Impersonations centers on an insular community of Smarta brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who don strī-vēṣam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance limited to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban to transnational, brahmin to non-brahmin, hegemonic to nonnormative—to explore the artifice of brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.

“By charting the complex practices of masculinity through South Indian dance, Kamath deconstructs hegemonic brahmin masculinity and offers an intellectual tour de force that challenges Western epistemologies of gender.” STANLEY THANGARAJ, author of Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity

“Beautifully crafted and presented, this book fills a lacuna in scholarship on the figure of the brahmin man in relation to his gender identity and makes a compelling contribution to the field of Indian dance historiography, which often overlooks the critical role the dancing male body.” VASUDHA NARAYANAN, Distinguished Professor of Religion, University of Florida

HARSHITA MRUTHINTI KAMATH is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Assistant Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History at Emory University.

Edited and with an introduction by Daniel Morgan
Foreword by Tom Gunning

In this beautifully written and deeply researched study, Hannah Frank provides an original way to understand American animated cartoons from the Golden Age of animation (1920–1960). In the pre-digital age of the twentieth century, the making of cartoons was mechanized and standardized: thousands of drawings were inked and painted onto individual transparent celluloid sheets (called “cels”) and then photographed in succession, a labor-intensive process that was divided across scores of artists and technicians. In order to see the art, labor, and technology of cel animation, Frank slows cartoons down to look frame by frame, finding hitherto unseen aspects of the animated image. What emerges is both a methodology and a highly original account of an art formed on the assembly line.

“A thrilling read—one of the most exuberant, brilliant books I’ve come across in a very long time. I have lived with many of the cartoons Hannah Frank analyzes for pretty much my entire life and never suspected the hidden life or lives within their images, the inscription of histories (social, personal, technological, aesthetic) in which, it turns out, they abound.” SCOTT BUKATMAN, Stanford University

“Frank’s work is deeply refreshing in its ability to think across and weave together different strands of the debates about animation that have arisen to date. These are big conversations, and Frank is impressive in her ability to think lucidly across them in such fluent and productive ways.” KAREN REDROBE, University of Pennsylvania

HANNAH FRANK (1984–2017) was Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has been published in Critical Quarterly and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and she contributed to A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood.

DANIEL MORGAN is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and is author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema.

Associate Editor MATTHEW KIRSCH

The Saburo Hasegawa Reader is an open access companion to the bilingual catalogue copublished with The Noguchi Museum to accompany an international touring exhibition, Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. The exhibition features the work of two artists who were friends and contemporaries: Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa. This volume is intended to give scholars and general readers access to a wealth of archival material and writings by and about Saburo Hasegawa. While Noguchi’s reputation as a preeminent American sculptor of the twentieth century only grows stronger, Saburo Hasegawa is less well known, despite being considered the most literate artist in Japan during his lifetime (1906–1957). Hasegawa is credited with introducing elements of European abstraction in Japan in the mid 1930s. He also worked in diverse media including oil and ink painting, photography, and printmaking. Hasegawa was a theorist and widely published essayist, curator, teacher, and multilingual conversationalist.

“A useful resource for scholars and general readers interested in the multiple connections between postwar Japanese modernism and American abstract expressionism.” AYA LOUISA MCDONALD, Professor of Art History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“The first comprehensive English-language resource on the artistic and theoretical oeuvre of the first proponent of abstract art in Japan, Saburo Hasegawa, one of the most original and inspirational art theoreticians of the twentieth century.” EUGENIA BOGDANOVA-KUMMER, Lecturer in Japanese Arts, Cultures, and Heritage, Sainsbury Institute

MARK DEAN JOHNSON is Professor of Art at San Francisco State University. DAKIN HART is Senior Curator of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.

Creating the Intellectual redefines how we understand relations between intellectuals and the Chinese socialist revolution of the last century. Under the Chinese Communist Party, “the intellectual” was first and foremost a widening classification of individuals based on Marxist thought. The party turned revolutionaries and otherwise ordinary people into subjects identified as usable but untrustworthy intellectuals, an identification that profoundly affected patterns of domination, interaction, and rupture within the revolutionary enterprise. Drawing on a wide range of data, Eddy U takes the reader on a journey that examines political discourses, revolutionary strategies, rural activities, urban registrations, workplace arrangements, organized protests, and theater productions. He lays out in colorful detail the formation of new identities in Chinese society as well as new forms of organization and association. The outcome is a compelling picture of the mutual constitution of the intellectual and the Chinese socialist revolution, the legacy of which still affects ways of seeing, thinking, acting, and feeling in what is now a globalized China.

