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Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing’s aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, and cosmopolitan aspiration. At the heart of these tensions, a question persistently emerges: How does English become more than a language—and whiteness more than a race? Engaging in this inquiry, Ke-Schutte explores twenty-first century Afro-Chinese encounters as translational events that diagram the discursive contours of a changing transnational political order—one that will certainly be shaped by African and Chinese relations.
“A tremendously nuanced book that moves beyond the verities of postcolonial theory as much as liberal illusions of postracialism in the academy. The ethnographic richness of Angloscene in its expositions of tropes and situated encounters is remarkable and pointed—even poignant.” — DILIP M. MENON, editor of Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South
“Reflecting a critical sensibility from the Global South, Jay Ke-Schutte’s book defies Euro-American-centric perspectives on language, race, and colonialism. The innovative concept of the Angloscene offers an imaginative way to unpack the transnational power matrix that conditions Afro-Chinese encounters.” — FAN YANG, author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization
“This book reveals the manner in which talk about signs of race and the racialization of those engaged in talk readily emerge hand in hand within social encounters, so that to isolate them from each other is to lose sight of the processes through which inequity persists in social life even when it is abjured.” — ASIF AGHA, Francis E. Johnston Term Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, and Editor-in-Chief, Signs and Society
JAY KE-SCHUTTE is a linguistic anthropologist and interdisciplinary ethnographer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.
Many Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Traveling enabled men to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage, while Syrian women’s roles in peddling led to more economic autonomy. In Possible Histories, Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy to reveal the sexual ideologies imbricated in Arab American racial histories. Possible Histories marshals a queer affective approach to community and family history to show how Syrian immigrant peddlers and their networks of labor and care appeared in interconnected discourses of modernity, sexuality, gender, class, and race. Karem Albrecht theorizes this profession, and its place in Arab American historiography, as a “queer ecology” of laboring practices, intimacies, and knowledge production. This book ultimately proposes a new understanding of the long arm of Arab American history that puts sexuality and gender at the heart of ways of navigating US racial systems.
“Possible Histories brings an innovative queer analytic to Arab American history, inquiring into the intimate relationships among itinerant peddlers. Uncovering the role of sexuality in racializing Arab Americans, it challenges respectability politics and brilliantly upends reigning paradigms in Arab American history.” — EVELYN ALSULTANY, author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion
“A deeply personal queer history that is brisk, unsettling, and brimming with insights. Puzzling through gossip, shame, and scandal, Charlotte Karem Albrecht offers an astounding kaleidoscope of Arab Americans in the twentieth century.” — NAYAN SHAH, author of Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes
“Possible Histories is a rich contribution to queer theorizing on kinship, archives, and diaspora. In this moving tribute to the challenges and traps of recovery work, Karem Albrecht traverses the maze of memory and family with care and thoughtfulness.” — JASBIR PUAR, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University
Charlotte Karem Albrecht is Assistant Professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Until the Storm Passes reveals how Brazil’s 1964–1985 military dictatorship contributed to its own demise by alienating the civilian political elites who initially helped bring it to power. Based on exhaustive research conducted in nearly twenty archives in five countries, as well as on oral histories with surviving politicians from the period, this book tells the surprising story of how the alternatingly self-interested and heroic resistance of the political class contributed decisively to Brazil’s democratization. As they gradually turned against military rule, politicians began to embrace a political role for the masses that most of them would never have accepted in 1964, thus setting the stage for the breathtaking expansion of democracy that Brazil enjoyed over the next three decades.
“In this remarkable study, Bryan Pitts shows how Brazil’s political class used notions of privilege and honor in order to navigate the spaces between the military dictatorship and popular movements. Through innovative research—including audio recordings of legislative proceedings made available to readers of this book—Until the Storm Passes skillfully captures the atmosphere of a pivotal moment in Brazilian history.” JACOB BLANC, author of Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil
“A timely and original addition to our understanding of the transition from military to democratic rule in Brazil. By providing an in-depth rereading of key political events during the dictatorship’s final years, Pitts fills a gap in the existing scholarship by advancing a somewhat revisionist, important argument about the relevance of the political class in the country’s recent history.” RAFAEL R. IORIS, author of Transforming Brazil: A History of National Development in the Postwar Era
BRYAN PITTS is a historian and Assistant Director of the Latin American Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weaving historical research with insights from political economy and science and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued.
