Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted as part of the Robson Reading Series at IKBLC, through illustrative story telling, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas challenges native stereotypes. The stories of the trickster Raven, as told by Yahgulanaas, are what most people would call comics, and they are fun, humorous and sometimes rude. Yahgulanaas takes traditional Haida stories and turns them into manga (Japanese-style comics). He has dropped the traditional rectangular boxes and voice balloons associated with the North American comics of Marvel and DC. Instead, he has developed a flowing style that uses a bold line stretched almost to the breaking point – a motif strongly associated with Haida art – to link the images in the narrative.
Charles Prebish – The Swans Came to Canada Too: Looking Backward and Looking Forward
Program sponsored by Buddhism and Contemporary Society Program, the Tung Lin Kok Yuen Canada Foundation, the Institute of Asian Research, and the Department of Asian Studies. Following the change in immigration law by Canada and the United States in the mid-twentieth century, Buddhism exploded on the North American continent. Buddhism is now found everywhere: from the cover of TIME magazine to the Simpson’s TV show; from Leonard Cohen practicing as a Zen priest to the Dalai Lama visiting the White House. Some estimates place the number of Buddhists on the continent as high as six million. This paper traces the development of the study of North American Buddhism as it developed as a legitimate sub-discipline in the larger discipline of Buddhist Studies, and highlights both the similarities and differences between Canadian and American forms of Buddhism. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Select Articles and Books from UBC Library
Prebish, C. S. (1979). American Buddhism. North Scituate, Mass: Duxbury Press.
Prebish, C. S. (1999). Luminous passage: The practice and study of Buddhism in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Prebish, C. S., Keown, D., & Taylor & Francis eBooks – CRKN. (2006). Buddhist studies from india to america: Essays in honor of Charles S. prebish. New York; London: Routledge. [Link]
Prebish, C. S. (1993). Religion and sport: The meeting of sacred and profane. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press.
UBC Library Guides
Maya Jasanoff – An Imperial Disaster? The Loyalist Diaspora after the American Revolution
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the UBC History department. Part of the “Disasters and Diasporas: Entangled Histories of Environment and Empire” Series of the UBC History Department Maya Jasanoff’s teaching and research focus on the history of modern Britain and the British Empire, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her first book, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, investigates British expansion in India and Egypt through the lives of art collectors. It was awarded the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize and was a book of the year selection in numerous British publications including The Economist, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. She has recently completed a new book, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (forthcoming February 2011), which provides the first global history of the loyalists who fled the United States after the American Revolution, and resettled in Canada, the Caribbean, Britain, Sierra Leone, and beyond. Her current research explores the worlds of Joseph Conrad. Jasanoff has been an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Jasanoff, M. (2011). Liberty’s exiles: American loyalists in the revolutionary world. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Jasanoff, M. (2011). Revenge of the Quiet American. Foreign Policy, (185), 101-101. [Link]
Jasanoff, M. (2007). Border-crossing: My imperial routes. History Workshop Journal, 64(64), 372-381. doi:10.1093/hwj/dbm044 [Link]
Jasanoff, M. (2005). Chameleon capital: The allure of Lucknow. Yale Review, 93(3), 1. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Global Local Learning Exchange webcast online
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, the Community Partner for Learning (CPL), C.A.R.E. Society, the School of Community and Regional Planning, IKBLC and other UBC partners engages the diverse community with young global citizens (UBC recipients of C.A.R.E. Travel Awards). This event serves to welcome all the recipients back from their overseas assignments and to kick off the first of a series of Global-Local Learning Exchanges in the 2010/2011 semester.
Stewart Brand – Rethinking Green
Hosted by UBC Reads Sustainability Lecture Series, and held at the Liu Institute of Global Issues, Steward Brand has been an environmentalist for over 40 years, and shares his wisdom in his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. His book is a compilation of his reflections and lessons which suggest a shift in the environmentalists’ dogmatic approach, and describes a process of reasonable debate and experimentation. His iconoclastic proposals include transitioning to nuclear energy and ecosystem engineering, and are sure to provoke widespread debate. He has helped define the collaborative, data-sharing, forward-thinking world in which we live. Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Global Business Network, the Long Now Foundation and the Well. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Brand, S. (1994). How buildings learn: What happens after they’re built. New York, NY: Viking.
Brand, S. (2009). Whole earth discipline: An ecopragmatist manifesto (1st ed.). New York: Viking.
Brand, S. (2007). Earth monitoring whole earth comes into focus. Nature, 450(7171), 797-797. doi:10.1038/450797a [Link]
Brand, S. (1999). The clock of the long now: Time and responsibility. New York: Basic Books.
UBC Library Research Guides
Lissa Paul's "Keywords For Children's Literature" Webcast Online
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Master of Arts in Children’s Literature (MACL) program, the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, the Departments of Language and Literacy Education, English, and the Creative Writing Program, SLAIS presents Lissa Paul. As scholars working in children’s literature know all too well, cross‐disciplinary conversations are often uneasy. Though librarians, literary scholars, educators, cultural studies and media specialists may critique the same primary texts, what they say and how they say it very much depends on the critical vocabularies of their particular disciplines. In developing Keywords for Children’s Literature, editors Philip Nel and Lissa Paul responded to the need for a shared vocabulary by inviting internationally renowned authors and scholars from a range of disciplines to map the histories and etymologies of key conflicted terms in the field. In her talk, Lissa will preview some of the engaging essays in the book, beginning with her key to the word ‘keyword.’
Chinese Art Students Society (C.A.S.S.) – Push and Pull
Image credit: C.A.S.S.
Showcasing works of art dealing with issues concerning identity, cohabitation, loss, migration, and adaptation ranging since the construction of the Pacific Canadian Railway to the modern age, this exhibit focuses on the transitional ideologies and identities of Chinese immigrants since the period of the building of the Canadian Railway to the modern day. Each contemporary piece of work constitutes its own reflections to these issues and their history in an attempt to define self identity and evolution of time, space, and culture.
C.A.S.S. (UBC Chinese Art Students Society) was established in 1994 with the mandate to educating and facilitating the appreciation of Chinese art and tradition. C.A.S.S. welcomes everyone, regardless of ethnicity, to take part in events and activities focusing on Chinese culture.
To see more photos of this exhibition, please find here.
Michael Nicholl Yahgulanaas
(Webcast of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ reading on September 30, 2010)
Through illustrative storytelling, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas turns stereotypes of First Nations’ cultures literally upside down. In RED: A Haida Manga (Douglas and McIntyre, 2009), he tells the epic tale of a Haida hero named Red, a leader so blinded by revenge that he leads his community to the brink of war and destruction. The story is told through 108 pages of hand-painted illustrations. When arranged in a specific order, the panels of the narrative create a Haida formline image four metres long. The sequence for this complex design is displayed on the inside jacket.
Drawing from classic Haida narratives, and in the “tradition of innovation,” Yahgulanaas has created a new genre called Haida Manga – part Haida, part Japanese-style comic. He has dropped the traditional rectangular boxes and gutters associated with North American graphic literature. Instead, he has invented a flowing style that uses a bold line stretched almost to the breaking point – a motif associated strongly with Haida formlines – to link the images in the narrative in a layout that confounds expectation.
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas was formerly introduced to Haida iconography by his elder cousin, the painter, carver and printmaker Robert Davidson. He also studied with Cantonese artist Cai Ben Kwon. He has exhibited his art throughout Canada. His other books include Flight of the Hummingbird, A Tale of Two Shamans, The Last Voyage of the Black Shipand Hachidori. He lives close to the Two Sisters mountains on an island in the Salish Sea.
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas read at the Lillooet Room of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on September 30, 2010, 1:00.
Michael Yahgulanaas – Red: A Haida Manga
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted as part of the Robson Reading Series at IKBLC, through illustrative story telling, Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas challenges native stereotypes. The stories of the trickster Raven, as told by Yahgulanaas, are what most people would call comics, and they are fun, humorous and sometimes rude. Yahgulanaas takes traditional Haida stories and turns them into manga (Japanese-style comics). He has dropped the traditional rectangular boxes and voice balloons associated with the North American comics of Marvel and DC. Instead, he has developed a flowing style that uses a bold line stretched almost to the breaking point – a motif strongly associated with Haida art – to link the images in the narrative.
Biography of Author
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ wide-ranging artistic practice explores themes of identity, environmentalism and the human condition. Influenced by both the tradition of Haida iconography and contemporary Asian visual culture, he has created an artistic practice that crosses diverse cultures, generations, and disciplines.
Yahgulanaas uses art to communicate a world view that, while particular to Haida Gwaii, his ancestral North Pacific archipelago, is also relevant to a contemporary and internationally-engaged audience. Working in multiple forms including painting, sculpture and illustrated publications, his artistic practice is acclaimed for its vitality and originality.
Raised in Delkatla, Haida Gwaii, Yahgulanaas began working as an artist after many decades in the leadership of the Haida Nation’s successful campaign to protect its people’s indigenous culture and environment. In the past decade, Yahgulanaas’ work has been presented in museums across Canada and all over the world, including at international exhibitions in Asia, Australia, the Middle East and Europe. His art works are in numerous public and private collections including the British Museum (London, England), the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, Canada), the Glenbow Museum (Calgary, Canada) and the Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver, Canada). His large sculptural works are part of the public art collection of the City of Vancouver in Canada. In 2011/2012, Yahgulanaas was the Audain Professor in Contemporary Arts of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Victoria.
Author’s Titles at UBC Library
Yahgulanaas, M. N. (2001). A tale of two shamans. Penticton, B.C.: Theytus. [Link]
Yahgulanaas, M. N., & Park, L. (2011). Old growth. Vancouver: Read Leaf. [Link]
Yahgulanaas, M. N. (2010). Red: A Haida manga. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Book, Theatre and Film Reviews
Lissa Paul – Keywords For Children's Literature
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, and hosted by the Master of Arts in Children’s Literature (MACL) program, the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, the Departments of Language and Literacy Education, English, and the Creative Writing Program, SLAIS presents Lissa Paul. As scholars working in children’s literature know all too well, cross‐disciplinary conversations are often uneasy. Though librarians, literary scholars, educators, cultural studies and media specialists may critique the same primary texts, what they say and how they say it very much depends on the critical vocabularies of their particular disciplines. In developing Keywords for Children’s Literature, editors Philip Nel and Lissa Paul responded to the need for a shared vocabulary by inviting internationally renowned authors and scholars from a range of disciplines to map the histories and etymologies of key conflicted terms in the field. In her talk, Lissa will preview some of the engaging essays in the book, beginning with her key to the word ‘keyword.’
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Paul, L. (2011). The children’s book business: Lessons from the long eighteenth century. New York: Routledge.
Paul, L. (1999). Boy stories, girl stories. Orbit, 30(3), 8.
Paul, L. (2005). Sex and the children’s book. The Lion and the Unicorn, 29(2), 222-235. doi:10.1353/uni.2005.0032 [Link]
Garavini, M. (2012). Keywords for children’s literature. edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul. New York and London: New York: University Press. International Research in Children’s Literature, 5(2), 223-224. doi:10.3366/ircl.2012.0068 [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides