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China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

• The Economic Observer has started a new column that provides a roundup of the commentary and op-ed pieces contained in each week’s newspaper and also a few of the opinion pieces that appear on the EO‘s website. The most recent column can be found here. The EO has also begun providing abstracts of its monthly Book Review; check out September’s lineup here.

Planning To Write A China Book? Just Say No, Jonathan Watts

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

We wrote to Jonathan Watts to ask him to write a commentary on the book tour he’s been on to promote When a Billion Chinese Jump, which included a stop at UC Irvine, but he said he was too busy being whisked from champagne receptions to meetings with Hollywood directors seeking to buy the film rights to the book to craft something suitable. Watts was, however, good enough to offer us permission to run (in slightly trimmed-down form) a piece he wrote—with tongue firmly in cheek—for a 2009 issue of the newsletter of the Beijing Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Composed while …

A Bitter Pill For Prime Minister Kan, James Farrer

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

It was a bitter pill for the Democratic Party of Japan, no matter how they swallowed it. By releasing a Chinese fishing boat captain detained by Japan without a trial, Prime Minster Kan Naoto was clearly bowing under Chinese pressure. The captain had been arrested by the Japanese coast guard for allegedly ramming his boat into Japanese coast guard vessels while in territorial waters claimed both by China and Japan. The Japanese government appeared to buckle and released the captain to China on Saturday. According to an unnamed official in the prime minister’s office quoted in the Asahi Shinbun on …

Forming Bodies And Reforming Healthcare: The Co-Construction Of Information Technologies And Bodies Through The Imperative For Self Care, Scout Calvert

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Faculty Publications

Care work and technological work are markedly striated by sex; the sites where they overlap are few. What happens when the labor of care meets up with information technologies? It makes good methodological sense to look at largely feminized environments that are also increasingly technological. Gender, Health, and Information Technology in Context, edited and with contributions by Ellen Balka, Eileen Green, and Flis Henwood, is a welcome contribution to the body of evidence about the socio-technical co-construction of technology, health, and gender. The volume houses nine studies, bookended by an astute introduction and conclusion by the editors. Each study …

The Political Economy Of Avatar’S Chinese Adventure, Stanley Rosen

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There’s been a lot of discussion of the political meanings that can be read intoAvatar and how this might relate to it being pulled from or simply ending its run in some Chinese theaters. As a political scientist with a long-term interest in the Chinese film industry, and the fate of Hollywood movies in China, and someone who is interested in the working of SARFT (the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television), here are four things worth keeping in mind when considering the situation:

Lu Xun, Mao Zedong, Perhaps A Badger, Sean Macdonald

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Urbanatomy has been running a series called “Why I Write” for the past several months, and we’ve noticed that when asked for their favorite Chinese author, many interviewees name Lu Xun (though Ian Johnson is a vocal dissenter). It’s likely that Lu Xun’s work will be known to even more non-Chinese speakers in the future, since Julia Lovell’s new translation of his complete fiction has hit bookshelves — read an excerpt from her introduction here, and see Jeff Wasserstrom’s review of the book here. So many decades after his death, why does Lu Xun remain one of China’s best-known authors, …

In Search Of Remembrance: Jia Zhangke’S I Wish I Knew, Ken Kwan Ming Hao

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In his new film I Wish I Knew, a documentary on Shanghai, Jia Zhangke recreates once again, after a detour of sorts with Useless and24 City, that wonderful tension between the biographical and the historical, the primal impetus of his art, that had made Platform,The World, and Still Life, his best films, so memorable. Jia is different from all other well-known mainland Chinese directors, be they of the 5th or 6th generation — his is a singular sensibility that is aware of but not chained to the social-political, which to him are meaningful only to the extent that they are …

Behind The Headline: Water, Water Everywhere…, Ken Pomeranz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In mid-December, Financial Times published a piece about China’s south-north water diversion project. Writer Jamil Anderlini begins the article with a brief description of the project:

Lamb Bright Saviors [Excerpt: Noon Song & Mady], Robert Vivian

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Lamb Bright Saviors begins as an apocalyptically inclined itinerant preacher staggers across the Nebraska prairie. With his young assistant, Mady, in tow hauling a wagon stacked with bibles, it’s not long before the preacher finds he’s come to the final fulfillment of his self-proclaimed life’s work: to die in front of a group of strangers. Odd as his own end-of-days might be, the lives and struggles of the strangers attending this deathbed scene are even odder. As the dying preacher unleashes a barrage of hallucinatory ramblings and rantings in the hope of imparting wisdom, each ragtag member of this unlikely …

American Lives: A Reader [Preface & Introduction], Alicia Christensen, Tobias Wolff

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

Memoirs are as varied as human emotion and experience, and those published in the distinguished American Lives Series run the gamut. Excerpted from this series (called “splendid” by Newsweek) and collected here for the first time, these dispatches from American lives take us from China during the Cultural Revolution to the streets of New York in the sixties to a cabin in the backwoods of Idaho. In prose as diverse as the stories they tell, writers such as Floyd Skloot, Ted Kooser, Peggy Shumaker, and Lee Martin, among many others, open windows to their own ordinary and extraordinary experiences. John …

In Trace Of Tr: A Montana Hunter's Journey, Dan Aadland

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

As a student of American history, as a hunter, horseman, and former Marine, and as someone passionate about the West, Dan Aadland had long felt a kinship with Theodore Roosevelt. One day, on a single-footing horse, lever-action rifle under his knee, Aadland set out to become acquainted with TR as only those who shared his experiences could. In Trace of TR documents that quest, inviting readers to ride along and get to know Theodore Roosevelt through the western environment that so profoundly influenced him. Accompany Aadland as he rides the broad prairies in search of TR’s “prongbuck,” tracks elk through …

Joe Cronin: A Life In Baseball, Mark Armour

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

From the sandlots of San Francisco to the power centers of the game, this book tells the story of Joe Cronin, one of twentieth-century baseball’s major players, both on the field and off. For most of his playing career, Cronin (1906–84) was the best shortstop in baseball. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1956. A manager by the age of twenty-six and general manager at forty-one, Cronin was the youngest player-manager ever to play in the World Series, and he managed the Red Sox longer than any other man in history. As president of the American League, …

Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds Of Anti-Imperialism And Feminism In Interwar Paris, Jennifer Anne Boittin

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

World War I gave colonial migrants and French women unprecedented access to the workplaces and nightlife of Paris. After the war they were expected to return without protest to their homes–either overseas or metropolitan. Neither group, however, was willing to be discarded. Between the world wars, the mesmerizing capital of France’s colonial empire attracted denizens from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Paris became not merely their home but also a site for political engagement. Colonial Metropolis tells the story of the interactions and connections of these black colonial migrants and white feminists in the social, cultural, and political …

Black Officer In A Buffalo Soldier Regiment, Brian G. Shellum

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

An unheralded military hero, Charles Young (1864–1922) was the third black graduate of West Point, the first African American national park superintendent, the first black U.S. military attaché, the first African American officer to command a Regular Army regiment, and the highest-ranking black officer in the Regular Army until his death. Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment tells the story of the man who—willingly or not—served as a standard-bearer for his race in the officer corps for nearly thirty years, and who, if not for racial prejudice, would have become the first African American general. Brian G. Shellum describes …

Goodbye Wifes And Daughters, Susan Kushner Resnikck

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

One morning in 1943, close to eighty men descended into the Smith coal mine in Bearcreek, Montana. Only three came out alive. “Goodbye wifes and daughters . . .” wrote two of the miners as they died. The story of that tragic day and its aftermath unfolds in this book through the eyes of those wives and daughters—women who lost their husbands, fathers, and sons, livelihoods, neighbors, and homes, yet managed to fight back and persevere. Susan Kushner Resnick has uncovered the story behind all those losses. She chronicles the missteps and questionable ethics of the mine’s managers, who blamed …

Shelby's Folly, Jason Kelly

University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters

In 1923, not long after oil had started gushing from northern Montana fields, real-estate sales in nearby Shelby were declining, dimming the little town’s prospects of becoming the “Tulsa of the West.” Then the mayor’s son dreamed up a marketing ploy: offer to host heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey’s next fight. What began as a publicity stunt soon spiraled into a civic drama unlike any Montana had ever seen—or ever would again. Shelby’s Folly tells this story in full for the first time. Against the background of boom-and-bust Montana history, the folly of Shelby’s would-be promoters unfolds in colorful detail. It …

Pod Network News Fall 2010

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: POD Network News

Notes from the POD Office 35th

Annual POD Conference

The Idea Center-35th Anniversary

Call for Manuscripts: To Improve the Academy

Guest Column

Call for Core Self Nominations

MERLOT ELIXR Digital Case Stories

Cartografías Urbanas Y Marítimas: Género Y Modernismo En Concha Méndez, Iker González-Allende

Spanish Language and Literature Papers

Concha Méndez encarnó la modernidad tanto en su producción literaria como en su participación cultural y trayectoria vital. Ella misma lo afirma al comienzo de sus memorias: "Yo he visto nacer todos los inventos del siglo. Nací en medio de la modernidad, del canto a los medios de transporte, a la velocidad, al vuelo" (29). Fue poeta, dramaturga, guionista de cine, editora, campeona de natación, y en todas estas actividades siempre la impulsó el deseo de aventuras y de nuevas experiencias. A través de su amistad con Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti y Maruja Mallo, entre otros, incursionó en los …

“Life, It’S Been Said, Is One Big Book…”: One Hundred Years Of Qian Zhongshu, Christopher Rea

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Headlines about China have been looking the same for some time now. “The China story” always seems to be political: labor riots and their suppression; sabre-rattling over Taiwan and cultural erasure in Tibet; catastrophic earthquakes and official ineptitude; internet censorship and jailed dissidents (the latest being Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo). Even ostensibly good news, such as the Chinese government’s investment in wind power, becomes yet another story about how China is going to eat our lunch.

Musings On A Museum: A Trip To Xibaipo, Kenneth Pomeranz

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A short trip to China earlier this month took me to Beijing to give a talk, to Shijiazhuang for a conference, and, briefly, to the Hebei countryside — my first time in quite a while in rural North China. And it once again proved that every trip teaches you something, but often not on the expected topics. (One little detail that I found telling: most of the Beijing-based academics who were at the Shijiazhuang conference told me it was their first time there. True, Shijiazhuang is not a tourist hot spot, but it is a provincial capital, with over 2 …

Flowers, Lies And Revolution: Contemporary Cuban Art, Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Sharon L. Kennedy, Britt-Marie Varisco

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

Flowers, Lies and Revolution surveys some themes that emerge in contemporary Cuban art, as revealed in three private collections in Lincoln, Nebraska. What a landlocked state and a sea locked nation share are the desires, comforts, and complexities of the other. This exhibition celebrates the transnational scope and vision witnessed in the breadth and focus of the three local collections: those of Karen and Robert Duncan, Kathy and Marc LeBaron, and Lisa and Tom Smith.

The collections represent the dominant trends of a new generation of Cuban artists that emerged in the last 30 years. Their work continues a tradition …

Voyage To Italia: Americans In Italy In The Nineteenth Century, Genevieve Ellerbee

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

ItalY had long been a destination for American travelers, but by the nineteenth century American tourists flooded into Rome and Florence, hunted for picturesque vistas on the Bay of Naples and roamed through ancient ruins in Paestum. Armed with Baedeker guidebooks or the Hand-Book for American Travellers in Europe, Collated from the Best Authorities, they sought the authentic spirit of Dante, Petrarch, and Virgil, and chronicled their lengthy tours in detailed journals and letters to friends. Americans traveled to Italy for various reasons: to gain social prestige, to pursue artistic and literary interests, or simply to enjoy a beautiful …

Dan Christensen: Forty Years Of Painting, Sharon L. Kennedy

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

Art critic Clement Greenberg described Dan Christensen (1942-2007) as "one of the painters on whom the course of American Art depends." 1 This retrospective exhibition documents Christensen's life-long quest to understand the possibilities of color, paint, and pictorial space. Though long associated with Color Field painting, Christensen's relentless experimentation with style and technique places him among this country's most ambitious abstract and gestural painters.

