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Beginning in 1948, Israeli paramilitary forces began violently displacing Palestinian Arabs from Palestine. Nakba and Survival tells the stories of Palestinians in Haifa and the Galilee during, and in the decade after, mass dispossession. Manna uses oral histories and Palestinian and Israeli archives, diaries, and memoirs to meticulously reconstruct the social history of the Palestinians who remained and returned to become Israeli citizens. This book focuses in particular on the Galilee, using the story of Manna’s own family and their village Majd al-Krum after the establishment of Israel to shed light on the cruelties faced by survivors of the military regime. While scholars of the Palestinian national movement have often studied Palestinian resistance to Israel as related to the armed struggle and the cultural struggle against the Jewish state, Manna shows that remaining in Israel under the brutality of occupation and fighting to return to Palestinian communities after displacement are acts of heroism in their own right.
“Nakba and Survival is bound to be the standard authoritative study of the 1948 war in the city of Haifa and the Galilee.”—Salim Tamari, coauthor of Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine
“Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how the events of 1948 continue to shape the Palestinian condition today.”—Maha Nassar, author of Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World
“The empathy for, and solidarity with, Adel Manna’s historical subjects shapes the book’s narratives, the questions it asks, and its deft use of oral histories. A must-read for all those who want to understand daily lives under settler colonial rule.”—Orit Bashkin, coeditor of Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity
ADEL MANNA is the author and editor of several books on Ottoman Palestinian history including The Palestinians in the Twentieth Century: A View from Within and Society and Administration in Jerusalem during the Middle Ottoman Period.
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.
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.
The relationships between female sex workers and their noncommercial male partners are often assumed to be coercive and anchored in risk, dismissed as “pimp-prostitute” arrangements by researchers and the general public alike. Yet, these stereotypes unjustly erase the complexity of lives we imagine to be consumed by social suffering. Dangerous Love centers a framework of love to rethink sex workers’ intimate relationships as commitments to collective solidarity and survival in contexts of oppression. Combining epidemiological research and ethnographic fieldwork in Tijuana, Mexico, Jennifer Leigh Syvertsen examines how individuals try to find love and meaning in lives marked by structural violence, social marginalization, drug addiction, and HIV/AIDS. Linking the political economy of inequalities along the border with emotional lived experience, this book explores how intimate relationships become dangerous safe havens that fundamentally shape both partners’ well-being. Through these stories, we are urged to reimagine the socially transformative power of love to carve new pathways to health equity.
Until the Storm Passes reveals how Brazil's 1964–1985 military dictatorship contributed to its own demise by alienating the civilian political elites who initially helped bring it to power. Based on exhaustive research conducted in nearly twenty archives in five countries, as well as on oral histories with surviving politicians from the period, this book tells the surprising story of how the alternatingly self-interested and heroic resistance of the political class contributed decisively to Brazil's democratization. As they gradually turned against military rule, politicians began to embrace a political role for the masses that most of them would never have accepted in 1964, thus setting the stage for the breathtaking expansion of democracy that Brazil enjoyed over the next three decades.
Recent decades have seen a widespread effort to imprison more people for sexual violence. The Stains of Imprisonment offers an ethnographic account of one of the worlds that this push has created: an English prison for men convicted of sex offenses. This book examines the ways in which prisons are morally communicative institutions, instilling in prisoners particular ideas about the offenses they have committed—ideas that carry implications for prisoners' moral character. Investigating the moral messages contained in the prosaic yet power-imbued processes that make up daily life in custody, Ievins finds that the prison she studied communicated a pervasive sense of disgust and shame, marking the men it held as permanently stained. Rather than promoting accountability, this message discouraged prisoners from engaging in serious moral reflection on the harms they had caused. Analyzing these effects, Ievins explores the role that imprisonment plays as a response to sexual harm, and the extent to which it takes us closer to and further from justice.
Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing’s aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, and cosmopolitan aspiration. At the heart of these tensions, a question persistently emerges: How does English become more than a language—and whiteness more than a race? Engaging in this inquiry, Ke-Schutte explores twenty-first century Afro-Chinese encounters as translational events that diagram the discursive contours of a changing transnational political order—one that will certainly be shaped by African and Chinese relations.
Well into the twenty-first century, achieving gender equality in the economy remains unfinished business. Worldwide, women’s employment, income, and leadership opportunities lag men’s. Building and using a one-of-a-kind database that covers 193 countries, this book systematically analyzes how far we’ve come and how far we have to go in adopting evidence-based solutions to close the gaps. Spanning topics including girls’ education, employment discrimination of all kinds, sexual harassment, and caregiving needs across the life course, the authors bring the findings to life through global maps, stories of laws’ impact in courts and beyond, and case studies of making change. A powerful call to action, Equality within Our Lifetimes reveals how gender equality is both feasible and urgently needed to address some of the greatest challenges of our generation.
Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world’s first “water-exporting country” when it signed a 1986 treaty with its powerful neighbor. An elaborate network of dams and tunnels now carries water to Johannesburg, the subcontinent’s water-stressed economic epicenter. Hopes that proceeds from water sales could improve Lesotho’s fortunes, however, have clashed with fears that soil erosion from overgrazing livestock could fill its reservoirs with sediment. In this wide-ranging and deeply researched book, Colin Hoag shows how producing water commodities incites a fluvial imagination: a sense for how water flows. As we enter our planet’s water-export era, Lesotho exposes the possibilities and perils ahead.
Many recent works of contemporary art, performance, and film turn a spotlight on sleep, wresting it from the hidden, private spaces to which it is commonly relegated. At the Edges of Sleep considers sleep in film and moving image art as both a subject matter to explore onscreen and a state to induce in the audience. Far from negating action or meaning, sleep extends into new territories as it designates ways of existing in the world, in relation to people, places, and the past. Defined positively, sleep also expands our understanding of reception beyond the binary of concentration and distraction. These possibilities converge in the work of Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has explored the subject of sleep systematically throughout his career. In examining Apichatpong’s work, Jean Ma brings together an array of interlocutors—from Freud to Proust, George Méliès to Tsai Ming-liang, Weegee to Warhol—to rethink moving images through the lens of sleep. Ma exposes an affinity between cinema, spectatorship, and sleep that dates to the earliest years of filmmaking, and sheds light upon the shifting cultural valences of sleep in the present moment.
The rise of China and India could be the most important political development of the twenty-first century. What will the foreign policies of China and India look like in the future? What should they look like? And what can each country learn from the other? Bridging Two Worlds gathers a coterie of experts in the field, analyzing profound political thinkers from these ancient regions whose theories of interstate relations set the terms for the debates today. This volume is the first work that systematically compares ancient thoughts and theories about international politics between China and India. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the growth of China and India and what it will mean for the rest of the world.
What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual Ends draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with hospice patients, chaplains, and medical workers to provide an intimate portrayal of how spiritual care is provided to the dying in Japan. Timothy O. Benedict uses both local and cross-cultural perspectives to show how hospice caregivers in Japan are appropriating and reinterpreting global ideas about spirituality and the practice of spiritual care. Benedict relates these findings to a longer story of how Japanese religious groups have pursued vocational roles in medical institutions as a means to demonstrate a so-called “healthy” role in society. By paying attention to how care for the kokoro (heart or mind) is key to the practice of spiritual care, this book enriches conventional understandings of religious identity in Japan while offering a valuable East Asian perspective to global conversations on the ways religion, spirituality, and medicine intersect at death.
