With contributions by Sharon R. Stocker

Although the Mycenaean civilization of the Greek Bronze Age was identified 150 years ago, its origins remain obscure. Jack L. Davis, codirector of excavations at the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, takes readers on a tour of the beginnings of Mycenaean civilization through a case study of this important site. In collaboration with codirector Sharon R. Stocker, Davis demonstrates that this ancient place was a major node for the exchange of ideas between the already established Minoan civilization, centered on the island of Crete, and the residents of the Greek mainland. Davis and Stocker show how adoption of Minoan culture created an ideology of power focused on a single individual, celebrating his military prowess, investing him with divine authority, and creating a figure instantly recognizable to readers of Homer and students of Greek history. A Greek State in Formation makes the powerful case that a knowledge of the Greek Bronze Age is indispensable to the classics curriculum.

“This is a book to be read, not just consulted. Jack Davis is a masterly raconteur whose story simultaneously provides a wide-ranging and accessible guide to what archaeology is all about, a broad account of the Greek Bronze Age, and a detailed evocation of Bronze Age Pylos.” ROBIN OSBORNE, Professor of Ancient History, University of Cambridge

“Accessibly written, this book will appeal to scholars of the ancient world and those with an interest in archaeology as a discipline, as well as anyone following the media exposure of the exciting new finds at Pylos.” KIM SHELTON, Associate Professor of Classics, University of California

JACK L. DAVIS is Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati and former Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He is codirector of excavations at the Palace of Nestor with Sharon R. Stocker.

From April to November 1975, the US military processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on the unincorporated territory of Guam; from 1977 to 1979, the State of Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi analyzes these two cases to theorize what she calls the refugee settler condition: the fraught positionality of refugee subjects whose resettlement in a settler colonial state is predicated on the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. This groundbreaking book explores two forms of critical geography: first, archipelagos of empire, examining how the Vietnam War is linked to the US military buildup in Guam and unwavering support of Israel, and second, corresponding archipelagos of trans-Indigenous resistance, tracing how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected through the Vietnamese refugee figure. Considering distinct yet overlapping modalities of refugee and Indigenous displacement, Gandhi offers tools for imagining emergent forms of decolonial solidarity between refugee settlers and Indigenous peoples.

“This is a phenomenal book that takes seriously the implication of Indigenous calls for place-based scholarship to refugee and migration studies and ups the ante by engaging the accountabilities such calls demand. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi exemplifies the possibilities of reading ‘archipelagically’ across Indigenous and Asian American studies, across settler colonies, and against US militarism and empire.” JODI A. BYRD, author of The Transit of Empire

“This strikingly original study demonstrates ways of knowing and connection otherwise— within, across, and beyond incommensurable structural divides and multiple belongings. Deeply inspiring, Gandhi’s archipelagic methodology elucidates compelling political possibilities for decolonial futures.” LISA YONEYAMA, author of Cold War Ruins

EVYN LÊ ESPIRITU GANDHI is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than movies—a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed. Exploring the communities that constituted key subscribers, Ink-Stained Hollywood tells the story of how a heterogeneous trade press triumphed by appealing to the foundational aspects of industry culture—taste, vanity, partisanship, and exclusivity. In captivating detail, Eric Hoyt chronicles the histories of well-known trade papers (Variety, Motion Picture Herald) alongside important yet forgotten publications (Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Camera!). Challenging the canon of film periodicals, we are offered new interpretative frameworks for understanding print journalism’s relationship with cinema and its impact today.

“I know of no other work like this one—a history of American movie trade journalism from the beginnings of cinema to the 1930s. This book constitutes such a deep dive into the archive of these materials, it’s astonishing.” ERIC SMOODIN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

“A terrific study of the rise of film industry trade journals and their behind-the-scenes maneuvering, fights, and back-stabbing. Ink-Stained Hollywood is beautifully written—spry, funny, lively, approachable, yet incredibly knowledgeable.” KATHRYN H. FULLER-SEELEY, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

ERIC HOYT is the Kahl Family Professor of Media Production at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video and is Director of the Media History Digital Library and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

Huizhou studies the construction of local identity through kinship in the prefecture of Huizhou, the most prominent merchant stronghold of Ming China. Employing an array of untapped genealogies and other sources, Qitao Guo explores how developments in the sociocultural, religious, and gender realms from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries intertwined to shape Huizhou identity as a land of “prominent lineages.” This gentrified self-image both sheltered and guided the development of mercantile lineages, which were further bolstered by the gender regime and the local religious order. As Guo demonstrates, the discrepancy between representation and practice helps explain Huizhou’s triumphs. The more active the economy became, the more those central to its commercialization embraced conservative sociocultural norms. Home lineages embraced neo-Confucian orthodoxy even as they provided the financial and logistical support to assure the success of Huizhou merchants. The end result was not “capitalism” but a gentrified mercantile lineage culture with Chinese—or Huizhou—characteristics.

“This book is both a comprehensive study of Huizhou society during the Ming dynasty and a valuable resource for the comparative study of Chinese migration. Ambitiously tackling a wide range of primary sources and different subfields, Qitao Guo has masterfully woven together seemingly disparate themes into this coherent and compelling study.” STEVEN B. MILES, author of Opportunity in Crisis: Cantonese Migrants and the State in Late Qing China

QITAO GUO is Professor of History at University of California, Irvine, and author of Exorcism and Money: The Symbolic World of the Five-Fury Spirits in Late Imperial China and Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage: The Confucian Transformation of Popular Culture in Late Imperial Huizhou.

The Practice of Texts examines the uses of the Sanskrit medical classics in two educational institutions of India’s classical life science, Ayurveda: the college and the gurukula. In this interdisciplinary study, Anthony Cerulli probes late- and postcolonial reforms in ayurvedic education, the development of the ayurvedic college, and the impacts of the college curriculum on ways that ayurvedic physicians understand and use the Sanskrit classics in their professional work today. His fieldwork in south India illuminates the nature of philology and ritual in the ayurvedic gurukula and showcases how knowledge is exchanged among students, teachers, and patients. The result, Cerulli shows, is that the Sanskrit classics are presented and applied differently in the college and gurukula, producing a variety of relationships with these texts among practitioners. By interrogating the politics surrounding the place of the Sanskrit classics in ayurvedic curricula, this book reveals a spectrum of views about the history and tradition of Ayurveda in modern India.

“A valuable scholarly contribution. The Practice of Texts provides a vivid account of the philological conversations between the vaidya-gurus and their students. By documenting how the gurukula system operated for two millennia, Anthony Cerulli demonstrates how it continues to impart a medical education that remains relevant today.” SREE PADMA, author of Vicissitudes of the Goddess: Reconstructions of the Gramadevata in India’s Religious Traditions

“By explaining the changing role of the gurukula, The Practice of Texts makes an important contribution to the histories of science and education in late- and postcolonial India. Beyond that, Cerulli offers new ways of conceptualizing the cultural uses of texts, which will be useful to scholars of India more broadly.” BRIAN COLLINS, Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy, Ohio University

ANTHONY CERULLI is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He is author of Somatic Lessons: Narrating Patienthood and Illness in Indian Medical Literature.

Yan’an is China’s “revolutionary holy land,” the heart of Mao Zedong’s Communist movement from 1937 to 1947. Based on thirty years of archival and documentary research and numerous field trips to the region, Joseph W. Esherick’s book examines the origins of the Communist revolution in Northwest China, from the political, social, and demographic changes of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), to the intellectual ferment of the early Republic, the guerrilla movement of the 1930s, and the replacement of the local revolutionary leadership after Mao and the Center arrived in 1935. In Accidental Holy Land, Esherick compels us to consider the Chinese Revolution not as some inevitable peasant response to poverty and oppression, but as the contingent product of local, national, and international events in a constantly changing milieu.

“If the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, the homeland of Xi Jinping’s family, is the ‘holy land’ of Mao’s revolution, then Esherick’s new book is its indispensable Baedecker guide. This thoroughly researched and clearly written narrative helps us understand the complex historical roots of the People’s Republic of China as it incubated in Shaanxi Province’s ‘yellow earth’ hills.” ORVILLE SCHELL, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations, Asia Society

“Shattering the myth of historical inevitability, this meticulously researched and beautifully crafted study is a refreshing corrective to previous interpretations of the Chinese Revolution. Esherick’s gripping tale of battling bandits and Bolsheviks in the making of Mao’s wartime sanctuary lays bare the indeterminate and contingent course of one of the most momentous events of the twentieth century. Scholars and general readers alike will learn much from this authoritative work by America’s premier historian of the Chinese Revolution.” ELIZABETH J. PERRY, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government, Harvard University

JOSEPH W. ESHERICK is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (UC Press), Ancestral Leaves (UC Press), and other works on modern Chinese history.

Cinematic Independence traces the emergence, demise, and rebirth of big-screen film exhibition in Nigeria. Film companies flocked to Nigeria in the years following independence, beginning a long history of interventions by Hollywood and corporate America. The 1980s and 1990s saw a shuttering of cinemas, which were almost entirely replaced by television and direct-to-video movies. However, after 1999, the exhibition sector was revitalized with the construction of multiplexes. Cinematic Independence is about the periods that straddle this disappearing act: the immediate decades bracketing independence in 1960, and the years after 1999. At stake is the Nigerian postcolony’s role in global debates about the future of the movie theater. That it was eventually resurrected in the flashy form of the multiplex is not simply an achievement of commercial real estate, but also a testament to cinema’s persistence—its capacity to stave off annihilation or, in this case, come back from the dead.

“Expansive in its historical coverage and rigorous in its analyses, Cinematic Independence is remarkable for its incalculable insights and revelations into Nigeria’s colonial media history and the ruthless workings of American capitalism.” PAUL UGOR, author of Nollywood: Popular Culture and Narratives of Youth Struggles in Nigeria

“Offers a panoramic view of theatrical exhibition in Nigeria and a major contribution to our understanding of a previously overlooked, imbricated history involving both Hollywood and what we now know as Nollywood.” MORADEWUN ADEJUNMOBI, Professor of African American and African Studies, University of California, Davis

NOAH TSIKA is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. He is contributing editor of Africa Is a Country and the author of several books, including Traumatic Imprints and Nollywood Stars.

This is the first book-length study in English of the Japanese-language literary activities of early Japanese migrants to Brazil. It provides a detailed history of Japanese-language bookstores, serialized newspaper fiction, original creative works, and critical apparatuses that existed in Brazil prior to World War II. This case study of the reading and writing of one diasporic population challenges the dominant mode of literary study, in which texts are often explicitly or implicitly understood through a framework of ethno-nationalism. Self-representations by writers in the diaspora reveal flaws in this prevailing framework through what Edward Mack calls “acquired alterity,” in which expectations about the stability of ethnic identity are subverted in surprising ways. Acquired Alterity encourages a reconsideration of the ramifications (and motivations) of cultural analyses of texts and the constructions of peoplehood that are often the true objects of literary knowledge production.

“Acquired Alterity is a trailblazing work on an extremely promising new topic of research in Japanese literary studies. Over the last decade we have seen a turn to writings produced in other regions that saw mass immigration from Japan. Grounded in exhaustive research, this book is the first to introduce this enormously interesting and important body of writings to English-language readers.” MICHAEL BOURDAGHS, Robert S. Ingersoll Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

EDWARD MACK is Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington and author of Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing, Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value.

Translations by David Shulman

What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a translated text? This volume provides opportunities to explore such questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. The translated selections come from a variety of Indian languages, genres, and periods, from the classical to the contemporary. The translations are accompanied by short essays written to help readers engage and enjoy them. Some of these essays provide background to enhance reading of the translation, whereas others model how to expand appreciation in comparative and broader ways. Together, the translations and the accompanying essays form an essential guide for people interested in literature and art from South Asia.

“The scholarly interpretations and commentary in this volume represent some of the most prominent voices in the philological and historical study of South Asia—a galaxy of experts in literary analysis and other subfields of South Asian cultural history. This volume beautifully illuminates the generative possibilities of the intimate, context-sensitive mode of reading that David Shulman has engaged in for decades.” DAVESH SONEJI, Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania

YIGAL BRONNER is Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. CHARLES HALLISEY is Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures at Harvard Divinity School. DAVID SHULMAN is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

From drought to deluge, climate extremes are mobilizing humanities scholars to reimagine water discourse, which has until now largely focused on human power over water. This volume unites preeminent and emerging voices across humanistic disciplines to develop a new discourse called the hydrohumanities, dedicated to examining water-human-power relationships.

Organized into three themes in water studies—agency, fluid identities, and cultural currencies—Hydrohumanities exemplifies how interdisciplinary approaches can transform water conversations. Part One explores the properties of water and the ways water challenges human plans for control. Part Two explores how water (or its absence) shapes human collective and individual identities. Part Three engages notions of value and circulation to think about how water has been employed for local, national, and international gains. This volume shows how humanities scholarship has world-changing potential to achieve more just water futures.

“This fascinating essay collection breaks new ground with its interdisciplinary insights into the relations between water and human societies.” MATTHEW GANDY, author of The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination

“Water’s power, purpose, and meaning cannot be contained by any one scholarly discipline. Understanding the value of water in a time of climate catastrophe demands more-than-human humanities, and Hydrohumanities answers this call.” ASTRIDA NIEMANIS, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology

KIM DE WOLFF is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. RINA C. FALETTI is an exhibition curator and researcher in the Global Arts Studies Program at the University of California, Merced. IGNACIO LÓPEZ-CALVO is UC Merced Presidential Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Latin American Literature.