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PUP Author Geoffrey Robinson in Documentary about East Timor

April 22, 2013 by

This weekend the acclaimed documentary Alias Ruby Blade will premiere at the Tribeca film festival. The documentary unravels the history behind the new nation in East Timor after its struggle for independence. The documentary features PUP author Geoffrey Robinson who has written a book about East Timor. Robinson authored “If you Leave Us Here, We Will Die”: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor. For showtime information click here.

Read a review for the documentary from This Week in New York below.

Alias Ruby Blade: A Story of Love and Revolution is an intimate, involving documentary that goes behind the scenes of East Timor’s battle for independence, structured like a gripping thriller with a decidedly personal edge. In 1991, Australian Kirsty Sword went to East Timor as part of a team posing as tourists while actually making a secret film about the embattled Indonesian island. Almost immediately, the Australian teacher and activist found herself right in the middle of the violent struggle as bullets flew all around her and her team, but they kept the cameras rolling, compiling amazing footage that helped alert the world as to what was happening there. Sword soon became a courier for the revolution, adopting the spy name Ruby Blade and smuggling in notes and, eventually, electronic equipment to jailed resistance leader Kay Rala “Xanana” Gusmão, who was serving a life sentence in Jakarta’s Cipinang Prison. Armed with a camera, Sword took remarkable footage during those years, most of which has never before been shown to the public; she opened up her archives for husband-and-wife documentarians Tanya Ager Meillier and Alex Meillier and speaks extensively with them in the film, relating her involvement with the independence movement — which included falling in love with the charismatic Xanana. The Meilliers also talk with such key resistance fighters as Nobel Peace Prize winner José Ramos-Horta and diplomat Constancio Pinto as well as historian and human rights activist Geoffrey Robinson and Inside Indonesia editor Pat Walsh, who share their stories about the Indonesian occupation that lasted from 1975 to 1999, followed by a UN-sponsored referendum for independence that led to yet more horrors. But Sword, who narrates much of the film, and Xanana, who appears primarily in archival footage and photographs, never gave up their dream of a free, democratic East Timor while also considering a life together. As much as Alias Ruby Blade delves into the political situation in East Timor, it’s really about how a young, strong woman followed her heart and made a difference in a faraway part of the globe. Alias Ruby Blade will have its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it’s part of the Documentary Competition. (By the way, the less you know about how things turned out in East Timor, the more exciting the film is, so don’t read up on it before going to one of the four screenings.)

Learn more about the film here.

Filed Under: Asian and Asian American studies, Events, International Relations, Sociology, Twitter, World History

Ayesha Jalal at University of Texas Austin today

April 11, 2013 by

Jalal_PityofPartitionRenowned historian Ayesha Jalal will visit the Hindi Urdu Flagship at University of Texas Austin today to launch her new book The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide. Jalal will give a seminar on her book at 3.30pm on April 11 in the Meyerson Conference Room, WCH 4.118. The seminar is free and open to the public.

For details, please check out the Hindi Urdu Flagship site: http://hindiurduflagship.org/2013/04/renowned-historian-ayesha-jalal-to-launch-new-book-at-huf/

Filed Under: Asian and Asian American studies, Events, Literature, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,

Circle of Animals, Zodiac Heads by Ai Weiwei on Princeton University Campus

January 28, 2013 by

Hope you have a chance to see the heads while they are on display outside of the Woodrow Wilson School. They really are impressive. We tracked their arrival and assembly many months ago and are proud to publish Weiwei-isms, too.

Ai WeiWei_Weiwei-isms

Filed Under: Art and Architecture, Asian and Asian American studies, Princeton, Twitter

Justin Lin Lectures on his Book and More

January 24, 2013 by

In late December Justin Lin, the first non-westerner to be chief economist of the World Bank and the author of the book The Quest for Prosperity: How Developing Economies Can Take Off, gave two public lectures in the UK. During his lectures at Overseas Development Institute and London School of Economics, Lin discussed his thoughts on the state of China, the economy, and his book.

You can see both of his lectures here:

Filed Under: Asian and Asian American studies, Economics, Twitter

Ai Weiwei releases “How to Scientifically Remove a Shiny Screw with Chinese Characteristics from a Moving Vehicle in Eighteen Turns”

November 12, 2012 by

We have just seen early copies of Weiwei-isms. It is a terrific little book and would make a great stocking stuffer for fans of Ai Weiwei or those who appreciate bons mots on art, human rights, the digital revolution, and countless other subjects.

