Middle Eastern history Books
Stanford University Press The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of
Book SynopsisThe Unsettled Plain studies agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined with migration and displacement. Muslim refugees, mountain nomads, families deported in the Armenian Genocide, and seasonal workers from all over the empire endured hardship, exile, and dispossession. Their settlement and survival defined new societies forged in the provincial spaces of the late Ottoman frontier. Through these movements, Chris Gratien reconstructs the remaking of Çukurova, a region at the historical juncture of Anatolia and Syria, and illuminates radical changes brought by the modern state, capitalism, war, and technology. Drawing on both Ottoman Turkish and Armenian sources, Gratien brings rural populations into the momentous events of the period: Ottoman reform, Mediterranean capitalism, the First World War, and Turkish nation-building. Through the ecological perspectives of everyday people in Çukurova, he charts how familiar facets of quotidian life, like malaria, cotton cultivation, labor, and leisure, attained modern manifestations. As the history of this pivotal region hidden on the geopolitical map reveals, the remarkable ecological transformation of late Ottoman society configured the trajectory of the contemporary societies of the Middle East.Trade Review"The Unsettled Plain is environmental history at its finest: not just a history of rivers, mountains, and soils or climates and diseases, but all of those and something more. Chris Gratien tells the story of an empire, meticulously researched, exceptionally insightful—all grounded in the lives and lands of Çukurova."—Sam White, author of The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire"The Unsettled Plain is a pathbreaking book that takes Ottoman studies to a new level. Chris Gratien's vivid account of how the Çukurova region was settled tackles big questions about the state, capitalism, and environmental factors, without ever losing sight of the individuals who bore the brunt of the consequences."—Reşat Kasaba, author of A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees"Chris Gratien charts an important new path for critical environmental history with The Unsettled Plain, which reflects scrupulous research in at least eight countries and multiple languages. A must-read for anyone interested in the dizzyingly complex relations between real people and the environment of which they are part."—Diana Davis, author of The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge"[The Unsettled Plain] is a wonderful contribution to our knowledge of Ottoman history. The author gets us thinking about change as experienced by the non-elite population, and allows us to ask to what extent non-urban populations are shaped by change itself, as well as the shapers of change."—Usman Butt, Middle East MonitorHistorians of the Ottoman Empire and environmental historians in general will certainly recognize the importance of The Unsettled Plain. But non-specialists interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of history also stand to benefit from it.... Indeed, Gratien's book is just the latest to demonstrate how sophisticated the field of Middle East environmental history has become."—Isacar A. Bolaños, Journal of Interdisciplinary History"The Unsettled Plain offers a model for writing environmental history, especially for anyone looking to write histories with rural and ordinary people at their center. Gratien brings together an impressively wide range of evidence, including folklore as well as archival sources in multiple languages, to highlight rural people and places, and the relationships between them.... I hope others will follow Gratien's lead in attending carefully to ordinary people in the countryside in writing histories of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East."—Camille Lyans Cole, International Journal of Middle East Studies"This study is a microhistory of modern Turkey focusing on Çukurova (Cilicia), a province in the southwest, and how it was transformed through official policies.... Gratien is an excellent historian who brings enviable biomedical knowledge to this study. Recommended."—A. J. Papalas, CHOICE"By consistently incorporating folk songs, laments, and oral accounts, Gratien not only eloquently displays pastoralists' forms of resistance and resilience against the Ottoman reform movement in Çukurova but also masterfully narrates perceptions and worldviews that have been silenced in the state archive. This use of a wide range of unconventional historical sources makesTheUnsettled Plainan innovative environmental history."—Zozan Pehlivan, H-EnvironmentTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Upland Empire: The Indigenous Ecology of Ottoman Cilicia 2. The Stench of Progress: Ecology and Settlement on the Ottoman Frontier, 1856–78 3. Second Nature in the Second Egypt: Capital, Ecology, and Intercommunality in Late Ottoman Cilicia, 1878–1914 4. Fallowed Years: War, Environment, and the End of Empire, 1914–23 5. A Modern Life of Transhumance: Change and Continuity in the Republic of Turkey, 1923–56
£21.59
Stanford University Press A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to
Book SynopsisA powerful examination of soulful journeys made to recover memory and recuperate stolen pasts in the face of unspeakable histories. Survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 took refuge across the globe. Traumatized by unspeakable brutalities, the idea of returning to their homeland was unthinkable. But decades later, some children and grandchildren felt compelled to travel back, having heard stories of family wholeness in beloved homes and of cherished ancestral towns and villages once in Ottoman Armenia, today in the Republic of Turkey. Hoping to satisfy spiritual yearnings, this new generation called themselves pilgrims—and their journeys, pilgrimages. Carel Bertram joined scores of these pilgrims on over a dozen pilgrimages, and amassed accounts from hundreds more who made these journeys. In telling their stories, A House in the Homeland documents how pilgrims encountered the ancestral house, village, or town as both real and metaphorical centerpieces of family history. Bertram recounts the moving, restorative connections pilgrims made, and illuminates how the ancestral house, as a spiritual place, offers an opening to a wellspring of humanity in sites that might otherwise be defined solely by tragic loss. As an exploration of the powerful links between memory and place, house and homeland, rupture and continuity, these Armenian stories reflect the resilience of diaspora in the face of the savage reaches of trauma, separation, and exile in ways that each of us, whatever our history, can recognize.Trade Review"Original and engrossing, A House in the Homeland relates individual experiences that resonate with universal themes of family, trauma, and home. Carel Bertram's gifts of empathy and storytelling make for a book that is at once heartbreaking and inspiring. Essential for anyone interested in place, memory, and mass violence."—Heghnar Watenpaugh, author of The Missing Pages"Carel Bertram's engrossing and well-researched story of Armenian pilgrimages is of universal importance, resonating with all of us searching for our own personal history and our place within it. This book is not just important to Armenians, but valuable to anyone interested in understanding where their family comes from."—Esther Safran Foer, author of I Want You to Know We're Still Here"Deeply knowledgeable about memory, trauma, pilgrimage, and the sacred, Carel Bertram offers both scholarly expertise and an eloquent, moving narrative. A House in the Homeland illuminates the mutually transformative links between the lost pre-Genocide homes and current homelands of Armenian pilgrims. A truly wonderful book."—Khachig Tölölyan, founding editor of Diaspora"A House in the Homeland speaks to a pressing concern for many Armenians: How to sustain memory of an event that is difficult to trace on its landscape, and which is officially denied by its perpetrator. Bertram has shown that the gap between historical fact and material evidence can be spanned by memorialization and pilgrimage, by witness and dialogue, and for her interlocutors, by keeping their ancestors alive through their family memory-stories."—Aram G. Sarkisian, Material Religion"A House in the Homeland is a remarkable book that offers a unique insight into the thoughts, feelings and deeds of the Armenian genocide survivors and their descendants – the people who have lived their lives in the shade of tragic events that more than a century ago changed the course of Armenian history. Bertram tells a passionate story that engages a reader emotionally as well as intellectually. Skillfully written, her work is highly informative but, at the same time, leaves a reader wanting more – more precious stories of human courage, perseverance, search for meaning and the power of memory."—Konrad Siekierski, Memory Studies"This moving ethnographic study documents Armenian Americans' pilgrimages to eastern Turkey to visit the sites where their ancestors experienced the traumas of the 1915 genocide by Turkish authorities and the related attempts to erase Armenian identity from Turkish society....Including histories, songs, poetry, literature, and personal memories—many originally in Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish—this enthralling book shares these travelers' stories as they explore their 'Armenian-ness'.... Highly recommended."—V. Clement, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: Where Memory Takes Place 1. The Family Mansion 2. An Erased Village and an Inhabited House 3. The House and Its Sacred Geography 4. Music as Sacred Memory and the Intrusion of the Profane 5. The House-Place and Memory-Stories 6. The Emergence of Rituals 7. Relics: Engaging the Spirits 8. Communion: A Unification of Souls 9. Sacred and Profane: A Poetic Encounter 10. Votives: For Reaching Home 11. Votives: For the Restoration of Something Lost 12. Ex-Votos: Gratitude 13. Shrines: Making Visible the Invisible 14. Blessings: At My Father's House 15. Homeland Music Performs the Village 16. Village Music Performs the Homeland 17. The Bus: Traveling Through a Trauma-scape 18. The Bus: Traveling as Wholeness 19. What Remains: "The Last Armenian" 20. What Remains: Armenians "Everywhere" 21. What Remains: A Homeland of Mirrors Conclusion: Conclusion: Ethnography as Methodology; Poetry as an Analytical Framework
£19.79
Stanford University Press Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical
Book SynopsisAlternative Iran offers a unique contribution to the field of contemporary art, investigating how Iranian artists engage with space and site amid the pressures of the art market and the state's regulatory regimes. Since the 1980s, political, economic, and intellectual forces have driven Iran's creative class toward increasingly original forms of artmaking not meant for official venues. Instead, these art forms appear in private homes with "trusted" audiences, derelict buildings, leftover urban zones, and remote natural sites. While many of these venues operate independently, others are fully sanctioned by the state. Drawing on interviews with over a hundred artists, gallerists, theater experts, musicians, and designers, Pamela Karimi throws into sharp relief the extraordinary art and performance activities that have received little attention outside Iran. Attending to nonconforming curatorial projects, independent guerrilla installations, escapist practices, and tacitly subversive performances, Karimi discloses the push-and-pull between the art community and the authorities, and discusses myriad instances of tentative coalition as opposed to outright partnership or uncompromising resistance. Illustrated with more than 120 full-color images, this book provides entry into unique artistic experiences without catering to voyeuristic curiosity around Iran's often-perceived "underground" culture.Trade Review"When politics becomes soul-craft, as it has in Islamic Iran over the last four decades, every aspect of life, each form of aesthetics, and every discursive practice becomes a potential locus of resistance, even rebellion. Alternative Iran is an informed and illuminating kaleidoscope of this dynamic culture pulsating beneath the dour Procrustean proclivities of the regime."—Abbas Milani, Stanford University"Only Pamela Karimi could have written this book, a sophisticated scholar able to stay both outside and inside Iran and the Western-dominated art world. She offers a richly illustrated book that archives temporary artworks in private homes, deserted basements, construction-sites, excessive landscapes, unimagined urban spaces, and reveals them as practices of hope for a more democratic Iran, a cosmopolitan art market, and a peaceful world."—Esra Akcan, Cornell University"Pamela Karimi's timely and important book highlights the charged agencies of contemporary Iranian artists in shaping their realities. Alternative Iran offers unexpected, impactful, and sophisticated insights into the contemporary art scene in Iran that necessarily subvert the dominant narrative imposed by and from both inside officials and outside hegemonic perceptions."—Nada Shabout, University of North Texas"Pamela Karimi brings together different spheres of artistic endeavor to show that, censorship and official puritanism notwithstanding, Iranian artists continue to be creative and find ways to express this creativity. Alternative Iran affords us a fascinating analysis of the continuing cultural effervescence observable in Iranian society."—Houchang Chehabi, University of St. Andrews"One can always read artistic production against the background of a particular place, time, or culture. But rarely do those elements take on such an important role as they do in this analysis of alternative art in contemporary Iran. Space, venue (sometimes literally hidden underground), and context all figure crucially in the analysis of recent forms of artistic expression that evade, co-opt, or obliquely challenge both the structure of state censorship and the Iranian regime. Karimi treats a broad range of artistic expression in supporting her contention that religious, cultural, and political constraints help shape the uniqueness of contemporary Iranian art.... Highly recommended."—J. L. Miller, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: The Different Senses of the Alternative 1. Invisibility: Art in Concealed and Loosely Covert Spaces 2. Escapism: Critical Engagements with Remote Natural Sites 3. Ephemerality: Temporal Interjections in the City 4. Improvisation: Artful Curation and Spatial Reconfiguration in and out of Conventional Sites Epilogue: Alternative Iran: Allures and Aversions
£26.99
Stanford University Press Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of
Book SynopsisThe November 1970 coup that brought Hafiz al-Asad to power fundamentally transformed cultural production in Syria. A comprehensive intellectual, ideological, and political project—a Ba'thist cultural revolution—sought to align artistic endeavors with the ideological interests of the regime. The ensuing agonistic struggle pitted official aesthetics of power against alternative modes of creative expression that could evade or ignore the effects of the state. With this book, Max Weiss offers the first cultural and intellectual history of Ba'thist Syria, from the coming to power of Hafiz al-Asad, through the transitional period under Bashar al-Asad, and continuing up through the Syria War. Revolutions Aesthetic reconceptualizes contemporary Syrian politics, authoritarianism, and cultural life. Engaging rich original sources—novels, films, and cultural periodicals—Weiss highlights themes crucial to the making of contemporary Syria: heroism and leadership, gender and power, comedy and ideology, surveillance and the senses, witnessing and temporality, and death and the imagination. Revolutions Aesthetic places front and center the struggle around aesthetic ideology that has been key to the constitution of state, society, and culture in Syria over the course of the past fifty years.Trade Review"Innovative, meticulous, and brilliantly written, Revolutions Aesthetic will serve as the standard bearer for studies on the modern cultural history of the Arab world and the broader Middle East. Max Weiss's work has profound implications for understanding the relationship of cultural producers and the state within postcolonial revolutionary systems around the world."—Kamran Rastegar, Tufts University"Revolutions Aesthetic intervenes in a rich conversation about 20th- and early 21st-century cultural production in Syria's evolving dictatorship. Max Weiss's attention to gender dynamics and competing artistic visions, as well as his admirably lucid prose, make this book a valuable contribution to understanding the relationship between politics and aesthetics."—Lisa Wedeen, University of Chicago"Max Weiss dives into the history of the revolution's aesthetic, which, like a safe for the imagination, senses, and freedom of Syrians, the dictator has failed to melt into his full metal statue. Revolutions Aesthetic enters the Syrian cinematic shot to observe and understand how it works."—Ossama Mohammed, director of Stars in Broad Daylight and Sacrifices"For readers who are interested in the intersection between culture and politics in the context of Syria and the Middle East, this book is a must-read."—Shaoqun Lian, China International Strategy Review
£23.79
Stanford University Press Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That
Book SynopsisA bracing corrective to the myths that have shaped economic, military, and diplomatic policy, dispelling our oil-soaked fantasies of dependence. There is a conventional wisdom about oil—that the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is what guarantees access to this strategic resource; that the "special" relationship with Saudi Arabia is necessary to stabilize an otherwise volatile market; and that these assumptions in turn provide Washington enormous leverage over Europe and Asia. Except, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Robert Vitalis debunks the myths to reveal "oilcraft," a line of magical thinking closer to witchcraft than statecraft. Oil is a commodity like any other: bought, sold, and subject to market forces. Thus, the first goal of this book is to expose the suspect fears of oil scarcity and conflict. The second goal is to investigate the significant geopolitical impact of these false beliefs. In particular, Vitalis shows how we can reconsider the question of the U.S.–Saudi special relationship, which confuses and traps many into unnecessarily accepting what they imagine is a devil's bargain. The House of Saud does many things for U.S. investors, firms, and government agencies, but guaranteeing the flow of oil, making it cheap, or stabilizing the price isn't one of them. Freeing ourselves from the spell of oilcraft won't be easy—but the benefits make it essential.Trade Review"Oilcraft eviscerates all the fundamental myths about the so-called special relationship between the House of Saud and the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Robert Vitalis thinks way outside the conventional wisdom—and the implications are startling: we don't need a devil's bargain with Saudi princes, least of all with a mad crown prince."—Kai Bird, author of The Good Spy and American Prometheus"Oilcraft dismantles, demolishes, and incinerates the bogus claims and specious myths that for decades now have perverted U.S. policy in the Middle East. In this briskly written and thoroughly documented study, Robert Vitalis demonstrates that America's 'endless wars' have their origins in an apparently inexhaustible capacity for self-deception."—Andrew Bacevich, author of The Age of Illusion: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory"Robert Vitalis has once again revealed that our conventional wisdom is filled with empty, and often dangerous, self-delusions. Taking on the virtually unanimous conviction that a longstanding 'oil-for-security deal' underpins U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia, he shows it to be inaccurate, illogical, deceptive, and ultimately self-defeating. Vintage Vitalis, this book is a triumph of clear-eyed and courageous criticism."—Lisa Anderson, Columbia University, author of Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century"Robert Vitalis's Oilcraft couldn't be more timely. For decades, the idea that the United States objectively needs oil has been taken as gospel, justifying U.S. power in the world while clouding critiques of that power. This book is indispensable to understanding the current moment, showing that moving beyond fossil fuels is more akin to quitting a sect than breaking an addiction."—Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America"If one accepts Mr. Vitalis's scarcity/security thesis, there's much to explore regarding American shale and geopolitics."—Mark P. Mills, Wall Street Journal"Vitalis makes a strong case against delusional thinking, whether in domestic affairs (especially regarding fossil fuel dependence) or across geopolitical boundaries. Recommended."—G. A. McBeath, CHOICE"Robert Vitalis' latest book, Oilcraft, is a valuable addition to the new wave of critical studies on the history of oil and 'energy policy' that have appeared in recent years... Oilcraft takes on the most fundamental guiding principles behind scholarship and policy-making: namely that the United States' need to secure the free flow of cheap oil has driven some of its most unsavory foreign policy positions. [Vitalis] turns the focus back on American academics, think tanks, and policy circles to trace the origins of this pervasive myth about the need, or even the mere ability, to secure access to, and the affordability of, oil."—James M. Gustafson, Diplomatic History"A short, spirited polemic, Oilcraft deserves a wide readership. Vitalis provides a useful reference for those making the arguments that conservation and markets, not garrisons and aircraft carriers, should underpin U.S. energy supply."—Paul Musgrave, Political Science Quarterly"Even if one does not delight in aggressive polemics,Oilcraft is highly recommendable to anybody interested in the history of oil and international relations.... It is particularly illuminating to read it in 2022 as the Russian war on Ukraine has produced a new wave of geopolitical thinking in which what Vitalis calls 'raw materialism' plays a prominent role."—Rüdiger Graf, H-Soz-KultTable of Contents1. Opening 2. Raw Materialism 3. 1973: A Time to Confuse 4. No Deal 5. Breaking the Spell
£19.79
Stanford University Press Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and
Book SynopsisLosing Istanbul offers an intimate history of empire, following the rise and fall of a generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists living in Istanbul. Mostafa Minawi shows how these men and women negotiated their loyalties and guarded their privileges through a microhistorical study of the changing social, political, and cultural currents between 1878 and the First World War. He narrates lives lived in these turbulent times—the joys and fears, triumphs and losses, pride and prejudices—while focusing on the complex dynamics of ethnicity and race in an increasingly Turco-centric imperial capital. Drawing on archival records, newspaper articles, travelogues, personal letters, diaries, photos, and interviews, Minawi shows how the loyalties of these imperialists were questioned and their ethnic identification weaponized. As the once diverse empire comes to an end, they are forced to give up their home in the imperial capital. An alternative history of the last four decades of the Ottoman Empire, Losing Istanbul frames global pivotal events through the experiences of Arab-Ottoman imperial loyalists who called Istanbul home, on the eve of a vanishing imperial world order.Trade Review"Mostafa Minawi offers a masterful and captivating account of the lost futures and overlooked legacies of the Arab Ottoman imperial experience. Losing Istanbul teaches us how to rescue late Ottoman history from Turkish nationalist narratives and gain a much richer understanding of global intellectual and political history of the high age of imperialism."—Cemil Aydin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill"Part biography, part political geography, and part history of a truly unsettling time in the Middle East and Africa, Losing Istanbul reveals lives and intimate relationships that did not survive the Ottoman Empire into the new Turkish Republic. Mostafa Minawi has written a brilliant book—painstaking, rich, and unique."—Eve Troutt-Powell, University of Pennsylvania"Through their personal experiences, Minawi captures a compelling narrative about the systemic challenges that confronted this last generation of 'Arab-Ottoman imperialists.' This book sheds much-needed light on hitherto ignored interpersonal dynamics that escaped the caustic identity politics historianslong claimed had destroyed the empire. Highly recommended."—I. Blumi, CHOICETable of Contents0. Introduction 1. From Meydan, Damascus, to Tashwiqiyyeh, Istanbul 2. A Career in Empire 3. An Ottoman Imperialist's Global Social Space 4. Coming to Terms with "Arap" 5. Racializing Self/Racializing Other 6. The Beginning of the End 7. Things Fall Apart 8. The Aftermath
£64.80
Stanford University Press Famine Worlds: Life at the Edge of Suffering in
Book SynopsisWorld War I was a catastrophe for the lands that would become Lebanon. With war came famine, and with famine came unspeakable suffering, starvation, and mass death. For nearly four years the deadly crisis reshaped society, killing untold thousands and transforming how people lived, how they interacted, and even how they saw the world around them. Famine Worlds peers out at the famine through their eyes, from the wealthy merchants and the dwindling middle classes, to those perishing in the streets. Tylor Brand draws on memoirs, diaries, and correspondence to explore how people negotiated the famine and its traumas. Many observers depicted society in collapse—the starving poor became wretched victims and the well-fed became villains or heroes for the judgment of their peers. He shows how individual struggles had social effects. The famine altered beliefs and behaviors, and those in turn influenced social relationships, policies, and even the historical memory of generations to come. More than simply a chronicle of the Great Famine, however, Famine Worlds offers a profound meditation on what it means to live through such collective trauma, and how doing so shapes the character of a society. Brand shows that there are consequences to living amid omnipresent suffering and death. A crisis like the Great Famine is transformative in ways we cannot comprehend. It not only reshapes the lives and social worlds of those who suffer, it creates a particular rationality that touches the most fundamental parts of our being, even down to the ways we view and interact with each other. We often assume that if we were thrust into historic calamity that we would continue to behave compassionately. Famine Worlds questions such confidence, providing a lesson that could not be more timely.Trade Review"Famine Worlds is a tour de force of history and theory. Tylor Brand recovers the silenced cultural and economic history of the famine of Lebanon, and makes it speak vitally to current debates on mass trauma in Lebanon and beyond. A must read for historians, anthropologists, and relief workers in our age of climate change."—Elizabeth Thompson, author of How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs"One of the forgotten famines of the past is the tragedy that struck the mainly Maronite population of mountainous north Lebanon during World War I. Tylor Brand's study of a famine that will henceforth be better known is erudite and accessible, fair and empathetic. A great book."—Cormac Gráda, author of Famine: A Short History and Eating People is Wrong: Essays on the History and Future of Famine"Famine Worlds offers a fascinating window into a period often overlooked, and lucidly recounts the trials, tribulation, and turmoil of everyday people during the Great War. A highly recommended read and, without a doubt, a significant and thoroughly elucidating contribution to the history of the modern Middle East."—Leila Fawaz, author of A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War"In Famine Worlds, [Brand] brilliantly studies how the population of Lebanon experienced a famine that brought massive death, changed society, and left an often unspoken but indelible mark on the country's historical consciousness."—Marc Martorell Junyent, Informed Comment"Famine Worlds is a meticulously researched account that will appeal to those with a scholarly interest in the historical Levant."—Syed Hamad Ali, The NationalTable of ContentsIntroduction: Four Years of War 1. Some "Sufficed"; Others Died 2. Death and the Famished Body 3. Staying Alive 4. Trauma and Time 5. A World in Decline 6. The Unwashed and Unwell 7. The Sheep and the Goats 8. Conclusion: An Uncomfortable Memory
