Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles and growing up amid the suspicion and scrutiny epitomized by the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant misfit—innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. This critical study of her cross-media and transnational career marshals extraordinary archival research and takes a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, Yiman Wang adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her subject as an interlocutor. In doing so, she invites a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.
“The definitive work regarding the contributions of Anna May Wong to cinema. The recognition that her talent demands and deserves is finally given to her by this magnificent book.” — Celine Parreñas Shimizu, author of The Movies of Racial Childhoods: Screening Self-Sovereignty in Asian/America
“No work has so rigorously, elegantly, and persuasively considered Anna May Wong’s screen presence, her affective labor, and the longue durée of a career that spanned over half a century. A definitive and field-shaping work.” — Denise Khor, author of Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II
“Yiman Wang artfully demonstrates how to write about a career, particularly one built within a racialized public sphere, without leaving behind the living person who animates it.” — Terri Francis, author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism
Yiman Wang is Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood.
For more than four decades, socially disadvantaged Israeli Mizrahim—descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern and North African communities—have continuously supported right-wing political parties. Scholars, left-wing politicians, and activists tend to view Mizrahim as reacting against their structural exclusion, or more crudely as acting against their own interests, but Nissim Mizrachi locates the source of their “paradoxical behavior” within the limitations of the liberal grammar by which their outlook and behavior are read. In Beyond Suspicion, Mizrachi turns the direction of inquiry back on itself, contrasting liberal grammar—which values autonomy, equality, and universal reason and morality as the only authentic human choice—with the grammar of rootedness, in which the self is experienced through a web of relational commitments, temporal ties, and codes of collective identity. Recognizing rootedness as a fundamental need and desire for belonging is necessary to understand both scholarly and political rifts in Israel and throughout the world.
“With profound lessons for us all, this book excavates the rootedness at the heart of right-populist politics in Israel. In seeing his subjects fully, Nissim Mizrachi turns the mirror on ourselves to show us how our constricted vision limits the appeal of our ideas to the very people whose rights we claim to fight for. This book powerfully redefines our understanding of the illiberal world we increasingly inhabit.” — Ann Swidler, Professor of the Graduate School, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
“In challenging sociological orthodoxy, Mizrachi dares us to conceptualize the social actor beyond our own dominant liberal paradigms. His extensive research among Mizrahi Jews calls into question prevalent ideas of individual autonomy, forcing us to recognize the role of rootedness and belonging in the self-conception of millions in Israel—and beyond.” — Adam Seligman, Professor of Religion, Boston University
Nissim Mizrachi is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University and head of the Challenge of Living Together area at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
Almost Futures looks to the people who pay the heaviest price exacted by war and capitalist globalization—particularly Vietnamese citizens and refugees—for glimpses of ways to exist at the end of our future’s promise. In order to learn from the lives destroyed (and lived) amid our inheritance of modern humanism and its uses of time, Almost Futures asks us to recognize new spectrums of feeling: the poetic, in the grief of protesters dispossessed by land speculation; the allegorical, in assembly line workers’ laughter and sorrow; the iterant and intimate, in the visual witnessing of revolutionary and state killing; the haunting, in refugees’ writing on the death of their nation; and the irreconcilable, in refugees’ inhabitation of history.
“Almost Futures is a tour de force. Within the immediate contexts of Vietnam studies and critical refugee studies, the book stands out as sui generis in its theoretical sophistication, interdisciplinary rigor, and beautiful prose. In a word, it is incomparably in a class by itself.” — JODI KIM, author of Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries
“This is a truly singular study: it contends with the ghosts of Vietnam in material, conceptual, and aesthetic modes, and it is a book that belongs to the humanities in the broadest possible sense of the word, to include a resonant understanding of humanism and humanity.” — JOSEPHINE NOCK-HEE PARK, School of Arts and Sciences President’s Distinguished Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
NGUYỄN-VÕ THU-HƯƠNG is Professor of Asian American Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.
This vibrant and visionary reimagining of the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens brings together emerging and established scholars and practitioners to explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. It promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism.
“This intellectually exciting collection seamlessly draws together highly original research and reflections on the perils and potential of technology—and imagines the digital futures that might be possible if we heed the insights of feminist scholars.” — ALONDRA NELSON, Institute for Advanced Study
“An indispensable resource for legal scholars and practitioners alike attempting to understand how the internet could live up to its true democratic ideals.” — IFEOMA AJUNWA, author of The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace
“A welcome and brilliant collection that we need now more than ever. Expertly showing how rules for digital technologies have always been about bodies, social dynamics, and power, these contributions provide an urgent and compelling demonstration of how cyberlaw often loses the thread—and of how to do better.” — WOODROW HARTZOG, author of Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies
“Scholarly yet engaging, broad in scope yet cogent in argument, and critical yet hopeful. A must‑read.”—ARI EZRA WALDMAN, author of Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power
MEG LETA JONES is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Ctrl+Z: The Right to Be Forgotten and The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and the Future of Technology Policy.
AMANDA LEVENDOWSKI is Associate Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. She is also the founder of the Cyberspace and Technology (CAT) Lab.
In Life at the Center, Erica Caple James traces how faith-based and secular institutions in Boston have helped Haitian refugees and immigrants attain economic independence, health, security, and citizenship in the United States. Using the concept of “corporate Catholicism,” James documents several paradoxes of assistance arising among the Catholic Church, Catholic Charities, and the Haitian Multi-Service Center: how social assistance produces and reproduces structural inequalities between providers and recipients; how these inequities may deepen aid recipients’ dependence and lead to resistance to organized benevolence; how institutional financial deficits harmed clients and providers; and how the same modes of charity or philanthropy that previously caused harm can be redeployed to repair damage and rebuild “charitable brands.” The culmination of more than a decade of advocacy and research on behalf of the Haitians in Boston, this groundbreaking work exposes how Catholic corporations have strengthened—but also eroded—Haitians’ civic power.
“One could read Life at the Center multiple times and, with each reading, encounter new dimensions. Erica Caple James’s work is exceptional.” — LINDA BARNES, Professor of Family Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine
“James has written an important book that deftly disentangles the complex relationships between a Catholic institution, Haitian immigrants, and the work of charity in Boston. The compelling ethnography of local worlds is matched by more general explications for understanding religion, immigrants and refugees, and their transformation into Americans.” — ARTHUR KLEINMAN, author of The Soul of Care
ERICA CAPLE JAMES is Professor of Medical Anthropology and Urban Studies at MIT and author of the award-winning book Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti.
One of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary Muslim ethics is the status of women in Islamic law. Whereas Muslim conservatives argue that gender-differentiated legal rulings reflect complementary gender roles, Muslim feminists argue that Islamic law has subordinated women and is thus in need of reform. The shared assumption on both sides, however, is that gender fundamentally shapes an individual’s legal status. Beyond the Binary explores an expansive cross section of topics in ninth- to twelfth-century Hanafi legal thought, ranging from sexual crimes to consent to marriage, to show that early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles. Saadia Yacoob offers a restorative reading of Islamic law, arguing that its intersectional and relational understanding of legal personhood offers a productive space for Muslim feminists to move beyond critique and instead think with and through the Islamic legal tradition.
“Saadia Yacoob delves deeply into the categories and logic of her primary sources, contextualizes them within the relevant social history, and probingly explores their ethical and political implications. Beyond the Binary marries philological depth with theoretical sophistication while remaining surprisingly accessible and engaging.” — MARION HOLMES KATZ, author of Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics before Modernity
“In this field-changing book, Yacoob shows that for classical Muslim jurists, legal personhood was intersectional, relational, and situational. She pushes back against modern conservative insistence on an Islamic femininity defined in binary opposition to masculinity while also challenging feminist analyses that overemphasize gender as a stable component of identity.” — KECIA ALI, author of Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam
SAADIA YACOOB is Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College.
What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine’s Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine’s Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.
“Written in a deeply engaging and accessible style, this pathbreaking book explores the world of plantation laborers, whose voices are either hidden or silenced in scholarly literature on economic botany.” — ROHAN DEB ROY, author of Malarial Subjects
“Accounts of science and empire describe the centrality of cinchona to the colonial project in India, but we know little about what came after. Quinine’s Remains is an ethnographically rich and thoroughly readable story of what it means to live in the wake of medical innovation on contemporary cinchona plantations.” — SARAH BESKY, author of Tasting Qualities
TOWNSEND MIDDLETON is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements. This gentrification itself leads to queer displacement. Combining urban history, architectural critique, and queer and trans theories, Queering Urbanism traces these phenomena through the history of a network of sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within that urban landscape, Stathis G. Yeros investigates how queer people appropriated existing spaces, how they expressed their distinct identities through aesthetic forms, and why they mobilized the language of citizenship to shape place and secure space. Here the legacies of LGBTQ+ rights activism meet contemporary debates about the right to housing and urban life.
“It is challenging to find a book that gives not just an account of a specific place and people but a theory of how queer space works, how it becomes queer. This is that book.” — ROBERT SELF, author of American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
“This is a timely work that offers insight into a pressing problem not just for San Francisco but for our understanding of cities themselves.” — SUSAN STRYKER, author of Transgender History and codirector of Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria
“This lively and illuminating book provides a new and needed history of San Francisco since the 1960s, tracing how LGBTQ people remade public and private spaces while contesting the bounds of normative citizenship. Moving from SROs to renovated Victorians, lesbian bars to community land grants, Yeros revives vital questions about how queer and trans communities remake the cities they call home.” — STEPHEN VIDER, author of The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II
Stathis G. Yeros is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Florida.
In Ritual Boundaries, Joseph E. Sanzo transforms our understanding of how early Christians experienced religion in lived practice through the study of magical objects, such as amulets and grimoires. Against the prevailing view of late antiquity as a time when only so-called elites were interested in religious and ritual differentiation, the evidence presented here reveals that the desire to distinguish between religious and ritual insiders and outsiders cut across diverse social strata. Sanzo’s examination of the magical also offers unique insight into early biblical reception, exposing a textual world in which scriptural reading was multisensory and multitraditional. As they addressed sickness, demonic struggle, and interpersonal conflicts, Mediterranean people thus acted in ways that challenge our conceptual boundaries between Christians and non-Christians; elites and non-elites; and words, materials, and images. Sanzo helps us rethink how early Christians imagined similarity and difference among texts, traditions, groups, and rituals as they went about their daily lives.
“Joseph Sanzo refutes the current view of Christians living amicably alongside their non-Christian neighbors, forcing us to completely rethink how we approach religion in late antiquity. A truly revolutionary book!” — JAN N. BREMMER, author of Maidens, Magic and Martyrs in Early Christianity
“Ritual Boundaries is a deeply stimulating work and a poignant exercise in the reading of objects. This book takes up familiar words and images and reveals the remarkable—and surprising—lives ‘lived’ in ancient Egyptian Christian practice.” — DYLAN M. BURNS, author of Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism
JOSEPH E. SANZO is Associate Professor of History of Religions at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and author of Scriptural Incipits on Amulets from Late Antique Egypt: Text, Typology, and Theory.
Indonesia is the world’s second-largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke, and clove-laced tobacco cigarettes called kretek make up 95 percent of the market. Each year, more than 250,000 Indonesians die of tobacco-related diseases. To account for the staggering success of this lethal industry, Kretek Capitalism examines how kretek manufacturers have adopted global tobacco technologies and enlisted Indonesians to labor on their behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. The book charts how Sampoerna, a Philip Morris subsidiary, uses contracts, competitions, and gender, age, and class hierarchies to extract labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers. Critically engaging nationalist claims about the commodity’s cultural heritage and the jobs it supports, Marina Welker shows how global capitalism has transformed both kretek and the labor required to make and promote it.
“Thoughtful and provocative, this is a superb book that will be widely read, especially by those who are looking for an antidote to current popular support of kretek.”—Abidin Kusno, author of Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions
“A magnificent book! Kretek Capitalism is destined to become a classic of both medical anthropology and public health scholarship.”—Robert Proctor, author of Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition
“Marina Welker argues that ubiquitous Indonesian representations of kretek as an authentic, small-scale industry in fact rest on a toxic addiction that is as cultural as it is chemical. A brilliant, beautiful, and disturbing book.”—Carla Jones, Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder
“Detailed, attentive, and careful, Kretek Capitalism is easily the most granular, informative, and textured ethnography of labor in the tobacco industry.”—Peter Benson, author of Tobacco Capitalism and Stuck Moving
Marina Welker is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University and author of Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia.
Cancer Intersections is an ethnographic analysis of the complex and paradoxical efforts to access neoliberal, market-based oncological treatments in Colombia, a country where all patients are legally guaranteed access to medical services, including high-cost oncology treatments. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the city of Cali, Camilo Sanz explores the deep entanglements between medical, legal, and policy practices that share a common goal of treating and curing cancer but are hindered by bureaucratic procedures, pernicious financial interests, and class politics. Cancer Intersections shows how the interplay of these hurdles dictates the rhythm at which patients access treatment and how even in resource-rich settings, patients suffer because of market imperatives that shape how cancer treatments unfold. Through careful and measured ethnography, Sanz unveils how a neoliberal universal health care regime delays access to care for those reliant on public assistance, which means that some patients will start expensive treatments only after they are unlikely to change the course of the disease.
Unprecedented numbers of young people are in crisis today, and our health care systems are set up to fail them. Breaking Points explores the stories of a diverse group of American young adults experiencing psychiatric hospitalization for psychotic symptoms for the first time and documents how patients and their families make decisions about treatment after their release. Approximately half of young people refuse mental-health care after their initial hospitalization even though we know that better outcomes depend on early support for youth and families. In attempting to determine why this is the case, Neely Laurenzo Myers identifies what matters most to young people in crisis, passionately arguing that health care providers must attend not only to the medical and material dimensions of care but also to a patient's moral agency.
Mal-Nutrition documents how maternal health interventions in Guatemala are complicit in reproducing poverty. Policymakers speak about how a critical window of biological growth around the time of pregnancy—called the "first 1,000 days of life"—determines health and wealth across the life course. They argue that fetal development is the key to global development. In this thought-provoking and timely book, Emily Yates-Doerr shows that a focus on prenatal health is a paradigmatic technique of American violence through which the control of mothering serves to control the reproduction of privilege and power. Presenting the powerful stories of Guatemalan scientists, midwives, and mothers, she illustrates their efforts to counter the harms of mal-nutrition, offering a window into a form of nutrition science and policy that encourages collective nourishment and fosters reproductive cycles in which women, children, and their entire communities can flourish.
In Being Another Way, Dustin Klinger recounts the history of how medieval Arabic philosophers in the Islamic East grappled with the logical role of the copula “to be,” an ambiguity that has bedeviled Western philosophy from Parmenides to the analytic philosophers of today. Working from within a language that has no copula, a group of increasingly independent Arabic philosophers began to critically investigate the semantic role that Aristotle, for many centuries their philosophical authority, invested in the copula as the basis of his logic. Drawing on extensive manuscript research, Klinger breaks through the thicket of unstudied philosophical works to demonstrate the creativity of postclassical Islamic scholarship as it explored the consequences of its intellectual break with the past. Against the still widespread view that intellectual ferment all but disappeared during the period, he shows how these intellectuals over the centuries developed and refined a sophisticated philosophy of language that speaks to core concerns of contemporary linguistics and philosophy.
Japan is a nation saddled with centuries of accumulated stereotypes and loaded assumptions about suicide. Many pronouncements have been made about those who have died by their own hand, without careful attention to the words of the dead themselves. Drawing upon far-ranging creations by famous twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese artists and little-known amateurs alike—such as death poems, suicide notes, memorials, suicide maps and manuals, works of literature, photography, film, and manga—Kirsten Cather interrogates how suicide is scripted and to what end. Entering the orbit of suicidal writers and readers with care, she shows that through close readings these works can reveal fundamental beliefs about suicide and, just as crucially, about acts of writing. These are not scripts set in stone but graven images and words nonetheless that serve to mourn the dead, straddling two impulses: to put the dead to rest and to keep them alive forever. These words reach out to us to initiate a dialogue with the dead, one that can reveal why it matters to write into and from the void.
Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, The Fourth Invasion examines an Ixil Maya community’s movement against the construction of one of the largest hydroelectric plants in Guatemala. The arrival of the Palo Viejo hydroelectric plant (built by the Italian corporation Enel Green Power) to the municipality of Cotzal highlighted the ongoing violence inflicted on Ixils by outsiders and the Guatemalan state. Locals referred to the building of the hydroelectric plant as the “new invasion” or “fourth invasion” for its similarity to preceding invasions: Spanish colonization, the creation of the plantation economy, and the state-led genocide during the Guatemalan armed conflict. Through a historical account of cyclical waves of invasions and resistance in Cotzal during the four invasions, Giovanni Batz argues that extractivist industries are a continuation of a colonial logic of extraction based on the displacement and destruction of Indigenous Peoples' territories and values that has existed since the arrival of the Spanish in 1524. The current movements in Cotzal, rooted in a long history of resistance, counter dominant narratives of Indigenous Peoples that often portray them as “conquered.”
African cities are under construction. Beyond the urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, the majority of urban residents are putting their resources into finding land and building homes on the city edges. As the first book-length analysis of Africa’s suburban middle-class, The Suburban Frontier examines how self-built housing on the urban periphery has become central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in contemporary Tanzania. Drawing on original qualitative and ethnographic field research in the city of Dar es Salaam, Claire Mercer writes a detailed exposition of how the "suburban frontier" has become the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped. This book offers a new lens on the African middle classes, making significant contributions to the study of urban social change in Africa and urbanization in the Global South.
Over the past few decades, scholars have traced how Indian Ocean merchants forged transregional networks into a world of global connections. East Africa's crucial role in this Indian Ocean world has primarily been understood through the influence of coastal trading centers like Mombasa. In Inland from Mombasa, David P. Bresnahan looks anew at this Swahili port city from the vantage point of the communities that lived on its rural edges. By reconstructing the deep history of these Mijikenda-speaking societies over the past two millennia, he shows how profoundly they influenced global trade even as they rejected many of the cosmopolitan practices that historians have claimed are critical to creating global connections, choosing smaller communities over urbanism, local ritual practices over Islam, and inland trade over maritime commerce. Inland from Mombasa makes the compelling case that the seemingly isolating alternative social pursuits selected by Mijikenda speakers were in fact key to their active role in global commerce and politics.
In God’s Other Book: The Qurʼan between History and Ideology, Mohammad Salama presents a powerful critique of the ways we study and analyze early Islam and its sacred text, filling a glaring hole in our understanding of this formative environment. Interrogating the ideological framework of late antiquity, Salama exposes hidden assumptions that prevent scholars from truly placing Islam in its socio-historical and cultural milieu. He also offers an alternative theoretical and practical model focused on pre-Islamic Arabic cultural production. Foregrounding the indigenous Arab community of seventh-century Hijaz, Salama demonstrates how the Qurʼan played an organic role in commenting on, interacting with, and taking sides concerning matters of ethnicity, ethics, dress codes, and social habits. While the study delves into the past, it carries implications for the future: only with renewed attention to the Qurʼan itself, in all of its splendor and intricacy, can Western readers engage thoughtfully and ethically not only with Islamic studies but also with the cultures and traditions of those who live according to another book.
In the late fifth century, a nameless girl was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In this book, Stephanie Balkwill documents the Empress Dowager’s rise to power and life on the throne against the broader social world of imperial China under the rule of the Northern Wei dynasty, a foreign people from Inner Asia who built their capital deep in the Chinese heartland.
Building on largely untapped Buddhist materials, Balkwill shows that the life and rule of the Empress Dowager is a much larger story of the reinvention of religious, ethnic, and gender norms in a rapidly changing, multicultural society. The Women Who Ruled China recovers the voices of those left out of the mainstream historical record and, through the life of the Empress Dowager, paints a compelling portrait of medieval Chinese society reinventing itself under her leadership.
After the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Rome finally took control of Egypt. This occupation simultaneously facilitated and circumscribed the exchange of goods, people, and ideas along the paths carved by Rome’s burgeoning empire. In this book, Edward Kelting sets out to recapture one of these systems of exchange: the vibrant literary tradition known as Aegyptiaca—or “Egyptian Things”—in which culturally mixed authors wrote about Egypt for a Greek and Roman audience. These authors have been dismissed as not really “Egyptian,” and their contemporary popularity has been ignored, but as the author powerfully argues, this genre in fact constitutes a vibrant intellectual tradition, developed from heterogenous influences but deeply engaged with Egypt’s pharaonic past. In contrast to usual narratives of Roman domination, Kelting uncovers a complex project of political engagement and cultural translation in which Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all participated.
In the 1990s, India's mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre's circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry's utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel negotiate their social lives when marked by their involvement with a taboo form. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.
