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Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan’s media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem. Drawing together approaches from literary, media, and disability studies, he contends that poetry actively aimed to disrupt the norms of media in each era. For the poets in Expanding Verse, poetry was not a medium in and of itself but a way to push back against what new media technologies crystallized and perpetuated. Their aim was to challenge dominant conceptions of embodiment and sensation, as well as who counts as a poet and what counts as poetry. Over and over, poetic practice became a way to think about each medium otherwise, and to find new possibilities at the edge of media.
“Approaches the history of modern Japanese literature from an entirely new angle—media ecologies of poetry. The result is nothing less than an alternative history of literature in Japan as well as a history of media that is by turns surprising and deeply satisfying.” THOMAS LAMARRE, author of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media
“Expanding Verse is original, timely, and substantial. Warm and inviting— readers will be left feeling much informed about the poets’ respective lives, challenges, and adventures.” ATSUKO SAKAKI, author of Train Travel as Embodied Space-Time in Narrative Theory
“This book impresses on every page as a stunning work of scholarly rigor and innovative thinking. Andrew Campana rethinks the literary form, challenging us to reconfigure literary and media studies.” JONATHAN E. ABEL, author of The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji
ANDREW CAMPANA is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Media at Cornell University.
Over the past few decades, scholars have traced how Indian Ocean merchants forged transregional networks into a world of global connections. East Africa’s crucial role in this Indian Ocean world has primarily been understood through the influence of coastal trading centers like Mombasa. In Inland from Mombasa, David P. Bresnahan looks anew at this Swahili port city from the vantage point of the communities that lived on its rural edges. By reconstructing the deep history of these Mijikenda-speaking societies over the past two millennia, he shows how profoundly they influenced global trade even as they rejected many of the cosmopolitan practices that historians have claimed are critical to creating global connections. Bresnahan makes the compelling case that the seemingly isolating alternative social pursuits engaged in by Mijikenda speakers were in fact key to their active role in global commerce and politics.
“This is exemplary scholarship that recenters the Indian Ocean world on the African continent. By reconstructing the deep history of Mijikenda societies, David Bresnahan demonstrates how the decisions they made about their own lives affected power relations across the Arabian Sea and beyond.” — Rhiannon Stephens, author of Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History
“An enlightening, urgent, and refreshing intervention. This book provides a critically important perspective on Mombasa from its surrounding communities and, in the process, a genre-defining reconceptualization of the essential role of inland societies that chose not to be centralized in the process of globalization and trade across the Indian Ocean.” — Bettina Ng’weno, Associate Professor of African American and African Studies, University of California, Davis
David P. Bresnahan is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah.
At once theoretically sophisticated and poignantly written, Constructed Movements centers stories from communities in Mexico profoundly affected by emigration to the United States to show how migration extracts resources along racial lines. Ragini Shah chronicles how three interrelated dynamics—the maldistribution of public resources, the exploitation of migrant labor, and the US immigration enforcement regime—entrench the necessity of migration as a strategy for survival in Mexico. She also highlights the alternative visions elaborated by migrant community organizations that seek to end the conditions that force migration. Recognizing that reform without recompense will never right an unjust migratory system, Shah concludes with a forceful call for the US and Mexican governments to make abolitionist investments and reparative compensation to directly counteract this legacy of extraction.
“Convincingly makes the case that migration is neither a symptom of nor a solution to inequality but is rather part of a racialized system of extraction perpetuated by both US and Mexican governments. Insightful and expertly argued.” — SHANNON GLEESON, coauthor of Scaling Migrant Worker Rights: How Advocates Collaborate and Contest State Power
“A compelling and timely examination of the ways that racial capitalism extracts wealth from migrant communities.” — CARMEN G. GONZALEZ, coeditor of The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development
“Essential reading for both students and scholars dedicated to shaping informed, humane migration policies.” — KARLA McKANDERS, Director, Thurgood Marshall Institute at NAACP Legal Defense Fund
“This paradigm-shifting book makes a timely and important contribution to the literature on migration, gender, and racial capitalism.” — RACHEL E. ROSENBLOOM, Northeastern University School of Law
RAGINI SHAH is Clinical Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School, where she is founding director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic.
Emergency in Transit responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. Eleanor Paynter reformulates Europe’s so‑called migrant crisis from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights. Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, she draws together testimonials from ethnographic research alongside examples from film, media, literature, and visual art to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration well beyond international borders. Revealing how this emergency apparatus operates, and centering the experiences of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea.
