Publications
Now showing items 61-120 of 320
The Divo and the Duce
(2019)
In the climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism that America experienced after the First World War, Italian-born movie star Rudolph Valentino and Italy’s dictator, Benito ...
Imperial Matter
(2016)
What is the role of the material world in shaping the tensions and paradoxes of imperial sovereignty? Scholars have long shone light on the complex processes of conquest, extraction, and colonialism under imperial rule. ...
Frame by Frame
(2019)
For most of the twentieth century, the making of animated cartoons was mechanized and standardized to allow for high-volume production: thousands of drawings were inked and painted onto individual transparent celluloid ...
Mountain, Water, Rock, God
(2019)
In Mountain, Water, Rock, God, Luke Whitmore situates the disastrous flooding that fell on the Hindu Himalayan shrine of Kedarnath in 2013 within its broader religious and ecological contexts. For centuries, the enmeshing ...
Mirage of Police Reform
(2017)
In the United States, the exercise of police authority—and the public’s trust that police authority is used properly—is a recurring concern. Contemporary prescriptions for police reform hold that the public would trust the ...
Ginseng and Borderland
(2017)
Ginseng and Borderland explores the territorial boundaries and political relations between Qing China and Chosŏn Korea during the period from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. By examining a unique ...
Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels
(2017)
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was home to numerous radical social and environmental eruptions. In the face of several major earthquakes and floods, riots and economic insecurity, police brutality and mass incarceration, some ...
Building Green
(2017)
Building Green explores the experience of environmental architects in Mumbai, one of the world’s most populous and population-dense urban areas and a city iconic for its massive informal settlements, extreme wealth ...
Instruments for New Music
(2015)
Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these ...
Finding Jerusalem
(2017)
Archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem capture worldwide attention in various media outlets. The continuing quest to discover the city’s physical remains is not simply an attempt to define Israel’s past or determine its ...
Exit and Voice
(2019)
Exit and Voice is a compelling account of how Mexican migrants with strong ties to their home communities impact the economic and political welfare of those they leave behind. In many decentralized democracies like Mexico, ...
Placing Empire
(2017)
Placing Empire examines the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism through a study of Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan between the late nineteenth century and the early 1950s. In a departure ...
The Place of Devotion
(2015)
Hindu devotional traditions have long been recognized for their sacred geographies as well as the sensuous aspects of their devotees’ experiences. Largely overlooked, however, are the subtle links between these religious ...
Music of a Thousand Years
(2019)
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 ...
Morals Not Knowledge
(2018)
In a time when conservative politicians challenge the irrefutability of scientific findings such as climate change, it is more important than ever to understand the conflict at the heart of the “religion vs. science” debates ...
Parameters of Disavowal (Volume 1.0)
(2018)
The colonial experience of the early twentieth century shaped Korea’s culture and identity, leaving a troubling past that was subtly reconstructed in South Korean postcolonial cinema. Relating postcolonial discourses to a ...
Public Debt, Inequality, and Power
(2016)
Who are the dominant owners of US public debt? Is it widely held, or concentrated in the hands of a few? Does ownership of public debt give these bondholders power over our government? What do we make of the fact that ...
Precarious Creativity
(2016)
Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media ...
The Indigenous State
(2017)
In 2005, Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Ushering in a new “democratic cultural revolution,” Morales promised to overturn neoliberalism and inaugurate a new decolonized society. In this ...
High-Tech Trash
(2019)
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, ...
The Big Gamble
(2019)
Tens of thousands of Eritreans make perilous voyages across Africa and the Mediterranean Sea every year. Why do they risk their lives to reach European countries where so many more hardships await them? By visiting family ...
The Erotics of History
(2018)
The Erotics of History challenges long-standing notions of sexuality as stable and context-free—as something that individuals discover about themselves. Rather, Donald L. Donham argues that historical circumstance, local ...
Making Things Stick
(2016)
With Mexico’s War on Crime as the backdrop, Making Things Stick offers an innovative analysis of how surveillance technologies impact governance in the global society. More than just tools to monitor ordinary people, ...
Hokum!
(2017)
Hokum!, the first book to take a comprehensive view of short-subject slapstick comedy in the early sound era, challenges the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition. Author Rob King explores the slapstick ...
Modernizing Composition
(2017)
The study of South Asian music falls under the purview of ethnomusicology, whereas that of South Asian literature falls under South Asian studies. As a consequence of this academic separation, scholars rarely take notice ...
The Hegemony of Heritage
(2018)
The Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of architectural objects and societies to the built environment changes over time. Studying two surviving ...
The Eternal Dissident
(2018)
The Eternal Dissident offers rare insight into one of the most inspiring and thought-provoking Reform rabbis of the twentieth century, Leonard Beerman, who was renowned both for his eloquent and challenging sermons and for ...
Impersonations
(2019)
Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis, this book centers on an insular community of Smarta brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India, who are required to don ...
Migrating into Financial Markets
(2015)
We understand very little about the billions of dollars that flow throughout the world from migrants back to their home countries. In this rigorous and illuminating work, Matt Bakker, an economic sociologist, examines how ...
Luxury and Rubble
(2016)
Luxury and Rubble is the tale of two cities in Ho Chi Minh City. It is the story of two planned, mixed-use residential and commercial developments that are changing the face of Vietnam’s largest city. Since the early 1990s, ...
Keys to Play
(2016)
How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its ...
Hindu Pluralism
(2017)
In Hindu Pluralism, Elaine M. Fisher complicates the traditional scholarly narrative of the unification of Hinduism. By calling into question the colonial categories implicit in the term “sectarianism,” Fisher’s work ...
The Prison of Democracy
(2019)
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 ...
Unjust Conditions
(2018)
Unjust Conditions follows the lives and labors of poor mothers in rural Peru, richly documenting the ordeals they face to participate in mainstream poverty alleviation programs. Championed by behavioral economists and the ...
The Saburo Hasegawa Reader
(2019)
Published on the occasion of the 2019 exhibition “Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan,” The Saburo Hasegawa Reader encompasses a selection of writings by the Japanese artist, theorist, ...
A Vietnamese Moses
(2016)
A Vietnamese Moses is the story of Philiphê Bình, a Vietnamese Catholic priest who in 1796 traveled from Tonkin to the Portuguese court in Lisbon to persuade its ruler to appoint a bishop for his community of ex-Jesuits. ...
Writing Self, Writing Empire
(2015)
Writing Self, Writing Empire examines the life, career, and writings of the Mughal state secretary, or munshi, Chandar Bhan Brahman (d. ca. 1670), one of the great Indo-Persian poets and prose stylists of early modern South ...
Citizen Outsider
(2017)
While portrayals of immigrants and their descendants in France and throughout Europe often center on burning cars and radical Islam, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France paints a different ...
The Persianate World
(2019)
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 ...
The Stains of Imprisonment
(2023)
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 ...
Capitalizing a Cure
(2023)
Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, ...
Angloscene
(2023)
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 ...
Possible Histories
(2023)
Many Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Traveling enabled men to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage, while Syrian women’s roles in peddling led to more economic autonomy. ...
Scaling Migrant Worker Rights
(2023)
International migrants’ home countries often play an integral part in protecting their citizens’ labor and human rights abroad. At the same time, institutions such as labor unions, worker centers, and legal aid groups are ...
The Cultural Legacy of the Pre-Ashkenazic Jews in Eastern Europe
(2023)
This book uncovers cultural traces of the ancient Jewry of Eastern Europe from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries in translations from Hebrew into East Slavic. These translations range from accounts of Old Testament ...
Merchants of Virtue
(2023)
Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century ...
Spiritual Ends
(2023)
What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual Ends draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to provide an intimate portrayal of how spiritual care is provided to the dying in Japan. Timothy O. ...
Provincializing Empire
(2023)
Provincializing Empire explores the global history of Japanese expansion through a regional lens. It rethinks the nation-centered geography and chronology of empire by uncovering the pivotal role of expeditionary merchants ...
Thinking with an Accent
(2023)
Thinking with an Accent casts accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception shaping our global cultural economy. Theorizing accent as a mediatized object, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied ...
Until the Storm Passes
(2023)
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 ...
When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven
(2023)
This book investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other ...
Practicing Asylum
(2023)
This multidisciplinary volume brings together experienced expert witnesses and immigration attorneys to highlight best practices and strategies for giving expert testimony in asylum cases. As the scale and severity of ...
Becoming Global Asia
(2023)
Becoming Global Asia centers Singapore as a crucial site for comprehending the uneven effects of colonialism and capitalism. In the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Singapore transformed its reputation as a culturally ...
Novel Palestine
(2023)
Palestinian writing imagines the nation not as a nation-in-waiting but as a living, changing structure that joins people, place, and time into distinct formations. Novel Palestine examines these imaginative structures so ...
Placing Islam
(2023)
For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion ...
Equality within Our Lifetimes
(2023)
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 ...
The Celluloid Specimen
(2023)
In The Celluloid Specimen, Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen behaviorist films of animal experiments from the 1930s and 1940s. These laboratory recordings—including Robert Yerkes’s work with North American ...
Bridging Two Worlds
(2023)
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 ...
Disrupting the Patrón
(2023)
In Paraguay’s Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world’s fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well-being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and ...
Beyond the Movie Theater
(2023)
Beyond the Movie Theater excavates the history of non-theatrical cinema before 1920, exploring how moving pictures were used in ways distinct from theatrical cinema. Looking away from the glimmer of the theater screen and ...