Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source–based history of concert dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Emily Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field. The digital edition of this title includes nineteen embedded videos of selected dance works discussed by the author.

“This excellent book is based on abundant archival materials and Emily Wilcox’s practiced knowledge of dance. Its dramatic biographical data, clear conceptual design, and close readings of choreographic works make for engaging reading and engaged scholarship. An important contribution.” REBECCA KARL, Professor of History, New York University

“Tracing the rise of Chinese dance in the turbulent times of twentieth-century China, Wilcox has offered a brilliant account of the mutation of diverse dance forms. A productive blend of choreography, ethnography, performance, and cultural studies, this book not only fills the gaps in dance studies, but also addresses broad issues of interaction between China and the West, ancient forms and socialist agenda, and regional traditions and national culture.” BAN WANG, William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies, Stanford University

EMILY WILCOX is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites’ conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country. These bonds transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language.

“Nicole Elizabeth Barnes demonstrates remarkable insights into some of the most well-known figures in healthcare in wartime China—and introduces many previously unknown—providing pointed character analyses while also connecting individual experiences to larger sociopolitical trends across the tumultuous wartime landscape.” SONYA GRYPMA, PhD, RN, author of China Interrupted: Japanese Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community

“Not only a major contribution to the histories of medicine, gender, emotion, and nationalism, but even more importantly, it opens up exciting horizons by making visible and exploring the surprising entanglements between them all.” SEAN HSIANG-LIN LEI, author of Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity

NICOLE ELIZABETH BARNES is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University.

In The Monastery Rules Berthe Jansen discusses the position of the monasteries in pre-modern Tibetan Buddhist societies and how that position was informed by the far-reaching relationship of monastic Buddhism with Tibetan society, economy, law, and culture. Jansen focuses her study on monastic guidelines or bca’ yig. The first study of its kind to examine the genre of bca’ yig in detail, the book contains an exploration of parallels of these texts in other Buddhist cultures, their connection to the Vinaya, and their value as sociohistorical source material. The monastic guidelines are witness to certain socioeconomic changes, but they also indicate that the monastery created rules intended to change the monastery in order to preserve it. Jansen argues that the monastic institutions’ influence on society was maintained not merely due to prevailing power-relations, but also because of certain deep-rooted Buddhist beliefs.

“The Monastery Rules provides an invaluable resource for those interested in a richer picture of traditional Tibet and its monastic life. This book will be an important scholarly resource.” GEORGES DREYFUS, Jackson Professor of Religion, Williams College, and author of The Sound of Two Hands Clapping

“This book provides a welcome and much needed contribution to our understanding of Tibetan monasticism. While monastic institutions have long been recognized as hubs of Buddhist life in Tibet, this study provides an extensive and granular exploration of pre-modern Tibetan monasteries as sites of community organization and integration, and as mediators of religious power.” ANDREW QUINTMAN, author of The Yogin and the Madman

BERTHE JANSEN is Professor of Central Asian Studies at the Institute for Indian and Central Asian Studies, Leipzig University.

David Atwill transports readers to the heart of the Himalayas as he traces the rise of the Tibetan Muslim community from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Radically altering popular interpretations that have portrayed Tibet as isolated and monolithically Buddhist, Atwill’s vibrant account demonstrates how truly cosmopolitan Tibetan society was by highlighting the hybrid infl uences and internal diversity of Tibet. In its exploration of the Tibetan Muslim experience, Islamic Shangri-La presents an unparalleled perspective of Tibet’s standing during the rise of post–World War II Asia.

“Atwill’s groundbreaking book traces a forgotten Muslim thread through the knot of identity, subjecthood, and citizenship in twentieth-century Tibet, offering a fresh perspective on the region’s tumultuous modern history. It is a highly readable narrative of a Muslim community that has often been rendered invisible, and an important statement on the transition from empires to nation-states at the Inner Asian nexus of Tibet, China, India, and the Islamic world.” RIAN THUM, author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History

“The history of the Tibetan Muslims, which at fi rst may seem like yet another borderland oddity, actually provides a remarkable vantage point from which to survey Asian history anew. Not only does Atwill’s use of untapped archival sources and interviews produce original scholarship, but his innovative framing of the material provides valuable perspectives on a history we thought we knew quite well.” JOHAN ELVERSKOG, author of Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

DAVID G. ATWILL is Associate Professor of History at Penn State University where he teaches a broad range of courses on China, Tibet, and world history. His previous books include The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwestern China, 1856–1873 and Sources in Chinese History: Diverse Perspectivesfrom 1644 to the Present.

Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat it: to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.

“Christopher Chowrimootoo’s exhaustively researched and elegantly written study deftly charts a course to the ambivalent heart of postwar modernism. He invites us to listen anew, offering provocative reinterpretations not just of Britten’s operas, but of a range of figures from Sibelius to Boulez.” ARMAN SCHWARTZ, author of Puccini’s Soundscapes

“Ranging widely across literary, theatrical, musical, and religious debates, Christopher Chowrimootoo traces how modernist values were negotiated in everyday critical practice. In the process, he offers sophisticated and compelling new readings of Britten’s operas, showing us how they register twentieth-century art’s paradoxical position in a market-driven society.” HEATHER WIEBE, author of Britten’s Unquiet Pasts

“In a virtuoso deconstruction, Chowrimootoo shows that middlebrow modernism is anything but peripheral. At the same time, this middlebrow center gets teased apart, becoming anything but middle. All the while, the swift prose is a pleasure, the intelligence crackling, the capacious readings of Britten’s operas indispensable.” SETH BRODSKY, author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious

CHRISTOPHER CHOWRIMOOTOO is Assistant Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and in the Department of Music at the University of Notre Dame.

In the Arabic eleventh-century, scholars were intensely preoccupied with the way that language generated truth and beauty in the space between God and the poets. Alexander Key leads the reader through discussions of language, mind, and reality across multiple genres of scholarship in the work of four of the most famous Classical Arabic scholars. The littérateur ar-Rāġib al-Iṣfahānī, the theologian and legal theorist Ibn Fūrak, the philosopher Ibn Sīnā (known in the west as Avicenna), and the literary critic ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ǧurǧānī shared a conceptual vocabulary based on the words maʿnā and ḥaqīqah. They built theories that can be used today. We still want to understand how poetry works through syntax to create affect, and we are still interested in the problem of how language, mind, and reality interact. Language Between God and the Poets makes Classical Arabic solutions to these problems available for the first time in twenty-first-century English, and does so within a rigorous and original theoretical framework for the translation of theory.

“Alexander Key takes four major exponents of eleventh-century Arabic lexicography, theology, logic, and poetics and explores the interconnectedness of their thinking on ‘mental content’ and its various ‘accurate’ realizations. This book, brimming with philological insight, crackles with erudition.” JAMES E. MONTGOMERY, Professor of Arabic, University of Cambridge

“This is really an excellent book—well-written, engaging, intellectually exciting, and a great advance in the fi eld. The selection of four scholars, experts in different disciplines, but all talking about language and meaning, is extremely clever. The sophistication and nuance of the argument makes this a work of solid scholarship.” ROBERT GLEAVE, Professor of Arabic Studies, University of Exeter

ALEXANDER KEY is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University.

The colonial experience of the early twentieth century shaped Korea’s culture and identity, leaving a troubling past that was subtly reconstructed in South Korean postcolonial cinema. Relating postcolonial discourses to a reading of Manchurian action films, kisaeng and gangster films, and revenge horror films, Parameters of Disavowal shows how filmmakers reworked, recontextualized, and erased ideas and symbols of colonial power. In particular, Jinsoo An examines how South Korean films privileged certain sites, such as the kisaeng house and the Manchurian frontier, generating unique meanings that challenged the domination of the colonial power, and how horror films indirectly explored both the continuing trauma of colonial violence and lingering emotional ties to the colonial order. Espousing the ideology of nationalism while responding to a new Cold War order that positioned Japan and South Korea as political and economic allies, postcolonial cinema formulated distinctive ways of seeing and imagining the colonial past.

