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From fashion sketches of Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to phantasmagoric imagery of war in the 1930s and 1940s, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the 1950s, the cartoon-style art known as manhua helped define China’s modern experience. Manhua Modernity offers a richly illustrated and deeply contextualized analysis of these illustrations from the lively pages of popular pictorial magazines that entertained, informed, and mobilized a nation through a half century of political and cultural transformation.
“An innovative reconceptualization of manhua. John Crespi’s meticulous study shows the many benefits of interpreting Chinese comics and other illustrations not simply as image genres but rather as part of a larger print culture institution. A must-read for anyone interested in modern Chinese visual culture.” CHRISTOPHER REA, author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China
“A rich media-centered reading of Chinese comics from the mid-1920s through the 1950s, Manhua Modernity shifts the emphasis away from ideological interpretation and demonstrates that the pictorial turn requires examinations of manhua in its heterogenous, expansive, spontaneous, and interactive ways of engaging its audience’s varied experiences of fast-changing everyday life.” YINGJIN ZHANG, author of Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China
JOHN A. CRESPI is Associate Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Colgate University. He is the author of Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the AuditoryImagination in Modern China
In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By reevaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema.
“A captivating account of Egyptian film director Togo Mizrahi. Starr shows that Mizrahi’s distinct, often comical vision of Egypt captured a dramatic moment of social, political, and cultural transformation in which people of diverse backgrounds coexisted and struggled to achieve better lives.” JOEL GORDON, author of Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt
“A remarkable study of a remarkable career. Starr offers a comprehensive analysis of a life in filmmaking that adds nuance to our definition of Egyptian nationalism and enhances our appreciation of Alexandrian cinema. This is a book of recovery, reclamation, and celebration.” NANCY E. BERG, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis
DEBORAH A. STARR is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Jewish Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire and coeditor of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff.
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.
“Christina Klein shines a brilliant klieg light on the still largely unknown South Korean classic films of the 1950s by placing them in a global context of Cold War culture and politics. This is an original and engaging study with broad scholarly and popular appeal.” CARTER J. ECKERT, author of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea
“Cold War Cosmopolitanism makes a unique contribution to multiple fields. Using Han Hyung-mo’s career and female characters as a springboard, Klein charts the historical and theoretical trajectories of the formation of Cold War cosmopolitanism in 1950s Korea under US hegemony.” HYE SEUNG CHUNG, author of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema
“This book belongs on the bookshelf of everyone interested in the Cold War culture of Asia.” POSHEK FU, author of Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas
CHRISTINA KLEIN is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Boston College.
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.
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.
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.
Motion pictures are made, not mass produced, requiring a remarkable collection of skills, self-discipline, and sociality—all of which are sources of enormous pride among Hollywood’s craft and creative workers. The interviews collected here showcase the pleasures that attract people to careers in film and television. They also reflect critically on changes in the workplace brought about by corporate conglomeration and globalization. Rather than offer publicity-friendly anecdotes by marquee celebrities, Voices of Labor presents off-screen observations about the everyday realities of Global Hollywood. Ranging across job categories—from showrunner to make-up artist to location manager—this collection features voices of labor from Los Angeles, Atlanta, Prague, and Vancouver. Together they show how abstract concepts like conglomeration, financialization, and globalization are crucial tools for understanding contemporary Hollywood and for reflecting more generally on changes and challenges in the screen media workplace and our culture at large.
“Essential reading for anyone interested in how Hollywood actually works.” RAMON LOBATO, author of Shadow Economies of Cinema
“Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson craft a powerful elegy for organized labor, demonstrating how critical theory is sung to the everyday rhythms of the workplace.” VICKI MAYER, author of Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: The Lure of the Local Film Economy
“A star-studded cast with diverse talents, backgrounds, and perspectives tells a varied but consistent tale of the importance of organized labor and the challenges it faces when pitted against the forces of media consolidation and globalization, all set in that magical company town known as Hollywood.” PATRIC M. VERRONE, writer and producer, former president, Writers Guild of America, West
MICHAEL CURTIN is Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Film and Media Studies and director of the Global Dynamics Initiative at University of California, Santa Barbara. KEVIN SANSON is a senior lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology and managing editor of Media Industries.
Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, redirected millions in tax dollars from the public coffers in an effort to become the top location site globally for the production of Hollywood films and television series. Why would lawmakers support such a policy? Why would citizens accept the policy’s uncomfortable effects on their economy and culture? Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans addresses these questions through a study of the local and everyday experiences of the film economy in New Orleans, Louisiana—a city that has twice taken the mantle of becoming a movie production capital. From the silent era to today’s Hollywood South, Vicki Mayer explains that the aura of a film economy is inseparable from a prevailing sense of home, even as it changes that place irrevocably.
“A scathing critique of the economic realities and broken promises of Hollywood South, told in rich ethnographic detail and passionately argued through Vicki Mayer’s deep connection to New Orleans. This is a vital book.” NITIN GOVIL, author of Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay
“Mayer guides readers through the numbers and arguments behind Louisiana’s costly love affair with the film industry and raises important questions over whether the state’s citizens are getting their money’s worth.” STEPHANIE GRACE, columnist, The New Orleans Advocate
“A visionary in the study of cultural labor, economy, and geography, Mayer is that rare writer who combines exquisite storytelling with rigorous scholarship. This is an essential contribution to film and media studies, and an urgent history lesson for policy makers.” MELISSA GREGG, author of Work’s Intimacy
VICKI MAYER is Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She is coeditor of the journal Television & New Media and author or editor of several books and journal articles about media production, creative industries, and cultural work.
How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.
“Keys to Play is full of novel ideas, provocative observations, and brilliant aperçus. Whether our interests lie in audiovisual media, aesthetics, performance, improvisation, compositional technique, notation, theory, or historiography, Moseley shows us how much the field at large has to gain from taking play seriously. In a word: stunning.” ALEXANDER REHDING, Harvard University
“Moseley’s game-changing book puts a new and versatile set of tools at our disposal. Wonderfully allusive and erudite, Keys to Play will open new horizons for music scholars of all kinds.” ELISABETH LE GUIN, University of California, Los Angeles
“A dazzling and daring book: an intellectual symphony, a virtuosic boss run, a vigorous expedition in media-musical archaeology, and an exquisite love letter to the vitality of interdisciplinary play.” WILLIAM CHENG, author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination
“Keys to Play offers a new approach to central episodes in the narrative of European art music refracted through histories of the keyboard, digital games, and improvisation. It is at once provocative, bracing and, yes, profoundly playful.” BENJAMIN WALTON, University of Cambridge
Keys to Play won the 2017 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society.
ROGER MOSELEY is Assistant Professor of Music at Cornell University.
Indefensible Spaces examines the national crisis of the policing of housing through the story of Black community building in the Antelope Valley. Tracing the history of Los Angeles County’s northernmost outpost from its segregated development in the postwar aerospace boom through its evolution into a destination for those priced, policed, and evicted out of Los Angeles, Rahim Kurwa tells the story of how the valley resisted racial integration through the policing of subsidized housing—and how Black tenants and organizers have worked to overcome it. This book sheds light on the intersection of the nation's policing and housing crises, offering powerful lessons for achieving housing justice across the country.
Victoria Wohl is Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. Her books include Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens, Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory, and Euripides and the Politics of Form.
The Presocratic philosophers, writing in Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, invented new ways of thinking about human life, the natural world, and structures of reality. They also developed novel ways of using language to express their thought. In this book, Victoria Wohl examines these innovations and the productive relation between them in the work of five figures: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus.
Bringing these thinkers into conversation with modern critical theorists on questions of shared concern, Wohl argues for the poetic sophistication of their work and the inextricable convergence of their aesthetic form and philosophical content. In addition to offering original readings of these fascinating figures and robust strategies for interpreting their fragmentary, rebarbative texts, this book invites readers to communicate across entrenched divisions between literature and philosophy and between antiquity and modernity.
Situated at the crossroads of author Stacie Selmon McCormick’s lived experiences as a Black birthing person, mother, and scholar, We Are Pregnant with Freedom traces Black sexual and reproductive liberation narratives through the storytelling work of those most marginalized in reproductive justice research and discourse. The book traces McCormick’s loss of twin sons to stillbirth, her near-fatal experience with preeclampsia, and her subsequent reproductive justice research and advocacy work with The Afiya Center, a Black-led reproductive justice organization in Texas. Its multidisciplinary narrative shatters the silences wrought by stigma and historical erasure, ultimately proposing a new grammar of reproductive justice that can serve the people as a vehicle for community building, healing, and bodily liberation.
Despite the massive costs associated with data breaches, ransomware, viruses, and cyberattacks, most organizations remain thoroughly unprepared to safeguard consumer data. Over the past two decades, the insurance industry has begun offering cyber insurance to help organizations manage cybersecurity and privacy law compliance, while also offering risk management services as part of their insurance packages. These insurers have thus effectively evolved into de facto regulators—yet at the same time, they have failed to effectively curtail cybersecurity breaches. Drawing from interviews, observations, and extensive content analysis of the cyber insurance industry, this book reveals how cyber insurers’ risk management services convey legitimacy to the public and to insureds but fall short of actually improving data security, rendering them largely symbolic. Speaking directly to broader debates on regulatory delegation to nonstate actors, Shauhin A. Talesh proposes a new institutional theory of insurance to explain how insurers shape the content and meaning of privacy law and cybersecurity compliance, offering policy recommendations for how insurers and governments can work together to improve cybersecurity and foster greater algorithmic justice.
What does everyday life look like for young men who flee to Europe, survive, and are then assigned temporary housing? Hypersurveillance or parallel normality, irrelevance or even nothingness? Based on a four-year ethnography, Undoing Nothing recounts the untold story of Italian asylum seekers' struggles to produce relevance—that is, to carve out meaning, control, and direction from their legal and existential liminality. Their ways of inhabiting space and time rest on a deeply ambivalent position: together and alone, inside and outside, absent and present. They dwell as racialized bodies in the center while their selves inhabit a suspended trans-local space of moral economies, nightmares, and furtive dreams. This book illuminates a distinctly modern form of purgatory, offering both a perceptive critique of state responses to the so-called refugee crisis and nuanced psychological portraits of a demographic rarely afforded narrative depth and grace.
Immigrant residents seeking legal status in the United States face a catch-22: the documents that they must present to immigration officials—bank records, paycheck stubs, and contracts in their own names—are often challenging for undocumented people to obtain. In this book, Susan Bibler Coutin analyzes how undocumented immigrants and the attorneys and paralegals who represent them attempt to surmount this and other documentary challenges. Based on four years of fieldwork and volunteer work in the legal services department of an immigrant-serving nonprofit and in-depth interviews with those seeking status, On the Record explores these complex dynamics by taking seriously both documents themselves and the legal craft that has developed around their use.
Leftover Women in China offers an intimate empirical and theoretical analysis of the lived experience and legal consciousness of China’s “leftover women,” women who remain unmarried in their late twenties and beyond. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus groups, Qian Liu examines how leftover women—including women who prefer to remain single, those who are waiting for the right husband, and queer women—deal with parental and social pressure, as well as the denial of their right to have children outside of heterosexual marriage. Sensitively exploring the distinctive patterns of parent-child interactions in Chinese families, Liu invites readers to understand leftover women’s observance, evasion, and manipulation of the law in the context of intergenerational relationships and obligations.
How do we know through atmospheres? How can being affected by an atmosphere give rise to knowledge? What role does somatic, nonverbal knowledge play in how we belong to places? Atmospheric Knowledge takes up these questions through detailed analyses of practices that generate atmospheres and in which knowledge emerges through visceral intermingling with atmospheres. From combined musicological and anthropological perspectives, Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr investigate atmospheres as a compelling alternative to better-known analytics of affect by way of performative and sonic practices across a range of ethnographic settings. With particular focus on oceanic relations and sonic affectedness, Atmospheric Knowledge centers the rich affordances of sonic connections for knowing our environments.
This book examines the spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean world, covering the period from 300 BCE to 600 CE. By analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and economic fabric of ancient societies. Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration traces the long history of carceral practices, considering the ways in which the prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and imperialism for over two millennia. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the incarcerated, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time, and call for new historical consciousness to arise around contemporary practices of incarceration.
