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In a world where attacks on the basic human rights and equal worth of all people are escalating, Advancing Equality reminds us of the critical role of constitutions in protecting equal rights. Analyzing the constitutions of all 193 United Nations countries, this book traces fifty years of change in constitution drafting and examines how stronger protections against discrimination, alongside core social and economic rights, can transform lives. Looking across gender, race and ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity, disability, social class, and migration status, the authors reveal whose rights are increasingly guaranteed in constitutions, identify which nations and groups lag behind, and share inspiring stories of activism and powerful court cases from around the globe. Advancing Equality serves as a comprehensive call to action for anyone who cares about their country’s future.
“Advancing Equality shows how far we have come around the world in protecting human rights, but also how far we still have to go. Working together and taking action, we can make sure everyone’s rights, particularly the most discriminated against and marginalized, are protected in every constitution and enforced by law and societal change to realize true equality and a better world.” ANTONIA KIRKLAND, Global Lead, Legal Equality and Access to Justice, at Equality Now
JODY HEYMANN is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, Director of the WORLD Policy Analysis Center, and Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and of Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. ALETA SPRAGUE is Senior Legal Analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center and an attorney whose career has focused on advancing public policies and laws that address inequality. AMY RAUB is Principal Research Analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center and an economist with over a decade of experience working on discrimination and inequality.
High-Tech Trash analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, primarily from the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, critically offset a broader culture of pervasive risk and discontent. In so doing, she questions how we continue onward, striving to do better and acquire more, despite inevitable disappointment. High-Tech Trash speaks to a paradox in contemporary society in which failure is disavowed yet necessary for technological innovation.
“Leonard Cohen sang ‘There’s a crack in everything…that’s how the light gets in.’ Here, Carolyn Kane teaches us how to see that light, one crack at a time.” FRED TURNER, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties
“Kane profiles art practices and media discourses that exploit and celebrate, rather than filter or suppress, all kinds of errors and noises. A welcome intervention in a number of discursive fields.” PETER KRAPP, author of Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture
“An original work of scholarship that addresses some of the most pervasive phenomena and foundational questions in the contemporary media environment.” ROBERT HARIMAN, coauthor of The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship
CAROLYN L. KANE is Associate Professor of Communication at Ryerson University and author of Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code.
Tens of thousands of Eritreans make perilous voyages across Africa and the Mediterranean Sea every year. Why do they risk their lives to reach European countries where so many more hardships await them? By visiting family homes in Eritrea and living with refugees in camps and urban peripheries across Ethiopia, Sudan, and Italy, Milena Belloni untangles the reasons behind one of the most under-researched refugee populations today. Balancing encounters with refugees and their families, smugglers, and visa officers, The Big Gamble contributes to ongoing debates about blurred boundaries between forced and voluntary migration, the complications of transnational marriages, the social matrix of smuggling, and the role of family expectations, emotions, and values in migrants’ choices of destinations.
“Milena Belloni’s engrossing ethnography—carried out across time, space, and place— is particularly commendable because of her scholarly commitment to ‘getting things right.’ The Eritrean women and men whose lives provided its empirical ground will see their pain, joy, and contradictions reflected back at them. This is scholar activism at its finest.” LAURA BISAILLON, Professor of Health and Society, University of Toronto Scarborough
“The Big Gamble is a study of a migrant group that has received very little scholarly attention. Its focus on the Eritrea to Europe corridor is a novel approach, and Milena Belloni has produced a compelling and courageous account.” PETER KIVISTO, Augustana College and University of Helsinki
“A monumental and perceptive story of migration, taking the reader on a journey not just from Africa to Europe but through reflections on moralities, risk, and trust that are central to contemporary mobility and immobility. Belloni’s account of Eritrean migration experiences is powered by formidable fieldwork and written with warmth and wisdom.” JØRGEN CARLING, Peace Research Institute Oslo
MILENA BELLONI is a sociologist at the University of Trento. Her doctoral research on Eritrean migration received the 2016 IMISCOE Award. Belloni has published in the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Exit and Voice is a compelling account of how Mexican migrants with strong ties to their home communities impact the economic and political welfare of those they leave behind. In many decentralized democracies like Mexico, migrants step in to supply public goods when local or state government cannot. Though migrants’ cross-border investments often improve citizens’ access to these goods and create a more responsive local government, their work allows them to unintentionally exert political engagement and power, undermining the influence of those still living in their hometowns. Exit and Voice sheds light on how migrant transnational engagement refashions the meaning of community, democratic governance, and practices of citizenship in the era of globalization.
“An extraordinary analysis of what it means to be a migrant. Duquette-Rury gives us a text that goes well beyond the familiar, and situates the migrant in a complex set of vectors, both local and transnational, opening up the meaning of migration itself.” SASKIA SASSEN, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy
“How do people who move to another country sometimes become more influential in the place they left? Exit and Voice combines surveys and lively details from original fieldwork to explore this paradox and identify the fragile pillars sustaining efforts to live in two worlds.” DAVID FITZGERALD, author of Refuge beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers
“Despite distance and difficulties, migrants around the world reach down into their pockets to help out the communities they left behind. Hoping that migration can spur development and possibly even democracy, scholars and policy makers find the effort laudable. But as Duquette-Rury demonstrates in this brilliant, beautifully written book, engaging from abroad is a challenging enterprise. A book to be savored by scholars and students alike.” ROGER WALDINGER, Distinguished Professor and Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration
LAUREN DUQUETTE-RURY is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University.
Iran’s particular system of traditional Persian art music has been long treated as the product of an ever-evolving, ancient Persian culture. In Music of a Thousand Years, Ann E. Lucas argues that this music is a modern phenomenon indelibly tied to changing notions of Iran’s national history. Rather than considering a single Persian music history, Lucas demonstrates cultural dissimilarity and discontinuity over time, bringing to light two different notions of music-making in relation to premodern and modern musical norms. An important corrective to the history of Persian music, Music of a Thousand Years is the first work to align understandings of Middle Eastern music history with current understandings of the region’s political history.
“Ann E. Lucas very effectively combines historical analysis, ethnomusicology, and musicology to provide a broad, holistic explanation for complex, nuanced processes of change. Well written and highly original in its approach, this is a major contribution to the field.” KAMRAN SCOT AGHAIE, Associate Professor of Iranian History, University of Texas
“Music of a Thousand Years presents an innovative narrative of Persian music history and also provides important new perspectives on how to analyze the meaning of music and culture in historical perspective.” MOHSEN MOHAMMADI, Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los Angeles
“Lucas turns the standard history of Persian music on its head, proving it is not a story of the survival of an ancient tradition, but rather the story of the invention of tradition. Revisionist in the best sense of the word.” JAMES L. GELVIN, author of The Modern Middle East: A History
ANN E. LUCAS is Assistant Professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at Boston College, where she also teaches in the Islamic Civilizations and Societies Program. She is recognized for her work on music historiography of the Middle East.
This boldly original book traces the evolution of documentary film and photography as they migrated onto digital platforms during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Kris Fallon examines the emergence of several key media forms—social networking and crowdsourcing, video games and virtual environments, big data and data visualization—and demonstrates the formative influence of political conflict and the documentary film tradition on their evolution and cultural integration. Focusing on particular moments of political rupture, Fallon argues that ideological rifts inspired the adoption and adaptation of newly available technologies to encourage social mobilization and political action, a function performed for much of the previous century by independent documentary film. Positioning documentary film and digital media side by side in the political sphere, Fallon asserts that “truth” now lies in a new set of media forms and discursive practices that implicitly shape the documentation of everything from widespread cultural spectacles like wars and presidential elections to more invisible or isolated phenomena like the Abu Ghraib torture scandal or the “fake news” debates of 2016.
“Looking at a unique and intriguing set of ‘hybrid media,’ Fallon convincingly makes a claim about a change in the form of new media, one linking politics, aesthetics, and technology.” ALEXANDRA JUHASZ, Brooklyn College, CUNY
“Where Truth Lies does the difficult and much-needed work of unpacking how the documentary impulse is shifting in the digital age, both through the profound influence of digital aesthetics and computational thinking and through the ways traditional documentary is infusing digital expression.” JENNIFER MALKOWSKI, author of Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary
KRIS FALLON is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at the University of California, Davis.
