The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. They publish books for general readers, scholars, and students. The Press focuses on selected academic areas: Latin American studies, Russian and East European studies, Central Asian studies, composition and literacy studies, environmental studies, urban studies, the history of architecture and the built environment, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Their books about Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania include history, art, architecture, photography, biography, fiction, and guidebooks.
Their renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognises the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780822957294
Pub Date: 09 Mar 2000
Description:
Constitutional reform has been one of the most significant aspects of democratization in late twentieth century Latin America. In The Friendly Liquidation of the Past—one of the first texts to examine this issue comprehensively —Van Cott focuses on the efforts of Bolivia and Colombia to incorporate ethnic rights into their fragile democracies. In the1990s, political leaders and social movements in Bolivia and Colombia expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of democracy--its exclusionary nature, the distance and illegitimacy of the state, and the empty promise of citizenship.
The highly symbolic act of constitution making elevated a public struggle for rights to the level of a discussion on the meaning of democracy and the nature of the state. Based on interviews with more than 100 participants in the reforms, Van Cott demonstrates how issues promoted by social movements—recognizing ethnic diversity, expanding political participation and improving representation, and creating spheres of cultural and territorial autonomy—were placed on the constitutional reform agenda and transformed through strategic interaction with political power-brokers into the nation’s highest law. The analysis follows each reform through five years of implementation to assess the early results of what Van Cott suggests is an emerging regional model of multicultural constitutionalism. The Friendly Liquidation of the Past fills an important gap in the study of ethnic politics and constitutional reform in the Andes, linking the literature on institutions and political reform to work in political theory on participatory democracy and multiculturalism.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780822957201
Pub Date: 09 Mar 2000
Description:
In The Horse Fair, Robin Becker asks questions about citizenship and participation in the marketplaces—of bodies, of ideas, of objects—in which we function. She investigates how individuals marginalized by gender, religion, and sexual preference negotiate public and private spheres while inventing sustainable communities. Beginning with the great nineteenth-century French painter Rosa Bonheur, Becker has produced a number of multi-voiced, synthetic portraits, each within a framework of social history and a poetics of partiality—she speaks from the persona of Charlotte Salomon, child of assimilate, German-Jewish parents and grandparents and killed by the Nazis at the age of twenty-six; she appropriates passages from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services; and juxtaposes them against stanzas that mourn her sister’s death and those that celebrate non-traditional families.
Organized around the long meditations, other poems show Becker's dexterity with formal verse (sestina, sonnet, tercets) and her imaginative engagements with free verse. The Horse Fair takes its name from Bonheur's monumental painting and serves as the vehicle through which Becker explores anti-Semitism, cross-dressing, and Bonheur's lifelong relationships with women. In Becker's hands, The Horse Fair transports us to the communal plaza where we come to barter and to buy, to study one another, to touch the foundation upon which we build our temporary habitations.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780822957140
Pub Date: 02 Mar 2000
Description:
After 21 years of military rule, Brazil returned to democracy in 1985. Over the past decade and a half, Brazilians in the Nova Rep\u00fablica (New Republic) have struggled with a range of diverse challenges that have tested the durability and quality of the young democracy. How well have they succeeded?
To what extent can we say that Brazilian democracy has consolidated? What actors, institutions, and processes have emerged as most salient over the past 15 years? Although Brazil is Latin America's largest country, the world's third largest democracy, and a country with a population and GNP larger than Yeltsin's Russia, more than a decade has passed since the last collaborative effort to examine regime change in Brazil, and no work in English has yet provided a comprehensive appraisal of Brazilian democracy in the period since 1985.Democratic Brazil analyzes Brazilian democracy in a comprehensive, systematic fashion, covering the full period of the New Republic from Presidents Sarney to Cardoso. Democratic Brazil brings together twelve top scholars, the \u201cnext generation of Brazilianists,\u201d with wide-ranging specialties including institutional analysis, state autonomy, federalism and decentralization, economic management and business-state relations, the military, the Catholic Church and the new religious pluralism, social movements, the left, regional integration, demographic change, and human rights and the rule of law. Each chapter focuses on a crucial process or actor in the New Republic, with emphasis on its relationship to democratic consolidation. The volume also contains a comprehensive bibliography on Brazilian politics and society since 1985. Prominent Brazilian historian Thomas Skidmore has contributed a foreword to the volume.Democratic Brazil speaks to a wide audience, including Brazilianists, Latin Americanists generally, students of comparative democratization, as well as specialists within the various thematic subfields represented by the contributors. Written in a clear, accessible style, the book is ideally suited for use in upper-level undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on Latin American politics and development.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 120
ISBN: 9780822957195
Pub Date: 02 Mar 2000
Description:
Windfall includes poems from three previous books by Maggie Anderson, along with a generous selection of new work. In this collection we can see over two decades of the growth of a poet memorable for the clarity, strength, and urgency of her voice. Anderson’s poems entangle a language, a history, and a group of belongings, and she is both at home and a foreigner in the places she invokes.
Every place in these poems seems inhabitable, yet the tensions of these deceptively quiet lines develop out of the clear reluctance or inability of the poet to sit still. Maggie Anderson writes out of deep grief for the political losses of work and money, of life and limb and home in our dangerous times. She remembers and witnesses, and she also speaks eloquently for our private griefs—the loss of family, vitality and self. These poems do not shout; we listen as if following a whisper in the dark. A counterpoint to the sorrows in these poems is a complex and often joyous music, as well as a wry, sometimes self-deprecating humor which saves the work from solemnity. Her rhythms are diverse and intricate; they move deftly from fiddle whine to saxophone, from fugue to blues.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780822957119
Pub Date: 16 Dec 1999
Description:
The poems of Reginald Shepherd’s third book move among, mix, and manufacture stories, seeking to redefine the meaning of mythology. From the ruined representatives of Greek divinity (broken statues and fragmented stories), and the dazzling extravagances of predecessors like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, to the fleeting promises of popular music and the laconic demigods of the contemporary gay subculture, they sketch maps of a world in which desire may find a restless home. But desire leads the maps astray and maps mislead desire.
The poems poems both enact language’s powers to create a world and enforce the world’s insistence (material, social, sexual, racial, historical) that mind (and body) surrender to circumstance. The struggle between these two halves that will never make a whole produces new myths of occasion, “packing the rifts/with sleeplessness, filling the gaps with lack.” In that space between promise and deprivation, Wrong builds its song.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 344
ISBN: 9780822957034
Pub Date: 28 Oct 1999
Description:
This book identifies a major problem facing developing nations and the countries and sources that fund them: the lack of attention and/or effective strategies available to prevent farmers in underdeveloped and poorly endowed regions from sinking still deeper into poverty while avoiding further degradation of marginal environments. The contributors propose an alliance of scientific knowledge with native skill as the best way to proceed, arguing that folk systems can often provide effective management solutions that are not only locally effective, but which may have the potential for spatial diffusion. While this has been said before, the volume makes one of the best articulated statements of how to implement such an approach.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 216
ISBN: 9780822985907
Pub Date: 15 Oct 1999
Description:
Jonathan A. Grant has written a highly original study of the Putilov works—the most famous industrial conglomerate in the Russian Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the emergence of a capitalist system in the Russian federation in the 1990s, scholarly debate over the nature of Russian capitalism has been revived, and with this study, Grant issues a major challenge to the conventional wisdom on the nature of the Russian economy in the years before the Bolshevik revolution.
Grant argues that the Putilov Company, which manufactured arms for the Russian state and a wide range of heavy industrial equipment for civilian use, adopted business practices that resembled the experiences of large machinery and armaments manufacturers in Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Germany. This interpretation runs directly counter to the traditional and widely held view that Russian capitalism was shaped by the tsarist state's orders and subsidies and that the tsarist system was incompatible with the development of modern capitalism. Grant makes direct comparisons between Putilov and the famous western firm of Krupp and Vickers, illustrating similar business decisions made by both companies in terms of diversification of the product line and a penchant for private (as opposed to state) markets for primary income. Grant has gone beyond Soviet works on the Putilov plant, examining archival documents of the company and offering critical comments on both Soviet and Western scholarship on Russian economic and social history from the perspective of this important industrial enterprise. Grant not only repeatedly demonstrates that the Putilov firm responded effectively to the changing market for its wide range of industrial products but also shows that the tsarist regime provided far more of the \u0022systemic regularity\u0022 needed for capitalist development than generally believed. Grant's work is a significant contribution to this ongoing debate, offering a much-needed case study of Russian business history and a comparative study that extends across national boundaries. Big Business in Russia is essential reading for graduate students in Russian and European history and will also appeal to American and European business leaders eager to understand the historical background of the current economic challenges facing Russia.
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9780822941118
Pub Date: 07 Oct 1999
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9780822961406
Pub Date: 15 Nov 1999
Description:
Initially commissioned to record the progress of Pittsburgh’s Renaissance I, these unforgettable black-and-white photographs of Roy Stryker's Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL) capture the city in a state of flux. They reveal a union of opposites—the suited wonderment of the downtown businessman with the easy grace and competence of a shirtless construction worker balanced high over his head; the anonymity and isolation of planned housing with the belief in expansion and renewal; the energy and excitement of a city on the move with the traditions of the established elite; the juxtaposition between the growing optimism about the ability of technology to improve our lives; and the traditional steel and other heavy smokestack industries that still dominated the region. The Renaissance was seen as a way for Pittsburgh to keep abreast of modern urban life and to preserve its economic position, but the rapid development of a white suburban middle class was sapping the very essence of the personalized downtown neighborhoods.
These photographers have captured the convergence of destruction and rejuvenation that is the essence of an urban renaissance—all the anxiety and hope of the decade is reflected in these poignant photographs.Constance Schulz's fascinating essay on the story of the PPL, in order to present a full picture of the political and civic goals, achievements, and failings of the project, provides a thorough discussion of the background of the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, putting into perspective the Allegheny Conference's purpose for initiating the PPL, Roy Stryker's own vision and work, as well as those of the photographers who worked for Stryker on the project, and the politics that undermined the full implementation of it. Clark M. Thomas's accompanying narrative offers an eclectic range of facts and fascinating bits of the city's history and neighborhood lore, as well as noting important political and economic episodes. It also provides a glimpse into the often underrepresented lives of minorities and women in the region's development. Anyone moved by the incredible social upheaval and expansion that occurred in cities across the nation in the 1950s following years of depression and war will want to have this collection.
Then Suddenly--
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822957096
Pub Date: 28 Sep 1999
Description:
Finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s 1999 Poetry Book of the YearA reader and a writer don their respective roles and embark on the journey of a book. This is their story--ultimately a love story--darkly funny, mournful, testy. It is about a reader who at times presides over the page like a god, and at others follows the leash of the author's voice through the dark streets of the book like a dog, and it is about a writer of determined slipperiness.
As we read, we think that each of us is The Reader, the one who knows the Real Story. But the more we think we understand, the more the story moves away from us—all is not what it seems.This eagerly awaited third volume by the poet whose work The New York Times described as "at once charmed and frightening" is a book of high-spirited subversiveness, a work of argument, seduction, and a relentless devotion to language. Then, Suddenly— bristles with the sound of the author's voice--insistent, vital, hilarious, and iconoclastic--tearing away at the confinement of the page and at the distance between the page and the reader. Emanuel's images are dazzling. She creates a performance that is fearsome and funny in its portrayal of the argument between the work of the text and the world of the body. The Gettsyburg Review has called her a writer of "exquisite craftsmanship" who can "strike from language . . . images chiseled clean as bas-relief." Then, Suddenly— is a book of spectacle and verve, part elegy, part vaudeville.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822957102
Pub Date: 23 Sep 1999
Description:
1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize winner.The Water Between Us is a poetic examination of cultural fragmentation, and the exile's struggle to reconcile the disparate and often conflicting influences of the homeland and the adopted country. The book also centers on other kinds of physical and emotional distances: those between mothers and daughters, those created by being of mixed racial descent, and those between colonizers and the colonized.
