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Permitted and Prohibited
Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan
By Anne Allison.
University of California Press. 225 pages. $16.95, paper. |
 This
provocative study of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan investigates
elements of Japanese popular culture including erotic comic books,
lunchboxes that mothers ritualistically prepare for children, and
children’s cartoons. After five years of fieldwork in a middle-class
Tokyo neighborhood, Allison, a cultural anthropology professor at
Duke, brings recent feminist psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to
bear on representations of sexuality, motherhood, and gender in these
and other aspects of Japanese culture. |
Piano Music for Four Hands
By Roger Grenier, translated and with a preface by Alice Kaplan.
University of Nebraska Press. 153 pages. $15, paper. |
 For
decades a key figure in French letters, Grenier has written a novel
that is a study of music and love set against three generations of
French history, from World War I to the 1960s. Pianist Michel Mailhoc
retreats from a series of bungled love affairs and professional disappointments
to a family home in the Pyrenees, where his grandniece Emma becomes
his prize-winning student. Caught between his wishing for her success
and his fear of losing her, Michel sends Emma into the world of international
musical stardom that he has renounced for himself. Kaplan, a professor
of Francophone studies at Duke, worked with Grenier throughout the
translation process for the novel. |
Blake’s Therapy
By Ariel Dorfman.
Seven Stories Press. 175 pages. $21.95. |
 Duke
professor Dorfman’s latest novel is a work of intense psychological
intrigue, following marketing guru Graham Blake into and through a
mental breakdown. Blake’s therapy catches him in a voyeuristic
spiral involving a mysterious Latina, and he must find out who is
controlling his life, his business ventures, and even his heart. The
novel holds a magnifying glass to one man’s life as it unravels
in a world of economic turmoil, spiritual crisis, reality television,
and genetic engineering, finally questioning the very nature of storytelling
in our time. |
Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and
Black Fathers
and Sons in America
By Houston A. Baker Jr.
University of Georgia Press. 75 pages. $24.95. |
 From
the lone outcry of Richard Wright’s Black Boy to the chorusing
voices of Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March, Critical Memory
looks across the past half-century to assess the current challenges
to African-American cultural and intellectual life. As Baker, a Duke
professor of English, recalls his own youth in Louisville, Kentucky,
and Washington, D.C., he situates such figures as Ralph Ellison, James
Baldwin, Shelby Steele, O.J. Simpson, Chris Rock, and Jesse Jackson
within such issues as the embattled state of African-American manhood
and the “financing and promotion of black intellectuals.”
Reason and cool rage converge to expose the draining tasks of reconciling
white America’s perception of its righteousness with its lack
of relish for the truth it claims to welcome from black intellectuals
and artists. |
The New Trial
By Peter Weiss, translated with an introduction by James Rolleston
and Kai Evers.
Duke University Press. 119 pages. $15.95, paper. |
 Rolleston,
a professor of Germanic languages and literature, and Duke graduate
student Evers have collaborated to bring into English the final drama
of German playwright Weiss, whose death in 1982 came just months after
the completion of this play. A transformative updating of Kafka’s
novel The Trial, The New Trial presents a surreal, hallucinatory look
at the life of “Josef K.,” chief attorney in an enormous
multinational firm that exploits both his idealism and his self-doubt
to create a public face meant to mask the firm’s dark and fascistic
intentions. The extensive introduction by the co-authors situates
the work in the full context of Weiss’ life, including his exile
in Sweden during the Third Reich. |
Postmodernism and China
Edited by Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang.
Duke University Press. 452 pages. $23.95, paper. |
 Few
countries have been so transformed in recent decades as China. With
a dynamic economy and rapidly changing social structure, the Sleeping
Giant challenges the West to understand the nature of its modernization.
This volume’s diverse group of contributors argues that the Chinese
experience is crucial for understanding postmodernism; the essays,
co-edited by Duke history professor Dirlik, question the implications
of such specific phenomena as literature, architecture, music, and
film in a postsocialist society. Although the focus is on mainland
China, the volume includes observations on social and cultural realities
in Hong Kong and Taiwan. |
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