Renaissance Futurities considers the intersections between artistic rebirth, the new science, and European imperialism in the global early modern world. Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez reconsider the work of Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), prolific artist and inventor, and other polymaths such as philosopher Giulio “Delminio” Camillo (1480–1544), physician and naturalist Francisco Hernández de Toledo (1514–1587), and writer Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). This concern with futurity is inspired by the Renaissance itself, a period defined by visions of the future, as well as by recent theorizing of temporality in Renaissance, queer, and ethnic studies. This transdisciplinary collection is at the cutting edge of the humanities, the sciences, and the arts with contributions in history, art history, literature, media studies, mathematics, and medicine.
“A superb provocation, asking us to reimagine the Renaissance in both space and time, resituating it at the crossroads of Europe and its early modern empires; of art, technology, and science; and of alternative pasts and futures.” TARA NUMMEDAL, author of Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany
“This volume approaches the field through the unique lens of futurity, bringing together an eclectic transdisciplinary group of scholars who focus on ingenuity and futuristic thinking in various Renaissance contexts.” PAULA DeVOS, Professor of History, San Diego State University
CHARLENE VILLASEÑOR BLACK is Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. MARI-TERE ÁLVAREZ is Associate Director of the University of Southern California’s International Museum Institute.
What Is a Family? explores the histories of diverse households during the Tokugawa period in Japan (1603–1868). The households studied here differ in locale and in status—from samurai to outcaste, peasant to merchant—but what unites them is life within the social order of the Tokugawa shogunate. The circumstances and choices that made one household unlike another were framed, then as now, by prevailing laws, norms, and controls on resources. These factors led the majority to form stem families, which are a focus of this volume. The essays in this book draw on rich sources—population registers, legal documents, personal archives, and popular literature—to combine accounts of collective practices (such as the adoption of heirs) with intimate portraits of individual actors (such as a murderous wife). They highlight the variety and adaptability of households that, while shaped by a shared social order, do not conform to any stereotypical version of a Japanese family.
“Asking fresh questions—and taking up new kinds of evidence—What Is a Family? illuminates household dynamics that have simply not come into focus before. Alongside sturdy formulae for success, the authors find marked diversity, improvisation, and change over time. A lively and provocative collection.” KÄREN WIGEN, author of A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600–1912
“An engaging and eye-opening volume. From the spread of the stem family structure across multiple status groups, to the emotional bonds of adoption and marriage, to the gendering of family relations, What Is a Family? is essential reading for students of early modern and modern Japan.” KATE McDONALD, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
MARY ELIZABETH BERRY is Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period. MARCIA YONEMOTO is Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her books include The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan.
A Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studies
There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories—pīr katha—are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels, Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal.
“The tales that are the subject of Tony K. Stewart’s book depict a Bengal that is miraculously hybrid, innocent of the estrangements of the modern era. This is essential reading for everyone interested in precolonial South Asia.” AMITAV GHOSH, author of The Great Derangement
“This is a work of great erudition; the sophisticated analysis is testament to Stewart’s deep engagement with Bengal’s religious, cultural, and literary histories.” FARINA MIR, University of Michigan
“While inspiring readers to acquire fresh methodological and analytical tools for studying religion and region, history, and aesthetics, this triumph of a book also causes us to pause and marvel at the art of translation. This is nothing less than a standard-setter in the studies of South Asia, Islam, and literature.” SYED AKBAR HYDER, University of Texas at Austin
TONY K. STEWART is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities at Vanderbilt University and a specialist in the religions and literatures of early modern Bengal. His works include The Final Word: The Caitanya Caritamrta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition and Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal.