“This is an illuminating study of how the introduction in early twentieth-century China of the new category of ‘intellectual’ not only altered the status of millions of educated Chinese but also transformed the trajectory of Chinese Communism itself.” ELIZABETH J. PERRY, Professor of Government, Harvard University

“Innovatively framing the story as a decades-long process, Eddy U conclusively demonstrates the political construction of the ‘intellectual’ as a social category by the Chinese Communist Party. This book deepens our understanding of the tortured relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and these individuals, one that would have catastrophic consequences during the Cultural Revolution.” ANDREW WALDER, Professor of Sociology, Stanford University

EDDY U is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Disorganizing China: Counter-Bureaucracy and the Decline of Socialism.

Introduced and Translated by Jens Hanssen and Hicham Safieddine
Foreword by Ussama Makdisi

When Nafir Suriyya—“The Clarion of Syria”—was penned between September 1860 and April 1861, its author Butrus al-Bustani, a major figure in the modern Arabic Renaissance, had witnessed his homeland undergo unprecedented violence in what many today consider Lebanon’s first civil war. Written during Ottoman and European investigations into the causes and culprits of the atrocities, The Clarion of Syria is both a commentary on the politics of state intervention and social upheaval and a set of visions for the future of Syrian society in the wake of conflict.

This translation makes a key historical document accessible for the first time to an English audience. Rereading this work in the context of today’s political violence in war-torn Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world helps us gain a critical and historical perspective on sectarianism, class rebellion, foreign invasions, conflict resolution, Western interventionism, and nationalist tropes of reconciliation.

“The first English translation of this foundational text offered alongside a fantastic historical introduction, this is an excellent and much-needed contribution from uniquely qualified scholars.” STEPHEN SHEEHI, author of The Arab Imago

BUTRUS AL-BUSTANI was a nineteenth century Ottoman Arab educator and public intellectual regarded by many as the first Syrian nationalist owing to the publication of his Nafir Suriyya following the 1860 communal disturbances in Mt. Lebanon and Damascus.

JENS HANSSEN is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean History at the University of Toronto. He is author of Fin de Siècle Beirut and coeditor of Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age and Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age.

HICHAM SAFIEDDINE is Assistant Professor of History of the Modern Middle East at King’s College, London. He is author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon, cofounder of Al-Akhbar English, and editor of The Legal Agenda English Edition.

Flight during times of persecution has a long and fraught history in early Christianity. In the third century, bishops who fl ed were considered cowards or, worse yet, heretics. On the face, flight meant denial of Christ and thus betrayal of faith and community. But by the fourth century, the terms of persecution changed as Christianity became the favored cult of the Roman Empire. Prominent Christians who fl ed and survived became founders and influencers of Christianity over time.

Bishops in Flight examines the various ways these episcopal leaders both appealed to and altered the discourse of Christian flight to defend their status as purveyors of Christian truth, even when their exiles appeared to condemn them. Their stories illuminate how profoundly Christian authors deployed theological discourse and the rhetoric of heresy to respond to the phenomenal political instability of the fourth and fifth centuries.

“This exciting book offers the first sustained examination of flight during times of persecution. A significant contribution to the study of late antiquity that readers are sure to find highly stimulating.” SUSANNA ELM, author of Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome

“A fascinating meditative exploration of the shifting nature of exile and its uses in late ancient Christianity. Jennifer Barry depicts with lucid prose the adoptions and adaptations Christian bishops made of the concept in order to tap the authority exile could grant to those who managed it well. Those who study early church politics and imperial power will relish this book.” ELLEN MUEHLBERGER, author of Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity

JENNIFER BARRY is Assistant Professor of Religion at University of Mary Washington.

Built in the 1890s at the center of the nation, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary was designed specifically to be a replica of the US Capitol Building. But why? The Prison of Democracy explains the political significance of a prison built to mimic one of America’s monuments to democracy. Locating Leavenworth in memory, history, and law, the prison geographically sits at the borders of Indian Territory (1825–1854) and Bleeding Kansas (1854–1864), both sites of contestation over slavery and freedom. Author Sara M. Benson argues that Leavenworth reshaped the design of punishment in America by gradually normalizing state-inflicted violence against citizens. Leavenworth’s peculiar architecture illustrates the real roots of mass incarceration—as an explicitly race- and nation-building system that has been ingrained in the very fabric of US history rather than as part of a recent post-war racial history. The book sheds light on the truth of the painful relationship between the carceral state and democracy in the United States—a relationship that thrives to this day.

