Books

Dieser Band enthält die Referate des 8. Göttinger Workshops zum Familienrecht 2009, der die Bedeutung der neuen Haager Unterhaltsübereinkommen und der Unterhaltsverordnung für das englische und deutsche Recht thematisierte. Die Referate von Matthias Heger (BMJ) und Juliane Hirsch (Haager Konferenz für Internationales Privatrecht) schildern den Entstehungsprozess, die Verständigungsschwierigkeiten und den Anwendungsmechanismus der neuen Rechtsinstrumente. Wolfgang Hau (Universität Passau) und Joachim Dose (BGH) reflektieren die Auswirkungen und neue Problemfelder, die sich für das deutsche Recht und die deutsche Rechtspraxis ergeben. Einen besonderen Akzent erhielt der Workshop durch die Beteiligung eines englischen Richters (Ian Karsten) und eines englischen Barristers (Tim Amos), die in anschaulicher Weise darstellen, warum die grenzüberschreitenden Rechtsinstrumente im Hinblick auf das englische autonome Verfahrens- und materielle Recht Schwierigkeiten bereiten. Band 8 der Reihe „Göttinger Juristische Schriften“ Die Reihe wird von der Juristischen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität herausgegeben und macht Veranstaltungen an der Fakultät einer interessierten Öffentlichkeit zugänglich.

Interdisciplining Digital Humanities sorts through definitions and patterns of practice over roughly sixty-five years of work, providing an overview for specialists and a general audience alike. It is the only book that tests the widespread claim that Digital Humanities is interdisciplinary. By examining the boundary work of constructing, expanding, and sustaining a new field, it depicts both the ways this new field is being situated within individual domains and dynamic cross-fertilizations that are fostering new relationships across academic boundaries. It also accounts for digital reinvigorations of “public humanities” in cultural heritage institutions of museums, archives, libraries, and community forums.

“YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED to be and appear before the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives of the United States, or a duly appointed subcommittee thereof, on February 10 (Monday), 1958, at ten o’clock a.m. at City Council Chambers, City Hall, Gary, Indiana, then and there to testify touching matters of inquiry committed to said committee, and not to depart without leave of said committee.”

So began a decade of hardship for Ed and Jean Yellin and their three young children as the repressive weight of the U.S. government, caught up in the throes of McCarthyism, crashed down upon their careers, their daily household budget, and their relationships to colleagues, neighbors, and their country. In Contempt is a faithful, factual testament to the enduring quality of patriotic dissent in our evolving democracy—and a loving reconstruction of what it meant to be labeled “unAmerican” for defending the Constitution.

How have traditional Chinese ways of thinking affected problem solving in this century? The traditional, imperial style of inquiry is associated with the belief that the universe is a coherent, internally structured unity understandable through the similarly structured human mind. It involves a reliance on antecedent and authoritarian models, coupled with an introspective focus in investigations, at some cost to objective fact gathering.In contrast, emergent forms of inquiry are guided by the values of individual autonomy and new perspectives on objectivity. In the 1930s and 1940s, some liberal educators held the model of Western science in great esteem, and some scientists practicing objective inquiry helped to create an awareness in the urban areas of inquiry not directed by political values.Drawing on philosophical, social science, and popular culture materials, Donald Munro shows that the two strains coexisted in twentieth century China as mixed motives. Many important figures were motivated by a desire to act consistently with the social values associated with the premodern or received view of knowledge and inquiry. At the same time, these people often had other motives, such as utilitarian values, efficiency, and entrepreneurship. Munro argues that while many competing positions can coexist in the same person, the seeds of the positive, instrumental value of individual autonomy in Chinese inquiry are beginning to compete in both scholarly and popular culture with other, older approaches.

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has served as a major platform for political performance, social justice activism, and large-scale public debates over race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. It has empowered minoritarian groups to organize protests, articulate often-underrepresented perspectives, and form community. It has also spread hashtags that have been used to bully and silence women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.

#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName; the controversies around #WhyIStayed and #CancelColbert; Twitter use in India and Africa; the integration of hashtags such as #nohomo and #onfleek that have become part of everyday online vernacular; and other ways in which Twitter has been used by, for, and against women, people of color, LGBTQ, and Global South communities. Collectively, the essays in this volume offer a critically interdisciplinary view of how and why social media has been at the heart of US and global political discourse for over a decade.

