Talking Hawai‘i’s Story at Pohai Nani Auditorium

Talking Hawaiʻi’s Story: Oral Histories of an Island People editors Michi Kodama-Nishimoto and Warren Nishimoto of the University of Hawai‘i’s Center for Oral History will speak at the Pohai Nani Auditorium (45-090 Namoku Street, Kaneohe) on Tuesday, July 6, from 7 to 8 pm.

The program will include book readings, presented by storyteller Nyla Fujii-Babb and UH English professor Craig Howes, followed by a question-and-answer session. Fujii-Babb will read Edith Anzai Yonenaka’s narrative, “Recollections from the Windward Side,” and Howes will read Alfred Preis’ compelling chapter, ‘Interned: Experiences of an ‘Enemy Alien.’”

The talk and reading is the third event in the Pohai Nani Retirement Community’s Yamashita Lecture Series on Hawaiʻi. The program is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase from UH Press.

For more information on the event, contact Carolyn Nakamura, Pohai Nani’s resident services coordinator, at (808) 236-7805.

Readings from Andha Yug

A readers theatre production of excerpts from Andha Yug, Dharamvir Bharati’s critically acclaimed play taken from the Indian epic Mahabharata, will be held on Saturday, June 26, at 7:30pm at Orvis Auditorium. For more information on this free event call 808-956-8246 or click here.

The reading will be accompanied by visual images from the Mahabharata and Gamelan music. Translator Alok Bhalla will introduce the performance and play a role as well. A question and answer session will follow the performance.

Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama

In the opening decades of the twentieth century in Japan, practically every major author wrote plays that were published and performed. The plays were seen not simply as the emergence of a new literary form but as a manifestation of modernity itself, transforming the stage into a site for the exploration of new ideas and ways of being. A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japanese Drama, 1900-1930, is the first book in English to examine the full range of early twentieth-century Japanese drama. Accompanying his study, M. Cody Poulton provides his translations of representative one-act plays. Poulton looks at the emergence of drama as a modern literary and artistic form and chronicles the creation of modern Japanese drama as a reaction to both traditional (particularly kabuki) dramaturgy and European drama. Translations and productions of the latter became the model for the so-called New Theater (shingeki), where the question of how to be both modern and Japanese at the same time was hotly contested.

June 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3452-4 / $29.00 (PAPER)

Warehouses Closed for Inventory

Our Hawai‘i and Pennsylvania warehouses will be closed for inventory June 21–30, 2010. Shipments will resume July 1, 2010.

Global Oriental Change of Distribution Agreement

Effective July 1, 2010, University of Hawai‘i Press will no longer distribute Global Oriental Publishers Ltd. University of Hawai‘i Press will fulfill all orders through June 30, 2010. The last date to place orders for in-stock Global Oriental books through University of Hawai‘i Press is June 15, 2010. University of Hawai‘i Press will continue to accept returns until July 31, 2010. The new distributor noted below will solicit and take orders and accept returns as of July 1, 2010.

Effective July 1, 2010, Brill will be distributing Global Oriental titles in North America. Orders and returns should be directed to:
BRILL
c/o Books International
P.O. Box 605
Herndon, VA 20172-0605
USA
1-800-337-9255 (toll free in US & Canada only); 1-703-661-1585
Fax: 1-703-661-1501
Email: brillmail@presswarehouse.com
Web: www.brill.nl

Understanding Islam in Indonesia Launch and Author Q&A

Last month the USINDO (United States-Indonesia Society) in Washington, D.C., hosted a book launch for Robert Pringle’s Understanding Islam in Indonesia: Politics and Diversity. Read about the launch here, including comments by Mr. Salman Al Farisi, Chargé d’Affaires, Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia, and Dr. Jonah Blank, Policy Director, South and Southeast Asia, Committee on Foreign Relations (Majority), United States Senate, and a brief Q&A with the author.