“A groundbreaking work that articulates a new methodology of theorizing and analyzing postcolonial cinema.” HYON JOO YOO, author of Cinema at the Crossroads: Nation and the Subject in East Asian Cinema

“Jinsoo An’s bold commitment to mining the layers and sometimes contradictions of individual films is remarkable. There is no more sustained and erudite examination of colonialism and film in Korea.” STEVEN CHUNG, author of Split Screen Korea: Shin Sang-ok and Postwar Cinema

JINSOO AN is Assistant Professor of Korean Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site of divine manifestation, becomes refracted in media practices that have become integral parts of religious traditions. At the core of Eisenlohr’s concern is the interplay of voice, media, affect, and listeners’ religious experiences. Sounding Islam sheds new light on a key dimension of religion, the sonic incitement of sensations that are often difficult to translate into language.

“Sounding Islam is both a pathbreaking contribution to the anthropological study of sound and media and a convincing engagement with core issues of religious transformation and experience. A sensitively written, insightful, and thought-provoking ethnographic account.” DON BRENNEIS, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz

“Eisenlohr’s marvelous Sounding Islam overcomes the dualism between discursive and materialist conceptualizations of voice through exploration of the ‘sonic atmosphere’ of Muslim devotional practice.” DOMINIC BOYER, Professor of Anthropology, Rice University

“Sounding Islam is a tour de force whose ethnographic sensitivity and analytic insights will reconfigure understandings of bodies, voices, mediatization, and religion. The book pinpoints questions that have intrigued scholars of Islam, linguistic anthropology, sound studies, semiotics, and the anthropology of media as it illuminates ways that bodies resonate with sounds that incite experiences of the divine.” CHARLES L. BRIGGS, coauthor of Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life

PATRICK EISENLOHR is Professor of Anthropology and Chair in Society and Culture in Modern India at the University of Göttingen. He is the author of Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius.

In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.

“This ambitious and pathbreaking genealogical study of the circulation and political uses of the dense figure of the educated South Asian Muslim woman/girl is brilliantly executed and utterly timely. Khoja-Moolji has written an exemplary book destined to become a classic.” LILA ABU-LUGHOD, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University

“A brilliant and unprecedented study . . . essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Muslims in South Asia and the gendered complexities of education.” JAMAL J. ELIAS, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania 

“Through careful sifting of archival material and interview data as well as analysis of important Urdu literary works, Khoja-Moolji highlights the historically, sociologically and politically contingent nature of discourses about women/girls education.” ALI S. ASANI, Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures, Harvard University

“A stunning genealogy of the Pakistani Muslim girl and her connections to educational, social, and national development from the colonial to the neoliberal state.” NANCY LESKO, Maxine Greene Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University

SHENILA KHOJA-MOOLJI is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College.

The Eternal Dissident offers rare insight into one of the most inspiring and thought-provoking Reform rabbis of the twentieth century, Leonard Beerman, who was renowned both for his eloquent and challenging sermons and for his unrelenting commitment to social action. Beerman was a man of powerful word and action—a probing intellectual and stirring orator, as well as a nationally known opponent of McCarthyism, racial injustice, and Israeli policy in the occupied territories. The shared source of Beerman’s thought and activism was the moral imperative of the Hebrew prophets, which he believed bestowed upon the Jewish people their role as the “eternal dissident.” This volume brings Beerman to life through a selection of his most powerful writings, followed by commentaries from notable scholars, rabbis, and public personalities that speak to the quality and ongoing relevance of Beerman’s work.

“David Myers is one of the leaders in the field and eminently qualified as editor. His scholarly reputation is stellar, and his own knowledge and work in progressive Jewish political circles puts him on a national stage.” MARC DOLLINGER, author of Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s

“Religion is not in the United States or for that matter elsewhere in the world only or exclusively the domain of the political right. The Eternal Dissident shows us a genealogy, a legacy of alliance politics that is theologically and ethically bound to a shared vision of social justice.” LAURA LEVITT, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender, Temple University, and author of American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust