Camera Palæstina is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–1972) and his seven photography albums titled The Illustrated History of Palestine. Jawhariyyeh’s nine hundred images narrate the rich cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this archive at the juncture between the history of photography in the Arab world and the social history of Palestine. Shedding new light on this foundational period, the authors explore not just major historical events and the development of an urban bourgeois lifestyle but a social field of vision of Palestinian life as exemplified in the Jerusalem community. Tracking the interplay between photographic images, the authors offer evidence of the unbroken field of material, historical, and collective experience from the living past to the living present of Arab Palestine.

“With decolonial commitment and intellectual breadth, the authors turn the photographs into an inalienable entitlement to Palestine, and turn Palestine into an ‘uninterrupted albeit traumatic’ place. This is a must-read book for scholars of Palestine and photography.” Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, author of Potential History

“The story of these archives highlights the polyvalent terms of Palestinian modernity while offering the grounds for a new theorization of Palestinian spectatorship as anticolonial practice.” Rebecca L. Stein, author of Screen Shots

Issam Nassar is Professor of History at Illinois State University and coeditor of Jerusalem Quarterly. He is coauthor of The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawahariyyeh and Gardens of Sand.

Stephen Sheehi is Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies and Director of the Decolonizing Humanities Project at William & Mary. He is coauthor of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine and author of The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography, 1860–1910.

Salim Tamari is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies and Director of its Jerusalem Studies Program. He is also Professor of Sociology, Emeritus at Birzeit University and author of The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine, Year of the Locust, and The Mountain Against the Sea.

Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic study of a community of self-identified effeminate men— known in local parlance as sasso—residing in coastal Jamestown, a suburb of Accra, Ghana’s capital. Drawing on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye’s notion of “amphibious personhood,” Kwame Edwin Otu argues that sasso embody and articulate amphibious subjectivity in their self-making, creating an identity that moves beyond the homogenizing impulses of Western categories of gender and sexuality. Such subjectivity unsettles claims made by both the Christian heteronationalist state and LGBT+ human rights organizations that Ghana is predominantly heterosexual or homophobic. Weaving together personal interactions with sasso, participant observation, autoethnography, archival sources, essays from African and African-diasporic literature, and critical analyses of documentaries such as the BBC’s The World’s Worst Place to Be Gay, Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic meditation on how Africa is configured as the “heart of homophobic darkness” in transnational LGBT+ human rights imaginaries.

“This book is a powerful synthesis of African theorization and rigorous fieldwork that presents an engaging and convincing read of a location. Kwame Edwin Otu’s work is not simply meaningful for Jamestown, Accra, Ghana, or West Africa; it has real import elsewhere while remaining committed to its locality and subjects, a rare feat.” T. J. Tallie, author of Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa 

“A unique project based on groundbreaking research. There is no other work that gives such elegant insight into the multifarious desires of queer life—in an African city or anywhere. Otu convincingly shows how simplistic identity categories are confounded by the fluidities and illegibilities of lived queer experience.” Jesse Weaver Shipley, Professor of African and African American Studies and Oratory, Dartmouth College 

Kwame Edwin Otu is Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, University of Virginia. He wrote and starred in the award-winning short film Reluctantly Queer.

Creating the Qur’an presents the first systematic historical-critical study of the Qur’an’s origins, drawing on methods and perspectives commonly used to study other scriptural traditions. Demonstrating in detail that the Islamic tradition relates not a single attested account of the holy text’s formation, Stephen J. Shoemaker shows how the Qur’an preserves a surprisingly diverse array of memories regarding the text’s early history and its canonization. To this he adds perspectives from radiocarbon dating of manuscripts, the linguistic history of Arabic, the social and cultural history of late ancient Arabia, and the limitations of human memory and oral transmission, as well as various peculiarities of the Qur’anic text itself. Considering all the relevant data to present the most comprehensive and convincing examination of the origin and evolution of the Qur’an available, Shoemaker concludes that the canonical text of the Qur’an was most likely produced only around the turn of the eighth century.

“Stephen Shoemaker leaves no significant aspect of the debate over the Qur’an’s origin and evolution unexamined. His book is a milestone in Qur’anic studies. Everyone in the field will have to read it.” FRED M. DONNER, Peter B. Ritzma Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern History, University of Chicago

STEPHEN J. SHOEMAKER is Professor of Religious Studies and Ira E. Gaston Fellow in Christian Studies at the University of Oregon. He is author of The Death of a Prophet, The Apocalypse of Empire, and A Prophet Has Appeared, among many other publications.

By the 1960s, Hindi-language films from Bombay were in high demand, not only for domestic and diasporic audiences, but for sizable non-diasporic audiences across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean world. Confounding critics who saw the films as noisy and nonsensical, Bombay films attracted worldwide viewers precisely for their elements of romance, music, and spectacle. In this richly documented history of 1960s Hindi cinema, Samhita Sunya historicizes the emergence of world cinema as a category of cinematic diplomacy that formed in the crucible of the Cold War. Interwoven with this history is an account of the prolific transnational circuits of popular Hindi films. By following archival leads and threads of argumentation within commercial Hindi films that seem to be odd cases—flops, remakes, low-budget comedies, and prestige productions—this book offers a novel map for excavating the historical and ethical stakes of world cinema and world-making via Bombay.

“Samhita Sunya’s rich and provocative book offers a needed corrective to contemporary debates on transnational cinema, translation and co-production, and cinephilia by approaching them from a new geographic and historical vantage point. A terrific contribution to a growing body of film studies scholarship that is redefining the field as we know it.” Masha Salazkina, author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico

“This elegantly written book remaps the atlas of world cinema. Its refreshingly non-Eurocentric perspective, innovative methods for tracing the intersection of material and affective histories of circulation, and transregional scope make it a valuable addition to film studies, South Asian studies, and inquiries into the global 1960s.” Manishita Dass, author of Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India

Samhita Sunya is Assistant Professor of Cinema in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia.

Palimpsests of Themselves is an intervention in current discussions about the fate of philosophy in postclassical Islamic intellectual history. Asad Q. Ahmed uses as a case study the most advanced logic textbook of Muslim South Asia, The Ladder of the Sciences, presenting in English its first full translation and extended commentary. He offers detailed assessments of the technical contributions of the work, explores the social and institutional settings of the vast commentarial response it elicited, and develops a theory of the philosophical commentary that is internal to the tradition. These approaches to the commentarial text complicate presuppositions upon which questions of Islam’s intellectual decline are erected. As such, Ahmed offers a unique and powerful opportunity to understand the transmission of knowledge across the Islamic world.

“This is a transformative work of historical scholarship. With empathy and rigor, Asad Ahmed succeeds brilliantly in recreating the intricate logical theories and exegetical practices of South-Asian Muslim logicians and commentators, who up to now have been entirely neglected in Islamic studies and in the history of philosophy.” ROBERT WISNOVSKY, J. McGill Professor of Islamic Philosophy, McGill University

“A stunning piece of work. The historical detective work on the commentaries and their interconnections is truly extraordinary, as is the marriage of philological and philosophical skills that went into the translation and commentary.” PETER ADAMSON, Professor of Philosophy, LMU Munich

“Both the amount of hitherto unstudied material excavated by Ahmed, and the care and sophistication with which he handles it, are remarkable and put scholarship on Indo-Muslim philosophy and logic on an entirely new footing.” KHALED EL-ROUAYHEB, J. R. Jewett Professor of Arabic and of Islamic Intellectual History, Harvard University

ASAD Q. AHMED is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Today, the majority of the world’s population lives in a country with falling marriage rates, a phenomenon with profound impacts on women, gender, and sexuality. In this exceptionally crafted ethnography, Sarah Lamb probes the gendered trend of single women in India, examining what makes living outside of marriage for women increasingly possible and yet incredibly challenging. Featuring the stories of never-married women as young as 35 and as old as 92, this book offers a remarkable portrait of a way of life experienced by women across class and caste divides. For women in India, complex social-cultural and political-economic contexts are foundational to their lives and decisions, and remaining unmarried is often an unintended consequence of other pressing life priorities. Arguing that never-married women are able to illuminate their society’s broader social-cultural values, Lamb offers a new and startling look at prevailing systems in India today.

“This pathbreaking book offers a vital analysis of the rising but unrecognized category of single women in a marriage-minded society such as India. Through beautifully rendered and diverse stories, Sarah Lamb challenges conventional wisdom.” —MARCIA C. INHORN, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Yale University

“For fans of Lamb’s evocative narratives on Bengali widows, her new book provides another rich look at the negative space of marriage: the rare demographic of single women in Bengal across class and caste.” —SRIMATI BASU, author of The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India

“This lively ethnographic account makes several key contributions to feminist anthropological appraisals of marriage as an institution. Lamb renders a compelling, detailed, and sensitive portrait of compulsory heterosexuality and patriliny as seen from the margins.” —LUCINDA RAMBERG, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Cornell University

SARAH LAMB is Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University.

The “Bastille Effect” refers to the unique ways that former sites of political imprisonment are transformed, physically and culturally. In their afterlives, these sites represent sustained efforts to hold perpetrators accountable for state violence. For that narrative to surface, the sites must be cleansed of their profane past. In some cases, clergy are even enlisted to perform purifying rituals that grant the sites a new identity as memorials. Around the globe, carceral sites have been dramatically repurposed into places of enlightenment that offer inspiring allegories of human rights. Interpreting the complexities of those common threads, this book weaves together a broad range of cultural, interdisciplinary, and critical thought to offer new insights into the study of political imprisonment, collective memory, and post-conflict societies.

“The scholarly work of Michael Welch is recognized for its blend of critical theory and human rights. The Bastille Effect is no exception. This book reveals the terrible depths— and pains—of political imprisonment.” KIERAN MCEVOY, Queen’s University, Belfast 

“With compelling case studies, this wide-ranging book expands the significance of human rights to political imprisonment, technologies of power, and the meaning of memory.” DIEGO ZYSMAN QUIRÓS, University of Buenos Aires

“Welch’s highly original project on the afterlife of sites of political imprisonment throws new critical light onto the politics of punishment and represents an important contribution to the burgeoning study of comparative penality.” TIM NEWBURN, London School of Economics

MICHAEL WELCH is Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and Visiting Professor at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. He is the author of several books, including Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment.

With contributions by Sharon R. Stocker

Although the Mycenaean civilization of the Greek Bronze Age was identified 150 years ago, its origins remain obscure. Jack L. Davis, codirector of excavations at the Palace of Nestor at Pylos, takes readers on a tour of the beginnings of Mycenaean civilization through a case study of this important site. In collaboration with codirector Sharon R. Stocker, Davis demonstrates that this ancient place was a major node for the exchange of ideas between the already established Minoan civilization, centered on the island of Crete, and the residents of the Greek mainland. Davis and Stocker show how adoption of Minoan culture created an ideology of power focused on a single individual, celebrating his military prowess, investing him with divine authority, and creating a figure instantly recognizable to readers of Homer and students of Greek history. A Greek State in Formation makes the powerful case that a knowledge of the Greek Bronze Age is indispensable to the classics curriculum.

“This is a book to be read, not just consulted. Jack Davis is a masterly raconteur whose story simultaneously provides a wide-ranging and accessible guide to what archaeology is all about, a broad account of the Greek Bronze Age, and a detailed evocation of Bronze Age Pylos.” ROBIN OSBORNE, Professor of Ancient History, University of Cambridge

“Accessibly written, this book will appeal to scholars of the ancient world and those with an interest in archaeology as a discipline, as well as anyone following the media exposure of the exciting new finds at Pylos.” KIM SHELTON, Associate Professor of Classics, University of California

JACK L. DAVIS is Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati and former Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He is codirector of excavations at the Palace of Nestor with Sharon R. Stocker.

From April to November 1975, the US military processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on the unincorporated territory of Guam; from 1977 to 1979, the State of Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi analyzes these two cases to theorize what she calls the refugee settler condition: the fraught positionality of refugee subjects whose resettlement in a settler colonial state is predicated on the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. This groundbreaking book explores two forms of critical geography: first, archipelagos of empire, examining how the Vietnam War is linked to the US military buildup in Guam and unwavering support of Israel, and second, corresponding archipelagos of trans-Indigenous resistance, tracing how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected through the Vietnamese refugee figure. Considering distinct yet overlapping modalities of refugee and Indigenous displacement, Gandhi offers tools for imagining emergent forms of decolonial solidarity between refugee settlers and Indigenous peoples.

“This is a phenomenal book that takes seriously the implication of Indigenous calls for place-based scholarship to refugee and migration studies and ups the ante by engaging the accountabilities such calls demand. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi exemplifies the possibilities of reading ‘archipelagically’ across Indigenous and Asian American studies, across settler colonies, and against US militarism and empire.” JODI A. BYRD, author of The Transit of Empire

“This strikingly original study demonstrates ways of knowing and connection otherwise— within, across, and beyond incommensurable structural divides and multiple belongings. Deeply inspiring, Gandhi’s archipelagic methodology elucidates compelling political possibilities for decolonial futures.” LISA YONEYAMA, author of Cold War Ruins

EVYN LÊ ESPIRITU GANDHI is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than movies—a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed. Exploring the communities that constituted key subscribers, Ink-Stained Hollywood tells the story of how a heterogeneous trade press triumphed by appealing to the foundational aspects of industry culture—taste, vanity, partisanship, and exclusivity. In captivating detail, Eric Hoyt chronicles the histories of well-known trade papers (Variety, Motion Picture Herald) alongside important yet forgotten publications (Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Camera!). Challenging the canon of film periodicals, we are offered new interpretative frameworks for understanding print journalism’s relationship with cinema and its impact today.

“I know of no other work like this one—a history of American movie trade journalism from the beginnings of cinema to the 1930s. This book constitutes such a deep dive into the archive of these materials, it’s astonishing.” ERIC SMOODIN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

“A terrific study of the rise of film industry trade journals and their behind-the-scenes maneuvering, fights, and back-stabbing. Ink-Stained Hollywood is beautifully written—spry, funny, lively, approachable, yet incredibly knowledgeable.” KATHRYN H. FULLER-SEELEY, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

ERIC HOYT is the Kahl Family Professor of Media Production at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video and is Director of the Media History Digital Library and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.