Filed Under: Art and Architecture, Asian and Asian American studies, Human Rights, Twitter

How many university press authors would do this? Ai Weiwei rocks Gangnam style moves in new video.

October 26, 2012 by

 

“The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It’s as simple as that.”

–Ai Weiwei, “China’s censorship can never defeat the internet,” The Guardian, April 15, 2012

 

Gangnam style has been taking over the world in recent weeks so it isn’t too surprising that it’s finally filtered into the university press world. The gauntlet has now been thrown down in this delightful homage to pop culture by Ai Weiwei and friends. Who among our authors can top it?

We are going to have a lot of fun publishing Weiwei-isms by Ai Weiwei in a few weeks. To read up on the book, which was a late addition to our fall 2012 catalog, please click through the book’s page.

 

bookjacket

Weiwei-isms

Ai Weiwei

Edited by Larry Warsh
Filed Under: Art and Architecture, Asian and Asian American studies, Twitter

BOOK FACT FRIDAY

September 21, 2012 by

FACT: “Farming began in Bali with the arrival of the Austronesians, who colonized the Indonesian archipelago between 4,500 and 3,000 years ago. The Austronesians were farmers and fishermen whose agricultural assemblage included pigs, dogs, and chickens; root and tree crops such as coconuts, bananas, taro, and bamboo; and a tool technology that included stone adzes.”

Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali
by J. Stephen Lansing

Along rivers in Bali, small groups of farmers meet regularly in water temples to manage their irrigation systems. They have done so for a thousand years. Over the centuries, water temple networks have expanded to manage the ecology of rice terraces at the scale of whole watersheds. Although each group focuses on its own problems, a global solution nonetheless emerges that optimizes irrigation flows for everyone. Did someone have to design Bali’s water temple networks, or could they have emerged from a self-organizing process?

Perfect Order—a groundbreaking work at the nexus of conservation, complexity theory, and anthropology—describes a series of fieldwork projects triggered by this question, ranging from the archaeology of the water temples to their ecological functions and their place in Balinese cosmology. Stephen Lansing shows that the temple networks are fragile, vulnerable to the cross-currents produced by competition among male descent groups. But the feminine rites of water temples mirror the farmers’ awareness that when they act in unison, small miracles of order occur regularly, as the jewel-like perfection of the rice terraces produces general prosperity. Much of this is barely visible from within the horizons of Western social theory.

The fruit of a decade of multidisciplinary research, this absorbing book shows that even as researchers probe the foundations of cooperation in the water temple networks, the very existence of the traditional farming techniques they represent is threatened by large-scale development projects.

We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8186.pdf

Filed Under: Anthropology, Asian and Asian American studies, Biological Sciences, Book Fact Friday

Assembling the Zodiac Heads exhibition – video

September 11, 2012 by

This is the set-up at a different location, but you can imagine this is pretty much what happened here on Princeton campus a few weeks ago. The exhibit of Zodiac Heads is just a few steps from our office and we are gearing up for the release of Weiwei-isms later this year.

Filed Under: Art and Architecture, Asian and Asian American studies, Twitter

Watch Daniel A. Bell discuss The Spirit of Cities in D.C.

August 2, 2012 by

The Comparative Urban Studies Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in D.C. recently hosted author Daniel A. Bell for a great discussion around his recent book, The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age, co-authored with Avner de-Shalit.

Bell was joined by John J. DeGioia, President of Georgetown University. This event was also co-sponsored by the Program on America and the Global Economy and the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. You can download the full audio podcast and PowerPoint presentation on the event page on the Woodrow Wilson Center site.

Do you have any questions for Daniel A. Bell or Avner de-Shalit about cities? Let us know in the comments section!

Filed Under: Asian and Asian American studies, Events, Political Theory, Public policy, Twitter

BOOK FACT FRIDAY

May 25, 2012 by

FACT: “The Chinese empire was established in 221 BCE, when the state of Qin unified the Chinese world after centuries of intensive interstate warfare. The nascent empire was then roughly contemporary with the Maurya Empire in India and with the Hellenistic and Roman empires in the Mediterranean area. The Chinese empire ended with the proclamation of the Republic in 1912 CE, almost simultaneously with the final collapse of three major empires in the West: the Ottoman, the Habsburg, and the Romanov.”

The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy
by Yuri Pines

Established in 221 BCE, the Chinese empire lasted for 2,132 years before being replaced by the Republic of China in 1912. During its two millennia, the empire endured internal wars, foreign incursions, alien occupations, and devastating rebellions—yet fundamental institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural features of the empire remained intact. The Everlasting Empire traces the roots of the Chinese empire’s exceptional longevity and unparalleled political durability, and shows how lessons from the imperial past are relevant for China today.

Yuri Pines demonstrates that the empire survived and adjusted to a variety of domestic and external challenges through a peculiar combination of rigid ideological premises and their flexible implementation. The empire’s major political actors and neighbors shared its fundamental ideological principles, such as unity under a single monarch—hence, even the empire’s strongest domestic and foreign foes adopted the system of imperial rule. Yet details of this rule were constantly negotiated and adjusted. Pines shows how deep tensions between political actors including the emperor, the literati, local elites, and rebellious commoners actually enabled the empire’s basic institutional framework to remain critically vital and adaptable to ever-changing sociopolitical circumstances. As contemporary China moves toward a new period of prosperity and power in the twenty-first century, Pines argues that the legacy of the empire may become an increasingly important force in shaping the nation’s future trajectory.

“Deeply researched, packed with detail, and bold in scope and analysis, The Everlasting Empire offers a compact yet profound interpretation of the ideological foundations of Chinese political culture. Reflecting on imperial China through its cycles of unity and disintegration from antiquity to the present, this magisterial contribution to empire studies and global history comes at a pivotal moment in time.”—Martin Kern, Princeton University

We invite you to read the Introduction here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9723.pdf

Filed Under: Asian and Asian American studies, Book Fact Friday, History, International Relations, Political Science, World History

Announcing Two New Books in the Lives of Great Religious Books Series

April 2, 2012 by

book jacketsLives of Great Religious Books is a new series of short volumes that recount the complex and fascinating histories of important religious texts from around the world. We are pleased to announce two more books are available in the series. These books examine the historical origins of texts from the great religious traditions, and trace how their reception, interpretation, and influence have changed–often radically–over time.

The Book of Mormon:
A Biography
by Paul C. Gutjahr

Late one night in 1823 Joseph Smith, Jr., was reportedly visited in his family’s farmhouse in upstate New York by an angel named Moroni. According to Smith, Moroni told him of a buried stack of gold plates that were inscribed with a history of the Americas’ ancient peoples, and which would restore the pure Gospel message as Jesus had delivered it to them. Thus began the unlikely career of the Book of Mormon, the founding text of the Mormon religion, and perhaps the most important sacred text ever to originate in the United States. Here Paul Gutjahr traces the life of this book as it has formed and fractured different strains of Mormonism and transformed religious expression around the world.

We invite you to read chapter one online at:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9655.html

The I Ching:
A Biography
by Richard J. Smith

The I Ching originated in China as a divination manual more than three thousand years ago. In 136 BCE the emperor declared it a Confucian classic, and in the centuries that followed, this work had a profound influence on the philosophy, religion, art, literature, politics, science, technology, and medicine of various cultures throughout East Asia. Jesuit missionaries brought knowledge of the I Ching to Europe in the seventeenth century, and the American counterculture embraced it in the 1960s. Here Richard Smith tells the extraordinary story of how this cryptic and once obscure book became one of the most widely read and extensively analyzed texts in all of world literature.

Read the introduction online at:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9656.html

For a complete listing of the books in the series, please visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/lgrb.html

Filed Under: American History, Asian and Asian American studies, Biography, Religion, Twitter

BOOK FACT FRIDAY

March 30, 2012 by

FACT: “When Tipu Sultan attacked Travancore, a British ally, in 1789, it led to war with the East India Company. For two years, Tipu held his own against the British forces until Charles, Lord Cornwallis, laid siege to Tipu’s capital. Hostilities were ended in 1792 by the Treaty of Srirangapattana, in which Tipu surrendered half his territories, paid thirty million rupees, and handed over two of his sons—Abdul Khaliq, age eight, and Muiz-ud-din, age five—as hostages to the British.”

The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power
by Partha Chatterjee

When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this episode was never independently confirmed, the story of “the black hole of Calcutta” was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects. The Black Hole of Empire follows the ever-changing representations of this historical event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the eighteenth century to the present. Partha Chatterjee explores how a supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the “civilizing” force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India.

Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative traditionalists, and examines the intellectual and political responses of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides of empire’s entwined history are brought together in the story of the Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history of the modern state.

“This is a powerfully argued account of the origins and subsequent justification of British rule in India, and an exploration of the response by Bengali elites to colonialism. A work of classic history, this book carries an intellectual power and brilliance of insight that will excite much interest and comment.”—Thomas Metcalf, professor emeritus of history, University of California, Berkeley

We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9756.pdf

Filed Under: Anthropology, Asian and Asian American studies, Book Fact Friday
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