Islamic Humanities, 2
Louder and Faster is a cultural study of the phenomenon of Asian American taiko, the thundering, athletic drumming tradition that originated in Japan. Immersed in the taiko scene for twenty years, Deborah Wong has witnessed cultural and demographic changes and the exponential growth and expansion of taiko, particularly in Southern California. Through her participatory ethnographic work, she reveals a complicated story embedded in memories of Japanese American incarceration and legacies of imperialism, Asian American identity and politics, a desire to be seen and heard, and the intersection of culture and global capitalism. Exploring the materialities of the drums, costumes, and bodies that make sound, analyzing the relationship of these to capitalist multiculturalism, and investigating the gender politics of taiko, Louder and Faster considers both the promises and pitfalls of music and performance as an antiracist practice. The result is a vivid glimpse of an Asian American presence that is both loud and fragile.
“Louder and Faster is a remarkable work of astounding breadth and originality. It is sure to become an instant classic.” SHAWN BENDER, author of Taiko Boom
“Illuminating how taiko is an instrument for Asian American community activism, this book provides a rare opportunity for readers to get inside a taiko player’s body and mind to experience her journey.” MASUMI IZUMI, author of The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law
“Deborah Wong’s new book is a model of the very best in ethnomusicological love and care. It forges many new directions built respectfully from, and with full acknowledgement of, fruitful directions forged by others.” SHERRIE TUCKER, author of Dance Floor Democracy
“A deeply moving account, Louder and Faster is a revelatory book.” GRACE WANG, author of Soundtracks of Asian America
DEBORAH WONG is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Sounding the Center and Speak it Louder.
American Crossroads, 55
Of Love and Papers explores how immigration policies are fundamentally reshaping Latino families. Drawing on two waves of interviews with undocumented young adults, Enriquez investigates how immigration status creeps into the most personal aspects of everyday life, intersecting with gender to constrain family formation. The imprint of illegality remains, even upon obtaining DACA or permanent residency.
Interweaving the perspectives of US citizen romantic partners and children, Enriquez illustrates the multigenerational punishment that limits the upward mobility of Latino families. Of Love and Papers sparks an intimate understanding of contemporary US immigration policies and their enduring consequences for immigrant families.
During the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes and exchanges that underlay these translations. Using as a case study the 1597 Persian rendition of the Yoga-Vasistha—an influential Sanskrit philosophical tale whose popularity stretched across the subcontinent—Shankar Nair illustrates how these early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars drew upon their respective religious, philosophical, and literary traditions to forge a common vocabulary through which to understand one another. These scholars thus achieved, Nair argues, a nuanced cultural exchange and interreligious and cross-philosophical dialogue significant not only to South Asia’s past but also its present.
South Korea in the 1950s was home to a burgeoning film culture, one of the many “Golden Age cinemas” that flourished in Asia during the postwar years. Cold War Cosmopolitanism offers a transnational cultural history of South Korean film style in this period, focusing on the works of Han Hyung-mo, director of the era’s most glamorous and popular women’s pictures, including the blockbuster Madame Freedom (1956). Christina Klein provides a unique approach to the study of film style, illuminating how Han’s films took shape within a “free world” network of aesthetic and material ties created by the legacies of Japanese colonialism, the construction of US military bases, the waging of the cultural Cold War, the forging of regional political alliances, and the import of popular cultures from around the world. Klein combines nuanced readings of Han’s films with careful attention to key issues of modernity—such as feminism, cosmopolitanism, and consumerism—in the first monograph devoted to this major Korean director.
Peruvian migrant workers began arriving in South Korea in large numbers in the mid- 1990s, eventually becoming one of the largest groups of non-Asians in the country. Migrant Conversions shows how despite facing unstable income and legal exclusion, migrants have come to see Korea as an ideal destination, sometimes even as part of their divine destiny. Faced with a forced end to their residence in Korea, Peruvians have developed strategies to transform themselves from economic migrants into heads of successful transnational families, influential church leaders, and cosmopolitan travelers. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis, Migrant Conversions explores the intersections of three types of conversions—monetary, religious, and cosmopolitan—to argue that migrants use conversions to negotiate the meaning of their lives in a constantly changing transnational context. As Peruvians carve out social spaces, they create complex and uneven connections between Peru and Korea that challenge a global hierarchy of nations and migrants. Exploring how migrants, churches, and nations change through processes of conversion reveals how globalization continues to impact people’s lives and ideas about their futures and pasts long after they have stopped moving or after a particular global moment has come to an end.
