Transcendients

While sheltering in place, artist Taiji Terasaki created original works of art every day as a reflection on the early months of COVID-19. For 100 consecutive days, Terasaki selected a person or story to highlight as a tribute to the remarkable people who are on the front lines ensuring essential services to our communities, protecting our health and safety, and standing up for justice. Each day, Terasaki created an original artwork, which wove together photographic images with words spotlighting the inspirational stories of the heroes in our midst. These works were posted on Taiji Terasaki's Instagram, @taijiterasakistudio, providing a daily virtual gallery chronicling 100 days of people and events during the pandemic. All of the works are assembled in this catalog, which is also a companion to the 2020 exhibition at the Japanese-American Museum in Los Angeles.

A major collection of short fiction from Peter F. Hamilton, New York Times bestselling author of Pandora’s Star, The Dreaming Void, and many other epic science fiction novels—including a brand-new novella starring detective Paula Myo Fans of the Commonwealth Saga will enjoy the return of Paula Myo, the genetically engineered police investigator whose single-minded pursuit of justice runs up against a postwar citizenry eager to forget old crimes. In the all-new novella “Manhattan in Reverse,” Paula is dispatched to the backwoods planet of Menard after a docile, supposedly nonintelligent alien species attacks peaceful human settlers. Menard may have to be evacuated—something the planet’s corporate owners and human populace are prepared to resist . . . perhaps with targeted aggression. Violence hits closer to home in “The Demon Trap” in which Paula’s investigation of a gruesome act of terrorism leads into unexpected political, technological, and philosophical waters, threatening the course of human evolution. Time travel has never been so tricky—or so deadly—as it is in “If at First . . .,” in which Metropolitan Police detective David Lanson finds himself matching wits with a sociopath who might very well be from the future . . . or, at least, a future. “Blessed by an Angel” is set in the Commonwealth Universe of the Void trilogy and features an alien visitor who offers the local human population a chance at paradise. But one species’ paradise may be another’s hell. Three other thrilling pieces round out the collection—and showcase Peter F. Hamilton’s ability to weave scientific speculation into very human storytelling.

Mine Okubo was one of 110,000 people of Japanese descent--nearly two-thirds of them American citizens -- who were rounded up into "protective custody" shortly after Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660, her memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah, was first published in 1946, then reissued by University of Washington Press in 1983 with a new Preface by the author. With 197 pen-and-ink illustrations, and poignantly written text, the book has been a perennial bestseller, and is used in college and university courses across the country. "[Mine Okubo] took her months of life in the concentration camp and made it the material for this amusing, heart-breaking book. . . . The moral is never expressed, but the wry pictures and the scanty words make the reader laugh -- and if he is an American too -- blush." -- Pearl Buck Read more about Mine Okubo in the 2008 UW Press book, Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road, edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef. http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/ROBMIN.html

When is a city born? When does it mature? When does it acquire an identity? There is just one answer to all three questions: when it looks death in the eye. This is a land of myths and traditions, where people do not die but, rather, are transformed into legends and live on with their curses and blessings, continuing to put their stamp on their environment, to inspire future generations and to draw up the maps of the country’s culture. —Vahé Oshagan Father Land by Vahé and Ara Oshagan is a poetic and personal journey through the rugged, human-and-history-laden landscape of Karabagh. It is also a unique collaboration between a photographer son and his famous, writer father. A family steeped in Armenian literature and art, Vahé and Ara Oshagan’s work is the result of an intensely felt connection to their heritage and homeland. Father Land is a literary and visual contemplation of Karabagh’s present-day, its history, and its culture, as well as a meditation on transnational identity, land, and paternal bonds. Springing from a deep understanding of the Armenian people and their unique past, Vahé Oshagan’s essay presents a reflective, yet witty and fluid, account of his encounters with people from all walks of Karabagh life. It touches upon topics as diverse as the happenings of the eighth century BC, the recent war of liberation, the dialect of the people, their worldview, their contradictions, their body language, their spirituality, and their legendary hospitality. It is an accomplished piece of imaginative literature, weaving between literary and literal, creative and factual, objective and subjective reflection. Ara Oshagan’s photographs provide insight into the lives of the people of Karabagh on a documentary as well as symbolic level and they reflect his personal encounters in the region. At times capturing an intimate familial moment; at other times, in the street, observing the chaos of life; or reverent in the presence of Karabagh’s millennial churches, the images simultaneously document, explore, and reflect upon Karabagh’s precarious present and uncertain future. Taken together, the text and images are symbiotic and deeply connected—like the father and son who produced the work—and they portray a region and a culture as old as the bonds of family and society themselves.

In TheGreat Unknown, award-winning historian and journalist Greg Robinson offers a fascinating and compulsively readable collection of biographical portraits of extraordinary but unheralded figures in Japanese American history: men and women who made remarkable contributions in the arts, literature, law, sports, and other fields. Recovering and celebrating the stories of noteworthy Issei and Nisei and of their supporters, TheGreat Unknown provides powerful evidence of the diverse experiences and substantial cultural, political, and intellectual contributions of Nikkei throughout the country and over multiple decades. What is more, The Great Unknown reshapes our understanding of the Asian American experience. By focusing attention on exceptional figures who deviated from social norms, Robinson subverts stereotypes of ethnic Japanese and other Asians as conformist or colorless. The collection also highlights a set of recurring themes absent from conventional histories—including the lives of Japanese Americans outside the West Coast, the role of women in shaping community life, encounters between Japanese American and African American communities during the struggle for civil rights, and the evolving status of queer community members.

In Home Rule Nandita Sharma traces the historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as “colonial invaders.” The imperial-state category of Native, initially a mark of colonized status, has been revitalized in what Sharma terms the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states. Under postcolonial rule, claims to autochthony—being the Native “people of a place”—are mobilized to define true national belonging. Consequently, Migrants—the quintessential “people out of place”—increasingly face exclusion, expulsion, or even extermination. This turn to autochthony has led to a hardening of nationalism(s). Criteria for political membership have shrunk, immigration controls have intensified, all while practices of expropriation and exploitation have expanded. Such politics exemplify the postcolonial politics of national sovereignty, a politics that Sharma sees as containing our dreams of decolonization. Home Rule rejects nationalisms and calls for the dissolution of the ruling categories of Native and Migrant so we can build a common, worldly place where our fundamental liberty to stay and move is realized.