AARC Books

Shanghai Splendor: A Cultural History, 1843-1945

Wen-hsin Yeh
2007

Rich with details of everyday life, this multifaceted social and cultural history of China's leading metropolis in the twentieth century offers a kaleidoscopic view of Shanghai as the major site of Chinese modernization. Engaging the entire span of Shanghai's modern history from the Opium War to the eve of the Communist takeover in 1949, Wen-hsin Yeh traces the evolution of a dazzling urban culture that became alternately isolated from and intertwined with China's tumultuous history. Looking in particular at Shanghai's leading banks, publishing enterprises, and department stores, she...

Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism

Wen-hsin Yeh
1996

Revealing information that has been suppressed in the Chinese Communist Party's official history, Wen-hsin Yeh presents an insightful new view of the Party's origins. She moves away from an emphasis on Mao and traces Chinese Communism's roots to the country's culturally conservative agrarian heartland. And for the first time, her book shows the transformation of May Fourth radical youth into pioneering Communist intellectuals from a social and cultural history perspective.Yeh's study provides a unique description of the spatial dimensions of China's transition into modernity and...

Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade

Winnie Wong
2014

In a manufacturing metropolis in south China lies Dafen, an urban village that famously houses thousands of workers who paint van Goghs, Da Vincis, Warhols, and other Western masterpieces for the world market, producing an astonishing five million paintings a year. To write about work and life in Dafen, Winnie Wong infiltrated this world, first investigating the work of conceptual artists who made projects there; then working as a dealer; apprenticing as a painter; surveying wholesalers and retailers in Europe, East Asia and North America; establishing relationships with local...

The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi: A Historical Archaeology of Masculinity in a University Fraternity

Laurie Wilkie
2010

The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi takes us inside the secret, amusing, and sometimes mundane world of a California fraternity around 1900. Gleaning history from recent archaeological excavations and from such intriguing sources as oral histories, architecture, and photographs, Laurie A. Wilkie uncovers details of everyday life in the first fraternity at the University of California, Berkeley, and sets this story into the rich social and historical context of West Coast America at the turn of the last century. In particular, Wilkie examines men’s coming-of-age experiences in a period when...

Sampling Many Pots: A Historical Archaeology of a Multi-Ethnic Bahamian Community

Laurie Wilkie
Paul Farnsworth
2005

The enslaved population of Clifton Plantation was an early 19th-century cultural melange including native Africans, island-born Creoles, and African-American slaves brought by the owners from the American South as part of the Loyalist resettlement. This study of the multi-ethnic African community explores the diverse ways that members of this single plantation community navigated the circumstances of enslavement and negotiated the construction of New World identities within their families and with their neighbors.Focusing on the household and community levels of social integration at...

The Archaeology of Mothering: An African-American Midwife’s Tale

Laurie Wilkie
2003

Using archaeological materials recovered from a housesite in Mobile, Alabama, Laurie Wilkie explores how one extended African-American family engaged with competing and conflicting mothering ideologies in the post-Emancipation South

Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders

Mary L. Dudziak
Leti Volpp
2006

This collection focuses broadly on the role of law in the construction of U.S. borders and takes up an important question raised by the global turn in American studies scholarship: once territory becomes less critical to scholarship in the discipline, what constitutes the frame of American studies?For this project, a "border" is not simply a territorial boundary. Borders are created through formal legal controls on entry and exit, through the construction of rights of citizenship and noncitizenship, and through the regulation of American power in other parts of the world. Where legal...

Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African-American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1845-1950

Laurie Wilkie
2000

Historians' conception of plantation life in the American South, both post- and antebellum, derives almost exclusively from the written record, hence mainly from the white owners' perspectives. In Creating Freedom, historical archaeologist Laurie Wilkie pulls the half-opened curtain wider by seeking out the experiences of the majority of people who made their home on plantations: the African American laborers. Specifically, Wilkie examines the lives of four black families who lived at Oakley Plantation in south Louisiana's West Feliciana Parish over the course of one hundred years....

From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution and the Making of The Cambodian Diaspora

Khatharya Um
2015

In a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked Cambodia with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human history. What emerged in the aftermath of the regime's collapse in 1979 was a nation fractured by death and dispersal. It is estimated that nearly one-fourth of the country's population perished from hard labor, disease, starvation, and executions. Another half million Cambodians fled their ancestral homeland, with over one hundred thousand finding refuge in America. From the Land of Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle to understand and...

Nisei Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics

Jere Takahashi
1997

In Nisei/Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics, Jere Takahashi challenges studies that describe the Japanese American community's essentially linear process toward assimilation into U.S. society. As he develops a complex and nuanced account of Japanese American life, he shows that a diversity of opinion and debate about effective political strategy characterized each generation of Japanese Americans. As he investigates the ways in which each generation attempted to advance its interests and concerns, he uncovers the struggles over key issues and introduces the...