£60.80
Stanford University Press The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub: Or, How
Book SynopsisThis is the fantastical, yet real, story of the merchants of Bethlehem, the young men who traveled to every corner of the globe in the nineteenth century. These men set off on the backs of donkeys with suitcases full of crosses and rosaries, to return via steamship with suitcases stuffed with French francs, Philippine pesos, or Salvadoran colones. They returned with news of mysterious lands and strange inventions—clocks, trains, and other devices that both befuddled and bewitched the Bethlehemites. With newfound wealth, these merchants built shimmering pink mansions that transformed Bethlehem from a rural village into Palestine's wealthiest and most cosmopolitan town. At the center of these extraordinary occurrences lived Jubrail Dabdoub. The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub tells the story of Jubrail's encounters, offering a version of Palestinian history rarely acknowledged. From his childhood in rural Bethlehem to later voyages across Europe, East Asia, and the Americas, Jubrail's story culminates in a recorded miracle: in 1909, he was brought back from the dead. To tell such a tale is to delve into the realms of the fantastic and improbable. Through the story of Jubrail's life, Jacob Norris explores the porous lines between history and fiction, the normal and the paranormal, the everyday and the extraordinary. Drawing on aspects of magical realism combined with elements of Palestinian folklore, Norris recovers the atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Bethlehem: a mood of excitement, disorientation, and wonder as the town was thrust into a new era. As the book offers an original approach to historical writing, it captures a fantastic story of global encounter and exchange.Trade Review"Jacob Norris has pioneered a fresh way to write of Middle Eastern migrants and their peregrinations across space, time, and culture. His wonderfully engrossing use of magical realism cum history allows us to more intimately understand how they navigated and found success in a bewilderingly changing world."—Akram Khater, author of Inventing Home"The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub is a most original treatise on local knowledge—a story of donkeys, suitcases and miracles, and the saga of Bethlehem merchant families moving between Palestine and the Americas. Jacob Norris weaves an astute combination of historical discourse and magical realism."—Salim Tamari, The Jerusalem Quarterly"Norris' book is an impressive work that offers a captivating glimpse into the history and lifeworld of Bethlehemites in the late 19th century, as he masterfully balances history and fiction to create a hybrid form that is both imaginative and informative."—Karim Kattan, The Markaz Review"Using a range of sources—the nun's notebooks, parish records, interviews with descendants of the Bethlehem merchants who were active at the turn of the century, memoirs written during those years, other supplemental material to provide context, and his imagination—Norris has written an account that brings to life a town on the cusp of transformation and a population that bravely stepped into the unknown to secure their fortunes."—Ida Audeh, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs"In a captivating retelling of Bethlehem's late nineteenth-century emigration boom and its age of economic and saintly miracles, The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub pushes the boundaries of historical writing to offer a fresh perspective on the interplay between commerce, religion, and migration in Palestine's pioneering hill town."—Eibhlin Priestley, Jerusalem QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Of a land called Amerka, Or how ammo Hanna was saved by al-Khadr 2. Of the hallowed ridge, Or how Jubrail learned to profit from Christmas 3. Of Jubrail's forebears, Or the toils of Yousef and Rosa 4. In which Bethlehem gets a new street 5. Of unruly markets and underwater ships 6. Of sunken eyes in a casket, Or how Bethlehem came to be covered in dust 7. Of mechanical wonders on near and distant shores 8. In search of Amerka 9. Of troubles on the Trocadero 10. Of the decline of Hosh Dabdoub, Or how Jubrail's schooling came in useful 11. Of a street named Rosario 12. By the truth of al-Khadr, I went and came back! 13. Of white cities and bronze medals 14. Of fertility potions and the dizzying heights of success 15. Of weeping icons, ghostly armies and visions of the Virgin 16. Of the enchanted palaces of Bethlehem 17. Of hyenas, serpents and French philanthropists 18. Of the resurrection of Jubrail Dabdoub Epilogue Author's Commentary
£60.80
Stanford University Press Making Space for the Gulf
Book SynopsisThe Persian Gulf has long been a contested spacean object of imperial ambitions, national antagonisms, and migratory dreams. The roots of these contestations lie in the different ways the Gulf has been defined as a region, both by those who live there and those beyond its shore. Making Space for the Gulf reveals how capitalism, empire-building, geopolitics, and urbanism have each shaped understandings of the region over the last two centuries. Here, the Gulf comes into view as a created space, encompassing dynamic social relations and competing interests.Arang Keshavarzian writes a new history of the region that places Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula together within global processes. He connects moments more often treated as rupturesthe discovery of oil, the Iranian Revolution, the rise and decline of British empire, the emergence of American powerand crafts a narrative populated by a diverse range of peoplemigrants and ruling families, pearl-divers and star arch
£84.15
Stanford University Press The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub: Or, How
Book SynopsisThis is the fantastical, yet real, story of the merchants of Bethlehem, the young men who traveled to every corner of the globe in the nineteenth century. These men set off on the backs of donkeys with suitcases full of crosses and rosaries, to return via steamship with suitcases stuffed with French francs, Philippine pesos, or Salvadoran colones. They returned with news of mysterious lands and strange inventions—clocks, trains, and other devices that both befuddled and bewitched the Bethlehemites. With newfound wealth, these merchants built shimmering pink mansions that transformed Bethlehem from a rural village into Palestine's wealthiest and most cosmopolitan town. At the center of these extraordinary occurrences lived Jubrail Dabdoub. The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub tells the story of Jubrail's encounters, offering a version of Palestinian history rarely acknowledged. From his childhood in rural Bethlehem to later voyages across Europe, East Asia, and the Americas, Jubrail's story culminates in a recorded miracle: in 1909, he was brought back from the dead. To tell such a tale is to delve into the realms of the fantastic and improbable. Through the story of Jubrail's life, Jacob Norris explores the porous lines between history and fiction, the normal and the paranormal, the everyday and the extraordinary. Drawing on aspects of magical realism combined with elements of Palestinian folklore, Norris recovers the atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Bethlehem: a mood of excitement, disorientation, and wonder as the town was thrust into a new era. As the book offers an original approach to historical writing, it captures a fantastic story of global encounter and exchange.Trade Review"Jacob Norris has pioneered a fresh way to write of Middle Eastern migrants and their peregrinations across space, time, and culture. His wonderfully engrossing use of magical realism cum history allows us to more intimately understand how they navigated and found success in a bewilderingly changing world."—Akram Khater, author of Inventing Home"The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub is a most original treatise on local knowledge—a story of donkeys, suitcases and miracles, and the saga of Bethlehem merchant families moving between Palestine and the Americas. Jacob Norris weaves an astute combination of historical discourse and magical realism."—Salim Tamari, The Jerusalem Quarterly"Norris' book is an impressive work that offers a captivating glimpse into the history and lifeworld of Bethlehemites in the late 19th century, as he masterfully balances history and fiction to create a hybrid form that is both imaginative and informative."—Karim Kattan, The Markaz Review"Using a range of sources—the nun's notebooks, parish records, interviews with descendants of the Bethlehem merchants who were active at the turn of the century, memoirs written during those years, other supplemental material to provide context, and his imagination—Norris has written an account that brings to life a town on the cusp of transformation and a population that bravely stepped into the unknown to secure their fortunes."—Ida Audeh, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs"In a captivating retelling of Bethlehem's late nineteenth-century emigration boom and its age of economic and saintly miracles, The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub pushes the boundaries of historical writing to offer a fresh perspective on the interplay between commerce, religion, and migration in Palestine's pioneering hill town."—Eibhlin Priestley, Jerusalem QuarterlyTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Of a land called Amerka, Or how ammo Hanna was saved by al-Khadr 2. Of the hallowed ridge, Or how Jubrail learned to profit from Christmas 3. Of Jubrail's forebears, Or the toils of Yousef and Rosa 4. In which Bethlehem gets a new street 5. Of unruly markets and underwater ships 6. Of sunken eyes in a casket, Or how Bethlehem came to be covered in dust 7. Of mechanical wonders on near and distant shores 8. In search of Amerka 9. Of troubles on the Trocadero 10. Of the decline of Hosh Dabdoub, Or how Jubrail's schooling came in useful 11. Of a street named Rosario 12. By the truth of al-Khadr, I went and came back! 13. Of white cities and bronze medals 14. Of fertility potions and the dizzying heights of success 15. Of weeping icons, ghostly armies and visions of the Virgin 16. Of the enchanted palaces of Bethlehem 17. Of hyenas, serpents and French philanthropists 18. Of the resurrection of Jubrail Dabdoub Epilogue Author's Commentary
£19.79
Stanford University Press Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and
Book SynopsisPracticing Sectarianism explores the imaginative and contradictory ways that people live sectarianism. The book's essays use the concept as an animating principle within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas and over a range of historical periods. With contributions from historians and anthropologists, this volume reveals the many ways sectarianism is used to exhibit, imagine, or contest power: What forms of affective pull does it have on people and communities? What epistemological work does it do as a concept? How does it function as a marker of social difference? Examining social interaction, each essay analyzes how people experience sectarianism, sometimes pushing back, sometimes evading it, sometimes deploying it strategically, to a variety of effects and consequences. The collection advances an understanding of sectarianism simultaneously constructed and experienced, a slippery and changeable concept with material effects. And even as the book's focus is Lebanon, its analysis fractures the association of sectarianism with the nation-state and suggests possibilities that can travel to other sites. Practicing Sectarianism, taken as a whole, argues that sectarianism can only be fully understood—and dismantled—if we first take it seriously as a practice.Trade Review"Bringing together a set of brilliant reflections on the landscapes of everyday sectarianism in Lebanon, Practicing Sectarianism will be an invaluable resource for anthropologists, historians, and all those interested in the making and meanings of community in the modern Middle East and beyond. A truly splendid book."—Andrew Arsan, University of Cambridge"This ambitious volume puzzles through the everyday lives of sectarianism to offer exciting, and at times counter-intuitive, findings about this complex discourse of power and identity. Bringing together top anthropologists and historians, Practicing Sectarianism draws on the best of both disciplines to reframe the question of sect and sectarianism in Lebanon and beyond."—Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Northwestern University"Practicing Sectarianism subtly kills the concept that won't die, situating sectarianism at once in material reality and in dynamic social construction. Provocative, incisive, grounded in lived realities, the book delivers a powerful antidote to those who see Lebanon simplistically through the lens of religion. A necessary read."—Suad Joseph, University of California, Davis"A crucial criticism of the everyday practices and discrepant experiences of sectarianism by a range of brilliant scholars."—Ussama Makdisi, Rice University"The volume as a whole is crucial for Middle East collections and highly beneficial for all study of contemporary sectarianism. Essential."—K. Tölölyan, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: Practicing Sectarianism in Lebanon —Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti 1. No Room for This Story: Education and the Limits of Sectarianism during the Mandate Era —Nadya Sbaiti 2. Negotiating Citizenship: Shi'i Families and the Ja'fari Shari'a Courts —Linda Sayed 3. The Archive Is Burning: Law, Unknowability, and the Curation of History —Maya Mikdashi 4. Donating in the Name of the Nation: Charity, Sectarianism, and the Mahjar —Reem Bailony 5. Along and beyond Sect? Olfactory Aesthetics and Rum Orthodox Identity —Roxana Maria Arãs 6. From Murder in New York to Salvation from Beirut: Armenian Intrasectarianism —Tsolin Nalbantian 7. Inequality and Identity: Social Class, Urban Space, and Sect —Joanne Randa Nucho 8. When Exposure Is Not Enough: Sectarianism as a Response to Mixed Marriage —Lara Deeb
£21.59
Stanford University Press In the Shadow of the Wall: The Life and Death of
Book SynopsisThe Maghrebi Quarter of Jerusalem long sat in the shadow of the Western Wall, the last vestige of the Second Temple. Three days after the June '67 War, Israeli forces razed the Quarter, its narrow alleys widened and homes removed, to create the Western Wall Plaza. With this book, Vincent Lemire offers the first history of the Maghrebi Quarter—spanning 800 years from its founding by Saladin in 1187 to house North African Muslim pilgrims through to its destruction. To bring this vanished district back to life, Lemire gathers its now-scattered documentation in the archives of Muslim pious foundations in Jerusalem and the Red Cross in Geneva, in Ottoman archives in Istanbul and Israeli state archives. He engages testimonies of former residents and looks to recent archaeological digs that have resurfaced household objects buried during the destruction. Today, the Western Wall Plaza extends over the former Maghrebi Quarter. It is one of the most identifiable places in the world—yet one of the most occluded in history. In the Shadow of the Wall offers a new point of entry to understand this consequential place.Trade Review"From the stones of the Western Wall Plaza, Vincent Lemire re-establishes the long-forgotten Maghrebi Quarter of the Old City to its rightful place in history. A fascinating and timely narrative."—Roberto Mazza, author of Jerusalem: From the Ottomans to the British"Engaging, sensitive and beautifully written, In the Shadow of the Wall brings to life a silenced and forgotten history, shedding light on the connection between historical knowledge and acknowledgment. Vincent Lemire shows us that the history of the Maghrebi Quarter is not only local, but global."—Abigail Jacobson, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem Between Ottoman and British Rule"In the Shadow of the Wall is a superb work of history that brings back to life the ancient Maghrebi Quarter. Vincent Lemire illuminates the history, the people, the buildings, the mosques, and the shrines of a storied Jerusalem neighborhood."—Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University, author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017"[Lemire] provides a painstakingly recorded economic history of the quarter, including extensive renovation and restoration projects in the early 19th century and geopolitical events during the interwar period that gradually fractured the financial, institutional and political bases of the once lucrative waqf."—Maryvelma Smith O'Neill, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
£23.79
Stanford University Press Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in
Book SynopsisThe United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war. Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.Trade Review"Elastic Empire is an utterly brilliant piece of research. Lisa Bhungalia fluently and beautifully uses theoretical elaborations of plasticity and malleability of empire to show the interconnections between the aid industry and settler colonial and imperial violence."—Laleh Khalili, author of Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies"Into the well-studied terrain of contemporary Palestine and Israel, Lisa Bhungalia has produced a book of stunning originality. Through wide-ranging and incisive analysis, she explains how ever more highly securitized models of foreign aid adversely affect Palestinians. Aid, she argues, is war by other means."—Lisa Hajjar, author of The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture"Elastic Empire offers a riveting portrait of the quiet administration of violence. Lisa Bhungalia maps US shadow wars carried out through the daily work of aid and state terror in Palestine. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the intimacies of US empire and the topological tentacles of counterterrorism law."—Alison Mountz, author of The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement ArchipelagoTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. War Through Law 2. Elastic Sovereignty 3. Work of the List 4. Afterlives and Reverberations 5. Asphyxiatory Violence Conclusion
£79.20
Stanford University Press States of Cultivation: Imperial Transition and
Book SynopsisThe final decades of the Ottoman Empire and the period of the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon coincided with a critical period of transformation in agricultural technologies and administration. Chemical fertilizers and mechanized equipment inspired model farms while government officials and technocratic elites pursued new land tenure, credit-lending, and tax collection policies to maximize revenue. These policies transformed rural communities and environments and were central to projects of reform and colonial control—as well as to resistance of that control. States of Cultivation examines the processes and effects of agrarian transformation over more than a century as Ottoman, Syrian, Lebanese, and French officials grappled with these new technologies, albeit with different end goals. Elizabeth Williams investigates the increasingly fragmented natures produced by these contrasting priorities and the results of their intersection with regional environmental limits. Not only did post–World War I policies realign the economic space of the mandate states, but they shaped an agricultural legacy that continued to impact Syria and Lebanon post-independence. With this book, Williams offers the first comprehensive account of the shared technocratic ideals that animated these policies and the divergent imperial goals that not only reshaped the region's agrarian institutions, but produced representations of the region with repercussions well beyond the mandate's end.Trade Review"Transgressing temporal divides and diving into the central but hitherto neglected spaces of the countryside, Elizabeth Williams takes us on a fascinating adventure through technology, infrastructure, and policy. States of Cultivation offers a new lens not simply on the Eastern Mediterranean, but on land itself as the site where politics and ecology are intimately bound."—Sherene Seikaly, University of California, Santa Barbara"Focusing on the development of agronomic expertise, Elizabeth Williams places agrarian transformation at the heart of historical scholarship. States of Cultivation boasts a flowing narrative magnificently documented, a strong yet unforced argument, and a respect for the voices of the region that spoke and wrote on the making of life in agriculture."—Martha Mundy, London School of Economics"States of Cultivation is an essential history of the agricultural technologies that swept the globe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, trailing promises to remake the countryside for the benefit of nations and empires. Required reading for those of us who seek to understand the origins and perversities of the twentieth-century romance with 'development.'"—Courtney Fullilove, Wesleyan University"Elizabeth R. Williams's States of Cultivation: Imperial Transition and Scientific Agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean is a deeply researched first monograph that ambitiously stakes out a wider territory than the title conveys.... Arguably, Williams's book is as much a history of administration and finance as it is a history of science and technology. It is at its strongest when it makes the interlinkages between each of those domains explicit, in both the Ottoman and French cases."—Kearby Matthew Chess, H-Sci-Med-TechTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Provincial Legibility and Ecologies of Extraction: Agrarian Networks and the Making of Late Ottoman Rural State Space 2. "Agriculture from a Book": "Scientific" Agriculture in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean 3. The Trials and Tribulations of Tractors: From Ottoman Provinces to French Mandate States 4. The Politics of Agricultural Expertise and Education: Exerting Rural Influence Under the French Mandate 5. Of Mice, Sunn Bugs, Drought, and Taxation: The Pests of Mandate Rural Administration and the Crisis of the 1930s Epilogue
£53.60
Stanford University Press Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday
Book SynopsisThe Dhufar Revolution was fought between 1965–1976, in an attempt to depose Oman's British-backed Sultan and advance social ideals of egalitarianism and gender equality. Dhufar, the southernmost governorate in today's Sultanate, captured global attention for its revolutionaries and their liberation movement's Marxist-inspired social change. But following counterinsurgency victory, Oman's government expunged the revolution from sanctioned historical narratives. Afterlives of Revolution offers a groundbreaking study of the legacies of officially silenced revolutionaries. How do their underlying convictions survive and inspire platforms for progressive politics in the wake of disappointment, defeat, and repression? Alice Wilson considers the "social afterlives" of revolutionary values and networks. Veteran militants have used kinship and daily socializing to reproduce networks of social egalitarianism and commemorate the revolution in unofficial ways. These afterlives revise conventional wartime and postwar histories. They highlight lasting engagement with revolutionary values, the agency of former militants in postwar modernization, and the limitations of government patronage for eliciting conformity. Recognizing that those typically depicted as coopted can still reproduce counterhegemonic values, this book considers a condition all too common across Southwest Asia and North Africa: the experience of defeated revolutionaries living under the authoritarian state they once contested.Trade Review"Afterlives of Revolution destabilizes triumphant narratives of counterinsurgency and advances a brilliant critique of reductionist perceptions that often define revolutions merely with references to their success or failure. Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, Alice Wilson shifts the question of 'what makes a revolution' to that of how the lasting values, hopes, promises, and social networks of a revolutionary moment continue to inform peoples' political and kinship relations."—Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Princeton University"Alice Wilson has produced a stunning ethnography exploring the ideals and social relationships forged in a revolutionary movement and lived after its formal defeat. She describes the struggles and connections of those whose hopes have been constrained but not erased. This beautiful work serves as a model for the best of anthropological research and writing."—Mandana Limbert, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY"An extraordinary study. By uncovering the survival strategies and legacies of armed insurgencies in Oman, Afterlives of Revolution sheds light on an important, yet under-explored aspect of post-war politics. This pathbreaking work is of great relevance to scholars of autocratic regimes, and peace and conflict studies."—Gyda Sindre, University of York and the Politics after War Network"Afterlives of Revolution is an important addition to our understanding of revolutions and their outcomes. There is much insight here into Dhufar—its history, politics, and social developments, in addition to the revolution itself."—Tugrul Mende, The Markaz Review"Oman in general, and the Dhufar Rebellion in particular, have tended to be neglected in studies of the Middle East and of the Arabian Peninsula for a variety of reasons. Afterlives of Revolution is a very welcome addition to that literature, illuminating on its own merits and pointing the way towards a wider set of possibilities in the study of frustrated revolutions which should prove quite fruitful for scholars focused on the aftermath of the 2011 failures and frustrations."—Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark"The triumph of Wilson's Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman is that it begins where most books end, with defeat and demobilization. Wilson takes a different approach than the well-worn path of tracking defeated revolutionaries' disillusionment, or retreat in rosy-eyed recollections of the past. By giving form to the evocative yet inchoate notion of afterlives, she urges us to think again about what it means to say that a social process or idea has died or failed."—Mona El-Ghobashy, Public BooksTable of ContentsIntroduction: Former Revolutionaries, Lasting Legacies Chapter 1: Anti-colonialism and Counterinsurgency Chapter 2: The Messiness of Social Change Chapter 3: Patronage, Coercion, and Transformed Spaces Chapter 4: Kinship, Values, and Networks Chapter 5: Everyday and Extraordinary Interactions Chapter 6: Resources of Unofficial Commemoration Conclusion: Postrevolutionary Platforms for Progressive Politics
£23.39
Stanford University Press Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and
Book SynopsisArabic Glitch explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed from an archive of social media data collected over the decades following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book interrogates how the logic of programming technology influences and shapes social movements. Engaging revolutionary politics, Arab media, and digital practice in form, method, and content, Laila Shereen Sakr formulates a media theory that advances the concept of the glitch as a disruptive media affordance. She employs data analytics to analyze tweets, posts, and blogs to describe the political culture of social media, and performs the results under the guise of the Arabic-speaking cyborg VJ Um Amel. Playing with multiple voices that span across the virtual and the real, Sakr argues that there is no longer a divide between the virtual and embodied: both bodies and data are physically, socially, and energetically actual. Are we cyborgs or citizens—or both? This book teaches us how a region under transformation became a vanguard for new thinking about digital systems: the records they keep, the lives they impact, and how to create change from within.Trade Review"Innovative and original, Arabic Glitch interrupts the theoretical silence around Arab technocultures. Channeling the academic, artistic, activist, and technologist, Laila Shereen Sakr embodies the contemporary hybridity of Arab cultural production, inaugurating a rightful place for it in the canon."—Adel Iskandar, Simon Fraser University"Laila Shereen Sakr's breathtaking work will transform how the social sciences and humanities understand cyber-activism, transnational solidarity, and collective power. Arabic Glitch is the book interdisciplinary scholars and activists across the world have been waiting for."—Nadine Naber, University of Illinois at Chicago"Laila Shereen Sakr and her avatar, VJ Um Amel, embrace the glitch—clouds of unknowing, slippery loops, cracks and failures of systems—to better see the materiality of technology, power, and revolution. Aligning theory and practice, installation and performance, Sakr mobilizes media art and digital activist scenes across the Middle East, North Africa, and the internet."—Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College CUNY"Arabic Glitch is an essential addition to the critical discourse on power and surveillance in the age of the internet. Laila Shereen Sakr decodes the specificity of language and cultural identity on digital praxis, boldly articulating how digital data can enable a distinct form of ocular awareness."—Dr. Omar Kholeif, author of Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTsTable of ContentsIntroduction: A Posthuman Techno-Feminist Praxis One: Glitch in the Age of Technoculture Two: Arab Data Bodies Three: Digital Activism Four: Aggregation as Archive Five: Art Practice Conclusion: Fix Your Own Democracy
£19.79
Stanford University Press Famine Worlds: Life at the Edge of Suffering in
Book SynopsisWorld War I was a catastrophe for the lands that would become Lebanon. With war came famine, and with famine came unspeakable suffering, starvation, and mass death. For nearly four years the deadly crisis reshaped society, killing untold thousands and transforming how people lived, how they interacted, and even how they saw the world around them. Famine Worlds peers out at the famine through their eyes, from the wealthy merchants and the dwindling middle classes, to those perishing in the streets. Tylor Brand draws on memoirs, diaries, and correspondence to explore how people negotiated the famine and its traumas. Many observers depicted society in collapse—the starving poor became wretched victims and the well-fed became villains or heroes for the judgment of their peers. He shows how individual struggles had social effects. The famine altered beliefs and behaviors, and those in turn influenced social relationships, policies, and even the historical memory of generations to come. More than simply a chronicle of the Great Famine, however, Famine Worlds offers a profound meditation on what it means to live through such collective trauma, and how doing so shapes the character of a society. Brand shows that there are consequences to living amid omnipresent suffering and death. A crisis like the Great Famine is transformative in ways we cannot comprehend. It not only reshapes the lives and social worlds of those who suffer, it creates a particular rationality that touches the most fundamental parts of our being, even down to the ways we view and interact with each other. We often assume that if we were thrust into historic calamity that we would continue to behave compassionately. Famine Worlds questions such confidence, providing a lesson that could not be more timely.Trade Review"Famine Worlds is a tour de force of history and theory. Tylor Brand recovers the silenced cultural and economic history of the famine of Lebanon, and makes it speak vitally to current debates on mass trauma in Lebanon and beyond. A must read for historians, anthropologists, and relief workers in our age of climate change."—Elizabeth Thompson, author of How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs"One of the forgotten famines of the past is the tragedy that struck the mainly Maronite population of mountainous north Lebanon during World War I. Tylor Brand's study of a famine that will henceforth be better known is erudite and accessible, fair and empathetic. A great book."—Cormac Gráda, author of Famine: A Short History and Eating People is Wrong: Essays on the History and Future of Famine"Famine Worlds offers a fascinating window into a period often overlooked, and lucidly recounts the trials, tribulation, and turmoil of everyday people during the Great War. A highly recommended read and, without a doubt, a significant and thoroughly elucidating contribution to the history of the modern Middle East."—Leila Fawaz, author of A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War"In Famine Worlds, [Brand] brilliantly studies how the population of Lebanon experienced a famine that brought massive death, changed society, and left an often unspoken but indelible mark on the country's historical consciousness."—Marc Martorell Junyent, Informed Comment"Famine Worlds is a meticulously researched account that will appeal to those with a scholarly interest in the historical Levant."—Syed Hamad Ali, The NationalTable of ContentsIntroduction: Four Years of War 1. Some "Sufficed"; Others Died 2. Death and the Famished Body 3. Staying Alive 4. Trauma and Time 5. A World in Decline 6. The Unwashed and Unwell 7. The Sheep and the Goats 8. Conclusion: An Uncomfortable Memory
£21.59
Stanford University Press The Persian Prince: The Rise and Resurrection of
Book SynopsisWith its title borrowed from Machiavelli, The Persian Prince goes far beyond Machiavelli's wildest imagination as to how to rule the world. Hamid Dabashi articulates a bold new idea of the Persian Prince—a metaphor of political authority, a figurative ideal deeply rooted in the collective memories of multiple nations, and a literary construct that connected Muslim empires across time and space and continues to inform political debate today. Drawing on works from Classical Antiquity and the vast Persianate worlds from India to the Mediterranean, as well as the Hebrew Bible and European medieval mirrors for princes, Dabashi engages a diverse body of political thought to reveal the construction of the Persian Prince as a potent archetype. He traces this archetype through its varied historic gestations and finds it resurfacing in postcolonial political thought as a rebel, a prophet, a poet, and a nomad. Bringing poetics and politics together, Dabashi shows how this archetypal figure has long defined political authority throughout the wider Iranian and Islamic worlds. With meticulous attention to literary and poetic texts, moral and philosophical treatises, allegorical and anecdotal stories, sacred and secular evidence, visual and performing arts, histories of global empires and colonial conquests, this sweeping work offers a deeply learned, richly erudite, and transformative piece of critical thinking. As Dabashi shows, the Persian Prince remains the stuff of current debate across the Muslim and Persianate worlds, in contestations over the public domain and the collective will to power, and above all in the prospects of democratic institutions. Trade Review"Hamid Dabashi's book takes the reader on a journey across time and place. 'More a persona than a person,' the Persian Prince reunites in one archetype such different images as the rebellious poet, the just monarch, and the charismatic prophet. Both a historical investigation and a philosophical-political proposal, the book will reward readers with many unusual intellectual encounters."—Giovanni Giorgini, University of Bologna and Columbia University"Disarmingly accessible, laden with millennia of Persian cultural riches, The Persian Prince deftly and decisively shifts the axis of history and of the conception of subjectivity itself. Colonizers and ayatollahs are mere blips in the long temporality of the Persian Prince, a figure of transformation that ultimately resides in the collective heart of rebellion."—Laura U. Marks, Simon Fraser University, author of Enfoldment and Infinity"In this gorgeously written tour de force, Hamid Dabashi spins the contrapuntal narrative of an archaic Iranian archetype as it weaves its way through political-poetical history. Building on his impressive body of work, The Persian Prince is a unique and formidable text that encapsulates the brilliance, vivacity, and political ferocity of Dabashi's mind."—Jeanne Morefield, University of Oxford, author of Unsettling the World"Hamid Dabashi's illuminating study, while both provincializing and enriching the classic frameworks of Machiavelli and Gramsci, provides a provocative and compelling archetype for understanding political power and organization."—Michael Hardt, Duke University, author of The Subversive Seventies"Rejecting an ideologically and politically manufactured binary between 'Islam and the West' and arguing for an 'irretrievably pluralistic' view of cultures and history, Dabashi illuminates the model of the Persian Prince as the archetype of 'a human being best fitted to face and embrace the world.' He eschews an overemphasis on 'political ideals' over 'literary aspects' in defining the nature of sovereignty and relations between rulers and the ruled, and he advocates a rediscovery of democratic institutions in the Muslim and Persianate worlds, and far beyond. Recommended."—B. Tavakolian, CHOICETable of ContentsPrelude: Who Is the Persian Prince—What Is the Persian Prince? Chapter One: The Idea and the Dominion of the Persian Prince Chapter Two: The Persian Prince Comes of Age Chapter Three: On the Histories, Geographies, and Iconographies of Muslim Empires Chapter Four: The Persian Literary Provenance of Muslim Empires Five: In the Light and Shadows of the Persian Prince Six: The Resurrection of the Persian Prince Under Colonial Duress Seven: Colonial Modernity and the Metamorphosis of the Persian Prince Eight: The Nomadic Fate of the Persian Prince Conclusion: The Sublimation of an Imperial Archetype
£23.39
Stanford University Press No Longer Ladies and Gentlemen: Gender and the
Book SynopsisFor the sixty thousand German Jews who escaped Nazi Germany and found refuge in Mandatory Palestine between 1933 and 1940, migration meant radical changes: it transformed their professional and cultural lives and confronted them with a new language, climate, and society. Bridging German-Jewish and Israeli history, this book tells the story of German-Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine/Eretz Israel as gender history. It argues that this migration was shaped and structured by gendered policies and ideologies and experienced by men and women in a gendered form—from the decision to immigrate and the anticipation of change, through the outcomes for family life, body, self-image, and sexuality. Immigration led to immediate transformations in allocations of tasks within the family, concepts of masculinity and femininity, and participation in the labor market and domestic life. Through a close examination of archival materials in German, English, and Hebrew, including administrative records, personal documents, newspapers, and oral history interviews conducted by the author, this book follows Jewish migrants along their journey from Germany and into the workplaces, living rooms, and kitchens of their new homeland, providing a new perspective on everyday life in Mandatory Palestine. Viola Alianov-Rautenberg's work illuminates key issues at the intersection of migration studies, German-Jewish studies, and Israeli history, demonstrating how the lens of gender enriches our understanding of social change, power, ethnicity, and nation-building.Trade Review"No Longer Ladies and Gentlemen tells a compelling and provocatively contrarian story of the German-Jewish migration to pre-state Palestine. Viola Alianov-Rautenburg offers a novel gendered analysis of the often caricatured and still remarkably under-researched flight of bourgeois Jews to a scrappy multicultural and contested Mandatory Palestine."—Atina Grossmann, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art"Based on a rich collection of sources, No Longer Ladies and Gentlemen offers an innovative examination of the historical saga of German-Jewish immigration to Palestine. Emphasizing the gender perspective, this book is one of the best new works on the history of immigration."—Guy Miron, Open University of Israel
£49.30
Stanford University Press The Labor of Hope: Meritocracy and Precarity in
Book SynopsisTechnological advancements, expanding education, and unfettered capitalism have encouraged many around the world to aspire to better lives, even as declines in employment and widening inequality are pushing more and more people into insecurity and hardship. In Egypt, a generation of young men desire fulfilling employment, meaningful relationships, and secure family life, yet find few paths to achieve this. The Labor of Hope follows these educated but underemployed men as they struggle to establish careers and build satisfying lives. In so doing, this book reveals the lived contradiction at the heart of capitalist systems—the expansive dreams they encourage and the precarious lives they produce. Harry Pettit follows young men as they engage a booming training, recruitment, and entrepreneurship industry that sells the cruel meritocratic promise that a good life is realizable for all. He considers the various ways individuals cultivate distraction and hope for future mobility: education, migration, consumption, and prayer. These hope-filled practices are a form of emotional labor for young men, placing responsibility on the individual rather than structural issues in Egypt's economy. Illuminating this emotional labor, Pettit shows how the capitalist economy continues to capture the attention of the very people harmed by it.Trade Review"There is no doubt that Harry Pettit has the gift of ethnographic presentation. The Labor of Hope is an important, original, and truly laudable addition to the emerging literature on contemporary labor in Egypt."—Nefissa Naguib, University of Oslo, author of Nurturing Masculinities"The Labor of Hope is an amazing ethnography of capitalist dreams that motivate Egyptians of modest means to strive for success—a success largely denied by inequalities that push people towards precarious service work. Harry Pettit reveals what happens when you're inspired to be the next Steve Jobs, but the labor market wants you for the call center."—Samuli Schielke, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient,author ofMigrant Dreams"The Labor of Hope brings into sharp focus the emotive work undertaken by slipping middle classes as they endure the many indignities and compromised life-trajectories of a polarized labor market. Harry Pettit offers a penetrating analysis of the affective labor that underpins contemporary capitalism marked by steepening inequalities."—Bruce O'Neill, Saint Louis University, author of The Space of BoredomTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Selling Hope 2. The Drugs of Life 3. Without Hope There Is No Life 4. The Labor of Love 5. The Migration of Hope Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
£79.20
Stanford University Press The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life
Book SynopsisIran's prison system is a foundational institution of Iranian political modernity. The Incarcerated Modern traces the transformation of Iran from a decentralized empire with few imprisoned persons at the turn of the twentieth century into a modern nation-state with over a quarter million prisoners today. In policing the line between "bad criminal" and "good citizen," the carceral system has shaped and reshaped Iranian understandings of citizenship, freedom, and political belonging. Golnar Nikpour explores the interplay between the concrete space of the Iranian prison and the role of prisons in producing new public cultures and political languages in Iran. From prison writings of 1920s leftist prisoners and communiqués of 1950s militant Islamists, to paintings of 1970s revolutionary guerrillas and mapping projects organized by contemporary dissident prisoners, carceral confinement has shaped modern Iranian political movements. Today, mass incarceration is a global phenomenon. The Incarcerated Modern connects Iranian history to transnational carceral histories to illuminate the shared architectures, economies, and techniques of modern punishment. Trade Review"Prisons that purport to isolate from public view nevertheless have a public life, Golnar Nikpour contends in this revelatory study. The Incarcerated Modern's depiction of transnational solidarity and human rights movements attempting to confront carcerality worldwide is acute and indispensable."—Samuel Moyn, Yale University"The Incarcerated Modern tells the story of Iran's transformation from a fading empire into a modern nation-state. Steeped in rich archival research, the book brilliantly unpacks the foundational significance of the carceral system and reveals the paradox of this massive system of surveillance—stabilizing the state while creating the space in which modern political movements came into being. A must read!"—Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Princeton University"The Incarcerated Modern is one of those exceptionally rare, original books that transcends academic disciplines and opens up myriad terrains of inquiry. Golnar Nikpour powerfully and convincingly illustrates how the modern prison is global in scope—linked to colonial histories, nation-states, and global politics."—Shahla Talebi, Arizona State UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: On the Significance of the Iranian Prison 1. Lawlessness and Order: The Qajar Roots of Modern Prisons in Iran 2. The Criminal Is the Patient, the Prison Will Be the Cure: Building the Carceral Imagination in Pahlavi Iran 3. Like a Fertile Storm: Prisons and Revolutionary Worldmaking in the Iranian Guerrilla Era 4. The Iranian Prison Goes Global: Iranian Revolutionaries and the International Human Rights Movement 5. Making an Example: Carceral Utopianism and Prison Expansion in Revolutionary Iran 6. Carcerality beyond Prisons?: The Politics of Punishment in the Contemporary Islamic Republic Conclusion: Politics and Prisons beyond Reform Notes Bibliography Index
£92.80
Stanford University Press The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe: Muslims in
Book SynopsisThe Afterlife of Ottoman Europe examines how Bosnian Muslims navigated the Ottoman and Habsburg domains following the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia Herzegovina after the 1878 Berlin Congress. Prominent members of the Ottoman imperial polity, Bosnian Muslims became minority subjects of Austria-Hungary, developing a relationship with the new authorities in Vienna while transforming their interactions with Istanbul and the rest of the Muslim world. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular explores the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire during this period—an influence perpetuated by the efforts of the imperial state from afar, and by its former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina negotiating their new geopolitical reality. Muslims' endeavors to maintain their prominence and shape their organizations and institutions influenced imperial considerations and policies on occupation, sovereignty, minorities, and migration. This book introduces Ottoman archival sources and draws on Ottoman and Eastern European historiographies to reframe the study of Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina within broader intellectual and political trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing transregional connections, imperial continuities, and multilayered allegiances, The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe bridges Ottoman, Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Balkan studies. Amzi-Erdoğdular tells the story of Muslims who redefined their place and influence in both empires and the modern world, and argues for the inclusion of Islamic intellectual history within the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Eastern Europe.Trade Review"Crossing over multiple intellectual networks and travel routes, Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular opens an expansive view of the emerging debates between the late Ottoman and Habsburg empires. Taking us through Sarajevo, Istanbul, Vienna, and many surprising stops along the way, her outstanding analysis contributes insights about overlapping allegiances and transimperial notions of sovereignty that will resonate with scholars well beyond Balkan history."—Edin Hajdarpasic, Loyola University Chicago"Never before has a study of the Habsburg period in Bosnia Herzegovina placed Bosnian Muslim agency and loyalties to both the Habsburg and Ottoman empires at the center of its analysis. Centering Ottoman sources, this pathbreaking work shows that Bosnia did not 'stop being Ottoman' in 1878. Under Habsburg rule, Bosnian Muslims continued to appeal to Ottoman authority and developed a form of Muslim modernity that outlasted both empires."—Maureen Healy, Lewis & Clark College"Few works have been able to scrutinize empire's influence on the modern world with the rigor, focus and brilliance displayed in this remarkable monograph. Offering a thoroughly researched case study of the afterlife of Ottoman Bosnia, it provides a model for how to think about the lasting effects of the old empires and will prove indispensable not only to historians of the Balkans, but to anyone interested in modern Europe and its relationship to the world around it."—Mark Mazower, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Diplomacies of Separation 2. Migration: Those Who Left 3. Hijra: Views and Debates on Migration 4. Competing Empires 5. Negotiating Imperial Ties: Mobilization and Politics 6. Allegiances and Final Separation Epilogue: Alternative Muslim Modernities
£53.60
Stanford University Press Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and
Book SynopsisBetween the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Trade Review"A brilliant tour de force. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a detailed, revisionist understanding of the beginnings of the modern refugee regime."—Dawn Chatty, University of Oxford"Magnificent and magisterial. Empire of Refugees not only reveals the emergence of a new template for refugee flows in the modern world, but it also captures the human experiences of the refugees themselves: their sorrows, hopes, failures, and successes. A prodigious achievement."—Michael A. Reynolds, Princeton University"Empire of Refugees is a meticulously researched and imaginatively conceived history of mass migration that represents a genuinely fresh contribution to both late Ottoman history and global refugee studies."—Laura Robson, Pennsylvania State UniversityTable of ContentsIllustrations and Tables Notes for the Reader Acknowledgments Introduction PART I: Refugee Migration 1. Muslim Migrations from the North Caucasus 2. Ottoman Refugee Regime PART II: Refugee Resettlement 3. Inequality and Sectarian Violence in the Balkans 4. Real Estate and Nomadic Frontier in the Levant 5. Building the Caucasus in Anatolia PART III: Diaspora and Return 6. Making the North Caucasian Diaspora 7. Return Migration to Russia Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
£92.80
Stanford University Press Fabricating Homeland Security
Book SynopsisHomeland security is rarely just a matter of the homeland; it involves the circulation and multiplication of policing practices across borders. Though the term homeland security is closely associated with the United States, Israel is credited with first developing this all-encompassing approach to domestic surveillance and territorial control. Today, it is a central node in the sprawling global homeland security industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, India emerged as a major growth market. Known as India''s 9/11 or simply 26/11, the attacks sparked significant public pressure to adopt modern homeland security approaches. Since 2008, India has become not only the single largest buyer of Israeli conventional weapons, but also a range of other surveillance technology, police training, and security expertise.Pairing insights from science and technology studies with those from decolonial and postcolonial theory, Fab
£98.60
Stanford University Press How Commerce Became Legal
£61.35
Stanford University Press The State of Lebanon
£93.60
University of Pennsylvania Press The New Turks: Pioneers of the Republic, 192-195
Book SynopsisThis book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
£68.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Sacred Places Tell Tales
Book SynopsisCairo's synagogues shed new light on the transformation Egyptian society and its Jewish community underwent from 1875 to the presentSacred Places Tell Tales is the previously untold history of Egyptian Jewry and the ways in which Cairo's synagogues historically functioned as active institutions in the social lives of these Jews. Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo's synagogues as exquisite storytellers. The synagogues still stand in Cairo, and they shed new light on the social, cultural, and political processes that Egyptian society and the Jews underwent from 1875 to the present. Studying old and new synagogues in the Egyptian capital, their locations, the items they stored, and the range of religious and nonreligious activities they hosted reveals the social heterogeneity and the diverse ways in which modern Jewish sociocultural identity was constructed within Cairo's Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Karaite communities. Meital contends that studying the congregati
£48.60
University of Pennsylvania Press Forensic Fantasies
£84.15
Cognella, Inc A History of the Modern Middle East
Book SynopsisA History of the Modern Middle East provides students with a primer on the major historical events that have shaped the Middle East over time. The book integrates environmental considerations throughout the historical narrative and includes material on the Nile Valley Sudan, a region often missing from traditional Middle East texts.The opening chapter introduces Islam in its historical context, introducing the linguistic groups that forged the early centuries of Muslim history. The following three chapters provide a bridge between that early historical context and roughly 1500 CE. This includes coverage of the Ottoman Empire and the early Iranian Safavi state. Additional chapters maintain the chronological continuity but also focus on political, social, and economic developments, including changes in the interpretations of Islam itself. Students read about the Middle East interacting with the world, including world wars, the production of oil, and the failures of leadership elites, as well as the contrasting disappointments and frustrations of most Middle Eastern people. The final chapter focuses on history as a discipline and suggests possibilities for the present and future.A History of the Modern Middle East is part of the Cognella History of Asia Series, a collection of books dedicated to helping students explore the exciting, complex, and influential past of Asian countries.
£54.40
University of Minnesota Press Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's
Book SynopsisRethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.Trade Review "Parisa Vaziri’s care for Iranian cinema reveals a complex archive—a curriculum, a vigor—that exceeds local abstraction. Its new waves and new particularities are ‘symptoms of the global.’ Her deep analytic concern with racial blackness shows that the absence that makes possible the local and the global is also the presence that disrupts the givenness of self and world. Rigorously, beautifully, Vaziri transforms the history of the Indian Ocean and the history of cinema."—Fred Moten, New York University "Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery is a truly groundbreaking work that asks us to seriously take up the question: What is blackness in Iranian culture? She critically interrogates the claim that Indian Ocean slavery has largely been forgotten in popular Iranian memory with her illuminating exposition and insightful analysis. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery prompts us to do a far better job of exploring the lived experience of blackness in modernity beyond the structures of the Atlantic sphere and to reconsider our thinking about the relationship between slavery, Africa, blackness, and the globalization of the nation state."—R. A. Judy, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black "Incisive, theoretically rich, and deeply researched, Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery challenges us to see the cinematic material she analyzes in new and striking ways. Crossing conventional disciplinary and area-studies boundaries, Vaziri’s book demands that we rethink the premises of our assumptions about blackness and histories of enslavement in West Asia, especially in Iran."—Amy Motlagh, author of Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran
£86.40
University of Minnesota Press Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's
Book SynopsisRethinking the history of African enslavement in the western Indian Ocean through the lens of Iranian cinema From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsī) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zār, which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.Trade Review "Parisa Vaziri’s care for Iranian cinema reveals a complex archive—a curriculum, a vigor—that exceeds local abstraction. Its new waves and new particularities are ‘symptoms of the global.’ Her deep analytic concern with racial blackness shows that the absence that makes possible the local and the global is also the presence that disrupts the givenness of self and world. Rigorously, beautifully, Vaziri transforms the history of the Indian Ocean and the history of cinema."—Fred Moten, New York University "Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery is a truly groundbreaking work that asks us to seriously take up the question: What is blackness in Iranian culture? She critically interrogates the claim that Indian Ocean slavery has largely been forgotten in popular Iranian memory with her illuminating exposition and insightful analysis. Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery prompts us to do a far better job of exploring the lived experience of blackness in modernity beyond the structures of the Atlantic sphere and to reconsider our thinking about the relationship between slavery, Africa, blackness, and the globalization of the nation state."—R. A. Judy, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black "Incisive, theoretically rich, and deeply researched, Parisa Vaziri’s Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery challenges us to see the cinematic material she analyzes in new and striking ways. Crossing conventional disciplinary and area-studies boundaries, Vaziri’s book demands that we rethink the premises of our assumptions about blackness and histories of enslavement in West Asia, especially in Iran."—Amy Motlagh, author of Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran
£23.39
Fordham University Press Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in
Book SynopsisHow do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in spite of the overdetermining conditions of precarity and injustice of which they are a product and against which they protest? Might the symptom of oppression become simultaneously the agent of its critique? Melancholy Acts offers richly nuanced reflections on these questions through a series of wide-ranging engagements with Arab thought, literature, and film in the aftermath of the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians and the 1967 military defeat of Arab armies. Melancholy Acts offers a psychoaffective theory of cultural production that arises out of the disjunction between political impoverishment and cultural resistance to colonial and neoliberal oppression. Such a theory allows the author to trace the melancholy disposition of Arabic literary and filmic productions and to discern the precarious rhetorical modes of their critical intervention in a culture that is continually strained to its breaking point. Across six chapters, Melancholy Acts reads with rigor and sensitivity contentious topics of Arab contemporaneity such as secular modernity and manhood, Arab nationalism and leftism, literary and artistic iltizām, or commitment, Islamism, and martyrdom. The book tracks the melancholy politics that inform the literary and cultural projects of a multitude of Arab novelists (Ghassan Kanafani and Naguib Mahfouz); poets and playwrights (Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Saadallah Wannous); filmmakers (Nouri Bouzid, Moufida Tlatli, Youssef Chahine, and Hany Abu Assad); alongside the work of such intellectuals as Hussein Muruwwa, Malek Bennabi, Karima Lazali, George Tarabishi, and Fethi Benslama, from within the Arab world, as well as such non-Arab thinkers as Freud, Lacan, Adorno, Fanon, Spivak, Butler, and Žižek. Melancholy Acts charts a fresh and bold new approach to Arabic and comparative literature that combines in interlaced simultaneity a high sensitivity to local idioms, as they swerve between symptom and critique, with nuanced knowledge of the geopolitics of theory and psychoanalysis.Table of ContentsNote on Translation and Transliteration | ix Introduction: Melancholy Acts | 1 1 Melancholy Formations: From Nakba to Naksa and Beyond | 45 2 Melancholy Forms: Poetry in the Aftermath of Catastrophe | 89 3 Enduring Left Melancholy: Recasting the Crisis of the Nasserite Intellectual | 123 4 Melancholy Manhood: Modernity and Neopatriarchy in Tunisian Cinema | 158 5 Melancholy Ends: Palestinian Film and Narrative Martyrdom | 195 6 Melancholy Islam: Jihad, Jouissance, and Female Clairvoyance | 234 Epilogue: Melancholy Critique | 277 Acknowledgments | 293 The Unsheltering Sky: A Note on the Cover Art | 297 Bibliography | 299 Index | 313
£95.20
Fordham University Press Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in
Book SynopsisHow do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in spite of the overdetermining conditions of precarity and injustice of which they are a product and against which they protest? Might the symptom of oppression become simultaneously the agent of its critique? Melancholy Acts offers richly nuanced reflections on these questions through a series of wide-ranging engagements with Arab thought, literature, and film in the aftermath of the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians and the 1967 military defeat of Arab armies. Melancholy Acts offers a psychoaffective theory of cultural production that arises out of the disjunction between political impoverishment and cultural resistance to colonial and neoliberal oppression. Such a theory allows the author to trace the melancholy disposition of Arabic literary and filmic productions and to discern the precarious rhetorical modes of their critical intervention in a culture that is continually strained to its breaking point. Across six chapters, Melancholy Acts reads with rigor and sensitivity contentious topics of Arab contemporaneity such as secular modernity and manhood, Arab nationalism and leftism, literary and artistic iltizām, or commitment, Islamism, and martyrdom. The book tracks the melancholy politics that inform the literary and cultural projects of a multitude of Arab novelists (Ghassan Kanafani and Naguib Mahfouz); poets and playwrights (Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Saadallah Wannous); filmmakers (Nouri Bouzid, Moufida Tlatli, Youssef Chahine, and Hany Abu Assad); alongside the work of such intellectuals as Hussein Muruwwa, Malek Bennabi, Karima Lazali, George Tarabishi, and Fethi Benslama, from within the Arab world, as well as such non-Arab thinkers as Freud, Lacan, Adorno, Fanon, Spivak, Butler, and Žižek. Melancholy Acts charts a fresh and bold new approach to Arabic and comparative literature that combines in interlaced simultaneity a high sensitivity to local idioms, as they swerve between symptom and critique, with nuanced knowledge of the geopolitics of theory and psychoanalysis.Table of ContentsNote on Translation and Transliteration | ix Introduction: Melancholy Acts | 1 1 Melancholy Formations: From Nakba to Naksa and Beyond | 45 2 Melancholy Forms: Poetry in the Aftermath of Catastrophe | 89 3 Enduring Left Melancholy: Recasting the Crisis of the Nasserite Intellectual | 123 4 Melancholy Manhood: Modernity and Neopatriarchy in Tunisian Cinema | 158 5 Melancholy Ends: Palestinian Film and Narrative Martyrdom | 195 6 Melancholy Islam: Jihad, Jouissance, and Female Clairvoyance | 234 Epilogue: Melancholy Critique | 277 Acknowledgments | 293 The Unsheltering Sky: A Note on the Cover Art | 297 Bibliography | 299 Index | 313
£26.99
Fordham University Press Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of
Book SynopsisLiron Mor’s book queries what conflict means in the context of Palestine–Israel. Conflict has long been seen as singular and primary: as an “original sin” that necessitates the state and underwrites politics. This book problematizes this universal notion of conflict, revealing its colonial implications and proposing that conflicts are always politically constructed after the fact and are thus to be understood in their various specific forms. The book explores sites of poetic and political strife in Palestine–Israel by combining a comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic literature with political and literary theory. Mor leverages an archive that ranges from the 1930s to the present, from prose and poetry to film and television, to challenge the conception of the Palestinian–Israeli context as a conflict, delineating the colonial history of this concept and showing its inadequacy to Palestine–Israel. Instead, Mor articulates locally specific modes of theorizing the antagonisms and mediations, colonial technologies, and anticolonial practices that make up the fabric of this site. The book thus offers five figurative conflictual concepts that are derived from the poetics of the works: conflict (judgment/ishtibāk), levaṭim (disorienting dilemmas), ikhtifāʾ (anti/colonial disappearance), ḥoḳ (mediating law), and inqisām (hostile severance). In so doing, Conflicts aims to generate a historically and geographically situated mode of theory-making, which defies the separation between the conceptual and the poetic.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 1 Conflict (Judgment/Ishtibāk) | 25 2 Levaṭim (Disorienting Dilemmas) | 68 3 Ikhtifāʾ (Anti/colonial Disappearance) | 108 4 Ḥoḳ (Mediating Law) | 153 5 Inqisām (Hostile Severance) | 195 Postscript | 243 Acknowledgments | 251 ' Bibliography | 255 Index | 277
£84.15
Fordham University Press Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of
Book SynopsisLiron Mor’s book queries what conflict means in the context of Palestine–Israel. Conflict has long been seen as singular and primary: as an “original sin” that necessitates the state and underwrites politics. This book problematizes this universal notion of conflict, revealing its colonial implications and proposing that conflicts are always politically constructed after the fact and are thus to be understood in their various specific forms. The book explores sites of poetic and political strife in Palestine–Israel by combining a comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic literature with political and literary theory. Mor leverages an archive that ranges from the 1930s to the present, from prose and poetry to film and television, to challenge the conception of the Palestinian–Israeli context as a conflict, delineating the colonial history of this concept and showing its inadequacy to Palestine–Israel. Instead, Mor articulates locally specific modes of theorizing the antagonisms and mediations, colonial technologies, and anticolonial practices that make up the fabric of this site. The book thus offers five figurative conflictual concepts that are derived from the poetics of the works: conflict (judgment/ishtibāk), levaṭim (disorienting dilemmas), ikhtifāʾ (anti/colonial disappearance), ḥoḳ (mediating law), and inqisām (hostile severance). In so doing, Conflicts aims to generate a historically and geographically situated mode of theory-making, which defies the separation between the conceptual and the poetic.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 1 Conflict (Judgment/Ishtibāk) | 25 2 Levaṭim (Disorienting Dilemmas) | 68 3 Ikhtifāʾ (Anti/colonial Disappearance) | 108 4 Ḥoḳ (Mediating Law) | 153 5 Inqisām (Hostile Severance) | 195 Postscript | 243 Acknowledgments | 251 ' Bibliography | 255 Index | 277
£23.79
Fordham University Press The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla:
Book SynopsisThe Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla intervenes in discussions on decolonialism and feminism by introducing the example of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement. Üstündağ shows how the practices and the concepts of the movement contribute to debates on how the past, present, and future can be critically rethought in revolutionary ways. In the movement’s images, figures, voices, bodies, and their reverberations Üstündağ elaborates a new political imagination that has emerged in Kurdistan through women’s acts and speech. This political imagination unfolds between flesh, body, voice, language. It is the result of Kurdish women’s desire to find new ways of being and becoming, between the necessary and the possible. Focusing on the figures of the mother, the woman politician and woman guerilla, Üstündağ argues that the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement changes what politics consists of, including its matter, relationality, temporality, and spatiality. Although anchored in the specific Kurdish experiences, the book puts the movement into conversation with feminist political theory, psychoanalysis, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Decolonial Studies. In solidarity with the Kurdish Movement’s tradition of resistance to History with a capital H that Kurds have built through reiterated performance, the book seeks to establish what new entanglements with wide-ranging thought the movement offers as a provocation for contemporary politics.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 Part I: Mother 1. The Voice of the Maternal: Kurdish Mothers at the Intersection of Linguicide and Matricide | 25 2. Law(s) of the Maternal: Kurdish Mothers in Public | 47 Part II: Politician 3. Antigone as Kurdish Politician: Gendered Dwellings in the Limit between Freedom and Peace | 73 4. Kurdish Women Politicians at the Border between Body and Flesh | 100 Part III: Guerrilla 5. Who Are We and How Must We Live? Being a Friend in the Guerrilla Movement | 127 6. A Promise, a Letter, a Funeral, and a Wedding | 156 Conclusion | 173 Acknowledgments | 181 Notes | 183 Bibliography | 229 Index | 251
£79.90
Fordham University Press The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla:
Book SynopsisThe Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla intervenes in discussions on decolonialism and feminism by introducing the example of the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement. Üstündağ shows how the practices and the concepts of the movement contribute to debates on how the past, present, and future can be critically rethought in revolutionary ways. In the movement’s images, figures, voices, bodies, and their reverberations Üstündağ elaborates a new political imagination that has emerged in Kurdistan through women’s acts and speech. This political imagination unfolds between flesh, body, voice, language. It is the result of Kurdish women’s desire to find new ways of being and becoming, between the necessary and the possible. Focusing on the figures of the mother, the woman politician and woman guerilla, Üstündağ argues that the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement changes what politics consists of, including its matter, relationality, temporality, and spatiality. Although anchored in the specific Kurdish experiences, the book puts the movement into conversation with feminist political theory, psychoanalysis, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Decolonial Studies. In solidarity with the Kurdish Movement’s tradition of resistance to History with a capital H that Kurds have built through reiterated performance, the book seeks to establish what new entanglements with wide-ranging thought the movement offers as a provocation for contemporary politics.Table of ContentsIntroduction | 1 Part I: Mother 1. The Voice of the Maternal: Kurdish Mothers at the Intersection of Linguicide and Matricide | 25 2. Law(s) of the Maternal: Kurdish Mothers in Public | 47 Part II: Politician 3. Antigone as Kurdish Politician: Gendered Dwellings in the Limit between Freedom and Peace | 73 4. Kurdish Women Politicians at the Border between Body and Flesh | 100 Part III: Guerrilla 5. Who Are We and How Must We Live? Being a Friend in the Guerrilla Movement | 127 6. A Promise, a Letter, a Funeral, and a Wedding | 156 Conclusion | 173 Acknowledgments | 181 Notes | 183 Bibliography | 229 Index | 251
£23.39
University of Arkansas Press Memories of Revolt: The 1936-1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past
Book SynopsisMemories of Revolt treats a subject that resonates with anyone who studies the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and particularly Palestinian nationalism.Trade Review"This wonderful monograph treats a subject that resonates with anyone who studies the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and particularly Palestinian nationalism: that how Palestinian history is remembered and constructed is as meaningful to our understanding of the current struggle as arriving as some sort of 'complete empirical understanding' of its history. Swedenburg . . . studies how a major anti-colonial insurrection, the 1936–38 strike and revolt in Palestine [against the British], is remembered in Palestinian nationalist historiography, western and Israeli 'official' historical discourse, and Palestinian popular memory. Using primarily oral history interviews, supplemented by archival material and national monuments, he presents multiple, complex, contradictory, and alternative interpretations of historical events. . . . The book is thematically divided into explorations of Palestinian nationalist symbols, stereotypes, and myths; Israeli national monuments that simultaneously act as historical 'injunctions against forgetting' Jewish history and efforts to 'marginalize, vilify, and obliterate' the Arab history of Palestine; Palestine subaltern memories as resistance to official narratives, including unpopular and controversial recollections of collaboration and assassination; and finally, how the recodification and revival of memories of the revolt informed the Palestinian intifada that erupted in 1987." —MESA Bulletin
£21.21
University of South Carolina Press A History of the Jews of Arabia: From Ancient
Book SynopsisThis is a reconstructed history of a complex Jewish community in Arabia at a critical juncture in world history. The Jewish communities of Arabia had a great influence on the attitudes that Muslims hold toward Jews, and yet relatively little has been written about their history. Through techniques borrowed from anthropology, literary criticism, sociology, and comparative religion, Gordon Darnell Newby reconstructs the understanding of Jewish life in Arabia before and during the time of Muhammad. In addition, this material is used to develop a perspective on the interconfessional relations between Judaism and Islam during an era when the latter was at one of its most dynamic stages of growth.Trade ReviewA daring venture... because of its attempt at reconstructing the history of a once-important but little-known group based on very sparse data. - Religious Studies Review ""The Jews of Arabia maintained a thriving, vital Diaspora community for centuries. While Muhammad was spreading Islam around Medina in the seventh century, there were Arabian Jewish merchants, poets, pastoral nomads, farmers, sculptors, and warriors. One of the findings of this scholarly synthesis is that Arabian Jewry influenced Muhammad's developing vision of his prophetic mission.... By identifying a body of shared experiences of Jews and Muslims, Newby's study gives hope for peaceful coexistence in the Middle East."" - Publishers Weekly
£19.76
Pennsylvania State University Press Identity in Persian Egypt: The Fate of the
Book SynopsisIn this book, Bob Becking provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the origins, lives, and eventual fate of the Yehudites, or Judeans, at Elephantine, framed within the greater history of the rise and fall of the Persian Empire. The Yehudites were among those mercenaries recruited by the Persians to defend the southwestern border of the empire in the fifth century BCE. Becking argues that this group, whom some label as the first “Jews,” lived on the island of Elephantine in relative peace with other ethnic groups under the aegis of the pax persica. Drawing on Aramaic and Demotic texts discovered during excavations on the island and at Syene on the adjacent shore of the Nile, Becking finds evidence of intermarriage, trade cooperation, and even a limited acceptance of one another’s gods between the various ethnic groups at Elephantine. His analysis of the Elephantine Yehudites’ unorthodox form of Yahwism provides valuable insight into the group’s religious beliefs and practices. An important contribution to the study of Yehudite life in the diaspora, this accessibly written and sweeping history enhances our understanding of the varieties of early Jewish life and how these contributed to the construction of Judaism. Trade Review“A good and stimulating read. It represents an innovative approach to research on Elephantine. The most important strength—construing the ‘fate’ of the Yehudite community in light of the rise and fall of pax persica—makes the book a contribution to the Yehudite community’s history and a microhistorical contribution to Achaemenid studies. Both students and experts will gain from reading the book.”—Gard Granerød Review of Biblical Literature“Becking has provided scholars with an accessible and well-researched history of Elephantine during the Persian period, which will enrich the debate for years to come.”—James D. Moore Journal for the Study of JudaismTable of ContentsIntroduction1 How Persian Power Entered Egypt1.1 Egypt Before the Persians1.2. Persia’s Rise to Power1.3 Cambyses Came to Egypt1.4 Darius’ Consolidation1.5 ‘The Silver and the Ebony were brought from Egypt’ or: The Character of Persian Rule in Egypt1.6 Who was Cambyses and what exactly is meant by the verb ‘to conquer’?2 Yehudites at Elephantine: Provenance, Identity, and Religion2.1 Jews, Judaeans, Judaeo-Arameans, or Yehudites?2.2 How Did They Come to Egypt?2.3 Religious Identity2.4 Yehudite Identity in Elephantine3 Multi-ethnic Elephantine: Some Remarks on Different Minor Ethnicities in a Persian Border Garrison3.1 Introduction3.2 Eastern Satrapies3.3 Anatolia3.4 Phoenicians3.5 Philistine3.6 The Aegean Sea3.7 Various People3.8 Conclusion and Prospect4 Pax Persica: Cooperation, Cohabitation, and Acceptance4.1 Introduction4.2 Intermarriage4.3 Salutations in Letters4.4 Trade Contacts4.5 Oaths and Other Deities4.6 An Interreligious Figurine4.7. Conclusions and Questions 5 Control through Education, Law, and Military Power5.1 Introduction: Two Literary Texts5.2 Aḥiqar as Scribal Propaganda5.3 The Function of the Aramaic Version of the Behistun Inscription5.4 Law5.5 Military5.6 An Inadequate Analogy6 Disruptions of the Inter-Ethnic Solidarity6.1 A Stone of Contention6.2 A Conflict between Egyptians and Yehudites6.3 Burglary in Times of Turmoil6.4 The Crisis around the Demolition of the Temple of Yahô in Elephantine6.5 Concluding Question7 Khnum is Against us Since Hananiah has been in Egypt’ On Two Historical Movements in the Fifth Century BCE7.1 From the oasis in the desert to the Land of the Pyramids (Papyrus Amherst 63)7.2 The Egyptian Strive for Independence8 Beyond the Final Curtain8.1 Independent under Nepherites8.2 The Fate of the Yehudites and other Minorities8.3 Some Speculations8.4 Conclusions8.5 A Final Remark
£64.56
Pennsylvania State University Press Ashkelon 1: Introduction and Overview (1985–2006)
Book SynopsisSince 1985, the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, directed by Lawrence E. Stager of Harvard University, has been a leading American archaeological project in Israel. Now, the work of the project is being collected in ten final report volumes published by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. The first volume, Introduction and Overview (1985–2006), spans more than 700 copiously illustrated pages, many in full color, and includes subjects ranging from microscopic DNA to monumental architecture. In addition, Volume 1 includes plans and descriptions of every architectural phase excavated during the course of seventeen field seasons and reveals the archaeological sequence of the site and aspects of the city plan from the Bronze Age to Crusader times, with special emphasis on Canaanite (Bronze Age) and Philistine (Iron Age) Ashkelon. The chapters in this volume, by more than three dozen contributors, combine to describe Ashkelon’s cultural constants and contingencies over la longue durée (3000 BCE to 1500 CE). As a result, Ashkelon 1: Introduction and Overview (1985–2006) will be an indispensable resource for investigating the maritime and terrestrial history of the southeastern Mediterranean littoral.
£999.99
Pennsylvania State University Press Ashkelon 4: Iron Age Figurines of Ashkelon
Book SynopsisIn this volume, Dr. Michael D. Press publishes the complete Iron Age corpus of terracotta anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines from the Leon Levy Expedition. Adapting a methodology of typology, iconography, and iconology, Press lays out his theoretical framework for analyzing and understanding the figurines of Ashkelon and those from Philistine cultures. Throughout this study, which covers nearly six centuries of Philistine life, the well-dated archaeological contexts of the figurines are stressed as much as their form and decoration. With an uncanny eye for form and detail, Press succeeds in changing our understanding of Philistine iconography while providing a model of method and theory that could be applied to the coroplastic art of many cultures.
£999.99
Pennsylvania State University Press Ashkelon 5: The Land behind Ashkelon
Book SynopsisCombining old surveys with new material from salvage excavations, The Land behind Ashkelon provides a wide regional context for the excavations at Tel Ashkelon. This volume is a distillation of numerous excavations by many talented archaeologists, brought together by Yaakov Huster, a man who has devoted his life to preserving the cultural heritage of the Ashkelon region.Yaakov Huster has not only revisited older surveys but has also taken into account the enormous amount of new information collected by the archaeologists of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) over the last several decades. This volume synthesizes all available data to create the most accurate and updated regional survey of the Ashkelon region to date. As such, it is an invaluable resource to anyone studying Ashkelon and its hinterland.
£45.86
Pennsylvania State University Press The Royal Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal (668–631
Book SynopsisIn this book, Jamie Novotny and Joshua Jeffers provide updated, reliable editions of seventy-one historical inscriptions of Ashurbanipal, including all historical inscriptions on clay prisms, clay cylinders, wall slabs, and other stone objects from Nineveh, Assur, and Kalhu. Each text edition is accompanied by an English translation, a catalog of all exemplars, a comprehensive bibliography, and commentary containing notes and technical information. This volume also contains a general introduction to the reign of Ashurbanipal, his military campaigns, the corpus of inscriptions, previous studies, and chronology; translations of the relevant passages of several Mesopotamian chronicles and king lists; photographs of objects inscribed with texts of Ashurbanipal; indexes of museum and excavation numbers, selected publications, and proper names.This reference work represents a significant revision of previously published collections and also makes available a number of unpublished inscriptions. It will be invaluable to specialists in royal inscriptions and will be of interest to all scholars of the history and archaeology of the Ancient Near East.Trade Review“The publication of RINAP 5/1 will without doubt be fundamental for future research on the reign of Ashurbanipal. The entire RINAP series has already greatly facilitated Assyriological research and the physical publication of RINAP 5/2, whose content is largely already available on ORACC, is eagerly awaited. The reviewer wishes to thank and congratulate the authors of RINAP 5/1 for their excellent and diligent work.”—Johannes Bach Journal of Near Eastern Studies“RINAP 5/1 is a solid reference tool for one of the largest and most diverse corpora of royal inscriptions from the first millennium BC. With its comprehensive introduction, the volume serves as an excellent point of departure for readers who are about to start their in-depth exploration into the crucial period not only of the Neo-Assyrian empire but also of the broader history of Mesopotamian civilization in the first millennium. For those already familiar with the corpus, RINAP 5/1 serves as a reminder of the scale of the source material studied by modern scholars for the past 150 years.”—Peerapat Ouysook Journal of the American Oriental Society“This new volume of Ashurbanipal’s inscriptions, with its ordered, revised, and improved comprehensive presentation of the texts, will ease the work of philologists and historians who deal with this crucial documentation and the placement of royal inscriptions within a complex system of communication with which various concordances are available.”—S. Ponchia Archiv für Orientforschung“This book is a precious tool for any scholar interested in the historical context of the latter southern kingdom.”—Bieke Mahieu Revue Biblique“[A] splendid volume for studying the reign of Ashurbanipal, one of the major Assyrian rulers of antiquity.”—Lester L. Grabbe Society for Old Testament Study Booklist (JSOT)
£72.21
Texas A & M University Press From Egypt to Mesopotamia: A Study of Predynastic Trade Routes
Book SynopsisIn Near Eastern studies, it has come to be accepted by many as fact that predynastic trade routes connected Egypt and Mesopotamia. The case for such trade routes, however, has until recently largely been based upon the two regions' shared influences rather than on archaeological evidence. In ""From Egypt to Mesopotamia"", Samuel Mark ferrets out the two possible trade routes between these two vastly different cultures. Ancient shipwreck sites and recently discovered artifacts allow Mark to delineate avenues of trade between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Taking to task previous studies that describe the Egypt-Mesopotamia trade connection as being one between two homogeneous cultures, Mark focuses on the variety of cultural differences, rather than their shared similarities, to map the infusion of these cultures. Scholars, students, and nautical archeology and Egyptology enthusiasts will appreciate this probing, fascinating trek through sea, sand, and time, unfolding the development of trade routes in the East.
£16.96
Texas A & M University Press Danger Close: Tactical Air Controllers in
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£18.36
Chelsea House Publishers SYRIA
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£25.46
