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In Circulations, Courtney Handman examines the surprising continuities in modernist communication discourses that shaped both colonial and decolonial projects in Papua New Guinea. Often described as a place with too many mountains and too many languages to be modern, Papua New Guinea was seen as a space of circulatory primitivity—where people, things, and talk could not move. Colonial missionaries and administrators, and even anticolonial delegations to the United Nations that spearheaded demands for Papua New Guinea’s independence in the 1950s, argued that this circulatory primitivity would only be overcome through the management of communications infrastructures, bureaucratic information flows, and the introduction of English. Innovatively bringing together analyses of communications infrastructures such as radios, airplanes, telepathy, bureaucracy, and lingua francas, Circulations argues for the critical role of communicative networks and communicative imaginaries in political processes of colonialism and decolonization worldwide.
In this book, Dana Simmons explores the enduring production of hunger in US history. Hunger, in the modern United States, became a technology—a weapon, a scientific method, and a policy instrument. During the nineteenth century, state agents and private citizens colluded in large-scale campaigns of ethnic cleansing using hunger and food deprivation. In the twentieth century, officials enacted policies and rules that made incarcerated people, welfare recipients, and beneficiaries of foreign food aid hungry by design, in order to modify their behavior. With the advent of ultraprocessed foods, food manufacturers designed products to stimulate cravings and consumption at the expense of public health. Taking us inside the labs of researchers devoted to understanding hunger as a biological and social phenomenon, On Hunger examines the continuing struggle to produce, suppress, or control hunger in America.
Today, Morocco’s hip hop artists are vital to their country’s reputation as diverse, creative, and modern. But in the 1990s and 2000s, teenage amateurs shaped their craft and ideals together as the profound socioeconomic changes of neoliberalization swept through their neighborhoods. Values That Pay traces Moroccan hip hop’s trajectory from sidewalk cyphers and bedroom studios to royal commendations and international festivals. Kendra Salois draws from more than ten years of research into her interlocutors’ music and moral reasoning to explore the constitutive tensions of institutionalization, hip hop aesthetics, and neoliberal life. Entrepreneurial artists respond to their unavoidable complicity with an extractive state through aesthetic and interpersonal sincerity, educating their fans on the risks and responsibilities of contemporary citizenship. Salois argues that over the past forty years, Moroccan hip hop practitioners have transformed not only themselves but also what it means to be an ethical citizen in a deeply unequal nation.
“Moving effortlessly between street-level ethnography of the rap scene and analysis of the political economy of transnational cultural flows, Kendra Salois offers a keenly observed, historically grounded, and eminently readable history of Moroccan hip hop.” — Hisham Aidi, author of Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture
“Guided by her steady refusal to dismiss Moroccan hip hop artists and their fans as complicit with the state, as sell-outs to the market, or alternatively as resistant, Salois’s caring world of neoliberal subject making is alive with improvisations, debate, ethics, human dilemmas, fortitude, music, and young people having fun.” — Louise Meintjes, author of Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid
Kendra Salois studies the ways musicians make meaning from systems that do not serve them to gain insight into a more just future. She is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at American University in Washington, DC.
At the beginning of the common era, the two major imperial powers of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East were Rome and Parthia. In this book, Jake Nabel analyzes Roman-Parthian interstate politics by focusing on a group of princes from the Arsacid family—the ruling dynasty of Parthia—who were sent to live at the Roman court. Although Roman authors called these figures “hostages” and scholars have studied them as such, Nabel draws on Iranian and Armenian sources to argue that the Parthians would have seen them as the emperor’s foster-children. These divergent perspectives allowed each empire to perceive itself as superior to the other, since the two sides interpreted the exchange of royal children through conflicting cultural frameworks. Moving beyond the paradigm of great powers in conflict, The Arsacids of Rome advances a new vision of interstate relations with misunderstanding at its center.
“A masterful work of political, diplomatic, and cultural history.” — MATTHEW P. CANEPA, University of California, Irvine
“With theoretical ambition, Jake Nabel leads the way towards a truly inclusive study of the ancient world. A transformative work.” — ALBERT DE JONG, Leiden University
“In a world in which human proxies continue to play an outsized role in international relations, this book offers lessons of value still for today.” — JOHN BODEL, Brown University
“Nabel’s thesis of ‘pragmatic misunderstanding,’ confirmed by historical comparison and stupendous criticism of the sources, places research on the political settlements of Roman-Parthian relations on an entirely new footing.” — JOSEF WIESEHÖFER, University of Kiel
JAKE NABEL is the Tombros Early Career Professor of Classical Studies and Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
Undead examines the visual culture of war, broadly understood, through the lens of animation. Focusing on works in which relational, intermedial, and variably paced practices of “(inter)(in)animation” generate aesthetic tactics for thinking about, feeling, and reframing war, Karen Redrobe analyzes works by artists including Yael Bartana, Nancy Davenport, Kelly Dolak and Wazhmah Osman, Gesiye, David Hartt, Helen Hill, Onyeka Igwe, Maryam Mohajer, Ibrahim Nasrallah, and Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. Deftly moving between cinema and media studies, peace and conflict studies, and art history, Undead is an interdisciplinary feminist meditation on the complex relationship between states of war and the discourses, infrastructures, and institutions through which memory, change, and understanding are made.
“Boldly intervenes in the theory and history of the art of animation, charting new approaches to the politics of the moving image at a moment when these are more urgently needed than ever.” — JEAN MA, author of At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators
“Brilliant and deeply inspiring, this book asks its readers to rethink war and animation together, producing a global, decolonial, and feminist theory of the animated image. Weaving a tapestry of animated works and theoretical engagements, Undead invites us to see a different, more hopeful world: one of un-war.” — MARC STEINBERG, author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan
“With theoretical brilliance and an encyclopedic knowledge of film and cultural history, Karen Redrobe enriches the feminist discourse of war resistance, which grows increasingly urgent in our times of emboldened cruelty and destructiveness.” — ROSALYN DEUTSCHE, author of Not-Forgetting: Contemporary Art and the Interrogation of Mastery
KAREN REDROBE is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism and Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis.
Focusing on the provision of gender-affirming care, Health Care Civil Rights analyzes the difficulties and potential of discrimination law in health care settings. The application of civil rights law could be a powerful response to health inequalities in the US, but conservative challenges and the complex and fragmented nature of our health care system have limited the real-world success of this strategy. Revealing deep divides and competing interests that reverberate through patient experiences, insurance claims, and courtroom arguments, Anna Kirkland explains what health care civil rights are, how they work in theory and practice, and how to strengthen them.
"Brilliantly reveals how antidiscrimination law's lofty goals are no match for the US health care system's pathologies. Providing more than just a captivating read on trans patients' fates, Anna Kirkland offers a blueprint for studying minority rights and the political economy of health." — Joanna Wuest, author of Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement
"A meticulously documented, theoretically poignant, and exquisitely written study of the insufficiency of civil rights policy in addressing systemic health inequalities, concluding with sound recommendations for alleviating the failures of health policy and practice." — stef m. shuster, author of Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender
"Informed by extensive fieldwork, this innovative book is written in a refreshingly engaging style that makes room for both an intellectually incisive argument and crystal-clear, practical pointers for correcting discriminatory patterns that harm vulnerable patients." — Colleen Grogan, author of Grow and Hide: The History of America's Health Care State
Anna Kirkland is the Kim Lane Scheppele Collegiate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is author of Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury and Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood.
In just half a century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, spurred by land reform efforts of the authoritarian Republic of China, by farmers associations, and by improved crop varieties. Yet overlooked is how Taiwan brought these practices to the developing world. In the Global Vanguard elucidates the history and impact of the “Taiwan model” of agrarian development by incorporating how Taiwanese experts exported the country’s agrarian success throughout rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. Driven by the global Cold War and challenges to the Republic of China’s legitimacy, Taiwanese agricultural technicians and scientists shared their practices, which they claimed were better suited for poor, tropical societies in the developing world. These development missions, James Lin argues, were portrayed in Taiwan as proof of the Republic of China’s modernity and were crucial to how the ruling government sought to hold on to its contested position in the international system and its rule by martial law at home.
“James Lin vividly recounts how Taiwan became legendary worldwide as a pioneer of rural reform, and how that image came to define it as a nation.” — NICK CULLATHER, author of The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia
“Lin’s compelling study of the ‘agrarian miracle’ in Taiwan is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the global Green Revolution, shedding new light on technoscience, authoritarianism, social change, and Taiwanese identity at home and on the world stage.” — SIGRID SCHMALZER, author of Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China
“Lin’s thoroughly researched book reveals the complex interplay between agriculture, domestic politics in Taiwan, and geopolitics. Examining the south-south development activities of Taiwan’s agricultural practitioners, Lin complicates the larger narrative of mid-twentieth-century global agricultural development practices.” — J. MEGAN GREENE, Professor of History, University of Kansas
JAMES LIN is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Nairobi Hip Hop Flow combines ethnographic methods, political history, and music and performance analysis to illustrate the richness of hip hop’s embodied performance practices. RaShelle R. Peck examines how hip hop artists in Nairobi’s underground rap culture engage with political seriousness in lyrics and sound by fostering a creative playfulness using bodily movement. This unprecedented study shows how Nairobi artists circulate diasporic blackness while at the same time indigenizing hip hop music to interrogate Kenya’s sociopolitical landscape.
“A much‑needed addition to scholarship on Kenya and global hip hop studies. RaShelle Peck places Kenyan hip hop within broader hip hop studies, while recognizing its unique identity.” — Msia Kibona Clark, author of Hip‑Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers
“A remarkable study that takes us into the heart of Nairobi hip hop and introduces a novel approach in the corporeality of hip hop. Peck demonstrates not only what is meant by hip hop flow, but how Kenyan hip hop artists embody such a practice.” — Quentin Williams, coeditor of Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism, and Education in Post‑Apartheid South Africa
“Peck offers a clear intervention into the diasporic and transnational elements of Nairobi hip hop, relating her account to broader histories of hip hop and global formations of blackness that transcend and complicate the local.” — Carter Mathes, author of Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights
RaShelle R. Peck is Assistant Professor of Ethnic and Race Studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. This study represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were collaborating closely with anthropologists who admitted freely that they could not have done their work without them. And both parties brought colonial biases into their work. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories.
“This fascinating collection of essays not only opens up the neglected history of Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian missionization of the Indonesian archipelago, but also contributes to the decolonizing of its historiography. The book’s wealth of data reveals new historical connections and insights that will confound conventional understandings of the region.” — MARGARET KARTOMI, author of Musical Journeys in Sumatra
“Examining anew the value of the documentation that missionaries accomplished, their interactions with the people and places they occupied, and their relationships with other kinds of observers, this volume is a much-needed corrective and an absolutely fascinating read that enriches the ethnomusicology of Indonesia and beyond.” — ANNE K. RASMUSSEN, author of Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia
ANNA MARIA BUSSE BERGER is Distinguished Professor of Music emerita at the University of California, Davis and the author of The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany and Medieval Music and the Art of Memory.
HENRY SPILLER is Professor of Music emeritus at the University of California, Davis and the author of Erotic Triangles and Javaphilia.
Delta Futures explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta’s imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain. In Bangladesh’s southwest, development programs that imagine the delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame the delta as a conservation zone and as projects that see its rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. Jason Cons explores how these competing futures are being brought to life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in the delta, and the entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits. These future visions produce the delta as a “climate frontier,” a zone where opportunity, expropriation, and risk in the present are increasingly framed in relation to disparate visions of the delta’s climate-affected future.
“Jason Cons’s ethnography is filled with insights into the multiple and often contradictory entanglements of global warming, crime, politics, development, and projected ‘climate solutions.’ This important work presents a ground-level portrait of the region’s ongoing transformation, examining the ways in which climate change, economic uncertainty, and historical legacies are shaping its future.” — AMITAV GHOSH, author of Smoke and Ashes
“Delta Futures illustrates how the Bengal Delta and its inhabitants are being ‘captured’ by particular actors and imaginations, struggling to navigate the ‘siltscape’ with ever smaller margins between climate frontier futures. A very powerful book.” — FRANZ KRAUSE, author of Thinking Like a River
“In this creative and original work, Cons makes us think more closely about how climate change is remaking a place that could be considered a ‘sentinel space’ for the planetary crisis, and how people are living through it.” — NAYANIKA MATHUR, author of Crooked Cats
JASON CONS is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
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.
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.
Music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and those offered by Chinese web giant Tencent are now central to everyday musical activity across much of the world, with enormous ramifications for musical culture in modern societies. Bringing together case studies from twelve countries, Music Streaming around the World provides the first international account of how streaming is shaping music culture today by considering the implications of streaming platforms for the production, distribution, and consumption of recorded music around the globe.