Despite these distances, or perhaps because of them, the poems affirm the need for a multilayered and cohesive sense of self. McCallum's language is precise and graceful. Drawing from Anancy tales, Greek myth, and biblical stories, the poems deftly alternate between American English and Jamaican patois, and between images both familiar and surreal.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822957003
Pub Date: 17 Jun 1999
Description:
With unprecedented use of local and national sources, Lauria-Santiago presents a more complex portrait of El Salvador than has ever been ventured before. Using thoroughly researched regional case studies, Lauria-Santiago uncovers an astonishing variety of patterns in land use, labor, and the organization of production. He finds a diverse, commercially active peasantry that was deeply involved with local and national networks of power.
An Agrarian Republic challenges the accepted vision of Central America in the nineteenth century and critiques the "liberal oligarchic hegemony" model of El Salvador. Detailed discussions of Ladino victories and successful Indian resistance give a perspective on Ladinization that does not rely on a polarized understanding of ethnic identity.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780822956938
Pub Date: 06 May 1999
Description:
As she did in Appalachian Spring and Appalachian Autumn, Bonta offers a day-by-day account of the natural life of one place--her 648-acre property in south central Pennsylvania. In Appalachian Summer, Bonta's first grandchild spends her first summer on earth, and her growth is compared with that of the forest animals. Another important event in this Appalachian summer is the disappearance of a local girl.
As the mountain is thoroughly searched, Bonta poses questions about the safety of women in the woods. Do women stay out of the woods because they fear attack by men, or wild creatures and the unknown? Should they have such fears? In her minute observations of one place, one season, Marcia Bonta lays bare the connections we retain to the natural world, which is, finally, our own.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822956907
Pub Date: 06 May 1999
Description:
In 1872, there were more than 300,000 slaves in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Though the Spanish government had passed a law for gradual abolition in 1870, slaveowners, particularly in Cuba, clung tenaciously to their slaves as unfree labor was at the core of the colonial economies. Nonetheless, people throughout the Spanish empire fought to abolish slavery, including the Antillean and Spanish liberals and republicans who founded the Spanish Abolitionist Society in 1865.
This book is an extensive study of the origins of the Abolitionist Society and its role in the destruction of Cuban and Puerto Rican slavery and the reshaping of colonial politics.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 406
ISBN: 9780822956990
Pub Date: 29 Apr 1999
Description:
Taylor explores aspects of himself that have affected his work. He delves into the creation of Aureole and From Sea to Shining Sea, from their initial inception to the ways in which specific dancers influenced the choreography, including such notables as Pina Bausch, Laura Dean, David Parsons, Twyla Tharp, Dan Wagoner, Senta Driver—all of whom went on to form their own companies—and others—Bettie de Jong, Nicholas Gunn, and Carolyn Adams—who remained as much a part of the Taylor style as the choreography itself. Taylor writes with sincerity, wit, and charm of his associations with Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins, Anthony Tudor, George Balanchine, and many others.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780822956846
Pub Date: 15 Apr 1999
Description:
In Researching Dance, an introduction to research methods in dance addressed primarily to graduate students, the editors explore dance as evolutional, defining it in view of its intrinsic participatory values, its developmental aspects, and its purposes from art to ritual, and they examine the role of theory in research. The editors have also included essays by nine dancer-scholars who examine qualitative and quantitative inquiry and delineate the most common approaches for investigating dance, raising concerns about philosophy and aesthetics, historical scholarship, movement analysis, sexual and gender identification, cultural diversity, and the resources available to students. The writers have included study questions, research exercises, and suggested readings to facilitate the book\u2019s use as a classroom text.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780822956976
Pub Date: 01 Apr 1999
Description:
Finalist for ForeWord Magazine 1999 Poetry Book of the YearWith rapid shifts between subject and tone, sometimes within single poems, Dean Young’s latest book explores the kaleidoscopic welter of art and life. Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading.
Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.