Roy’s account moves between public and private labs, Wall Street and corporate board rooms, and public health meetings and health centers to trace the ways in which curative medicines became financial assets dominated by strategies of speculation and extraction at the expense of access and care. Provocative and sobering, this book illuminates the harmful impact of allowing financial markets to determine who heals and who suffers and points to the necessary work of building more equitable futures.
“An important voice on the links between finance and health ecosystems, Victor Roy makes a valuable contribution to building an economy that is based on providing health for all.” — Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy and Chair of the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All
“This book is a riveting read that will strike fear in the heart of anybody who cares about the right to health or thinks that the drive for profits should not supersede democracy or human need.” — Salmaan Keshavjee, author of Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health
“The best piece of nonfiction I have read in a long time. This book offers a fantastic, relevant, and necessary case study to understand how the financialization of the economy has affected the organization of industrial sectors.” — Marc-André Gagnon, Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy, Carleton University
Victor Roy, MD, PhD, is a family physician, sociologist, and fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program at Yale University.
Recent decades have seen a widespread effort to imprison more people for sexual violence. The Stains of Imprisonment offers an ethnographic account of one of the worlds that this push has created: an English prison for men convicted of sex offenses. This book examines the ways in which prisons are morally communicative institutions, instilling in prisoners particular ideas about the offenses they have committed—ideas that carry implications for prisoners’ moral character. Investigating the moral messages contained in the prosaic yet power-imbued processes that make up daily life in custody, Ievins finds that the prison she studied communicated a pervasive sense of disgust and shame, marking the men it held as permanently stained. Rather than promoting accountability, this message discouraged prisoners from engaging in serious moral reflection on the harms they had caused. Analyzing these effects, Ievins explores the role that imprisonment plays as a response to sexual harm, and the extent to which it takes us closer to and further from justice.
“A highly original and empirically grounded account of what imprisonment communicates and fails to communicate to men convicted of sexual offenses. This book is, by some distance, the best-developed analysis of how men in this position experience and make sense of their punishment.” — FERGUS McNEILL, author of Pervasive Punishment: Making Sense of Mass Supervision
“The Stains of Imprisonment gives the reader captivating insight into the world that is prison for men convicted of sex offenses. Ievins deftly weaves together theoretical discussions of feminism and the carceral with the nuanced experiences of the men interviewed. A definite must-read for anyone interested in punishment and prison.” — ROSEMARY RICCIARDELLI, author of Also Serving Time: Canada’s Provincial and Territorial Correctional Officers
ALICE IEVINS is a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool.
International migrants’ home countries often play an integral part in protecting their citizens’ labor and human rights abroad. At the same time, institutions such as labor unions, worker centers, and legal aid groups are among the most visible actors holding governments of immigrant destinations accountable. Focusing on Mexico and the United States, Scaling Migrant Worker Rights analyzes how these organizations pressure governments to defend migrants. The result is a multilayered picture of the impediments to migrant worker rights and the possibilities for their realization.
“Highly original and timely, this book shines a light on underexplored actors in the labor rights and protection enforcement process.” — LEAH F. VOSKO, author of Disrupting Deportability: Transnational Workers Organize
“A very robust and nuanced empirical analysis documenting how co-enforcement mechanisms across transnational civil society, consulates, and national governments work to implement existing labor rights protections.” — ALEXANDRA DÉLANO ALONSO, author of Mexico and Its Diaspora in the United States: Policies of Emigration since 1848
“This important and innovative work provides a nuanced, rich, and detailed meso-analysis of institutions and institutional collaboration in Mexico and the US.” — NANCY PLANKEY-VIDELA, author of We Are in This Dance Together: Gender, Power, and Globalization at a Mexican Garment Firm
XÓCHITL BADA is Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is author of Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán: From Local to Transnational Civic Engagement.
SHANNON GLEESON is Professor of Labor Relations, Law, and History at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She is author of Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States.
This book uncovers cultural traces of the ancient Jewry of Eastern Europe from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries in translations from Hebrew into East Slavic. These translations range from accounts of Old Testament prophets and other historical figures important to both Jews and Christians, such as Alexander the Great, to scientific and philosophical texts on subjects spanning astronomy, physiognomy, and metaphysics. Moshe Taube’s fine-grained analysis teases out a robust picture of this massive cultural enterprise: the translators, their erudition, their biases, and their collaborative methods of translation with neighboring Christians. Summarizing over thirty years of the author’s philological and linguistic research, this book is a substantial original contribution to the cultural history of Jews in Eastern Europe and their interaction with, and influence on, Slavic culture in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period.
“A perceptive and original analysis of the field from a world-leading authority. This is a condensation of a lifetime’s outstanding and innovative scholarly research into the historical and cultural relations between Jews and Russia.” —William F. Ryan, Professor Emeritus and Honorary Fellow at the Warburg Institute in the School of Advanced Study, University of London
Moshe Taube is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Slavic Studies at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is author of The Logika of the Judaizers: A Fifteenth Century Ruthenian Translation from Hebrew and coeditor of The Slavonic Book of Esther: Text, Lexicon, Linguistic Analysis and Problems of Translation and The Secret of Secrets: The East Slavic Version.
The rise of China and India could be the most important political development of the twenty-first century. What will the foreign policies of China and India look like in the future? What should they look like? And what can each country learn from the other? Bridging Two Worlds gathers a coterie of experts in the field, analyzing profound political thinkers from these ancient regions whose theories of interstate relations set the terms for the debates today. This volume is the first work of its kind and is essential reading for anyone interested in the growth of China and India and what it means for the rest of the world.
“This brilliant volume shines a light on the two great civilizations that will once again drive world history. No volume could be more timely, more relevant, and more needed than this one.” — KISHORE MAHBUBANI, Distinguished Fellow, Asia Research Institute, NUS, and author of The Asian 21st Century
“With the recently elevated economic and political power of China and the great potential of India in the twenty-first century, interdisciplinary dialogue and engagement such as is found in this book is necessary for contemporary debates in political theory and international relations.” — KUIYI SHEN, Professor of Asian Art History, Theory, and Criticism, University of California, San Diego
AMITAV ACHARYA is Distinguished Professor of International Relations and UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service, American University (Washington, DC).
DANIEL A. BELL is Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University (Qingdao) and Distinguished Chair Professor at Fudan University (Shanghai).
RAJEEV BHARGAVA is Honorary Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (Delhi) and Director of its Parekh Institute of Indian Thought.
YAN XUETONG is Distinguished Professor of International Relations at Tsinghua University (Beijing) and Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of “Hindu,” setting it in contrast to “Untouchable” in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.
“A refreshingly different perspective on the history of caste and untouchability in India, enlarging the field of scholarship from its focus on the colonial era by telling us how precolonial configurations of power in the locality shaped the everyday experience of caste.” — GOPAL GURU, coauthor of The Cracked Mirror and Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social
“This provocative and empirically rich study offers a plenitude of fascinating insights into aspects of western Indian history ca. 1800, from kingship and caste hierarchy to abortion and alcohol consumption. Particularly innovative is its focus on the critical role played by merchants in articulating social identities that became widespread in modern times.” — CYNTHIA TALBOT, author of The Last Hindu Emperor
“A pathbreaking book that explodes essentialist views of the construction of Hindu and Muslim identities in precolonial India. Divya Cherian provocatively argues that the category of ‘Hindu’ was the primary locus for a system of radical othering that excluded Untouchables (and Muslims as Untouchables) through mechanisms of state, law, and everyday life.” — CHRISTIAN LEE NOVETZKE, Professor of South Asian and Religious Studies, University of Washington
DIVYA CHERIAN is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University.
What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual Ends draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to provide an intimate portrayal of how spiritual care is provided to the dying in Japan. Timothy O. Benedict shows how hospice caregivers in Japan are appropriating and reinterpreting global ideas about spirituality and the practice of spiritual care. Benedict relates these findings to a longer story of how Japanese religious groups have pursued vocational roles in medical institutions as a means to demonstrate a so-called “healthy” role in society. Focusing on how care for the kokoro (heart or mind) is key to the practice of spiritual care, this book enriches conventional understandings of religious identity in Japan while offering a valuable East Asian perspective to global conversations on the ways religion, spirituality, and medicine intersect at death.
“Timothy Benedict has produced a work brimming with wisdom drawn from his work as a chaplain as well as a broad understanding of the place of religion in the lives of contemporary Japanese people.” — HELEN HARDACRE, Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society, Harvard University
“Benedict offers a highly original perspective and new insightful material, providing a critical approach to the debate about spiritual care and spirituality.” — ERICA BAFFELLI, Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Manchester
“Spiritual Ends reveals an unassuming approach to spiritual care that privileges human connections at life’s end.” — JACQUELINE STONE, author of Right Thoughts at the Last Moment: Buddhism and Deathbed Practices in Early Medieval Japan
“A discerning study of pain and comfort at the end of life, and a story of the invention of spirituality in Japan, which traffics between medical, psychological, and religious thought.” — AMY B. BOROVOY, Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University
TIMOTHY O. BENEDICT is Assistant Professor in the School of Sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan.
Well into the twenty-first century, achieving gender equality in the economy remains unfinished business. Worldwide, women’s employment, income, and leadership opportunities lag men’s. Building and using a one-of-a-kind database that covers 193 countries, this book systematically analyzes how far we’ve come and how far we have to go in adopting evidence-based solutions to close the gaps. Spanning topics including girls’ education, employment discrimination of all kinds, sexual harassment, and caregiving needs across the life course, the authors bring the findings to life through global maps, stories of laws’ impact in courts and beyond, and case studies of making change. A powerful call to action, Equality within Our Lifetimes reveals how gender equality is both feasible and urgently needed to address some of the greatest challenges of our generation.
World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War reconstructs the circulation of international film between the Soviet Bloc and the countries of the Global South in the mid- to late twentieth century. The book examines the vast body of work screened at the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which took place in Soviet Uzbekistan throughout the 1960s and 1970s. From this point of departure, Masha Salazkina proposes a new distinct formation—world socialist cinema: a film history emerging from the Global South that provides an alternative to Eurocentric, national, and regional narratives.
Provincializing Empire explores the global history of Japanese expansion through a regional lens. It rethinks the nation-centered geography and chronology of empire by uncovering the pivotal role of expeditionary merchants from Ōmi (present-day Shiga Prefecture) and their modern successors. Tracing their lives from the early modern era, and writing them into the global histories of empire, diaspora, and capitalism, Jun Uchida offers an innovative analysis of expansion through a story previously untold: how the nation's provincials built on their traditions to create a transpacific diaspora that stretched from Seoul to Vancouver, while helping shape the modern world of transoceanic exchange.
Beyond the Movie Theater excavates the history of non-theatrical cinema before 1920, exploring where and how moving pictures of the 1910s were used in ways distinct from and often alternative to typical theatrical cinema. Unlike commercial cinema, non-theatrical cinema was multi-purpose in its uses and multi-sited in where it could be shown, targeted at particular audiences and, in some manner, sponsored. Relying on contemporary print sources and ephemera of the era to articulate how non-theatrical cinema was practiced and understood in the US during the 1910s, historian Gregory A. Waller charts a heterogeneous, fragmentary, and rich field that cannot be explained in terms of a master narrative concerning origin or institutionalization, progress or decline. Uncovering how and where films were put to use beyond the movie theater, this book complicates and expands our understanding of the history of American cinema, underscoring the myriad roles and everyday presence of moving pictures during the early twentieth century.
The Celluloid Specimen examines twentieth-century behaviorist films that captured animal experiments, revealing the central role of cinema in generating psychosocial definitions of species, race, identity, and culture that continue to shape our contemporary political and scientific discourses. Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa analyzes rarely seen archival films made by Robert Yerkes in the 1930s at the first experimental primate colonies in North America, the rat films made to simulate human society at Yale University in the 1930s and 1940s, and the promotional films made by B.F. Skinner to sell the US military on his design for a pigeon-guided missile during World War II. These laboratory films have long been categorized as passive recordings of scientific research, but when examined in their own right, they become rich historical, political, and aesthetic texts that played a crucial role in the history of science.
For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. In this book, however, Timur Hammond argues that making a geography of Islam involves considerably more than this figure alone. Tracing practices of storytelling and building projects from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the early 2010s, Placing Islam shows how different individuals and groups articulated connections between people, places, traditions, and histories to make a place that is paradoxically defined both by powerful continuities and a radically reconfigured relationship to the city and world beyond. This book provides a rich account of urban religion in Istanbul, offering a key opportunity to reconsider how we understand the changing cultures of Islam in contemporary Turkey.
Thinking with an Accent brings together leading and emerging scholars of media, literature, education, law, linguistics, sound, and politics to theorize accent as an understudied lynchpin of the global cultural economy. It reframes accent as a powerfully coded and yet unexplored mode of perception—one that, properly harnessed, can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care. Accent, this anthology shows, does more than denote geographic, ethnic, or social identity. Accent emerges through listening, mobilizes negotiations of power, and enacts desiring relations. To think with an accent is to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that unfolds the tensions of address within mediated utterances.
In Paraguay’s Chaco, cattle ranching drives some of the world's fastest deforestation and most extreme land tenure inequality, with grave impacts on Indigenous well-being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Indigenous struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons, to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and through their decades-long resistance in pursuit of decolonial futures. The Enxet and Sanapaná communities at the heart of this story employ a dialectics of disruption by working with and against the law to challenge settler land control and rebuild territorial relations. Joel E. Correia’s ethnography of contested political ecologies shows how racial geographies endure through the politics of recognition while centering Indigenous efforts to create more just futures. This work advances hemispheric conversations about environmental justice, research ethics, and Indigenous resurgence on Latin America's settler frontiers.
This book explores an approach to the analysis of cross-case evidence on qualitative outcomes that has deep roots in sociology in the form of a technique known as Analytic Induction (AI). A popular research technique in the early decades of empirical sociology, AI as a method of social research differs fundamentally from conventional, variation-based approaches. In Analytic Induction for Social Research, Charles Ragin demonstrates that much is gained from systematizing AI. The approach he introduces provides a new set of tools for answering common research questions that existing methods cannot address and offers a new template for conducting cross-case analysis.
A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer literary portraits that gesture to a universal condition while also shedding light on the exceptional nature of certain experiences. The childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish; each essay thus testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith community into which its author was born. This translation makes this unique collection available to a broad English-speaking public for the first time. The original version, published in French in 2012, was awarded the Prix Haïm Zafrani, a prize given by the Elie Wiesel Institute of Jewish Studies to a literary project that valorizes Jewish civilization in the Muslim world.
This multidisciplinary volume brings together experienced expert witnesses and immigration attorneys to highlight best practices and strategies for giving expert testimony in asylum cases. As the scale and severity of violence in Latin America has grown in the last decade, scholars and attorneys have collaborated to defend the rights of immigrant women, children, and LGBTQ+ persons who are threatened by gender-based, sexual, and gang violence in their home countries. Researchers in anthropology, history, political science, and sociology have regularly supported the work of immigration lawyers and contributed to public debates on immigration reform, but the academy contains untapped scholarly expertise that, guided by the resources provided in this handbook, can aid asylum seekers and refugees and promote the fair adjudication of asylum claims in US courts. As the recent refugee crisis of immigrant mothers and children and unaccompanied minors has made clear, there is an urgent need for academics to work with other professionals to build a legal framework and national network that can respond effectively to this human rights crisis.