“Passionate and timely. Illuminates possibilities for a different future.” — SANDRO MEZZADRA, coauthor of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (with Brett Neilson)
“This excellent book navigates its way through the at times haunting accounts of survivors of the Mediterranean crossings, the forms of protest crafted in elegy to the victims, and the many artistic productions that document a rich and vibrant emergent cultural world often silenced in popular discourse. Eleanor Paynter unearths the many symbols and tokens of transformation of a society caught in its own web of forgetting.” — DONALD MARTIN CARTER, author of Navigating the African Diaspora: The Anthropology of Invisibility
“Emergency in Transit brilliantly shows how emergency, as both a logic and an operation, ushers in a new age in Italy wherein virulent and violent forms of racism are given space to play out. This beautifully written book also holds space for the voices, texts, films, and sounds that serve as witness and testimony to this pernicious age.” — STEPHANIE MALIA HOM, University of California, Santa Barbara
ELEANOR PAYNTER is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Oregon.
After the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Rome finally took control of Egypt. This occupation simultaneously facilitated and circumscribed the exchange of goods, people, and ideas along the paths carved across Rome’s burgeoning empire. In this book, Edward Kelting sets out to recapture one of these systems of exchange: the vibrant literary tradition known as Aegyptiaca—or “Egyptian things”—in which culturally mixed authors wrote about Egypt for a Greek and Roman audience. These authors have been dismissed as not really “Egyptian,” and their contemporary popularity has been ignored. But as Kelting powerfully argues, this genre in fact constitutes a vibrant intellectual tradition, developed from heterogeneous influences but deeply engaged with Egypt’s pharaonic past. In contrast to usual narratives of Roman domination, Kelting uncovers a complex project of political engagement and cultural translation in which Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all participated.
“In this stunning book, Edward Kelting tells the story of how Rome discovered Egyptian culture in the first century ce. He skillfully explores the lives of the people who made it happen, a group of bicultural intellectuals and writers who worked in Rome but had their roots in Alexandria. This is an important book that needed to be written and deserves to be widely read.” — IAN RUTHERFORD, Professor of Greek at the University of Reading
“Rich and wide-ranging, this book interrogates the concept of Aegyptiaca and finds something that was never fixed, never simply the merging of two pure components, Greek and Egyptian. The reality was, instead, both heterogeneous and fluid. Kelting repeatedly draws out the problems of reductive readings of Greco-Roman Egypt. A major scholarly contribution.” — JOHN DILLERY, Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia
EDWARD WILLIAM KELTING is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
Mal-Nutrition documents how maternal health interventions in Guatemala are complicit in reproducing poverty. Policy makers speak about how a critical window of biological growth around the time of pregnancy—called the "first 1,000 days of life"—determines health and wealth across the life course. They argue that fetal development is the key to global development. In this thought-provoking and timely book, Emily Yates-Doerr shows that the control of mothering is a paradigmatic technique of American violence that serves to control the reproduction of privilege and power. She illustrates the efforts of Guatemalan scientists, midwives, and mothers to counter the harms of such mal-nutrition. Their powerful stories offer a window into a form of nutrition science and policy that encourages collective nourishment and fosters reproductive cycles in which women, children, and their entire communities can flourish.
"This sensitive, wide-ranging, and beautifully written ethnography teaches us how the language of biological reproduction works to appropriate women’s rich generative and creative capacities for the reproduction of empire." — CARLOTA McALLISTER, author of The Good Road
"Gripping and intricately layered in its analysis, this groundbreaking work illuminates how interventions purporting to improve women’s health and reproduction so often do more to uphold the very structures underlying gender violence and health inequality." — MEGAN A. CARNEY, author of The Unending Hunger
"Mal-Nutrition brilliantly reveals a global struggle behind vulnerable women—against sexual violence and the displacement of their communities by agricapital. This is a timely and urgent book." — RAYNA RAPP, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus
EMILY YATES-DOERR is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oregon State University and author of The Weight of Obesity.
Intersectional Incoherence stages an encounter between the critical discourse on intersectionality and texts produced by Korean subjects of the Japanese empire and their postwar descendants in Japan, known as Zainichi Koreans. Arguing for intersectionality as a reading method rather than strictly a tool of social analysis, Cindi Textor reads moments of illegibility and incoherent language in these texts as a product of the pressures on Zainichi Koreans and their literature to represent both Korean difference from and affinity with Japan. Rejecting linguistic norms and representational imperatives of identity categories, Textor instead demands that the reader grapple with the silent, absent, illegible, or unintelligible. Engaging with the incoherent, she argues, allows for a more ethical approach to texts, subjects, and communities that resist representation within existing paradigms.
“Intersectional Incoherence offers an expansive critical curation of a significant but silenced Korean minority literature in Japan. By globalizing intersectional critique on race, gender, and disability, this book is a welcome development beyond Euro‑American postcolonial and critical race studies.” — Nayoung Aimee Kwon, author of Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan
“This rich and self‑reflective study aims to tell an anti‑essentialist literary history of the Zainichi community. The fruits of Cindi Textor’s close readings will be relevant to many other literary histories of communities around the world.” — Janet Poole, author of When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea
“A powerful intervention that forces us to rethink what literature is, what history is, and what identity is.” — Sonia Ryang, author of Language and Truth in North Korea
Cindi Textor is Associate Professor of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah.
Japan is a nation saddled with centuries of accumulated stereotypes and loaded assumptions about suicide. Many pronouncements have been made about those who have died by their own hand, without careful attention to the words of the dead themselves. Drawing upon far-ranging creations by famous twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese writers and little-known amateurs alike, Kirsten Cather interrogates how suicide is scripted and to what end. Entering the orbit of suicidal writers and readers with care, she shows that through close contextualized readings these works can reveal fundamental beliefs about suicide and, just as crucially, about acts of writing. These are not scripts set in stone but graven images and words nonetheless that serve to mourn the dead, straddling two impulses: to put the dead to rest and to keep them alive forever. These words reach out to us to initiate a dialogue with the dead, one that can reveal why it matters to write into and from the void.
“Equal parts literary analysis and social psychology, this subtle and profound study engages with a wide range of Japanese places and people to demonstrate the insoluble entanglement of suicide with the practice of writing.” — Jordan Sand, author of Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects
“In this stunning book, Kirsten Cather questions the relationship between the acts of suicide and writing, and why and for whom such ‘autothanatography’ trends as so popular in Japan. Scripting Suicide in Japan is masterful in its attention, as hauntingly beautiful as it is analytically profound.” — Anne Allison, author of Precarious Japan
“This meticulously researched monograph presents a radical rethinking of the very limits of literature itself, showing us what it might mean to ethically engage with ambivalence, silence, and the ultimate unknown of death. It is a tour de force.” — Christina Yi, author of Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea
Kirsten Cather is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Texas at Austin.
Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research, The Fourth Invasion examines an Ixil Maya community’s movement against the construction of one of the largest hydroelectric plants in Guatemala. The arrival of the Palo Viejo hydroelectric plant (built by the Italian corporation Enel Green Power) to the municipality of Cotzal highlighted the ongoing violence inflicted on Ixils by outsiders and the Guatemalan state. Locals referred to the building of the hydroelectric plant as the “fourth invasion” for its similarity to preceding invasions: Spanish colonization, the creation of the plantation economy, and the state-led genocide during the Guatemalan armed conflict. Through a historical account of cyclical waves of invasions and resistance in Cotzal during the four invasions, Giovanni Batz argues that extractivist industries are a continuation of a colonial logic of extraction based on the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and the destruction of their territories and values that has existed since Spanish arrival in 1524.
“A wonderfully insightful and powerful book, which vividly captures the continuity of colonialism and the way the past presses on the future. I strongly recommend it.” — Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
“This extraordinary, detailed account of Maya-Ixil framings of five hundred years of struggle is a remarkable achievement for the author and the Ixil communities with which he collaborates.”— Carlota McAllister, coeditor of War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala
“This brilliant book illuminates how Indigenous world-making ideas shape contemporary resistance to megaprojects. Its deep and careful collaboration with Mayan communities in Guatemala is a model for scholars and activists alike.” — Elizabeth Oglesby, coeditor of The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics
Giovanni Batz (Maya K’iche’) is Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public school board fired nearly 7,500 teachers and employees. In the decade that followed, the city created the first urban public school system in the United States to be entirely contracted out to private management. Veteran educators, collectively referred to as the “backbone” of the city’s Black middle class, were replaced by younger, less experienced, white teachers who lacked historical ties to the city. In A Burdensome Experiment, Christien Philmarc Tompkins argues that the privatization of New Orleans schools has made educators into a new kind of racialized worker. As school districts across the nation backslide on school integration, Tompkins asks, who exactly deserves to teach our children? The struggle over this question exposes the inherent antiblackness of charter school systems and the unequal burdens of school choice.
“Anyone committed to creating liberatory models of education must read this book, not because it has all the answers but because it asks the right questions, with care and humility. And isn’t that what great teachers do?” — ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History, University of California, Los Angeles
“Christien Philmarc Tompkins’s trenchant labor ethnography goes beyond ‘what works’ in urban schools to attend to a city still reeling from the institutional violence of post-Katrina school reform.” — SAVANNAH SHANGE, author of Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco
“Theoretically precise and powerfully personal, this ethnographic analysis is spot-on and a uniquely important contribution to real-world understandings of the ways that the universalized, normative whiteness so prominent in design worlds continues to damage and destroy while claiming to solve problems.” — ELIZABETH CHIN, Editor in Chief, American Anthropologist
CHRISTIEN PHILMARC TOMPKINS is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
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.
Why are the small and unimportant relics of Roman antiquity often the most enduring, in both material form and our affections? Through close encounters with minor things such as insects, brief lives, quibbles, irritants, and jokes, Emily Gowers provocatively argues that much of what the Romans dismissed as superfluous or peripheral in fact took up immense imaginative space. There is much to learn from what didn’t or shouldn’t matter. It was often through the small stuff that the Romans most acutely probed and challenged their society’s overarching values and priorities and its sense of proportion and justice. By marking the spots where the apparently pointless becomes significant, this book radically adjusts our understanding of the Romans and their world, as well as our own minor feelings and intimate preoccupations.
This groundbreaking collection of essays from leading film historians features original research on movie magazines published in China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Latin America, South Korea, the U.S., and beyond. Vital resources for the study of film history and culture, movie magazines are frequently cited as sources, but rarely centered as objects of study. Global Movie Magazine Networks does precisely that, revealing the hybridity, heterogeneity, and connectivity of movie magazines and the important role they play in the intercontinental exchange of information and ideas about cinema. Uniquely, the contributors in this book have developed their critical analysis alongside the collaborative work of building digital resources, facilitating the digitization of more than a dozen of these historic magazines on an open-access basis.
The first book to draw a direct line between the datafication and prediction techniques of past eugenicists and today’s often violent and extractive “big data” regimes.
Predatory Data illuminates the throughline between the nineteenth century’s anti-immigration and eugenics movements and our sprawling systems of techno-surveillance and algorithmic discrimination. With this book, Anita Say Chan offers a historical, globally multisited analysis of the relations of dispossession, misrecognition, and segregation expanded by dominant knowledge institutions in the Age of Big Data.
While technological advancement has a tendency to feel inevitable, it always has a history, including efforts to chart a path for alternative futures and the important parallel story of defiant refusal and liberatory activism. Chan explores how more than a century ago, feminist, immigrant, and other minoritized actors refused dominant institutional research norms and worked to develop alternative data practices whose methods and traditions continue to reverberate through global justice-based data initiatives today. Looking to the past to shape our future, this book charts a path for an alternative historical consciousness grounded in the pursuit of global justice.
As HIV/AIDS emerged as a public health crisis of significant proportions across much of sub-Saharan Africa, it became the subject of local and international interest—prurient, benevolent, and interventionist. Meanwhile, the experience of Africans living with HIV/AIDS became an object of aesthetic representation in multiple genres by Africans themselves. These cultural representations engaged public discourse—the public policy pronouncements of officials of postcolonial states, an emerging global NGO-speak, and journalism. In Pandemic Genres, Neville Hoad investigates how cultural production—novels, poems, films—around the pandemic supplemented public discourse. From Botswana, Kenya, and South Africa, he shows that the long historical imaginaries of race, empire, and sex underwrote all attempts to bring the pandemic into public representation. Attention to genres that stage themselves as imaginary, particularly on the terrain of feeling, may forecast possibilities for new figurations.
Focusing on the provision of gender-affirming care, Health Care Civil Rights analyzes the difficulties and potential of discrimination law in healthcare settings. The application of civil rights law could be a powerful response to health inequalities in the U.S., 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.
DNA, Race, and Reproduction helps readers inside and outside of academia evaluate and engage with the current genomic landscape. It brings together expertise in law, medicine, religion, history, anthropology, philosophy, and genetics to examine how scientists, medical professionals, and laypeople use genomic concepts to construct racial identity and make or advise reproductive decisions, often at the same moment. It critically and accessibly interrogates how DNA figures in the reproduction of racialized bodies and the racialization of reproduction and examines the privileged position from which genomic knowledge claims to speak about human bodies, societies, and activities. The volume begins from the premise that reproduction, regardless of the means, forces a confrontation between biomedical, scientific, and popular understandings of genetics, and that those understandings are often racialized. It therefore centers reproduction as both a site of analysis and an analytic lens.
Though Japanese migration to Brazil only started at the turn of the twentieth century, Brazil is now the country with the largest ethnic Japanese population outside of Japan. Collaborative Settler Colonialism examines this history as a central chapter of both Brazil's and Japan's processes of nation and empire building, and, crucially, as a convergence of their settler colonial projects. Inspired by American colonialism and the final conquest of the U.S. Western frontier, Brazilian and Japanese empire builders collaborated to bring Japanese migrant workers to Brazil, which had the intended outcome of simultaneously dispossessing indigenous Brazilians of their land and furthering the expansion of Japanese land and resource possession abroad. Bringing discourses of Latin American and Japanese settler colonialism into rare dialogue with each other, this book offers new insight into understanding the Japanese empire, the history of immigration in Brazil and Latin America, and the past and present of settler colonialism.
Focusing on the lived experiences of Afro-Colombians processing and resisting violence against their ecological communities, Visions of Global Environmental Justice employs accounts of the supernatural narratively and analytically to frame a contemporary struggle for environmental justice. The book applies Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics to the environmental racism of the US War on Drugs in Colombia, specifically the aerial eradication of coca in the comunidades negras of the Pacific Coast. Through critical examination and deconstruction of transnational mythmaking and local oral tradition, Visions of Global Environmental Justice illustrates that non/humans rendered expendable by US-driven drug (necro)politics are indispensable to both the conceptualization and the realization of environmental justice globally. Far from being a study singularly focused on the symptoms of environmental issues, this book creatively guides us toward a broader understanding of environmental racism and justice across geographic scales and non/human agencies.
The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with regard to transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit W. Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. Showing how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—he argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomfiting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.
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.
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 the delta's 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 the delta, and the often surprising entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits, and more. 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.
In just half a century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, spurred by efforts of the authoritarian Republic of China government in land reform, farmers associations, and 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 took the country’s agrarian success and exported it 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 argued were better suited for poor, tropical societies in the developing world. These development missions, James Lin argues, were projected in Taiwan as proof of the ruling government’s modernity and technical prowess and were crucial to how the state sought to hold onto its contested position in the international system and its rule by martial law at home.
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.
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, 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.
For decades, scholars have examined the Mughal Empire, South Asia’s largest and most powerful pre-colonial empire, to measure the greatness of its political, ideological, and cultural institutions. Between Household and State departs from dynastic narrations of the Mughal past to highlight the role of elite households and familial networks in shaping imperial power, particularly in peninsular India, the only region of the subcontinent never fully incorporated into the imperial realm.
Drawing on rare documentary and literary materials in Persian and Urdu alongside the Dutch East India Company’s archives, this book takes us on a journey from military forts and regional courts in the Deccan to the weaving villages of the Coromandel Coast to examine how regional elite alliances, feuds, and material exchanges intersected with imperial institutions to create new forms of affinity, belonging, and social exclusion. Between Household and State brings attention to the importance of ghar—or home—as an analytical framework for the creation of mobile forms of sovereignty that anchored the Mughal frontier across the variable geography of peninsular India in the seventeenth century.
Nairobi Hip Hop Flow is an interdisciplinary study that 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 underground rap culture in Nairobi to illustrate how hip hop artists engage with political seriousness in lyrics and sound and foster a creative playfulness using bodily movement. Through these artists' embodiments, a persistent diasporic blackness circulates, indigenizing the music and working alongside lyrical content to interrogate Kenya's sociopolitical landscape. Peck presents an unprecedented study of Nairobi artists' interactions with localized lyrics and globally signified performative, masculinist, and diasporic embodiments—one that is critical for understanding how hip hop espouses a globalized locality.
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 frame this institutionalization around the constitutive tensions of 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.