“The imaginative rereading, through primary sources, of Fort Leavenworth and a host of other subjects including abolitionism, border prisons, North-South relations, and the campaign against Native Americans adds up to an original and exceptionally significant piece of research and scholarship.” DESMOND KING, author of Separate and Unequal

“A significant contribution to the literature regarding race, crime, and punishment. The analytical insight that the author provides through a rereading and recentering of Leavenworth is both a contribution to and an immanent critique of racialized notions of mass incarceration.” DANIEL KATO, author of Liberalizing Lynching

SARA M. BENSON is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at San Jose State University and teaches at Oakes College at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Persian is one of the great lingua francas of world history. Yet despite its recognition as a shared language across the Islamic world and beyond, its scope, impact, and mechanisms remain underexplored. A world historical inquiry into pre-modern cosmopolitanism, The Persianate World traces the reach and limits of Persian as a Eurasian language in a comprehensive survey of its geographical, literary, and social frontiers. From Siberia to Southeast Asia, and between London and Beijing, this book shows how Persian gained, maintained, and finally surrendered its status to imperial and vernacular competitors. Fourteen essays trace Persian’s interactions with Bengali, Chinese, Turkic, Punjabi, and other languages to identify the forces that extended “Persographia,” the domain of written Persian. Spanning the ages of expansion and contraction, The Persianate World offers a critical survey of both the supports and constraints of one of history’s key languages of global exchange.

“This groundbreaking collection illuminates the multifaceted and very complex history of the rise and decline of the Persian language as a lingua franca.” AHMAD KARIMI-HAKKAK, author of Recasting Persian Poetry

“With erudition and refinement, this book accomplishes something remarkable—it provides a timely corrective to an anachronistic understanding of the Persianate sphere as an empire of letters centred on Iran.” PAOLO SARTORI, author of Visions of Justice

“An exceptionally important contribution to our understanding of what constituted the Persianate world.” ANDREW PEACOCK, University of St. Andrews

NILE GREEN holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Sufism: A Global History and Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam and editor of Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban.

Scholarly discussions on economic development in history, specifically those linked to industrialization or modern economic growth, have paid great attention to the formation and development of the market economy as a set of institutions able to augment people’s welfare. The role of nonmarket practices for promoting economic development and success has been an area of interest, typically involving discussion of the state’s economic policies. How have societies tackled problems that the market did not handle well? To what extent did their solutions reflect the structure of their economy?

Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy explores these questions by investigating efforts made for the provision of “public goods” in early modern economies from the perspective of Japanese socioeconomic history during the Tokugawa era (1603–1868), and comparing those cases with others from Europe and China. The contributors focus on three areas of inquiry—welfare policies for the poor, infrastructure, and forest management—to provide both a unique perspective on Japanese public finance at local levels and a vantage point outside of Europe. The book seeks to encourage a more global view of the early modern political economies that shaped subsequent modern transformations.

“With new global evidence that goes well beyond the timeworn topics of taxation and military spending, Public Goods Provision will make historians and social scientists rethink the development of fiscal systems, the history of public spending, and the long-run pattern of political and economic development.” PHILIP T. HOFFMAN, author of Why Did Europe Conquer the World?

MASAYUKI TANIMOTO is Professor of Economic History at the University of Tokyo and editor of The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization: Another Path to Industrialization. R. BIN WONG is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and coauthor of Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe.

In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority.

“A fantastic and an eminently readable milestone in the study of celebrity. Bertellini sets a new standard for archival and analytical approaches to movie stardom in the 1920s while also illuminating the political stakes of celebrity that resonate with twenty-first-century culture.” GAYLYN STUDLAR, author of Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood

“This is a remarkable and timely study, and a model of interdisciplinary and transnational scholarship. Only someone with Bertellini’s cross-disciplinary expertise and meticulous research skills could pull together these cases and weave them into a compelling account of the ‘cinema effect’ on American politics.” BARBARA SPACKMAN, University of California, Berkeley

“Bertellini’s brilliant book shows clearly how celebrity and promotional culture became integral to new practices of mass governance in the early twentieth century. It is a crucial history, essential also to any genealogy of the mediatized present and the rise of modes of authoritarian and neofascist governance.” LEE GRIEVESON, author of Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System

GIORGIO BERTELLINI is Professor of Film and Media History at the University of Michigan. He is the author and editor of the award-winning volumes Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque and Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader.