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Multiculturalism in the British Commonwealth examines cultural diversity across the postwar Commonwealth, situating modern multiculturalism in its national, international, and historical contexts. Bringing together practitioners from across the humanities and social sciences to explore the legal, political, and philosophical issues involved, these essays address common questions: What is postwar multiculturalism? Why did it come about? How have social actors responded to it? In addition to chapters on Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, this volume also covers India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, and Trinidad, tracing the historical roots of contemporary dilemmas back to the intertwined legacies of imperialism and liberalism. In so doing, it demonstrates that multiculturalism has implications that stretch far beyond current formulations in public and academic discourse.
“This volume makes a significant contribution to the history and politics of crossnational multiculturalism within the English-speaking world. I expect this book to quickly become a principal text.” ANDREW FAGAN, author of Human Rights and Cultural Diversity
“Ashcroft and Bevir have put together an excellent collection of essays by a first-rate group of scholars. I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in the challenges posed by cultural and national identity to liberal democratic states.” PHIL PARVIN, author of Karl Popper
RICHARD T. ASHCROFT is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and in the International and Area Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His research has been published in the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy and The Political Quarterly.
MARK BEVIR is Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Professor of Governance at the United Nations University and a Distinguished Research Professor at Swansea University. He is the author of A Theory of Governance, The Making of British Socialism, and Democratic Governance.
Impersonations centers on an insular community of Smarta brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who don strī-vēṣam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance limited to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban to transnational, brahmin to non-brahmin, hegemonic to nonnormative—to explore the artifice of brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.
“By charting the complex practices of masculinity through South Indian dance, Kamath deconstructs hegemonic brahmin masculinity and offers an intellectual tour de force that challenges Western epistemologies of gender.” STANLEY THANGARAJ, author of Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity
“Beautifully crafted and presented, this book fills a lacuna in scholarship on the figure of the brahmin man in relation to his gender identity and makes a compelling contribution to the field of Indian dance historiography, which often overlooks the critical role the dancing male body.” VASUDHA NARAYANAN, Distinguished Professor of Religion, University of Florida
HARSHITA MRUTHINTI KAMATH is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Assistant Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History at Emory University.
Edited and with an introduction by Daniel Morgan
Foreword by Tom Gunning
In this beautifully written and deeply researched study, Hannah Frank provides an original way to understand American animated cartoons from the Golden Age of animation (1920–1960). In the pre-digital age of the twentieth century, the making of cartoons was mechanized and standardized: thousands of drawings were inked and painted onto individual transparent celluloid sheets (called “cels”) and then photographed in succession, a labor-intensive process that was divided across scores of artists and technicians. In order to see the art, labor, and technology of cel animation, Frank slows cartoons down to look frame by frame, finding hitherto unseen aspects of the animated image. What emerges is both a methodology and a highly original account of an art formed on the assembly line.
“A thrilling read—one of the most exuberant, brilliant books I’ve come across in a very long time. I have lived with many of the cartoons Hannah Frank analyzes for pretty much my entire life and never suspected the hidden life or lives within their images, the inscription of histories (social, personal, technological, aesthetic) in which, it turns out, they abound.” SCOTT BUKATMAN, Stanford University
“Frank’s work is deeply refreshing in its ability to think across and weave together different strands of the debates about animation that have arisen to date. These are big conversations, and Frank is impressive in her ability to think lucidly across them in such fluent and productive ways.” KAREN REDROBE, University of Pennsylvania
HANNAH FRANK (1984–2017) was Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work has been published in Critical Quarterly and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and she contributed to A World Redrawn: Eisenstein and Brecht in Hollywood.
DANIEL MORGAN is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and is author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema.
Associate Editor MATTHEW KIRSCH
The Saburo Hasegawa Reader is an open access companion to the bilingual catalogue copublished with The Noguchi Museum to accompany an international touring exhibition, Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. The exhibition features the work of two artists who were friends and contemporaries: Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa. This volume is intended to give scholars and general readers access to a wealth of archival material and writings by and about Saburo Hasegawa. While Noguchi’s reputation as a preeminent American sculptor of the twentieth century only grows stronger, Saburo Hasegawa is less well known, despite being considered the most literate artist in Japan during his lifetime (1906–1957). Hasegawa is credited with introducing elements of European abstraction in Japan in the mid 1930s. He also worked in diverse media including oil and ink painting, photography, and printmaking. Hasegawa was a theorist and widely published essayist, curator, teacher, and multilingual conversationalist.
“A useful resource for scholars and general readers interested in the multiple connections between postwar Japanese modernism and American abstract expressionism.” AYA LOUISA MCDONALD, Professor of Art History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
“The first comprehensive English-language resource on the artistic and theoretical oeuvre of the first proponent of abstract art in Japan, Saburo Hasegawa, one of the most original and inspirational art theoreticians of the twentieth century.” EUGENIA BOGDANOVA-KUMMER, Lecturer in Japanese Arts, Cultures, and Heritage, Sainsbury Institute
MARK DEAN JOHNSON is Professor of Art at San Francisco State University. DAKIN HART is Senior Curator of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.
Creating the Intellectual redefines how we understand relations between intellectuals and the Chinese socialist revolution of the last century. Under the Chinese Communist Party, “the intellectual” was first and foremost a widening classification of individuals based on Marxist thought. The party turned revolutionaries and otherwise ordinary people into subjects identified as usable but untrustworthy intellectuals, an identification that profoundly affected patterns of domination, interaction, and rupture within the revolutionary enterprise. Drawing on a wide range of data, Eddy U takes the reader on a journey that examines political discourses, revolutionary strategies, rural activities, urban registrations, workplace arrangements, organized protests, and theater productions. He lays out in colorful detail the formation of new identities in Chinese society as well as new forms of organization and association. The outcome is a compelling picture of the mutual constitution of the intellectual and the Chinese socialist revolution, the legacy of which still affects ways of seeing, thinking, acting, and feeling in what is now a globalized China.
“This is an illuminating study of how the introduction in early twentieth-century China of the new category of ‘intellectual’ not only altered the status of millions of educated Chinese but also transformed the trajectory of Chinese Communism itself.” ELIZABETH J. PERRY, Professor of Government, Harvard University
“Innovatively framing the story as a decades-long process, Eddy U conclusively demonstrates the political construction of the ‘intellectual’ as a social category by the Chinese Communist Party. This book deepens our understanding of the tortured relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and these individuals, one that would have catastrophic consequences during the Cultural Revolution.” ANDREW WALDER, Professor of Sociology, Stanford University
EDDY U is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Disorganizing China: Counter-Bureaucracy and the Decline of Socialism.
Introduced and Translated by Jens Hanssen and Hicham Safieddine
Foreword by Ussama Makdisi
When Nafir Suriyya—“The Clarion of Syria”—was penned between September 1860 and April 1861, its author Butrus al-Bustani, a major figure in the modern Arabic Renaissance, had witnessed his homeland undergo unprecedented violence in what many today consider Lebanon’s first civil war. Written during Ottoman and European investigations into the causes and culprits of the atrocities, The Clarion of Syria is both a commentary on the politics of state intervention and social upheaval and a set of visions for the future of Syrian society in the wake of conflict.
This translation makes a key historical document accessible for the first time to an English audience. Rereading this work in the context of today’s political violence in war-torn Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world helps us gain a critical and historical perspective on sectarianism, class rebellion, foreign invasions, conflict resolution, Western interventionism, and nationalist tropes of reconciliation.
“The first English translation of this foundational text offered alongside a fantastic historical introduction, this is an excellent and much-needed contribution from uniquely qualified scholars.” STEPHEN SHEEHI, author of The Arab Imago
BUTRUS AL-BUSTANI was a nineteenth century Ottoman Arab educator and public intellectual regarded by many as the first Syrian nationalist owing to the publication of his Nafir Suriyya following the 1860 communal disturbances in Mt. Lebanon and Damascus.
JENS HANSSEN is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean History at the University of Toronto. He is author of Fin de Siècle Beirut and coeditor of Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age and Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age.
HICHAM SAFIEDDINE is Assistant Professor of History of the Modern Middle East at King’s College, London. He is author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon, cofounder of Al-Akhbar English, and editor of The Legal Agenda English Edition.
Flight during times of persecution has a long and fraught history in early Christianity. In the third century, bishops who fl ed were considered cowards or, worse yet, heretics. On the face, flight meant denial of Christ and thus betrayal of faith and community. But by the fourth century, the terms of persecution changed as Christianity became the favored cult of the Roman Empire. Prominent Christians who fl ed and survived became founders and influencers of Christianity over time.
Bishops in Flight examines the various ways these episcopal leaders both appealed to and altered the discourse of Christian flight to defend their status as purveyors of Christian truth, even when their exiles appeared to condemn them. Their stories illuminate how profoundly Christian authors deployed theological discourse and the rhetoric of heresy to respond to the phenomenal political instability of the fourth and fifth centuries.
“This exciting book offers the first sustained examination of flight during times of persecution. A significant contribution to the study of late antiquity that readers are sure to find highly stimulating.” SUSANNA ELM, author of Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome
“A fascinating meditative exploration of the shifting nature of exile and its uses in late ancient Christianity. Jennifer Barry depicts with lucid prose the adoptions and adaptations Christian bishops made of the concept in order to tap the authority exile could grant to those who managed it well. Those who study early church politics and imperial power will relish this book.” ELLEN MUEHLBERGER, author of Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity
JENNIFER BARRY is Assistant Professor of Religion at University of Mary Washington.
Built in the 1890s at the center of the nation, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary was designed specifically to be a replica of the US Capitol Building. But why? The Prison of Democracy explains the political significance of a prison built to mimic one of America’s monuments to democracy. Locating Leavenworth in memory, history, and law, the prison geographically sits at the borders of Indian Territory (1825–1854) and Bleeding Kansas (1854–1864), both sites of contestation over slavery and freedom. Author Sara M. Benson argues that Leavenworth reshaped the design of punishment in America by gradually normalizing state-inflicted violence against citizens. Leavenworth’s peculiar architecture illustrates the real roots of mass incarceration—as an explicitly race- and nation-building system that has been ingrained in the very fabric of US history rather than as part of a recent post-war racial history. The book sheds light on the truth of the painful relationship between the carceral state and democracy in the United States—a relationship that thrives to this day.
“The imaginative rereading, through primary sources, of Fort Leavenworth and a host of other subjects including abolitionism, border prisons, North-South relations, and the campaign against Native Americans adds up to an original and exceptionally significant piece of research and scholarship.” DESMOND KING, author of Separate and Unequal
“A significant contribution to the literature regarding race, crime, and punishment. The analytical insight that the author provides through a rereading and recentering of Leavenworth is both a contribution to and an immanent critique of racialized notions of mass incarceration.” DANIEL KATO, author of Liberalizing Lynching
SARA M. BENSON is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at San Jose State University and teaches at Oakes College at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Persian is one of the great lingua francas of world history. Yet despite its recognition as a shared language across the Islamic world and beyond, its scope, impact, and mechanisms remain underexplored. A world historical inquiry into pre-modern cosmopolitanism, The Persianate World traces the reach and limits of Persian as a Eurasian language in a comprehensive survey of its geographical, literary, and social frontiers. From Siberia to Southeast Asia, and between London and Beijing, this book shows how Persian gained, maintained, and finally surrendered its status to imperial and vernacular competitors. Fourteen essays trace Persian’s interactions with Bengali, Chinese, Turkic, Punjabi, and other languages to identify the forces that extended “Persographia,” the domain of written Persian. Spanning the ages of expansion and contraction, The Persianate World offers a critical survey of both the supports and constraints of one of history’s key languages of global exchange.
“This groundbreaking collection illuminates the multifaceted and very complex history of the rise and decline of the Persian language as a lingua franca.” AHMAD KARIMI-HAKKAK, author of Recasting Persian Poetry
“With erudition and refinement, this book accomplishes something remarkable—it provides a timely corrective to an anachronistic understanding of the Persianate sphere as an empire of letters centred on Iran.” PAOLO SARTORI, author of Visions of Justice
“An exceptionally important contribution to our understanding of what constituted the Persianate world.” ANDREW PEACOCK, University of St. Andrews
NILE GREEN holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Sufism: A Global History and Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam and editor of Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban.
Scholarly discussions on economic development in history, specifically those linked to industrialization or modern economic growth, have paid great attention to the formation and development of the market economy as a set of institutions able to augment people’s welfare. The role of nonmarket practices for promoting economic development and success has been an area of interest, typically involving discussion of the state’s economic policies. How have societies tackled problems that the market did not handle well? To what extent did their solutions reflect the structure of their economy?
Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy explores these questions by investigating efforts made for the provision of “public goods” in early modern economies from the perspective of Japanese socioeconomic history during the Tokugawa era (1603–1868), and comparing those cases with others from Europe and China. The contributors focus on three areas of inquiry—welfare policies for the poor, infrastructure, and forest management—to provide both a unique perspective on Japanese public finance at local levels and a vantage point outside of Europe. The book seeks to encourage a more global view of the early modern political economies that shaped subsequent modern transformations.
“With new global evidence that goes well beyond the timeworn topics of taxation and military spending, Public Goods Provision will make historians and social scientists rethink the development of fiscal systems, the history of public spending, and the long-run pattern of political and economic development.” PHILIP T. HOFFMAN, author of Why Did Europe Conquer the World?
MASAYUKI TANIMOTO is Professor of Economic History at the University of Tokyo and editor of The Role of Tradition in Japan’s Industrialization: Another Path to Industrialization. R. BIN WONG is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and coauthor of Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe.
Renaissance Futurities considers the intersections between artistic rebirth, the new science, and European imperialism in the global early modern world. Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez reconsider the work of Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), prolific artist and inventor, and other polymaths such as philosopher Giulio “Delminio” Camillo (1480–1544), physician and naturalist Francisco Hernández de Toledo (1514–1587), and writer Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). This concern with futurity is inspired by the Renaissance itself, a period defined by visions of the future, as well as by recent theorizing of temporality in Renaissance, queer, and ethnic studies. This transdisciplinary collection is at the cutting edge of the humanities, the sciences, and the arts with contributions in history, art history, literature, media studies, mathematics, and medicine.
Iran’s particular system of traditional Persian art music has been long treated as the product of an ever-evolving, ancient Persian culture. In Music of a Thousand Years, Ann E. Lucas argues that this music is a modern phenomenon indelibly tied to changing notions of Iran’s national history. Rather than considering a single Persian music history, Lucas demonstrates cultural dissimilarity and discontinuity over time, bringing to light two different notions of music-making in relation to premodern and modern musical norms. An important corrective to the history of Persian music, Music of a Thousand Years is the first work to align understandings of Middle Eastern music history with current understandings of the region’s political history.
Louder and Faster is a cultural study of the phenomenon of Asian American taiko, the thundering, athletic drumming tradition that originated in Japan. Immersed in the taiko scene for twenty years, Deborah Wong has witnessed cultural and demographic changes and the exponential growth and expansion of taiko, particularly in Southern California. Through her participatory ethnographic work, she reveals a complicated story embedded in memories of Japanese American incarceration and legacies of imperialism, Asian American identity and politics, a desire to be seen and heard, and the intersection of culture and global capitalism. Exploring the materialities of the drums, costumes, and bodies that make sound, analyzing the relationship of these to capitalist multiculturalism, and investigating the gender politics of taiko, Louder and Faster considers both the promises and pitfalls of music and performance as an antiracist practice. The result is a vivid glimpse of an Asian American presence that is both loud and fragile.
Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the “giant evils” while diagnosing the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society. More recently, during the final quarter of the twentieth century, the global spread of neoliberal policies enlarged these crises so much that the Social Question has made a comeback.
This carefully curated volume maps the linked crises across regions and countries and identifies the renewed and intensified Social Question as a labor issue. It includes discussions of American exceptionalism, Chinese repression, Indian exclusion, South African colonialism, democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, and other phenomena. Evaluated here are the effects of capitalism, the impact of the scarcity of waged work, and the degree to which the dispossessed poor bear the brunt of the crisis. Both thorough and thoughtful, the book serves as collective effort to revive and reposition the Social Question, reconstructing its meaning and its politics in the world today.
The Emergence of Modern Hinduism argues for the importance of regional, vernacular innovation in processes of Hindu modernization. Scholars usually trace the emergence of modern Hinduism to cosmopolitan reform movements, producing accounts that overemphasize the centrality of elite religion and the influence of Western ideas and models. In this study, the author considers religious change on the margins of colonialism by looking at an important local figure, the Tamil Shaiva poet and mystic Ramalinga Swami (1823–1874). Richard S. Weiss narrates a history of Hindu modernization that demonstrates the transformative role of Hindu ideas, models, and institutions, making this text essential for scholarly audiences of South Asian history, religious studies, Hindu studies, and South Asian studies.
There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories—pīr katha—are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels, Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal.
What Is a Family? explores the histories of diverse households during the Tokugawa period in Japan (1603–1868). The households studied here differ in locale and in status—from samurai to outcaste, peasant to merchant—but what unites them is life within the social order of the Tokugawa shogunate. The circumstances and choices that made one household unlike another were framed, then as now, by prevailing laws, norms, and controls on resources. These factors led the majority to form stem families, which are a focus of this volume. The essays in this book draw on rich sources—population registers, legal documents, personal archives, and popular literature—to combine accounts of collective practices (such as the adoption of heirs) with intimate portraits of individual actors (such as a murderous wife). They highlight the variety and adaptability of households that, while shaped by a shared social order, do not conform to any stereotypical version of a Japanese family.
