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"In 16th-century Mughal India, warrior groups across the subcontinent rose in rebellion, causing great political disruptions to the existing order. During this period, the Sikh community transformed from a relatively insignificant religious minority to an elevated position of kingship and empire. Under the leadership of Guru Gobind Singh, Sikh elites and peasants began to align themselves with discourses of power and authority, and within a few decades Khalsa warriors conquered some of the wealthiest provinces of the Mughal and Afghan empires. In this book, Satnam Singh argues that the Sikhs' increasing self-assertion was not simply a reaction to Mughal persecution but also a result of an active program initiated by the Guru to pursue larger visions of scholarship, conquest, and political sovereignty. Using a vast trove of understudied court literature, Singh shows how Sikhs grappled with Indo-Islamic traditions to forge their own ideas of governance and kingship with the aim to establish an independent Sikh polity. The Road to Empire offers an impressive intellectual history of the early modern Sikh world"--

"Expanding Verse is original in terms of the selection of the corpus; timely in terms of the interdisciplinary scope; and substantial, in terms of the extent of research and the wealth of knowledge imparted. Andrew Campana demonstrates the genre's importance through careful consideration of each poet whose experimental creativity is eloquently introduced and assessed. Warm and inviting--readers will be left feeling much informed about the poets' respective lives, challenges, and adventures."--Atsuko Sakaki, author of Train Travel as Embodied Space-Time in Narrative Theory "Expanding Verse impresses on every page as a stunning work of scholarly rigor and innovative thinking about a complex problem at the core of humanities. Campana's brilliant understanding of the materiality of poetry rethinks the literary form, challenging us to reconfigure literary and media studies."--Jonathan E. Abel, author of The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Intersectional Incoherence stages an encounter between the critical discourse on intersectionality and texts by Korean subjects of the Japanese empire and their postwar descendants in Japan, known as Zainichi Koreans. Arguing for intersectionality as a reading method rather than strictly a tool of social analysis, Cindi Textor reads moments of illegibility and incoherent language in these texts as a confrontation between the pressures on Zainichi Koreans and their literature to represent both Korean difference from and affinity with Japan. Rejecting linguistic norms and representational imperatives of identity categories, Textor instead demands that the reader grapple with the silent, absent, illegible, or unintelligible. Engaging with the incoherent, she argues, allows for a more ethical approach to texts, subjects, and communities that resist representation within existing paradigms, such as those of Korean descent in Japan.

"A model for future film scholars. The decade-long research that went into making this book is evident in its rich historical details, insightful conversations, and multisited fieldwork. Perhaps even more impressive is Darshana Sreedhar Mini's ability to pull together such vast and diverse material in a riveting story, so absorbing and beautifully written that I often felt like I was reading a novel. This exemplary work will produce lively discussions about film historiography, diaspora, stardom, authorship, and sexuality."--Monika Mehta, author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema "Don't be tempted to think you know porn if you see it. Mini's analysis invites us to see soft-core porn as a social construction that has reflected the borders of sexual agency and gendered respectability in Indian society for more than fifty years. Through a mosaic of methods, Mini strips down layers of mediated meanings, precarious labor, urban politics, and transnational consumption flows. Mini's work is exemplary of how soft-porn is a part of people's lived experiences. Her own confessions about the research process unfold as a subplot to a story of frustrated desires, circuitous pathways, and patient perseverance."--Vicki Mayer, author of Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy "Mini delivers a deeply impressive, groundbreaking historical analysis of the Malayalam-language soft-core pornography that emerged in Kerala, India, during the transformative decades of the 1990s and 2000s. This comprehensive study explores industrial processes and regulatory challenges, traces production intricacies, foregrounds the lived experiences of performers, and highlights exhibition dynamics and audience responses, shedding light on a rich but previously unexamined subject. In doing so it immediately joins the ranks of essential porn-studies texts."--Peter Alilunas, author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video "This remarkable book on the Malayalam-language soft-core porn industry of Kerala arrives as a bold feminist and 'southern' intervention in porn studies. Its mesmerizing mapping of evolving social relations and gendered aspirations, dueling economies of desire and regulatory regimes, emergent transnational media circuits, and piratical publics is bound to animate conversations across disciplines."--Bhaskar Sarkar, author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition "A formidably researched counterhistory of Indian cinema through the regional mode of the sex film and a brilliantly synthetic work of adult-film history. Rated A dazzles with insight, relaying how Malayalam soft-porn produced complexly mobile and contested media publics. Exploring films that center female sexual autonomy and rely on the bounteous allure and non-normative sexuality of their stars, Rated A is a deeply feminist account of an era's cultural productions, its stars and makers, and the networks and economies of their often invisible labor. Committed to examining the ways precarity, class, and caste politics inflect the unruly circulations of sexually coded media forms, this is a fascinating, vital, and essential work of film and cultural history."--Elena Gorfinkel, author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s "Mini takes readers on a truly fascinating exploration of Malayalam soft-porn cinema, which emerged in the 1980s and has captivated millions of viewers across India and the Middle East. Extensive archival and ethnographic research reveals the local and global influences that shaped the genre, the social and gendered dynamics of the industry, and the complex politics of sexuality and censorship in contemporary India. By challenging the dominant narratives of pornography as a Western phenomenon, this book provides a new model for studying soft-core film genres in diverse cultural contexts."--Clarissa Smith, author of One for the Girls!: The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women's Porn and coeditor of Porn Studies "Rated A is a captivating cultural history of Malayalam soft-porn cinema, and moreover of its afterlives--how it is remediated across a range of sites, reverberating in the cultural imagination. In the unfolding of that history, Mini shows how soft-porn and the debates and desires that it provokes are entangled with the building of gender, sexuality, politics, and social life. A major new contribution to the study of pornographies."--Feona Attwood, author of Sex Media and coeditor of Porn Studies "Rated A delivers a richly layered account of the precarious and often invisible world of Malayalam soft-porn cinema. Employing creative and tenacious research strategies, Mini adroitly delineates the textual logics and quotidian practices of a popular film industry that perseveres as Bollywood's forsaken other."--Michael Curtin, coeditor of Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood

"This book is truly groundbreaking in its focus, theoretical contributions, and methodological innovations. Stephanie Balkwill's deft treatment of Buddhism, gender, and ethnic difference in the Northern Wei court of Empress Dowager Ling will surely serve as a model for other scholars."--Megan Bryson, author of Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China "Balkwill's penetrating scholarship greatly enlarges our understanding of two often-ignored and deeply intertwined aspects of rulership in East Asia: women and Buddhism. This book explores the powerful role that women played in Northern Wei politics and how Buddhism provided a new repertoire for enlarging their roles, especially in the more populist forms favored by the Empress Dowager. A revealing, thought-provoking read."--Andrew Chittick, author of The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History "Employing a wide range of sources, Balkwill persuasively argues that Dowager Empress Hu paved the way for Wu Zetian to become China's only female emperor. Both pastoral nomadic customs, which respected female agency and authority, and Buddhism, which provided women with autonomy and leadership opportunities, created this new path to power."--Keith N. Knapp, Professor of East Asian History at The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina

"This brilliant book shows how colonial logics of extraction reach into the present, while also illuminating how Indigenous world-making ideas of time, space, and history shape contemporary resistance to megaprojects. Its deep and careful collaboration with Mayan communities in Guatemala is a model for scholars and activists alike."--Elizabeth Oglesby, coeditor of The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics

In Being Another Way, Dustin D. Klinger recounts the history of how medieval Arabic philosophers in the Islamic East grappled with the logical role of the copula "to be," an ambiguity that has bedeviled Western philosophy from Parmenides to the analytic philosophers of today. Working from within a language that has no copula, a group of increasingly independent Arabic philosophers began to critically investigate the semantic role that Aristotle, for many centuries their philosophical authority, invested in the copula as the basis of his logic. Drawing on extensive manuscript research, Klinger breaks through the thicket of unstudied philosophical works to demonstrate the creativity of postclassical Islamic scholarship as it explored the consequences of its intellectual break with the past. Against the still widespread view that intellectual ferment all but disappeared during the period, Klinger shows how these intellectuals over the centuries developed and refined a sophisticated philosophy of language that speaks to core concerns of contemporary linguistics and philosophy.

"With characteristic elegance and humor, Paul Binski powerfully reinserts human subjectivity into medieval architectural history and addresses the profound aesthetic effect of the great cathedrals, halls, and mosques of the Middle Ages on the men and women who used them."--Matthew Reeve, author of Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole "Binski shifts attention from the design of medieval buildings to their affects, drawing on a formidable range of Greek, Latin, and medieval sources to retrieve a historically authentic vocabulary to describe Gothic architecture's emotional power. Crucially, he shows how these affects--from fear to joy or wonder--were shaped by rhetorical, ethical, philosophical, and even musical traditions and how they diverge from post-Romantic responses to Gothic churches."--Tom Nickson, author of Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile "This book provides a cultural analysis of architecture that weaves together philology, anthropology, and reception theory, among other approaches, with insight and erudition unique to Binski, who illuminates in clear and flowing prose just why great Gothic churches have the power to move individuals and societies."--Meredith Cohen, author of The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Emergency in Transit responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights. Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Eleanor Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research-alongside literature, film, and visual art-to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea.

"This groundbreaking collection of essays from leading film historians features original research on movie magazines published in China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Latin America, South Korea, the U.S., and beyond. Vital resources for the study of film history and culture, movie magazines are frequently cited as ources, but rarely centered as objects of study. Global Movie Magazine Networks does precisely that, revealing the hybridity, heterogeneity, and connectivity of movie magazines and the important role they play in the intercontinental exchange of information and ideas about cinema. Uniquely, the contributors in this book have developed their critical analysis alongside the collaborative work of building digital resources, facilitating the digitization of more than a dozen of these historic magazines on an open-access basis"--

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents-a narrative that is especially pervasive with regard to transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Kit Myers comparatively examines the transracial and transnational adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. Showing how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures-in contrast to others that are not-he argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomfiting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care.

"Claire Mercer tells a story about the transformation of Dar es Salaam's periphery that is being replicated everywhere in Africa. The story is about the conversion of farmland into suburban housing necklaces--not produced through large-scale corporate investments but rather through the exertions of Tanzania's middle classes. It is a story about urban ambitions as much as it is about bricks and mortar. The gates and walls of the houses in these communities do not merely speak to a desire for safety; they are also a cipher for intense dreams and aspirations. This book will resonate well beyond its immediate audience."--Ato Quayson, author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism "Professor Mercer presents a case of the formation and transformation of middle-class urbanites as they acquire and develop land at the city frontier without mortgage finance, creating spectacular neighborhoods. She traces access to land in Dar es Salaam from the colonial era to the independence era, when an entrepreneur class of new urbanites, whose insatiable appetite for land, has driven the city outwards at supersonic speed. The politics of the day, like the Ujamaa socialist era, provides new opportunities of acquiring land and property. The moving of the frontier is an unending episode, which makes the book extremely interesting to read."--J.M. Lusugga Kironde, Professor of Urban Economics and Management, Ardhi University, Dar es Salaam "The Suburban Frontier is a major intervention concerning debates on the African city. In exploring the role of the suburbs in middle-class formation, Mercer argues that class is not an a priori category, but instead a process, one that is enacted through the everyday repetition of certain actions and practices."--Jason Sumich, author of The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern Africa "From discourses around the aesthetics of urban landscapes to the status associated with the 'capacity to build' and the growth of 'archipelagos' of suburban lifestyle services, Mercer takes us on a journey through the long-term and everyday processes of middle-class construction that are reconstituting the city. For anyone interested in how the middle classes come to define themselves and their spatial milieu--not just in Tanzania, but anywhere--this will be essential reading."--Tom Goodfellow, author of Politics and the Urban Frontier: Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa "Through her dynamic notion of the 'suburban frontier, ' Claire Mercer has produced a model study of spatial sociology that analyzes historical and contemporary patterns of urbanization. The result is a culturally informed argument about how the aspirations, anxieties, and investments of African middle classes are shaping the world's fastest growing cities."--James R. Brennan, author of Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania "The Suburban Frontier connects very well with debates about land in the region by linking the struggle for land with middle-class aspirations. Mercer truly shows us what 'middle-classness' means and effectively utilizes the historiography of Dar es Salaam, deploying an archaeology of historical and social science research over the last thirty to forty years or more."--Garth Myers, author of Rethinking Urbanism: Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South "Based on deep reflection on Dar es Salaam city and selected neighborhoods, Mercer examines and brings to the fore nuances that depict the everyday life shaping the urban frontiers. The ethnographic narrative approach captures quite well the sociocultural practices including the new consumption, lifestyles, leisure, and movement modes that have eluded most studies on spatialization of African cities. This is much-needed food for thought for those who are curious to understand and are acting on African urbanisms."--W. J. Kombe, Professor of Human Settlements Studies, Ardhi University, Dar es Salaam

