This revelatory book shows how the influential and controversial Empress Dowager Cixi used art and architecture to establish her authority Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), who ruled China from 1861 until her death in 1908, is a subject of fascination and controversy, at turns vilified for her political maneuvering and admired for modernizing China. In addition to being an astute politician, she was an earnest art patron, and this beautifully illustrated book explores a wide range of objects, revealing how the empress dowager used art and architecture to solidify her rule. Cixi's art commissions were innovative in the way that they unified two distant conceptions of gender in China at the time, demonstrating her strength and wisdom as a monarch while highlighting her identity as a woman and mother. Artful Subversion examines commissioned works, including portrait paintings and photographs, ceramics, fashion, architecture, and garden design, as well as work Cixi created, such as painting and calligraphy. The book is a compelling study of how a powerful matriarch at once subverted and upheld the Qing imperial patriarchy.

Subversive Scribes and the Solomonic Narrative considers 1 Kgs 1-11 through the optics of propaganda and subversion with primary attention given to subversive readings of portions of the Solomonic narrative. Seibert explores the social context in which scribal subversion was not only possible but perhaps even necessary and examines texts that covertly undermine the legitimacy or the legacy of Solomon. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, Seibert develops definitions of propaganda and subversion and notes other studies which have understood certain biblical texts to function in these ways. Primary consideration is given to developing a theory of subversive scribal activity in this section of the book. An important distinction is made between "submissive scribes," individuals who wrote what they were told, and "subversive scribes," individuals who did otherwise. Since many scribes were writing for the very people who paid them, those wanting to engage in subversive literary activity had to do so carefully, and to a certain extent covertly, lest they be detected and exposed. Yet their critique could not be so obscure that none could detect it. There needed to be enough clues to allow like-minded scribes to read the text and appreciate the critique, but not so many that opponents could charge such scribes with sedition. In the second part of the book, Seibert applies this theory of scribal subversion to various passages in 1 Kgs 1-11. An extended discussion is given to 1 Kgs 1-2 with the remainder of the Solomonic narrative being treated more episodically. The focus is on passages which look suspiciously like the work of a subversive scribe and/or which have subversive potential. It is argued that scribes could-and sometimes did-intentionally encode a critique of the king/kingship in the text and that one of the most effective ways they accomplished this was by cloaking scribal subversion in the guise of propaganda.

Bringing to light the largely overlooked female participation in domestic and international art worlds, this book offers the first comprehensive study of how women embroiderers, traditionalist calligraphers and painters, including Shen Shou, Wu Xingfen, Jin Taotao, and members of Chinese Women’s Society of Calligraphy and Painting, shaped the terrain of the modern art world and gender positioning during China’s important moments of social-cultural transformation from empire to republic. Drawing on a wealth of previously unexhibited artworks, rare artist’s monographs, women’s journals, personal narratives, diaries, and catalogs of international expositions, Doris Sung not only affirms women’s significant roles as guardian and innovator of traditionalist art forms for a modern nation, but she also reveals their contribution to cultural diplomacy and revaluation of Chinese artistic heritage on the international stage in the early twentieth century.

Reveals the personal experiences of those who adopted the Rastafari religion in the 1950s to 1970s. This title explores the identity development of the religion, demonstrating how shifts in the movement's identity have led some of the elder Rastafari to adopt, embrace, and internalize Rastafari and Blackness as central to their concept of self.

DIVDIVEarly modern English canonical sources and sermons often urge the subordination of women. In Household Politics, Don Herzog argues that these sources were blather—not that they were irrelevant, but that plenty of people rolled their eyes at them. Indeed many held that a man had to be an idiot or a buffoon to try to act on their hoary “wisdom.� Households didn’t bask serenely in naturalized or essentialized patriarchy. Instead, husbands, wives, and servants struggled endlessly over authority. Nor did some insidiously gendered public/private distinction make the political subordination of women invisible. Conflict, Herzog argues, doesn't corrode social order: it's what social order usually consists in. He uses the argument to impeach conservatives and their radical critics for sharing confused alternatives. The social world Herzog brings vibrantly alive is much richer—and much pricklier—than many imagine./div/div

Threads of globalization is an interdisciplinary volume that brings fashion-specific garments, motifs, materials, and methods of production into dialogue with gender and identity in various cultures throughout Asia during the long twentieth century. It examines how the shift from artisanal production to 'fast fashion' over the past 150 years has devalued women’s textile labour and how skilled textile/ garment makers and the organizations that support them are preserving and reviving heritage traditions. It also offers examples of how socially engaged artists in Asia and the diaspora use their work to criticize labour and environmental abuses in the global fashion industry.