Christensen was born in Lexington, Nebraska and grew up outside of Cozad. As a teenager Christensen listened to music on radio stations from Shreveport and Little Rock and grew fond of soul, blues, and pop music. …

Divine Abstractions: Spiritual Expressions In Art, Susan J. Soriente

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

In Northern Europe during the early 1800s, artists began departing from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the realism of traditional artwork. Their desire to express the mysterious and unseen essence of the divine through their artwork transformed the way we think about art. Called Romanticists, these artists valued subjective experience over reason and the individual experience rather than the collective. They abandoned conventional religious iconography and produced private, intensely meditative images, depicting the divine as something eternal and infinite. These artists believed that material reality hindered experiencing the divine. They sought to fracture the shell of physical reality to …

12th Biennial Symposium Program, Part 1, Textiles And Settlement: From Plains Space To Cyber Space

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

As President of TSA, I am delighted to welcome you to the 12th Biennial Symposium of the Textile Society of America. This gathering brings together an impressive number of scholars, artists, museum and gallery professionals, educators, and textile enthusiasts from around the world.

As an organization, TSA selects Symposium venues which through their unique site specific offerings broaden our understanding of diverse museum collections and institutions in different geographic settings, encouraging new and old members to discover what yet another location holds of serious interest to specialists. Each gathering has its own flavor and distinct sense of place. For this …

Head Coverings In The Virtual Umma: The Case Of Niqab, Heather Marie Akou

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

A growing body of literature points to the Internet as a place where Muslims are re-imagining themselves as part of a global, interconnected, religious culture—a new virtual umma. Along with issues such as politics, Islamic law, the interpretation of text, and procedures for rituals, hijab (modest dress) is a frequent topic of conversation. Compared to the physical world, where debates are heavily framed by time, place, and the habits of daily life, on the World Wide Web ideas and products flow much more easily. A new convert in Canada, for example, could use the Internet to read translated passages from …

Textiles And Tradition In The Marketplace, Philis Alvic

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Textiles and traditional textile techniques have been part of economic crafts development in many countries for a long time. Many of the schemes for helping the poorest of the world’s poor involve using or adapting textiles and creating products to appeal to the tourist and export markets. Individual styles become marketing tools because they are unique to a particular culture. In coming up with items that will sell, rarely does the product honor the culture that it came from.

While any TSA member would realize the value of traditional textiles, most customers prefer that the fabric be used to make …

Beni Itajime: Carved Board Clamp Resist Dyeing In Red, Masanao Arai, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Throughout Japanese textile history, Kyokechi or itajime shibori has been known as a resist dyeing process wherein a piece of folded cloth is sandwiched between wooden boards clamped tightly to protect selective areas of fabric from dye. This paper introduces a lesser known group of itajime textiles called beni ita, beni itajime, Kyo beni -- fine, lightweight silks patterned by clamp resist using boards carved with pictorial designs of flowers, birds, etc. These silks were used exclusively for under layers -- shitagi, an underkimono worn by women in the latter Edo Period (1603-1867) through the Meiji Period (1868-1912) and into …

Textiles Of Qaraqalpaqstan And Their Relationship To Central Asian Traditions And The Legacy Of Igor Savitsky, Marinika Babanazarova

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Karakalpak people are a semi-nomadic, Turkic-speaking tribe situated near the southern end of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, whose textile folk art forms a distinct thread in the larger fabric of the Central Asian textile tradition. The I.V. Savitsky State Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan in the northwest of Uzbekistan near the southern end of the Aral Sea houses the world’s most comprehensive collection of Karakalpak textile art. Passionately collected by Igor Savitsky despite Soviet prohibitions, he singlehandedly preserved records of a dying culture. This presentation will focus on aspects of the collection as it relates to …

Oriental Carpets, Spatial Dimension, And The Development Of Linear Perspective: From Grid To Projective Grid, Carol Bier

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Studies of the origins of linear perspective in European painting tend to focus on developments in treatment of the spatial dimension, with attention especially devoted to mathematical principles that underlie the representation of three-dimensional space. The theoretical understanding of this is first articulated in Alberti’s treatise De pictura (1435). Given that carpets are relatively flat objects, and that their patterning, no matter how complex, was intended to be viewed as two-dimensional, the linking of carpets to the representation of three-dimensional space would seem to be paradoxical. But the relationship may actually find a basis in historical reality.

Carpets produced in …