For decades, scholars have examined the Mughal Empire, South Asia's largest and most powerful pre-colonial empire, to measure the greatness of its political, ideological, and cultural institutions. Between Household and State departs from dynastic narrations of the Mughal past to highlight the role of elite households and familial networks in shaping imperial power, particularly in peninsular India, the only region of the subcontinent never fully incorporated into the imperial realm.    Drawing upon rare documentary and literary materials in Persian and Urdu alongside the Dutch East India Company's archives, the book takes us on a journey from military forts and regional courts in the Deccan to the weaving villages of the Coromandel Coast to examine how regional elite alliances, feuds, and material exchanges intersected with imperial institutions to create new forms of affinity, belonging, and social exclusion. Between Household and State brings attention to the importance of ghar-or home-as an analytical framework for the creation of mobile forms of sovereignty that anchored the Mughal frontier across the variable geography of peninsular India in the seventeenth century.

"After the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Rome finally took control of Egypt. This occupation simultaneously facilitated and circumscribed the exchange of goods, people, and ideas along the paths carved by Rome's burgeoning empire. In this book, Edward Kelting sets out to recapture one of these systems of exchange: the vibrant literary tradition known as Aegyptiaca--or 'Egyptian Things'--in which culturally mixed authors wrote about Egypt for a Greek and Roman audience. These authors have been dismissed as not really 'Egyptian,' and their contemporary popularity has been ignored, but as the author powerfully argues, this genre in fact constitutes a vibrant intellectual tradition, developed from heterogenous influences but deeply engaged with Egypt's pharaonic past. In contrast to usual narratives of Roman domination, Kelting uncovers a complex project of political engagement and cultural translation in which Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all participated"

"In this brilliant book, Charlotte Biltekoff deftly examines unexplored dimensions of the food wars, including the deployment of science to defend processed food, as if science is free of social context and cultural values. In effect Biltekoff asks for more nuanced thinking about science as the ultimate arbiter of fundamentally political decisions--a difficult but necessary challenge in a 'post-truth' world."--Julie Guthman, author of The Problem with Solutions "Real Food, Real Facts clearly highlights the centrality of scientism and deficit thinking in contemporary food policy, showing how this approach is a form of antipolitics that excludes key issues from the realm of legitimate political debate."--Saul Halfon, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Virginia Tech "This deeply researched and important book illuminates how trust in science informs trust in the industrial food system. Biltekoff's analysis is critical reading for scholars, consumers, and food industry professionals alike."--Anna Zeide, author of Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry "Why do the food industry and the public seem to be speaking different languages about the American industrial food system? Biltekoff provides a clear-eyed explanation of food fights between food industry professionals--who assume that if only the public understood the science they would enthusiastically embrace processed foods--and a public wanting something different, including a more transparent food system and a voice in making it. In lucid, accessible prose, Biltekoff employs the frames of Real Facts and Real Food to understand the twenty-first-century landscape of American food."--Amy Bentley, Professor of Food Studies, New York University

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans public school board fired nearly 7,500 teachers and employees. In the decade that followed, the city created the first urban public school system in the United States to be entirely contracted out to private management. Veteran educators, collectively referred to as the "backbone" of the city's Black middle class, were replaced by younger, less experienced, white teachers who lacked historical ties to the city. In A Burdensome Experiment, Christien Philmarc Tompkins argues that the privatization of New Orleans schools has made educators into a new kind of racialized worker. As school districts across the nation backslide on school integration, Tompkins asks, who exactly deserves to teach our children? The struggle over this question exposes the inherent anti-blackness of charter school systems and the unequal burdens of school choice.