In recent decades, many members of the public have come to see processed food as a problem that needs to be solved by eating "real" food and reforming the food system. But for many food industry professionals, the problem is not processed food or the food system itself, but misperceptions and irrational fears caused by the public's lack of scientific understanding. In her highly original book, Charlotte Biltekoff explores the role that science and scientific authority play in food industry responses to consumer concerns about what we eat and how it is made. As Biltekoff documents, industry efforts to correct public misperceptions through science-based education have consistently misunderstood the public's concerns, which she argues are an expression of politics. This has entrenched "food scientism" in public discourse and seeded a form of antipolitics, with broad consequences. Real Food, Real Facts offers lessons that extend well beyond food choice and will appeal to readers interested in how everyday people come to accept or reject scientific authority in matters of personal health and well-being.
Making Sense explores the experiential, ethical, and intellectual stakes of living in, and thinking with, worlds wherein language cannot be taken for granted. In Nepal, many deaf signers use Nepali Sign Language (NSL), a young, conventional signed language. The majority of deaf Nepalis, however, use what NSL signers call natural sign. Natural sign involves conventional and improvisatory signs, many of which recruit semiotic relations immanent in the social and material world. These features make conversation in natural sign both possible and precarious. Sense-making in natural sign depends on signers’ skillful use of resources and on addressees’ willingness to engage. Natural sign reveals the labor of sense-making that in more conventional language is carried by shared grammar. Ultimately, this highly original book shows that emergent language is an ethical endeavor, challenging readers to consider what it means, and what it takes, to understand and to be understood.
This book follows the production, transnational circulation, and reception of the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet exhibition, the 1971 Mexican romance "Yesenia." The film adaptation of a telenovela based on a wildly popular graphic novel set during the Second Franco-Mexican War became a surprise hit in the USSR, selling more than ninety million tickets in the first year of its Soviet release alone. Drawing on years of archival research, renowned film scholar Masha Salazkina takes "Yesenia"’s unprecedented popularity as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of the cultures of Mexico and the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and the ways in which popular culture circulated globally. Paying particular attention to the shifting landscape of sexual politics, Romancing Yesenia argues for the enduring importance and ideological ambiguities of melodramatic forms in global popular media.
This groundbreaking collection of essays from leading film historians features original research on movie magazines published in China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Latin America, South Korea, the U.S., and beyond. Vital resources for the study of film history and culture, movie magazines are frequently cited as sources, but rarely centered as objects of study. Global Movie Magazine Networks does precisely that, revealing the hybridity, heterogeneity, and connectivity of movie magazines and the important role they play in the intercontinental exchange of information and ideas about cinema. Uniquely, the contributors in this book have developed their critical analysis alongside the collaborative work of building digital resources, facilitating the digitization of more than a dozen of these historic magazines on an open-access basis.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public school board fired nearly 7,500 teachers and employees. In the decade that followed, the city created the first urban public school system in the United States to be entirely contracted out to private management. Veteran educators, collectively referred to as the "backbone" of the city's Black middle class, were replaced by younger, less experienced, white teachers who lacked historical ties to the city. In A Burdensome Experiment, Christien Philmarc Tompkins argues that the privatization of New Orleans schools has made educators into a new kind of racialized worker. As school districts across the nation backslide on school integration, Tompkins asks, who exactly deserves to teach our children? The struggle over this question exposes the inherent anti-blackness of charter school systems and the unequal burdens of school choice.
Intersectional Incoherence stages an encounter between the critical discourse on intersectionality and texts by Korean subjects of the Japanese empire and their postwar descendants in Japan, known as Zainichi Koreans. Arguing for intersectionality as a reading method rather than strictly a tool of social analysis, Cindi Textor reads moments of illegibility and incoherent language in these texts as a confrontation between the pressures on Zainichi Koreans and their literature to represent both Korean difference from and affinity with Japan. Rejecting linguistic norms and representational imperatives of identity categories, Textor instead demands that the reader grapple with the silent, absent, illegible, or unintelligible. Engaging with the incoherent, she argues, allows for a more ethical approach to texts, subjects, and communities that resist representation within existing paradigms, such as those of Korean descent in Japan.
Emergency in Transit responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights.
Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Eleanor Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea.