 27 at 7 p.m., Paul de Barros, Jackson Street After Hours, The Black and Tan: Reimagining Seattle’s Legendary Jazz Club, Museum of History and Industry in partnership with the Black and Tan Hall, Seattle, WA ($5 for MOHAI members / $10 general public)

February 28 at 12:30 p.m., Ingrid Walker, High, Publish and Flourish, Sponsored by UW Office of Research, University Book Store Tacoma, and UW Tacoma Library, Tioga Library, Tacoma, WA

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2017 National Women’s Studies Association Conference Preview

This week we head to the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association annual conference in Baltimore, Maryland. UW Press editor in chief Larin McLaughlin and assistant editor Niccole Leilanionapae’aina Coggins will be representing the press, premiering several new books, and hosting a celebration of the Feminist Technosciences series with editors, authors, and friends.

Edited by Rebecca Herzig and Banu Subramaniam, Feminist Technosciences seeks to publish emerging, intersectional, cutting-edge feminist work in science and technology studies (learn more in the series brochure). We hope to see you at the booth (#202) on Friday, November 17 at 4 p.m. for the series celebration!

Be sure to stop by to learn more about our new and forthcoming titles in women’s and gender studies, and follow the meeting on social media with the #NWSA2017, #ReadUP, and #LookItUP hashtags.

FEMINIST TECHNOSCIENCES SERIES CELEBRATION

Friday, November 17 at 4 p.m.

Gender before Birth: Sex Selection in a Transnational Context
By Rajani Bhatia
FEBRUARY 2018

Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader
Edited by Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey

Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants, and Patents in South Africa
By Laura A. Foster

Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy: Reflections on Sexuality, Media, Science, Finance
By Geeta Patel

Figuring the Population Bomb: Gender and Demography in the Mid-Twentieth Century
By Carole R. McCann

FORTHCOMING SPRING 2018

Firebrand Feminism: The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore
By Breanne Fahs
APRIL 2018

Unapologetic, troublemaking, agitating, revolutionary, and hot-headed: radical feminism bravely transformed the history of politics, love, sexuality, and science. Firebrand Feminism brings together ten years of dialogue with four founders of the radical feminist movement and provides a timely and historically rich account of these audacious women and the lasting impact of their words and work.

We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies
By Cutcha Risling Baldy
JUNE 2018
Indigenous Confluences

“I am here. You will never be alone. We are dancing for you.” So begins this deeply personal account of the revitalization of the women’s coming-of-age ceremony for the Hoopa Valley Tribe. Using a framework of Native feminisms, Risling Baldy locates this revival within a broad context of decolonizing praxis.

OTHER FEATURED TITLES

2017 American Studies Association Conference Preview

We are excited to attend the 2017 annual meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA) in Chicago from November 9-12, 2017.

UW Press editor in chief Larin McLaughlin, interim marketing manager Katherine Tacke, and associate editor and Mellon University Press Diversity Fellow Mike Baccam will be representing the press at booth 205.

We hope you’ll join us at the booth on Friday for signings with Migrating the Black Body coeditor Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Playing While White author David J. Leonard, and on Saturday for signings with Network Sovereignty author Marisa Duarte and Queering Contemporary Asian American Art editors Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe.

Follow along on social media with the #2017ASA hashtag and learn more about the scheduled book signings and other featured titles below!

BOOK SIGNING WITH HEIKE RAPHAEL-HERNANDEZ

Friday, November 10 at 1:45 p.m.

Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture
Edited by Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-Hernandez

Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media—from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels—has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self.

BOOK SIGNING WITH DAVID J. LEONARD

Friday, November 10 at 3:45 p.m.

Playing While White: Privilege and Power on and off the Field
By David J. Leonard

Whiteness matters in sports culture, both on and off the field. Offering critical analysis of athletic stars such as Johnny Manziel, Marshall Henderson, Jordan Spieth, Lance Armstrong, Josh Hamilton, as well as the predominantly white cultures of NASCAR and extreme sports, David Leonard identifies how whiteness is central to the commodification of athletes and the sports they play.

BOOK SIGNING WITH MARISA DUARTE

Saturday, November 11 at 11:45 a.m.

Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country
By Marisa Duarte

Given the significance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to social and political life, many U.S. tribes and Native organizations have created their own projects, from streaming radio to building networks to telecommunications advocacy. Duarte examines these ICT projects to explore the significance of information flows and information systems to Native sovereignty, and toward self-governance, self-determination, and decolonization.

BOOK SIGNING WITH LAURA KINA AND JAN CHRISTIAN BERNABE

Saturday, November 11 at 1:45 p.m.

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art
Edited by Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe
Foreword by Susette Min

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art takes Asian American differences as its point of departure, and brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialisms, and methodologies within Asian American art and visual culture. Taken together, these nine original artist interviews, cutting-edge visual artworks, and seven critical essays explore contemporary currents and experiences within Asian American art, including the multiple axes of race and identity; queer bodies and forms; kinship and affect; and digital identities and performances.

OTHER FEATURED TITLES

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November 2017 News, Reviews, and Events

News

University Press Week is November 6-11 (next week!) and we can’t wait to celebrate the value of our books and expertise of our authors with this year’s theme, #LookItUP: Knowledge Matters.

Find a run-down of online and offline events on the UP Week site and join in with the #ReadUP and #LookItUP hashtags on social media.

In huge literary news, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated Seattle as a City of Literature in the Creative Cities Network. Please join us in heartily congratulating all involved in the bid, with a special mention to UW Press staffer and Seattle City of Literature cofounder Rebecca Brinbury! Find more from UNESCO, Seattle City of Literature, and the Seattle Review of Books. Read and write on, Seattle!

Monthly Giveaways

Reviews and Interviews


The Atlantic interviews Pumpkin author Cindy Ott in an article about what counts as a pumpkin. WDEL also interviews the author about the connection between pumpkins and fall.


Tell Me Something I Don’t Know with Stephen J. Dubner features Smell Detectives author Melanie Kiechle in a recent podcast episode all about the senses.
High Country News reviews The Tao of Raven by Ernestine Hayes: “As with Blonde Indian, Hayes blurs the boundaries of genre in The Tao of Raven, which braids sharp grandmotherly meditations and gripping personal history into the fictional storyline of another troubled, typical family. . . . Her prose is as insistent as it is lyrical.”—Rob Rich


Inquirer.net USA reviews A Time to Rise edited by Rene Ciria Cruz, Cindy Domingo, and Bruce Occena: “A Time to Rise comes out at an opportune time as another fascist regime emerges in the Philippines. As in the past, former KDP activists have responded to the call to fight back.”—Boying Pimentel


International Examiner also reviews: “This nearly 20-year project is a remarkable documentation of one of the leading revolutionary Asian American Movement organizations. . . . A Time to Rise provides much greater complexity to teaching and learning about both Filipino American and Asian American movement history. . . . More than lessons of the past, A Time to Rise illuminates the way forward to complete unfinished revolutions.”—Tracy Lai


KING 5 Evening features Razor Clams author David Berger in a new series on Wild Food. Langdon Cook (James Beard Award-winning writer and author of books including Upstream and The Mushroom Hunters) reviews the book on his blog: “For the uninitiated, David Berger’s Razor Clams is just the ticket to understanding what all the fuss is about. Berger is a lively guide to Siliqua patula‘s ecology, culinary lore, and historical importance in the region. . . . Readers looking for such nourishment will find much to savor in this account of a beloved bivalve.”


CASSIUS publishes an article by author David J. Leonard about the Las Vegas shooting, white male terrorism, and how race shapes our reaction to gun violence. Playing While White gets a byline mention. The Undefeated also publishes an adaption from the book. The Seattle Times publishes an opinion piece by the author on WSU football coach Mike Leach using his platform to thwart conversation on racial equity rather than advance it, where the book gets a byline mention.


The Seattle Times reviews “Witness to Wartime” and prominently mentions The Hope of Another Spring: “The book and exhibition, together, shed a powerful new light on a troubling chapter in U.S. history. . . . Compelling as both artwork and history.”—Michael Upchurch


The Everett Herald reviews Territorial Hues by David F. Martin (dist. Cascadia Art Museum): “If you love the Northwest and Northwest regional art, be sure to check out Territorial Hues.”—Gale Fiege


Asia Pacific Forum interviews Queering Contemporary Asian American Art editors Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe.


Publishers Weekly interviews author Ingrid Walker in an article about the recent Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association fall tradeshow. High gets a mention.


The Eureka Times-Standard features Defending Giants by Darren F. Speece in an article about the 40th anniversary of the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC). Truthout reviews the book: “Eloquent, inspiring, eminently readable nonfiction with precious lessons for those fighting the ever-greater environmental destruction wrought by corporate greed. . . . A tale fully relevant to here and now.”—Robert James Parsons

New Books

Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake
By Joanna L. Dyl
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Combining urban environmental history and disaster studies, this close study of San Francisco’s calamitous earthquake and aftermath demonstrates how the crisis and subsequent rebuilding reflect the dynamic interplay of natural and human influences that have shaped San Francisco.


Chinook Resilience: Heritage and Cultural Revitalization on the Lower Columbia River
By Jon D. Daehnke
Foreword by Tony A. Johnson

A collaborative ethnography of how the Chinook Indian Nation, whose land and heritage are under assault, continues to move forward and remain culturally strong and resilient. Chinook Resilience offers a tribally relevant, forward-looking, and decolonized approach for the cultural resilience and survival of the Chinook Indian Nation, even in the face of federal nonrecognition.

Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader
Edited by Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey

The foundational essays and new writings collected here take a transnational, trans-species, and intersectional approach to this cutting-edge area of inquiry between women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and science and technology studies (STS), and demonstrate the ingenuity and dynamism of queer feminist scholarship.


Living Sharia: Law and Practice in Malaysia
By Timothy P. Daniels

What role does sharia play today in Malaysia? Drawing on ethnographic research, this book traces the contested implementation of Islamic family and criminal laws and sharia economics to provide cultural frameworks for understanding sharia among Muslims and non-Muslims in Southeast Asia and beyond.


Mobilizing Krishna’s World: The Writings of Prince Savant Singh of Kishangarh
By Heidi R. M. Pauwels

Through an examination of the life and works of Savant Singh (1697-1764), this remarkable study explores the circulation of ideas and culture in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in north India, revealing how the Rajput prince mobilized soldiers but also used myths, songs, and stories about saints in order to cope with his personal and political crisis.


The Rebirth of Bodh Gaya: Buddhism and the Making of a World Heritage Site
By David Geary

This multilayered historical ethnography of Bodh Gaya—the place of Buddha’s enlightenment in the north Indian state of Bihar—explores the spatial politics surrounding the transformation of the Mahabodhi Temple Complex into a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2002.


The Jewish Bible: A Material History
By David Stern

Drawing on the most recent scholarship on the history of the book, this beautifully illustrated material history shows how the Bible has been not only a medium for transmitting its text—the word of God—but a physical object with a meaning of its own.

Events

NOVEMBER

November 1 at 6:30 p.m., Linda Carlson, Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest, Dungeness Valley Lutheran Church, Sequim, WA

November 2 at 6 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Washington Athletic Club, Seattle, WA

November 2 at 7 p.m., David B. Williams, Jennifer Ott, and staff of HistoryLink, Waterway, King County Library System – Mercer Island, Mercer Island, WA

November 4 at 1 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Seward Park Audubon Center, Seattle, WA

November 8 at 6:30 p.m., Linda Carlson, Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest, Dungeness Valley Lutheran Church, Sequim, WA

November 9 at 6 p.m., Zoltán Grossman, Unlikely Alliances, Orca Books, Olympia, WA

November 9 at 12:30 p.m., David Biggs, Quagmire / War in the Land (forthcoming 2018), University of Washington, Southeast Asia Center, Thomson Room 317, Seattle, WA

November 9 at 7 p.m., Ingrid Walker, High, King’s Books, Tacoma, WA

November 10 at 7 p.m., James Longhurst, Bike Battles, BikePGH and Healthy Ride, Pittsburgh, PA

November 10 – 13, Emily T. Yeh, Mapping Shangrila, 2017 Machik Weekend, New York, NY

November 11 at 10 a.m., David Biggs, Quagmire / War in the Land (forthcoming 2018), Seattle Asian Art Museum, Saturday University, History Flows from the Mekong Mud, Seattle Art Museum, Plestcheeff Auditorium (SAM), Seattle, WA (Get tickets)

November 12 at 4 p.m., David B. Williams, Jennifer Ott, and staff of HistoryLink, Waterway, Eastside Heritage Center, Bellevue, WA

November 14, Geeta Patel, Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA

November 16 at 7 p.m., Melanie A. Kiechle, Smell Detectives, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA

November 16 at 6 p.m., Zhi LIN (dist. for Tacoma Art Museum), Tacoma Art Museum, Artist Talk: Conversation with Zhi LIN and Chief Curator Rock Hushka, Tacoma, WA

November 17 at 10 a.m., David E. Wilkins and Shelly Hulse Wilkins, Dismembered, Symposium on Tribal Citizenship, San Diego State University, Scripps Cottage, San Diego, CA

November 18 at 3 p.m., Seattle7Writers Holiday Bookfest with Kathleen Alcalá (The Deepest Roots) and David B. Williams (Seattle Walks), Seattle, WA

November 19 at 2 p.m., Linda Carlson, Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest, Snoqualmie Valley History Society, King County Library System – North Bend, North Bend, WA

November 22 at 7 p.m., Cindy Domingo, A Time to Rise, with Vincente Rafael (Motherless Tongues), Duterte’s War: The Current Crisis in the Philippines and Beyond, Third Place Books – Seward Park, Seattle, WA

DECEMBER

December 2 at 11 a.m., Zoltán Grossman, Unlikely Alliances, Hoquiam Timberland Library, Hoquiam, WA

December 10 at noon, Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, Full Circle Bookstore, Oklahoma City, OK

December 14 at 7 p.m., Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, MA

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March 2017 News, Reviews, and Events

News

Our job posting for the 2017-2018 Mellon Diversity Fellow is now live and we are accepting applications through March 15. If you know of excellent candidates, please send them our way!

Reviews and Interviews


The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog features No-No Boy by John Okada: “Reading No-No Boy, this week, it no longer seemed bound to its past; it felt like a prophecy, a cosmic tragedy, a message in a bottle that arrives a half century later.”—Hua Hsu


A collaborative piece with PRI’s Global Nation Education and Densho mentions Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 in an article about activists working to keep the story of Executive Order 9066 alive today. Bustle also features the book in a round-up of “10 Graphic Novels Written by Activists That You Need to Read Now More Than Ever”: “Heartbreaking, candid. . . . Okubo recounts her experience with poignancy and a surprising amount of humor.”—Charlotte Ahlin

Continue reading →

Exhibitions on View: ‘Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series’

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is widely regarded as one of America’s most important and celebrated artists. Lawrence’s paintings, drawings, and murals depict both critical moments in history and poignant struggles of the black American experience—from the Civil War to the civil rights movement and beyond. Lawrence’s many awards include his 1983 election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Arts Award in 1992, and his confirmation as Commissioner of the National Council of the Arts in 1978 by the U.S. Senate. Lawrence accepted a tenured position at the University of Washington in 1971, retired as professor emeritus in 1986, and remains one of Seattle’s most beloved artists.

Jacob Lawrence in his Seattle studio, 1984. Photo by Mary Randlett.

Jacob Lawrence in his Seattle studio, 1984. Photo by Mary Randlett.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Seattle Art Museum will show all sixty panels of the epic series considered his masterwork together on the West Coast for the first time in decades. Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series is on view from Saturday, January 21 through Sunday, April 23, 2017.

The University of Washington Press is proud to have published many books by and about Lawrence over the years and in conjunction with key exhibitions of his work at museums throughout the country.

Learn more about Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series at the Seattle Art Museum site, which also provides links to online interactive experiences created by the two museums that jointly own the series:

Additional reading from UW Press by and about Jacob Lawrence:

Aesop’s Fables
Jacob Lawrence

Aesop’s Fables combines 23 timeless morality tales with striking black ink drawings by the revered artist. Published originally in 1970, the book was out of print for two decades. The new edition, completely redesigned and typeset, adds five illustrations Lawrence prepared for the original edition but which were not included in it.

Jacob Lawrence: American Painter
By Ellen Harkins Wheat

This major book is the most comprehensive survey ever made of Lawrence’s work and traces his development as an artist as well as places his work within the tradition of American modernism. The chronological overview of his career is enhanced by over 150 illustrations of his work, 85 in color, and a generous selection of photos that place him in his studio, in the art world at large, and among his friends and colleagues.

Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence
Edited by Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois

The first multi-author, in-depth probe of the artist’s entire career: the nature of his work, his education, the critical climate in which he worked, and his use of materials and techniques. It reproduces, in full color, more than 200 works, most of which had not been published in color, or at all, in other books on the artist.

Also available:

Jacob Lawrence: The Complete Prints, 1963-2000
Peter T. Nesbett

This new edition of Jacob Lawrence: Thirty Years of Prints (1963-1993) includes 19 new prints produced by Lawrence since 1993, including 7 from the Toussaint L’Ouverture series. The book includes an essay by Patricial Hills. In his graphic work, Lawrence presents a vision of a common struggle toward unity and equality, a universal struggle seated in the depths of the human consciousness.