“i used to love to dream” is a mixtap/e/ssay that performs hip-hop scholarship using sampled and live instrumentation; repurposed music, film, and news clips; and original rap lyrics. As a genre, the mixtap/e/ssay brings together the mixtape—a self-produced or independently released album issued free of charge to gain publicity—and the personal and scholarly essays. “i used to love to dream” names Decatur, Illinois—the author’s hometown—as a reference point for place- and time-specific rapped ruminations about the ideas of growing up, moving away, and pondering one’s life choices. At the same time, the tracks attempt to account for moral, philosophical, and ethical dimensions undergirding unease about authenticity, or staying true to oneself and to one’s city or neighborhood, as well as the external factors that contribute to such feelings. Using the local to ask questions about the global, “i used to love to dream” highlights outlooks on Black life generally, and Black manhood in particular, in the United States. The tracks are presented along with liner notes and a short documentary about the making of the mixtap/e/ssay, and accompanying articles to provide context for the tracks for listeners both in classrooms and outside of them.

Better known in his own times than later, Huan T’an (43 BCE–25 CE) was a scholar-official, independent in his thought and unafraid to criticize orthodox currents of his time. A practitioner of the Old Text exegesis of the Classics, he maintained a position on the court during a turbulent time of political crises, uprisings, and civil war, spanning the reigns of four emperors.
His principal work, Hsin-lun, differs from other books on political criticism in that it does not deal primarily with history but takes many examples from contemporary social and political life. While belonging to the Old Text group of court officials and scholars, Huan T’an differed radically from them in his stress on direct knowledge, in his range of practical experience, and in his outspoken criticism of popular opinions. He was not a systematic philosopher, but his ideas were influential in the return to a more worldly conception of Confucianism.
To translate Huan T’an’s writings, one must reconstruct the texts. Timoteus Pokora uses two nineteenth-century fragments as a basis around which to orient quotations from Hsin-lun from sixty-four other sources, primarily encyclopedias and commentaries. Pokora provides notes to give context to these short references and to account for discrepancies between quotations and originals, and he includes a large index to add coherence and points of entry.

Despite the economic and political importance of the U.S.-Japan relationship and the extensive attention paid to automotive trade, few American scholars or policy makers are familiar with the history of Japanese government-business relations, either generally or for specific industries such as passenger cars. This book hopefully helps in a small way to fill that gap in our knowledge and, thus, to help strengthen the foundation from which we make public policy decisions about bilateral trade.

In 1995, on the thirtieth anniversary of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s death, Adriana Boscaro organized an international conference in Venice that had an unusally lasting effect on the study of this major Japanese novelist. Thanks to Boscaro’s energetic commitment, Venice became a center for Tanizaki studies that produced two volumes of conference proceedings now considered foundational for all scholarly works on Tanizaki. In the years before and after the Venice Conference, Boscaro and her students published an abundance of works on Tanizaki and translations of his writings, contributing to his literary success in Italy and internationally.The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition honors Boscaro’s work by collecting nine essays on Tanizaki’s position in relation to the “great tradition” of Japanese classical literature. To open the collection, Edward Seidensticker contributes a provocative essay on literary styles and the task of translating Genji into a modern language. Gaye Rowley and Ibuki Kazuko also consider Tanizaki’s Genji translations, from a completely different point of view, documenting the author’s three separate translation efforts. Aileen Gatten turns to the influence of Heian narrative methods on Tanizaki’s fiction, arguing that his classicism, far from being superficial, “reflects a deep sensitivity to Heian narrative.” Tzevetana Kristeva holds a different perspective on Tanizaki’s classicism, singling out specific aspects of Tanizaki’s eroticism as the basis of comparison.The next two essays emphasize Tanizaki’s experimental engagement with the classical literary genres—Amy V. Heinrich treats the understudied poetry, and Bonaventura Ruperti considers a 1933 essay on performance arts. Taking up cinema, Roberta Novelli focuses on the novel Manji, exploring how it was recast for the screen by Masumura Yasuzo. The volume concludes with two contributions interpreting Tanizaki’s works in the light of Western and Meiji literary traditions: Paul McCarthy considers Nabokovas a point of comparison, and Jacqueline Pigeot conducts a groundbreaking comparison with a novel by Natsume Soseki.

For many years, the oral performing and dramatic literatures of China from 1200 to 1600 CE were considered some of the most difficult texts in the Chinese corpus. They included ballad medleys, comic farces, Yuan music dramas, Ming music dramas, and the novel Shuihu zhuan. The Japanese scholars who first dedicated themselves to study these works in the mid-twentieth century were considered daring. As late as 1981, no comprehensive dictionary or glossary for this literature existed in any language, Asian or Western.
A Glossary of Words and Phrases fills this gap for Western readers, allowing even a relative novice who has reasonable command of Chinese to read, translate, and appreciate this great body of literature with an ease undreamed of even two decades ago. The Glossary is organized into approximately 8,000 entries based on the reading notes and glosses found in various dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and editions of works from the period. Main entries are listed alphabetically in the pinyin romanization system. In addition to glosses, entries include symbolic annotations, guides to pronunciation, and text citations. The result is a broadly useful glossary serving the needs of students of this literature as well as scholars researching Jin and Yuan language and its usage.

Two boys discover that the title of their stop-motion animated film about Vietnam has been taken by director Stanley Kubrick. A 150-year-old woman on the run from the government is tracked down by the company who extended her life. A military contractor carrying his robot son in a gym bag struggles to find his way out of the Nigerian delta during a bloody civil war. The wife of an up-and-coming politician grieves his infidelity by prowling rooftops with a sniper rifle. Following his celebrated debut collection, Super Flat Times, Matthew Derby delivers a disturbing new set of stories that plunges us into a lonely heartland of misfits, outcasts, and would-be assassins who lurk in the shadows, searching for connection and meaning in all the wrong places.

In Finding Voice, Kim Berman demonstrates how she was able to use visual arts training in disenfranchised communities as a tool for political and social transformation in South Africa. Using her own fieldwork as a case study, Berman shows how hands-on work in the arts with learners of all ages and backgrounds can contribute to economic stability by developing new skills, as well as enhancing public health and gender justice within communities. Berman’s work, and the community artwork her book documents, present the visual arts as a crucial channel for citizens to find their individual voices and to become agents for change in the arenas of human rights and democracy.

The authors consider the ways in which the high degree of ethnic diversity within the region is related to the nature of tropical Asian environments, on the one hand, and the nature of Southeast Asian political systems and the ways in which they manipulate natural resources, on the other. Rather than focus on defining the phenomenon of ethnicity, this book examines the different social evolutionary contexts in which the phenomenon is manifested.Companion volume to Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia (Michigan Papers no. 27).

Living in a networked world means never really getting to decide in any thoroughgoing way who or what enters your “space” (your laptop, your iPhone, your thermostat . . . your home). With this as a basic frame-of-reference, James J. Brown’s Ethical Programs examines and explores the rhetorical potential and problems of a hospitality ethos suited to a new era of hosts and guests. Brown reads a range of computational strategies and actors, from the general principles underwriting the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which determines how packets of information can travel through the internet, to the Obama election campaign’s use of the power of protocols to reach voters, harvest their data, incentivize and, ultimately, shape their participation in the campaign. In demonstrating the kind of rhetorical spaces networked software establishes and the access it permits, prevents, and molds, Brown makes a significant contribution to the emergent discourse of software studies as a major component of efforts in broad fields including media studies, rhetorical studies, and cultural studies.

The Cultural Revolution was an emotionally charged political awakening for the educated youth of China. Called upon by aging revolutionary Mao Tse-tung to assume a “vanguard” role in his new revolution to eliminate bourgeois revisionist influence in education, politics, and the arts, and to help to establish proletarian culture, habits, and customs, in a new Chinese society, educated young Chinese generally accepted this opportunity for meaningful and dramatic involvement in Chinese affairs. It also gave them the opportunity to gain recognition as a viable and responsible part of the Chinese polity. In the end, these revolutionary youths were not successful in proving their reliability. Too “idealistic” to compromise with the bourgeois way, their sense of moral rectitude also made it impossible for them to submerge their factional differences with other revolutionary mass organizations to achieve unity and consolidate proletarian victories. Many young revolutionaries were bitterly disillusioned by their own failures and those of other segments of the Chinese population and by the assignment of recent graduates to labor in rural communes.
Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China reconstructs the events of the Cultural Revolution as they affected young people. Martin Singer integrates material from a range of factors and effects, including the characteristics of this generation of youths, the roles Mao called them to play, their resentment against the older generation, their membership in mass organizations, the educational system in which they were placed, and their perception that their skills were underutilized. To most educated young people in China, Singer concludes, the Cultural Revolution represented a traumatic and irreversible loss of political innocence, made yet more tragic by its allegiance to the unsuccessful campaign of an old revolutionary to preserve his legacy from the inevitable storms of history.

Economic development in mainland China during the first two decades of Communist control provides a typical example for the difficult task to transform a vast underdeveloped agrarian economy into a modern industrial one. In the first half of this period, a series of massive transformations of social and economic institutions was accompanied by a drafted industrialization program; the result was an impressive speed-up in economic growth. The second decade witnessed an economic crisis (1960–62) and a political upheaval (1966–68). These disruptions marred the economic performance over the period as a whole. Consequently, the long-term growth rate appears to have been only moderate.The Economy of Communist China reviews selected aspects of the economy. After examining the development strategy, it analyzes the quantitative trends and the structural changes. The book goes on to analyze the key factors contributing to the earlier growth and the elements responsible for the later disruption and finally assesses the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the Chinese economy and the prospects of the current Third Five-Year Plan.The text includes a bibliography of selected materials on Chinese economic development.