Nairobi, named after the cool water that flows through it, started as a railway stop and became known as the Green City in the Sun. Yet, the city has taken shape through a set of anti-urban ideologies and practices that insist that some people cannot, should not, and must not be permanent urban residents and that the city is not their home. Based on decades of experience in rapidly changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in the New City traverses rivers, cemeteries, parks, railways, housing estates, roads, and dancehalls to explore how policies of anti-urbanism manifest across time and space, shaping how people live in Nairobi. With deeply personal insights, Bettina Ng’weno highlights how people contest anti-urbanism through their insistence on building life in the city despite it, even in the current dynamic of ubiquitous demolition and reconstruction. Through quotidian practices and creative resistance, long-term residents imagine alternatives to displacement, create belonging, and build new urban futures.
Industrial Islamism analyzes the relationship, since the end of the Cold War, between the rise of political Islamism in Muslim-majority countries and the rise of a new global "middle class" of industrial entrepreneurs. Challenging common assumptions, Utku Balaban questions the idea that political Islamism represents the antithesis of Western modernity and industrialization. On the contrary: the more enthusiastically a Muslim-majority country industrializes, the more "Islamized" its politics becomes.
The book focuses on Turkey, historically the most industrialized Muslim-majority country in the world, with the most successful Islamist movement and a relatively competitive electoral system. It provides a fine-grained historical and ethnographic analysis at the local level of urban-industrial control over workers in sweatshops and working-class neighborhoods by this new global middle class, whom Balaban calls the faubourgeoisie. As the central actor behind Turkey's post–Cold War industrialization, the faubourgeoisie allies with the Islamist movement to control its workers and significantly influence national politics.
The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico. It is a destination boasting the “happiest Carnival in the world,” nightly live music, and public dancing. It is also where Blackness is an integral and celebrated part of local culture and history, but not of the individual self. In Local Color, anthropologist Karma F. Frierson follows Veracruzanos as they reckon with the Afro-Caribbean roots of their distinctive history, traditions, and culture. As residents learn to be more “jarocho,” or more local to Veracruz, Frierson examines how people both internalize and externalize the centrality of Blackness in their regional identity. Frierson provocatively asks readers to consider a manifestation of Mexican Blackness unconcerned with self-identification as Black in favor of the active pursuit and cultivation of a collective and regionalized Blackness.
Kathryn Henne is a professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University, where she directs the Justice and Technoscience Lab, and an adjunct professor in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University.
Matt Ventresca is a researcher in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology and a visiting fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University.
Concerns regarding brain injury in sport have escalated into what is often termed a “concussion crisis,” fueled by high-profile lawsuits and deaths. Although athletes are central figures in this narrative, they comprise only a small proportion of the people who experience brain injuries, while other high-risk groups—including victims of domestic violence and police brutality—are all too often left out of the story. In Violent Impacts, Kathryn Henne and Matt Ventresca examine what is and isn’t captured in popular discourse, scrutinizing how law, science, and social inequalities shape depictions and understandings of brain injury. Drawing on research carried out in Australia, Canada, and the United States, they illustrate how structural violence centers certain bodies as part of the concussion crisis while pushing others to the margins.
Moorings follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings that are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from the dhow, the book examines the social worlds of Muslim seafarers who have been rendered invisible even as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life, navigating colonialism, neoliberalism, the rise of Hindutva, insurgency, climate change, and border regimes across the Indian Ocean. Based on historical and ethnographic research aboard ships, at ports and religious shrines, and in homes, Moorings shows how capitalism derives value from historically sedimented practices grounded in caste, gender, and transregional community-based forms of regulation.
Archipelagic Cinemas compares trajectories of cinematic and political development across Southeast Asia from the mid-twentieth century to the present, taking the Indonesian island of Java as a key point of departure. Its “archipelagic” approach reflects a region of tanah air (land-water) where strategies of communication are shaped by the inevitability of difference and constant change. Archipelagic Cinemas foregrounds the outgrowth of local motion pictures from established regional modes of expression, such as touring vernacular theaters, known for their improvised assemblies of narratives and aesthetics from diverse places and times. Similarly, Southeast Asian movies distinguished themselves by rejecting the imposition of a single, sovereign, or necessarily masculine point of reference. Filmmakers responded to political and social shifts with populist shows of unruliness, mockery, and often horror while challenging binary interpretation of good and evil, self and other, and on- and off-screen space. A common cinematic “matrifocal gaze” takes the blurring of women’s and men’s roles in the region as a tool of engagement with nationalist contests over gender and power. Together, regional cinemas set the stage for a multifarious modern visuality rooted in the unique, intertwined histories of Southeast Asian nations.
