Columbia University Press: 2355 books
Hog and Hominy
Soul Food from Africa to America
Language: English
Release Date: October 8, 2008
Frederick Douglass Opie deconstructs and compares the foodways of people of African descent throughout the Americas, interprets the health legacies of black culinary traditions, and explains the concept of soul itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West and Central African social and...
by Patrick Keating
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2009
Lighting performs essential functions in Hollywood films, enhancing the glamour, clarifying the action, and intensifying the mood. Examining every facet of this understated art form, from the glowing backlights of the silent period to the shaded alleys of film noir, Patrick Keating affirms the role...
Speculative Taxidermy
Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene
Language: English
Release Date: January 23, 2018
Taxidermy, once the province of natural history and dedicated to the pursuit of lifelike realism, has recently resurfaced in the world of contemporary art, culture, and interior design. In Speculative Taxidermy, Giovanni Aloi offers a comprehensive mapping of the discourses and practices that have...
by Seiji Lippit
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2002
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2002
What happens when a critique of modernity—a "revolt against the traditions of the Western world"—is situated within a non-European context, where the concept of the modern has been inevitably tied to the image of the West?
Seiji M. Lippit offers the first comprehensive study in...
Translating Mount Fuji
Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity
Language: English
Release Date: November 7, 2006
Dennis Washburn traces the changing character of Japanese national identity in the works of six major authors: Ueda Akinari, Natsume S?seki, Mori ?gai, Yokomitsu Riichi, ?oka Shohei, and Mishima Yukio. By focusing on certain interconnected themes, Washburn illuminates the contradictory desires of...
What Is Modernity?
Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi
Language: English
Release Date: February 1, 2005
Regarded as one of the foremost thinkers in postwar Japan, Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977) questioned traditional Japanese thought and radically reconfigured an understanding of the subject's relationship to the world. His works were also central in drawing Japanese attention to the problems inherent...
The Sarashina Diary
A Woman's Life in Eleventh-Century Japan
Language: English
Release Date: July 22, 2014
A thousand years ago, a young Japanese girl embarked on a journey from the wild East Country to the capital. She began a diary that she would continue to write for the next forty years and compile later in life, bringing lasting prestige to her family.
Some aspects of the author's life and...
by Mari Ruti
Language: English
Release Date: August 9, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: August 9, 2011
We are conditioned to think that love heals wounds, makes us happy, and gives our lives meaning. When the opposite occurs and love causes fracturing, disenchantment, and existential turmoil, we suffer deeply, especially if we feel that love has failed us or that we have failed to experience what others...
Love and War
How Militarism Shapes Sexuality and Romance
Language: English
Release Date: October 28, 2014
Ideas of masculinity and femininity become sharply defined in war-reliant societies, resulting in a presumed enmity between men and women. This so-called "battle of the sexes" is intensified by the use of misogyny to encourage men and boys to conform to the demands of masculinity. These...
The Dynamic Frame
Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood
Language: English
Release Date: February 19, 2019
The camera’s movement in a film may seem straightforward or merely technical. Yet skillfully deployed pans, tilts, dollies, cranes, and zooms can express the emotions of a character, convey attitude and irony, or even challenge an ideological stance. In The Dynamic Frame, Patrick Keating offers...
Inside Private Prisons
An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Language: English
Release Date: November 7, 2017
When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal...
by Richard Allen
Language: English
Release Date: October 16, 2007
Language: English
Release Date: October 16, 2007
Is Hitchcock a superficial, though brilliant, entertainer or a moralist? Do his films celebrate the ideal of romantic love or subvert it? In a new interpretation of the director's work, Richard Allen argues that Hitchcock orchestrates the narrative and stylistic idioms of popular cinema to at once...
Neurogastronomy
How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters
Language: English
Release Date: December 2, 2011
Leading neuroscientist Gordon M. Shepherd embarks on a paradigm-shifting trip through the "human brain flavor system," laying the foundations for a new scientific field: neurogastronomy. Challenging the belief that the sense of smell diminished during human evolution, Shepherd argues that...
Nuthin' but a "G" Thang
The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap
Language: English
Release Date: November 17, 2004
In the late 1980s, gangsta rap music emerged in urban America, giving voice to—and making money for—a social group widely considered to be in crisis: young, poor, black men. From its local origins, gangsta rap went on to flood the mainstream, generating enormous popularity and profits. Yet the...