In this book, Deborah A. Starr recuperates the work of Togo Mizrahi, a pioneer of Egyptian cinema. Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew with Italian nationality, established himself as a prolific director of popular comedies and musicals in the 1930s and 1940s. As a studio owner and producer, Mizrahi promoted the idea that developing a local cinema industry was a project of national importance. Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema integrates film analysis with film history to tease out the cultural and political implications of Mizrahi’s work. His movies, Starr argues, subvert dominant notions of race, gender, and nationality through their playful—and queer—use of masquerade and mistaken identity. Taken together, Mizrahi’s films offer a hopeful vision of a pluralist Egypt. By reevaluating Mizrahi’s contributions to Egyptian culture, Starr challenges readers to reconsider the debates over who is Egyptian and what constitutes national cinema.

“A captivating account of Egyptian film director Togo Mizrahi. Starr shows that Mizrahi’s distinct, often comical vision of Egypt captured a dramatic moment of social, political, and cultural transformation in which people of diverse backgrounds coexisted and struggled to achieve better lives.” JOEL GORDON, author of Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt

“A remarkable study of a remarkable career. Starr offers a comprehensive analysis of a life in filmmaking that adds nuance to our definition of Egyptian nationalism and enhances our appreciation of Alexandrian cinema. This is a book of recovery, reclamation, and celebration.” NANCY E. BERG, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Washington University in St. Louis

DEBORAH A. STARR is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Jewish Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire and coeditor of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff.

In this vitally important book, medical anthropologist Holly Wardlow takes readers through a ten-year history of the AIDS epidemic in Tari, Papua New Guinea, focusing on the political and economic factors that make women vulnerable to HIV and on their experiences with antiretroviral therapy. Alive with the women’s stories about being trafficked to gold mines, resisting polygynous marriages, and struggling to be perceived as morally upright, Fencing in AIDS demonstrates that being female shapes every aspect of the AIDS epidemic. Offering crucial insights into the anthropologies of mining, ethics, and gender, this is essential reading for scholars and professionals addressing the global AIDS crisis today.

“This inspiring book sets the stage for the arrival of the AIDS epidemic in Tari. With the collapse of the state, some women turn to transactional sex for school fees and basic goods. A chorus of women tell stories of rape and abandonment and of their resilience in adopting forms of self-care that include protection for others.” SHIRLEY LINDENBAUM, author of Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands

“Fencing in AIDS is a superb book that creates a consummate connection between an intimate ethnography of gender, sexuality, and HIV amongst Huli people in Papua New Guinea and the structural contours of the economy and politics in that country, engaging the global literature on sex, love, HIV, the state, extractive industries, and moral philosophy.” MARGARET JOLLY, Professor in the School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University

“Holly Wardlow’s thoughtful analysis of changing gender relations reminds us once again why New Guinea societies have figured so importantly in anthropology. Engagingly written, the book offers vignettes of women and situations that are tough and touching.” SUSAN REYNOLDS WHYTE, editor of Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda

HOLLY WARDLOW is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and author of Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society.

Chicago is home to one of the largest, most politically active Palestinian immigrant communities in the United States. For decades, secular nationalism held sway as the dominant political ideology, but since the 1990sits structures have weakened and Islamic institutions have gained strength. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interview data, Palestinian Chicago charts the origins of these changes and the multiple effects they have had on identity across religious, political, class, gender, and generational lines. The perspectives that emerge through this rich ethnography challenge prevailing understandings of secularity and religion,offering critical insight into current debates about immigration and national belonging.

“Provides the first in-depth examination of an important Palestinian-American community in a major US city. This book is a welcome contribution to our understanding of both the Palestinian diaspora and an important US immigrant community.” RASHID KHALIDI, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

“In this groundbreaking and beautifully written book, Loren Lybarger centers the voices of a wide array of Palestinians and brings forth the complex, dynamic, and fluid ways members of this community navigate identity and belonging in today’s world.” MAHA NASSAR, author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World

“Palestinian Chicago masterfully transforms existing understandings of Palestinian identity, resistance, and diaspora. This is an extraordinarily valuable text for anyone interested in history, ethnic studies, urban studies, religious studies, and Middle East studies.” NADINE NABER, author of Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism

“A compelling work that complicates the secular in Palestine and the Arab world, in diaspora, and in the United States.” SHERENE SEIKALY, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine

LOREN D. LYBARGER is Associate Professor of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University. He is the author of Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Islamism and Secularism in the Occupied Territories.

What can anthropological thinking contribute to the study of revolutions? The first book-length anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthropologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted attempts to radically reconstitute the worlds people inhabit. Viewing revolutions as all-embracing, world-creating projects, the authors ask readers to move beyond the idea of revolutions as acts of violent political rupture, and instead regard them as processes of societal transformation that penetrate deeply into the fabric of people’s lives, unfolding and refolding the coordinates of human existence.

“With insightful references to cases around the world, this book advances a brilliant holistic theory that offers credibility and significance to the ways revolutions unfold in culturally specific practices without diminishing their political impact and universal aspirations.” Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, author of Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment

“This fascinating volume opens up new horizons in the study of revolutionary practice. It is difficult to imagine a more important or original work.” David Nugent, author of The Encrypted State: Delusion and Displacement in the Peruvian Andes

“This book is a truly original (in all senses of the term) contribution to understanding the global and human condition of far-reaching political, social, and cosmological change.” Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, author of Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality, and Power in Mozambique

Igor Cherstich is Teaching Fellow in Social Anthropology at University College London. He is coeditor of the special issue “The Multiple Narratives of the Libyan Revolution,” Middle East Critique. Martin Holbraad is Professor of Social Anthropology at University College London. He is author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination and coauthor of The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Nico Tassi is Research Associate at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia, and author of The Native World System: An Ethnography of Bolivian Aymara Traders in the Global Economy.

Of Love and Papers explores how immigration policies are fundamentally reshaping Latino families. Drawing on interviews with undocumented young adults, Enriquez investigates how immigration status creeps into the most personal aspects of everyday life, intersecting with gender to constrain dating, marriage, and parenting. She illustrates how the imprint of illegality remains, even upon obtaining DACA or permanent residency.

Interweaving the perspectives of US citizen romantic partners and children, she exposes the multigenerational punishment that limits the upward mobility of Latino families. Of Love and Papers sparks an intimate understanding of contemporary US immigration policies and their enduring consequences for immigrant families.

“By highlighting the ways US immigration policies shape the experiences of romantic love, intimacy, and family formation, Enriquez’s meticulous research calls attention to the enduring injurious effects on undocumented and DACAmented young adults, and on their citizen spouses and children. An innovative and sobering account of the far-reaching consequences of our punishing immigration policies. Timely and compelling.” PIERRETTE HONDAGNEU-SOTELO, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California

“In an engaging and methodologically rigorous narrative, Enriquez sheds novel light on the courtship and dating phase of family formation among undocumented and/or mixed status Mexican immigrant families. Undeniably, it will be of central interest to anyone who cares about immigrants and their families.” CECILIA MENJÍVAR, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

LAURA E. ENRIQUEZ is Assistant Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

During the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes that underlay these translations. Using as a case study the 1597 Persian rendition of the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha—an influential and popular Sanskrit philosophical tale—Shankar Nair illustrates how these early modern scholars drew upon their respective traditions to forge a common vocabulary through which to understand one another. These scholars thus achieved, Nair argues, a nuanced cultural exchange significant not only to South Asia’s past but also its present.

“An erudite and valuable contribution. Nair’s deep linguistic and philosophical expertise illuminates the writings of three important if overlooked seventeenth-century thinkers.” Supriya Gandhi, author of The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India

“Nair exhibits a breathtaking command of languages, textual traditions, and intellectual cultures in this pioneering study of the crisscrossing of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic cultural jet streams in sixteenth-century India.” Jonardon Ganeri, author of The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700

“Shankar Nair examines a pivotal work of Mughal translation and shows how it channels huge vortexes of Islamic and Hindu intellectual culture. A masterwork.” John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

“A welcome addition to the history of Hindu and Islamic interactions in early modern India, highlighting the subtleties of translation and the painstaking creation of a vocabulary important for both religions.” Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University

Shankar Nair is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia.

Peruvian migrant workers began arriving in South Korea in large numbers in the mid-1990s, eventually becoming one of the largest groups of non-Asians in the country. Migrant Conversions shows how despite facing unstable income and legal exclusion, migrants have come to see Korea as an ideal destination, sometimes even as part of their divine destiny. Faced with a forced end to their residence in Korea, Peruvians have developed strategies to transform themselves from economic migrants into heads of successful transnational families, influential church leaders, and cosmopolitan travelers. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis, Migrant Conversions explores the intersections of three types of conversions—monetary, religious, and cosmopolitan—to argue that migrants use conversions to negotiate the meaning of their lives in a constantly changing transnational context. As Peruvians carve out social spaces, they create complex and uneven connections between Peru and Korea that challenge a global hierarchy of nations and migrants. Exploring how migrants, churches, and nations change through processes of conversion reveals how globalization continues to impact people’s lives and ideas about their futures and pasts long after they have stopped moving or after a particular global moment has come to an end.

“A model of what transnational ethnographic research can accomplish.” ELEANA J. KIM, author of Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging

“With crisp prose and candid presence throughout the text, Vogel gives us the first book-length study of the experiences of non-Asian migrants in South Korea.” CAREN FREEMAN, author of Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea

ERICA VOGEL is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Saddleback College.

South Korea in the 1950s was home to a burgeoning film culture, one of the many “Golden Age cinemas” that flourished in Asia during the postwar years. Cold War Cosmopolitanism offers a transnational cultural history of South Korean film style in this period, focusing on the works of Han Hyung-mo, director of the era’s most glamorous and popular women’s pictures, including the blockbuster Madame Freedom (1956). Christina Klein provides a unique approach to the study of film style, illuminating how Han’s films took shape within a “free world” network of aesthetic and material ties created by the legacies of Japanese colonialism, the construction of US military bases, the waging of the cultural Cold War, the forging of regional political alliances, and the import of popular cultures from around the world. Klein combines nuanced readings of Han’s films with careful attention to key issues of modernity—such as feminism, cosmopolitanism, and consumerism—in the first monograph devoted to this major Korean director.

“Christina Klein shines a brilliant klieg light on the still largely unknown South Korean classic films of the 1950s by placing them in a global context of Cold War culture and politics. This is an original and engaging study with broad scholarly and popular appeal.” CARTER J. ECKERT, author of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea

“Cold War Cosmopolitanism makes a unique contribution to multiple fields. Using Han Hyung-mo’s career and female characters as a springboard, Klein charts the historical and theoretical trajectories of the formation of Cold War cosmopolitanism in 1950s Korea under US hegemony.” HYE SEUNG CHUNG, author of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema

“This book belongs on the bookshelf of everyone interested in the Cold War culture of Asia.” POSHEK FU, author of Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas

CHRISTINA KLEIN is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Boston College.

In a world where attacks on the basic human rights and equal worth of all people are escalating, Advancing Equality reminds us of the critical role of constitutions in protecting equal rights. Analyzing the constitutions of all 193 United Nations countries, this book traces fifty years of change in constitution drafting and examines how stronger protections against discrimination, alongside core social and economic rights, can transform lives. Looking across gender, race and ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity, disability, social class, and migration status, the authors reveal whose rights are increasingly guaranteed in constitutions, identify which nations and groups lag behind, and share inspiring stories of activism and powerful court cases from around the globe. Advancing Equality serves as a comprehensive call to action for anyone who cares about their country’s future.

“Advancing Equality shows how far we have come around the world in protecting human rights, but also how far we still have to go. Working together and taking action, we can make sure everyone’s rights, particularly the most discriminated against and marginalized, are protected in every constitution and enforced by law and societal change to realize true equality and a better world.” ANTONIA KIRKLAND, Global Lead, Legal Equality and Access to Justice, at Equality Now

JODY HEYMANN is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, Director of the WORLD Policy Analysis Center, and Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and of Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. ALETA SPRAGUE is Senior Legal Analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center and an attorney whose career has focused on advancing public policies and laws that address inequality. AMY RAUB is Principal Research Analyst at the WORLD Policy Analysis Center and an economist with over a decade of experience working on discrimination and inequality.

High-Tech Trash analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, primarily from the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, critically offset a broader culture of pervasive risk and discontent. In so doing, she questions how we continue onward, striving to do better and acquire more, despite inevitable disappointment. High-Tech Trash speaks to a paradox in contemporary society in which failure is disavowed yet necessary for technological innovation.

“Leonard Cohen sang ‘There’s a crack in everything…that’s how the light gets in.’ Here, Carolyn Kane teaches us how to see that light, one crack at a time.” FRED TURNER, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties

“Kane profiles art practices and media discourses that exploit and celebrate, rather than filter or suppress, all kinds of errors and noises. A welcome intervention in a number of discursive fields.” PETER KRAPP, author of Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture

“An original work of scholarship that addresses some of the most pervasive phenomena and foundational questions in the contemporary media environment.” ROBERT HARIMAN, coauthor of The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship

CAROLYN L. KANE is Associate Professor of Communication at Ryerson University and author of Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code.