How might queer theory transform our interpretations of medieval Japanese literature and how might this literature reorient the assumptions, priorities, and critical practices of queer theory? Through a close reading of The Tale of Genji, an eleventh-century text that depicts the lifestyles of aristocrats during the Heian period, A Proximate Remove explores this question by mapping the destabilizing aesthetic, affective, and phenomenological dimensions of experiencing intimacy and loss. The spatiotemporal fissures Reginald Jackson calls “proximate removes” suspend belief in prevailing structures. Beyond issues of sexuality, Genji queers in its reluctance to romanticize or reproduce a flawed social order. An understanding of this hesitation enhances how we engage with premodern texts and how we question contemporary disciplinary stances.

“A brave and groundbreaking work. Jackson’s queer reading of The Tale of Genji— where ‘queer’ does not index a particular sexual identity or mode of erotic exchange but, rather, provides a provocative critical lens—throws into sharp relief practices of Heian sexual politics. Intimately researched and engagingly written.” CHARLOTTE EUBANKS, author of Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan

“A Proximate Remove offers a bold and provocative reading of the eleventh-century classic The Tale of Genji. It begins the much-needed task of exposing the ideological limitations that define the parameters of existing premodern Japanese studies.” ATSUKO UEDA, author of Language, Nation, Race: Linguistic Reform in Meiji Japan (1868–1912)

REGINALD JACKSON is Associate Professor of Premodern Japanese Literature and Performance at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and the Tale of Genji Scrolls.

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Early in the twenty-first century, Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the United States, redirected millions in tax dollars from the public coffers in an effort to become the top location site globally for the production of Hollywood films and television series. Why would lawmakers support such a policy? Why would citizens accept the policy’s uncomfortable effects on their economy and culture? Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans addresses these questions through a study of the local and everyday experiences of the film economy in New Orleans, Louisiana—a city that has twice taken the mantle of becoming a movie production capital. From the silent era to today’s Hollywood South, Vicki Mayer explains that the aura of a film economy is inseparable from a prevailing sense of home, even as it changes that place irrevocably.

“A scathing critique of the economic realities and broken promises of Hollywood South, told in rich ethnographic detail and passionately argued through Vicki Mayer’s deep connection to New Orleans. This is a vital book.” NITIN GOVIL, author of Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay

“Mayer guides readers through the numbers and arguments behind Louisiana’s costly love affair with the film industry and raises important questions over whether the state’s citizens are getting their money’s worth.” STEPHANIE GRACE, columnist, The New Orleans Advocate

“A visionary in the study of cultural labor, economy, and geography, Mayer is that rare writer who combines exquisite storytelling with rigorous scholarship. This is an essential contribution to film and media studies, and an urgent history lesson for policy makers.” MELISSA GREGG, author of Work’s Intimacy

VICKI MAYER is Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She is coeditor of the journal Television & New Media and author or editor of several books and journal articles about media production, creative industries, and cultural work.

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American Mobilities investigates representations of mobility – social, economic, geographic – in American film and literature during the Depression, WWII, and the early Cold War. With an emphasis on the dual meaning of »domestic«, referring to both the family home and the nation, this study traces the important trope of mobility that runs through the »American« century. Juxtaposing canonical fiction with popular, and low-budget independent films with Classical Hollywood, Leyda brings the analytic tools of American cultural and literary studies to bear on an eclectic array of primary texts as she builds a case for the significance of mobility in the study of the United States.

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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.

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This book explores analytic induction, an approach to the analysis of cross-case evidence on qualitative outcomes that has deep roots in sociology. A popular research technique in the early decades of empirical sociology, analytic induction differs fundamentally as a method of social research from conventional variation-based approaches. In Analytic Induction for Social Research, Charles C. Ragin demonstrates that much is gained from systematizing analytic induction. The approach he introduces here offers a new template for conducting cross-case analysis and provides a new set of tools for answering common research questions that existing methods cannot address.

“Breaks new ground in introducing analytic induction as an approach distinct from qualitative comparative analysis. Charles Ragin’s writing is among the clearest, most accessible, and engaging that I know.” — PEER C. FISS, Jill and Frank Fertitta Chair in Business Administration and Professor of Management and Organization, University of Southern California

“At a time when methodological debates are becoming increasingly mathematical, this intervention is both refreshingly nontechnical and unusually helpful for qualitative researchers in sociology and political science. Because of its clarity, brevity, and usability, qualitative researchers in the social sciences are going to want a copy of this book.” — JAMES MAHONEY, Gordon Fulcher Professor in Decision-Making and Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Northwestern University

CHARLES C. RAGIN is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is a recipient of the International Science Council’s Stein Rokkan Prize, the Policy Studies Organization’s Donald Campbell Award, and the American Sociological Association’s Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award.

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This book explores analytic induction, an approach to the analysis of cross-case evidence on qualitative outcomes that has deep roots in sociology. A popular research technique in the early decades of empirical sociology, analytic induction differs fundamentally as a method of social research from conventional variation-based approaches. In Analytic Induction for Social Research, Charles C. Ragin demonstrates that much is gained from systematizing analytic induction. The approach he introduces here offers a new template for conducting cross-case analysis and provides a new set of tools for answering common research questions that existing methods cannot address.

“Breaks new ground in introducing analytic induction as an approach distinct from qualitative comparative analysis. Charles Ragin’s writing is among the clearest, most accessible, and engaging that I know.” — PEER C. FISS, Jill and Frank Fertitta Chair in Business Administration and Professor of Management and Organization, University of Southern California

“At a time when methodological debates are becoming increasingly mathematical, this intervention is both refreshingly nontechnical and unusually helpful for qualitative researchers in sociology and political science. Because of its clarity, brevity, and usability, qualitative researchers in the social sciences are going to want a copy of this book.” — JAMES MAHONEY, Gordon Fulcher Professor in Decision-Making and Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Northwestern University

CHARLES C. RAGIN is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is a recipient of the International Science Council’s Stein Rokkan Prize, the Policy Studies Organization’s Donald Campbell Award, and the American Sociological Association’s Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award.

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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.

“A tremendously nuanced book that moves beyond the verities of postcolonial theory as much as liberal illusions of postracialism in the academy. The ethnographic richness of Angloscene in its expositions of tropes and situated encounters is remarkable and pointed—even poignant.” — DILIP M. MENON, editor of Changing Theory: Concepts from the Global South

“Reflecting a critical sensibility from the Global South, Jay Ke-Schutte’s book defies Euro-American-centric perspectives on language, race, and colonialism. The innovative concept of the Angloscene offers an imaginative way to unpack the transnational power matrix that conditions Afro-Chinese encounters.” — FAN YANG, author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization

“This book reveals the manner in which talk about signs of race and the racialization of those engaged in talk readily emerge hand in hand within social encounters, so that to isolate them from each other is to lose sight of the processes through which inequity persists in social life even when it is abjured.” — ASIF AGHA, Francis E. Johnston Term Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, and Editor-in-Chief, Signs and Society

JAY KE-SCHUTTE is a linguistic anthropologist and interdisciplinary ethnographer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

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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.

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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.

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Fugue for J. S. Bach was a natural language; he wrote fugues in organ toccatas and voluntaries, in masses and motets, in orchestral and chamber music, and even in his sonatas for violin solo. The more intimate fugues he wrote for keyboard are among the greatest, most infl uential, and best-loved works in all of Western music. They have long been the foundation of the keyboard repertory, played by beginning students and world-famous virtuosi alike. In a series of elegantly written essays, eminent musicologist Joseph Kerman discusses his favorite Bach keyboard fugues—some of them among the best-known fugues and others much less familiar. Kerman skillfully, at times playfully, reveals the inner workings of these pieces, linking the form of the fugues with their many different characters and expressive qualities, and illuminating what makes them particularly beautiful, powerful, and moving.

“Beautifully produced and even more beautifully written, suffused with humanistic learning, warmth, generosity, and wit.”—Early Music

“Kerman’s hearing is sharp, his thinking precise and original, and his prose elegant and sapid.”—Michael Steinberg, author of The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide

“Astonishing, stimulating, marvelous, and accessible.”—Stephen Kovacevich

JOSEPH KERMAN (1924–2014) was Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, author of Concerto Conversations, Write All These Down, and Opera as Drama, among other books. He was a founding editor of the journal 19th-Century Music and a regular contributor to the New York Review.

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Originally delivered in 2020 as the Biennial Ehsan Yarshater Lectures, Aspects of Kinship in Ancient Iran is an exploration of kinship in the archaeological and historical record of Iran’s most ancient civilizations. D. T. Potts brings together history, archaeology, and social anthropology to provide an overview of what we can know about the kith and kinship ties in Iran, from prehistory to Elamite, Achaemenid, and Sasanian times. In so doing, he sheds light on the rich body of evidence that exists for kin relations in Iran, a topic that has too often been ignored in the study of the ancient world. “As always with this excellent authority on ancient Iranian history and cultures, D. T. Potts presents five highly innovative essays on forms of kinship and social organization in ancient Iran from the Elamites to the Sasanians that are full of new ideas and suggestions for further research.” — Josef Wiesehöfer, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History and Classics, University of Kiel, and author of Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD

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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. “Moving with ease across historical contextualization, theoretical inquiry, and the close reading of films and other cultural objects, Jean Ma takes on urgent contemporary debates pertaining to corporeality, slowness, attention, and cinematic relocation. A true pleasure to read.” — ERIKA BALSOM, author of After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation “Intellectually ambitious, erudite across a number of fields, poetically written yet lucid, and both historically informed and deeply attuned to our own moment.” — KAREN REDROBE, author of Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis “Downright groundbreaking in its far-ranging and far-reaching insights.” — DANA POLAN, Cinema Studies, New York University

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What becomes of men the U.S. locks up and kicks out? From 2009 to 2020, the U.S. deported more than five million people—over 90 percent of them men. In Banished Men, Abigail Andrews and her students tell 186 of their stories. How, they ask, does expulsion shape men’s lives and sense of themselves? The book uncovers a harrowing carceral system that weaves together policing, prison, detention, removal, and border militarization to undermine migrants as men. Guards and gangs beat them down, till they feel like cockroaches, pigs, or dogs. Many lose ties with family. They do not go “home.” Instead, they end up in limbo: stripped of their very humanity. Against the odds, they fight for new ways to belong. At once devastating and humane, Banished Men offers a clear-eyed critique of the violence of deportation. “Banished Men is beautifully written, bringing deported men to life in all their misery and hopes. It is a timely contribution to immigration and Latinx sociology literatures, as well as an intervention in how to do collective social-justice-oriented research.” — NANCY PLANKEY-VIDELA, Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of Latino/a and Mexican American Studies at Texas A&M University “Banished Men asks what becomes of men—their emotions, relationships, family ties, economic opportunities, and very sense of self—as they are forced to live through U.S. detention, imprisonment, and deportation. This powerful book delves into how banishment upends men’s lives and shapes their humanity.” — JENNIFER RANDLES, author of Essential Dads

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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 sterile and punitive nation to “Global Asia”—an alluring location ideal for economic flourishing. Cheryl Narumi Naruse analyzes how Singapore gained cultural capital and soft power by examining genres such as literary anthologies, demographic compilations, coming-of-career narratives, and princess fantasies. Tracing the trajectory of Singapore’s positioning as Global Asia, Naruse reveals how the country emerged as a celebrated postcolonial model nation and a site of imperial desire that enables subjugation of the so-called Third World. Her readings of Global Asia as an invention of postcolonial capitalism offer new conceptual paradigms for understanding postcolonialism, neoliberalism, and empire.

“Cheryl Narumi Naruse offers a lucid, much-needed theorization of postcolonial capitalism—a mode of sovereignty simultaneously forged against empire and productive of neoliberal governance. An important and original contribution to debates around Global Asia and its cultural forms, with ramifications far beyond Singapore.”— JINI KIM WATSON, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University

“After Becoming Global Asia, criticism about cultural geopolitics and literary studies that disregards Singapore, or does not center Naruse’s cogent analysis on the aesthetics of postcolonial capitalism, will be incomplete.” — MOHAN AMBIKAIPAKER, author of Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain

“If you’ve ever wondered about the dark side of the idea of ‘Global Asia,’ read this book. And if you are looking for evidence that literature can be more than a mere tool of the state and capital, this book is also for you.” — COLLEEN LYE, author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945

CHERYL NARUMI NARUSE is Assistant Professor of English and the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Tulane University.

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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 sterile and punitive nation to “Global Asia”—an alluring location ideal for economic flourishing. Cheryl Narumi Naruse analyzes how Singapore gained cultural capital and soft power by examining genres such as literary anthologies, demographic compilations, coming-of-career narratives, and princess fantasies. Tracing the trajectory of Singapore’s positioning as Global Asia, Naruse reveals how the country emerged as a celebrated postcolonial model nation and a site of imperial desire that enables subjugation of the so-called Third World. Her readings of Global Asia as an invention of postcolonial capitalism offer new conceptual paradigms for understanding postcolonialism, neoliberalism, and empire.

“Cheryl Narumi Naruse offers a lucid, much-needed theorization of postcolonial capitalism—a mode of sovereignty simultaneously forged against empire and productive of neoliberal governance. An important and original contribution to debates around Global Asia and its cultural forms, with ramifications far beyond Singapore.”— JINI KIM WATSON, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University

“After Becoming Global Asia, criticism about cultural geopolitics and literary studies that disregards Singapore, or does not center Naruse’s cogent analysis on the aesthetics of postcolonial capitalism, will be incomplete.” — MOHAN AMBIKAIPAKER, author of Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain

“If you’ve ever wondered about the dark side of the idea of ‘Global Asia,’ read this book. And if you are looking for evidence that literature can be more than a mere tool of the state and capital, this book is also for you.” — COLLEEN LYE, author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945

CHERYL NARUMI NARUSE is Assistant Professor of English and the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Tulane University.

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In Being Another Way, Dustin Klinger recounts the history of how medieval Arabic philosophers in the Islamic East grappled with the logical role of the copula “to be,” an ambiguity that has bedeviled Western philosophy from Parmenides to the analytic philosophers of today. Working from within a language that has no copula, a group of increasingly independent Arabic philosophers began to critically investigate the semantic role that Aristotle, for many centuries their philosophical authority, invested in the copula as the basis of his logic. Drawing on extensive manuscript research, Klinger breaks through the thicket of unstudied philosophical works to demonstrate the creativity of postclassical Islamic scholarship as it explored the consequences of its intellectual break with the past. Against the still widespread view that intellectual ferment all but disappeared during the period, he shows how these intellectuals over the centuries developed and refined a sophisticated philosophy of language that speaks to core concerns of contemporary linguistics and philosophy. “Dustin Klinger’s study of medieval Arabic and Islamic views of the copula is remarkable on a number of counts: its historical range, the number of sources it incorporates, and its engagement with modern philosophical discussions of the analysis of propositions. It is a significant contribution to the field of Arabic-Islamic philosophy and logic.” — KHALED EL-ROUAYHEB, Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard University “In this wide-ranging study, Klinger looks at an issue that was pivotal in both ancient Greek and medieval Arabic philosophy. An important contribution to the exciting fields of logic and the philosophy of language in the Islamic world.” PETER ADAMSON, Professor of Philosophy at LMU Munich

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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.

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Between Household and State departs from dynastic narrations of the Mughal past to highlight the role of elite households and familial networks 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 readers on a journey from military forts and regional courts in the Deccan to the ports and weaving villages of the Coromandel Coast. It examines how regional elite alliances, feuds, and material exchanges intersected with imperial institutions to create new forms of affinity, belonging, and social exclusion. Subah Dayal brings attention to the importance of ghar—or home—in the creation of forms of mobility that anchored the Mughal frontier across the variable geography of peninsular India in the seventeenth century.

“Subah Dayal’s impressive archival discoveries open up entirely new ways of thinking about mobility in South Asia in this exciting multilingual study.” — Purnima Dhavan, author of When Sparrows Became Hawks: The Making of the Sikh Warrior Tradition, 1699–1799

“A significant contribution. This engaging book should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of early modern South Asia and beyond.” — Ali Anooshahr, Professor of History at University of California, Davis

“Through a careful reading of historical and literary texts and archival documents, Dayal provides many original insights into the world of the seventeenth century.” — Muzaffar Alam, George V. Bobrinskoy Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at University of Chicago

Subah Dayal is Assistant Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

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For more than four decades, socially disadvantaged Israeli Mizrahim—descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern and North African communities—have continuously supported right-wing political parties. Scholars, left-wing politicians, and activists tend to view Mizrahim as reacting against their structural exclusion, or more crudely as acting against their own interests, but Nissim Mizrachi locates the source of their “paradoxical behavior” within the limitations of the liberal grammar by which their outlook and behavior are read. In Beyond Suspicion, Mizrachi turns the direction of inquiry back on itself, contrasting liberal grammar—which values autonomy, equality, and universal reason and morality as the only authentic human choice—with the grammar of rootedness, in which the self is experienced through a web of relational commitments, temporal ties, and codes of collective identity. Recognizing rootedness as a fundamental need and desire for belonging is necessary to understand both scholarly and political rifts in Israel and throughout the world. “With profound lessons for us all, this book excavates the rootedness at the heart of right-populist politics in Israel. In seeing his subjects fully, Nissim Mizrachi turns the mirror on ourselves to show us how our constricted vision limits the appeal of our ideas to the very people whose rights we claim to fight for. This book powerfully redefines our understanding of the illiberal world we increasingly inhabit.” — Ann Swidler, Professor of the Graduate School, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley “In challenging sociological orthodoxy, Mizrachi dares us to conceptualize the social actor beyond our own dominant liberal paradigms. His extensive research among Mizrahi Jews calls into question prevalent ideas of individual autonomy, forcing us to recognize the role of rootedness and belonging in the self-conception of millions in Israel—and beyond.” — Adam Seligman, Professor of Religion, Boston University

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One of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary Muslim ethics is the status of women in Islamic law. Whereas Muslim conservatives argue that gender-differentiated legal rulings reflect complementary gender roles, Muslim feminists argue that Islamic law has subordinated women and is thus in need of reform. The shared assumption on both sides, however, is that gender fundamentally shapes an individual’s legal status. Beyond the Binary explores an expansive cross section of topics in ninth- to twelfth-century Hanafi legal thought, ranging from sexual crimes to consent to marriage, to show that early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles. Saadia Yacoob offers a restorative reading of Islamic law, arguing that its intersectional and relational understanding of legal personhood offers a productive space for Muslim feminists to move beyond critique and instead think with and through the Islamic legal tradition.

“Saadia Yacoob delves deeply into the categories and logic of her primary sources, contextualizes them within the relevant social history, and probingly explores their ethical and political implications. Beyond the Binary marries philological depth with theoretical sophistication while remaining surprisingly accessible and engaging.” — MARION HOLMES KATZ, author of Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics before Modernity

“In this field-changing book, Yacoob shows that for classical Muslim jurists, legal personhood was intersectional, relational, and situational. She pushes back against modern conservative insistence on an Islamic femininity defined in binary opposition to masculinity while also challenging feminist analyses that overemphasize gender as a stable component of identity.” — KECIA ALI, author of Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam

SAADIA YACOOB is Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College.

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One of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary Muslim ethics is the status of women in Islamic law. Whereas Muslim conservatives argue that gender-differentiated legal rulings reflect complementary gender roles, Muslim feminists argue that Islamic law has subordinated women and is thus in need of reform. The shared assumption on both sides, however, is that gender fundamentally shapes an individual’s legal status. Beyond the Binary explores an expansive cross section of topics in ninth- to twelfth-century Hanafi legal thought, ranging from sexual crimes to consent to marriage, to show that early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles. Saadia Yacoob offers a restorative reading of Islamic law, arguing that its intersectional and relational understanding of legal personhood offers a productive space for Muslim feminists to move beyond critique and instead think with and through the Islamic legal tradition.

“Saadia Yacoob delves deeply into the categories and logic of her primary sources, contextualizes them within the relevant social history, and probingly explores their ethical and political implications. Beyond the Binary marries philological depth with theoretical sophistication while remaining surprisingly accessible and engaging.” — MARION HOLMES KATZ, author of Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics before Modernity

“In this field-changing book, Yacoob shows that for classical Muslim jurists, legal personhood was intersectional, relational, and situational. She pushes back against modern conservative insistence on an Islamic femininity defined in binary opposition to masculinity while also challenging feminist analyses that overemphasize gender as a stable component of identity.” — KECIA ALI, author of Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam

SAADIA YACOOB is Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College.

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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 stepping outside the light of the marquee, Beyond the Movie Theater reveals that sponsored moving pictures were put to a variety of uses and screened at a host of sites, targeting a surprisingly wide range of audiences. Relying on contemporary print sources and ephemera, Gregory A. Waller charts a heterogeneous, fragmentary, and rich field that cannot be explained in terms of a master narrative concerning origin or institutionalization, progress or decline. Uncovering how and where films were put to use beyond the movie theater, this book complicates and expands our understanding of the history of American cinema, underscoring the myriad roles and everyday presence of moving pictures during the early twentieth century. “A monumental triumph. Gregory A. Waller mines untapped historical evidence, revealing a vast and previously obscured area of early twentieth- century cultural activity. This is a fresh, surprising, and highly original contribution to American film history.” — HAIDEE WASSON, author of Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture “Outstanding. Waller brings a mastery of archival source work and careful methodological consideration to myriad contemporary periodicals and newspapers—many of which have been overlooked by previous historians of American cinema, until now.” — PATRICK VONDERAU, University of Halle

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The politics of race in British screen culture over the last 30 years vis-a-vis the institutional, textual, cultural and political shifts that have occurred during this period.

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This comprehensive work presents a thorough exploration of celebrity ‘bromances,’ interrogating how bromances are portrayed in media and consumed by audiences to examine themes of celebrity persona, performativity, and authenticity. The authors examine how the performance of intimate male friendships functions within broadly ‘Western’ celebrity culture from three primary perspectives: construction of persona; interactions with audiences and fans; and commodification. Case studies from film and television are used to illustrate the argument that, regardless of their authenticity (real or staged), bromances are useful for engaging audiences and creating an extension of entertainment beyond the film the actors originally sought to promote. The first truly interdisciplinary study of its kind, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of communications, advertising, marketing, Internet studies, media, journalism, cultural studies, and film and television.

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Some of the most pressing contemporary issues (ecological crisis, migration and integration, fragmented worldviews, social media, fake news, extremist politics and terrorism) can be understood more profoundly through how they interact with both individual and collective forces of nostalgia. Nostalgia is politics, but these politics are also interwoven with media and culture. Notwithstanding how nostalgia is used or contextualized in terms of politics and social practices, commodification or personal development, its power is primarily situated within its efficacy as a governing, influential human emotion. The vast and luminous contributions to this special issue on contemporary nostalgia are all investigating the role different aesthetic media formats (film, music, literature, computer games) plays in nostalgic negotiations with style, history, migration, love, nationalism, diaspora, irony, modernity, colonial and postcolonial discourses, and adoption. Mutually, these essays stand out as important, original, critical contributions to the expanding field of nostalgia studies and offer a valued insight on our world.

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The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued politicians and filmmakers alike.Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses—the crowd scenes—in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions.

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This book examines the reverberations of key components of Ronald Reagan’s ideology in selected Hollywood blockbuster movies. The aim of this analysis is to provide a clearer understanding of the intertwinement of cinematic spectacles with neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The analysis comprises a dissection of Reagan’s presidential rhetoric and the examination of four seminal Hollywood blockbuster movies. The time range for analysis stretches from the 1980s until the 2010s. Among the key foci are filmic content as well as production and distribution contexts. It is concluded that Reagan’s political metaphors and the corporatization of film studios in the 1970s and 1980s continue to shape much of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking.

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'Memory and popular film' uses memory as a specific framework for the cultural study of film. Taking Hollywood as its focus, this timely book provides a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. Considering the relationship between official and popular memory, the politics of memory, and the technological and representational shifts that have come to effect memory's contemporary mediation, the book contributes to the growing debate on the status and function of the past in cultural life and discourse. By gathering key critics from film studies, American studies and cultural studies, 'Memory and popular film' establishes a framework for discussing issues of memory IN film and of film AS memory. Together with essays on the remembered past in early film marketing, within popular reminiscence, and at film festivals, the book considers memory films such as Forrest Gump, Lone Star, Pleasantville, Rosewood and Jackie Brown. 'Memory and popular film' provides a wide-ranging analysis that will benefit both students and critics of popular culture, film studies and the past.

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A Kansas City Star 2008 Notable Book Since the early days of Hollywood film, portrayals of interracial romance and of individuals of mixed racial and ethnic heritage have served to highlight and challenge fault lines within Hollywood and the nation’s racial categories and borders. Mixed Race Hollywood is a pioneering compilation of essays on mixed-race romance, individuals, families, and stars in U.S. film and media culture. Situated at the cutting-edge juncture of ethnic studies and media studies, this collection addresses early mixed-race film characters, Blaxploitation, mixed race in children’s television programming, and the "outing" of mixed-race stars on the Internet, among other issues and contemporary trends in mixed-race representation. The contributors explore this history and current trends from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives in order to better understand the evolving conception of race and ethnicity in contemporary culture.

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Research on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems has matured during the past decade, and many effective applications of this technology are currently being deployed. Although computational approaches for multi-agent systems have mainly emerged in the past few decades, scholars have been prolific with regard to the variety of methods proposed to solve this paradigm. Different communities have emerged with multi-agent systems as their main research topic. Multi-agent systems allow the development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and dynamic environments. Systems of this kind play a crucial role in life, evidenced by the broad range of applied areas involved in their use, including manufacturing, management sciences, e-commerce, and biotechnology. There are many reasons for the interest of researchers in this new discipline. Firstly, computational systems have gradually shifted towards a distributed paradigm where heterogeneous entities with different goals can enter and leave the system dynamically and interact with each other. Secondly, new computational systems should be able to negotiate with one another, typically on the behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. As a consequence, autonomy, interaction, mobility, and openness are key concepts studied in the area. The purpose of this book is to document some of the advances made in this paradigm and attempt to show the current state of this technology by analyzing different aspects in addition its possible application in various domains. This review of the current state-of-the-art does not intend to make an exhaustive exploration of all the current existing works but, rather, to try to give an overview of the research in agent technology, showing the high level of activity of this area.

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Since its inception, U.S. American cinema has grappled with the articulation of racial boundaries. This applies, in the first instance, to featuring mixed-race characters crossing the color line. In a broader sense, however, this also concerns viewing conditions and knowledge configurations. The fact that American film engages itself so extensively with the unbalanced relation between black and white is neither coincidental nor trivial to state — it has much more to do with disputing boundaries that pertain to the medium itself. Lisa Gotto examines this constellation along the early history of American film, the cinematic modernism of the late 1950s, and the post-classical cinema of the turn of the millennium.

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Die 1930er-Jahre gelten als das populistische Jahrzehnt Hollywoods. Regisseure wie Frank Capra, Leo McCarey und John Ford entwerfen in ihren Werken Szenarien geglückter oder gescheiterter politischer Repräsentation, in denen sich demokratische Ideale mit politischer Theologie und amerikanischem Exzeptionalismus verbinden. Die Szenographie dieser Filme hat sich tief in das kulturelle Gedächtnis der USA eingeschrieben und prägt die politische Inszenierung von Repräsentation bis heute. Johannes Pause liest die damals entstandene Bildsprache als eine Typologie populistischer Repräsentation neu und nutzt sie als Folie, um aktuelle politische Tendenzen zu analysieren.

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This book charts and analyses the work of Oliver Stone – arguably one of the foremost political filmmakers in Hollywood during the last thirty years. Drawing on previously unseen production files from Oliver Stone’s personal archives and hours of interviews both with Stone and a range of present and former associates within the industry, the book employs a thematic structure to explore Stone’s life and work in terms of war, politics, money, love and corporations. This allows the authors both to provide a synthesis of earlier and later film work as well as locate that work within Stone’s developing critique of government. The book explores the development of aesthetic changes in Stone’s filmmaking and locates those changes within ongoing academic debates about the relationship between film and history as well as wider debates about Hollywood and the film industry. All of this is explored with detailed reference to the films themselves and related to a set of wider concerns that Stone has sought to grapple with -the American Century, exceptionalism and the American Dream, global empire, government surveillance and corporate accountability. The book concludes with a perspective on Stone’s ‘brand’ as not just an auteur and commercially viable independent filmmaker but as an activist arguing for a very distinct kind of American exceptionalism that seeks a positive role for the US globally whilst eschewing military adventurism.

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In 1923, Victor Sjöström (1879-1960) got an offer from Goldwyn Pictures to come to Hollywood. This was nothing unusual for a successful European director: - Metro's bring - ing them in by car load - , as Photoplay stated in 1926. At the time, Sjöström was Sweden's most renowned director, who had become world famous for his austere and naturalistic film style. Sjöström stayed in Hollywood for seven years and made nine films. What happened during those years to the characteristic style that he had developed in Sweden? How was it transformed by Hollywood? Did he maintain any of his stylistic particularities from the Swedish period? How were his Hollywood films received by the American and Swedish critics? This portrayal of a European in Hollywood reveals how Sjöström, in adapting to the new production system, integrated and developed various stylistic elements from the Swedish years in a radically different context. Transition and Transformation is the first book-length study dedicated to the films of Victor Sjöström made in Hollywood, which also nuances the picture of the American production system.

Victor Sjöström (1879-1960), in Hollywood bekend onder de naam Victor Seastrom, was ongetwijfeld een van de meest getalenteerde filmregisseurs van de stomme film. Door de focus op meesterwerken als The Scarlet Letter en The Wind, met tevens aandacht voor films die Sjöström in Zweden maakte voordat hij naar Hollywood vertrok (waaronder als verloren gegaan beschouwde filmfragmenten), analyseert de auteur Sjöströms sobere en naturalistische stijl en de veranderingen die diens manier van regisseren onderging tijdens zijn verblijf in Hollywood.

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In her novel “Leben ohne Geheimnis” (Engl.: “Falling Star”), published by Ullstein in 1932, Vicki Baum takes up current topics and discourses in the transition phase from silent movies to so-called “talkies”: film as a new mass product, the beginnings of 'celebrity culture', the self-marketing of stars with the exploitation of their private lives for PR purposes, the culture industry with its fan culture. She presents Hollywood – which she got to know when she was involved in the production of the film adaption of her novel “Menschen im Hotel” (Engl.: “Grand Hotel”) – as “Sehnsuchtstopos” (“topos of longing”) in which her characters act in various stages of disillusionment, and confronts them with the film production companies‘ capitalist greed for profit; she shows that sexual exploitation was already omnipresent in the film industry around 1930. Using cinematic narrative techniques, she demonstrates how the characters behave in the game of appearance and reality, how they lose old identities and form new ones as emigrants.

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Motion pictures are made, not mass produced, requiring a remarkable collection of skills, self-discipline, and sociality—all of which are sources of enormous pride among Hollywood’s craft and creative workers. The interviews collected here showcase the pleasures that attract people to careers in film and television. They also reflect critically on changes in the workplace brought about by corporate conglomeration and globalization. Rather than offer publicity-friendly anecdotes by marquee celebrities, Voices of Labor presents off-screen observations about the everyday realities of Global Hollywood. Ranging across job categories—from showrunner to make-up artist to location manager—this collection features voices of labor from Los Angeles, Atlanta, Prague, and Vancouver. Together they show how abstract concepts like conglomeration, financialization, and globalization are crucial tools for understanding contemporary Hollywood and for reflecting more generally on changes and challenges in the screen media workplace and our culture at large.

“Essential reading for anyone interested in how Hollywood actually works.” RAMON LOBATO, author of Shadow Economies of Cinema

“Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson craft a powerful elegy for organized labor, demonstrating how critical theory is sung to the everyday rhythms of the workplace.” VICKI MAYER, author of Almost Hollywood, Nearly New Orleans: The Lure of the Local Film Economy

“A star-studded cast with diverse talents, backgrounds, and perspectives tells a varied but consistent tale of the importance of organized labor and the challenges it faces when pitted against the forces of media consolidation and globalization, all set in that magical company town known as Hollywood.” PATRIC M. VERRONE, writer and producer, former president, Writers Guild of America, West

MICHAEL CURTIN is Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Film and Media Studies and director of the Global Dynamics Initiative at University of California, Santa Barbara. KEVIN SANSON is a senior lecturer in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology and managing editor of Media Industries.

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Los Angeles rose to significance in the first half of the twentieth century by way of its complex relationship to three rivers: the Los Angeles, the Owens, and the Colorado. The remarkable urban and suburban trajectory of southern California since then cannot be fully understood without reference to the ways in which each of these three river systems came to be connected to the future of the metropolitan region. This history of growth must be understood in full consideration of all three rivers and the challenges and opportunities they presented to those who would come to make Los Angeles a global power. Full of primary sources and original documents, Water and Los Angeles will be of interest to both students of Los Angeles and general readers interested in the origins of the city.

“This is an invaluable new source book by two preeminent authorities on Los Angeles history.” STEVEN P. ERIE, University of California, San Diego

“Energized by a conviction of geography as destiny, this innovative docudrama of primary sources reveals the process whereby the Colorado River system propelled the urbanization of the American West. Water and Los Angeles constitutes a breakthrough fusion of environmental, engineering, urban, and political perspectives.” KEVIN STARR, University of Southern California

“This book offers an accessible, readable account of the importance of rivers to the development of modern Los Angeles.” SARAH SCHRANK, Professor of History, California State University, Long Beach

“Through a history of Los Angeles and the three rivers that helped to create it, this volume crosses several areas of scholarship to create an original and valuable contribution to research and teaching.” NICOLAS G. ROSENTHAL, author of Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

WILLIAM DEVERELL is Professor of History at the University of California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. TOM SITTON is a curator emeritus of history from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Together, they are authors of California Progressive Revisited and Metropolis in the Making.

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In Ways of Seeking, Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded through fiction to the transformations of modernity. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novelʼs place in the constellation of Arab modernism, modeling an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves.

“A beautiful bahth that sheds a new light on Arabic detective fiction in the twentieth century. Emily Drumstaʼs original approach makes us rethink genres and epistemologies, juridical and metaphysical quests, and the role of literature in bringing them together.” — TAREK EL-ARISS, James Wright Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College

“Drumstaʼs perceptive consideration of detection in modern Arabic fiction will stimulate readers to consider anew the centrality of the detective figure for writers and intellectuals in the grip of a rapacious and erratic modernization. Starting from the details of the Arabic context, this study ultimately provokes the problem of knowledge itself.” — HOSAM ABOUL-ELA, author of Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

EMILY DRUMSTA is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is editor and translator of Revolt Against the Sun: Selected Poetry of Nazik al-Malaʼika.

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In Ways of Seeking, Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded through fiction to the transformations of modernity. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novelʼs place in the constellation of Arab modernism, modeling an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves.

“A beautiful bahth that sheds a new light on Arabic detective fiction in the twentieth century. Emily Drumstaʼs original approach makes us rethink genres and epistemologies, juridical and metaphysical quests, and the role of literature in bringing them together.” — TAREK EL-ARISS, James Wright Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College

“Drumstaʼs perceptive consideration of detection in modern Arabic fiction will stimulate readers to consider anew the centrality of the detective figure for writers and intellectuals in the grip of a rapacious and erratic modernization. Starting from the details of the Arabic context, this study ultimately provokes the problem of knowledge itself.” — HOSAM ABOUL-ELA, author of Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

EMILY DRUMSTA is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is editor and translator of Revolt Against the Sun: Selected Poetry of Nazik al-Malaʼika.

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