The Tropical Silk Road maps patterns of global investment, infrastructure transformation, and social-environmental struggle at the juncture of two of today's most transformative processes: China's stepping out into the global south and the disintegration of the Amazonian, Cerrado, and Andean biomes.
Practicing 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.
This book, the first-ever collection of primary documents on North African history and the Holocaust, gives voice to the diversity of those involved—Muslims, Christians, and Jews; women, men, and children; black, brown, and white; the unknown and the notable; locals, refugees, the displaced, and the interned; soldiers, officers, bureaucrats, volunteer fighters, and the forcibly recruited. At times their calls are lofty, full of spiritual lamentation and political outrage. At others, they are humble, yearning for medicine, a cigarette, or a pair of shoes. Translated from French, Arabic, North African Judeo-Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, Moroccan Darija, Tamazight (Berber), Italian, and Yiddish, or transcribed from their original English, these writings shed light on how war, occupation, race laws, internment, and Vichy French, Italian fascist, and German Nazi rule were experienced day by day across North Africa. Though some selections are drawn from published books, including memoirs, diaries, and collections of poetry, most have never been published before, nor previously translated into English. These human experiences, combined, make up the history of wartime North Africa.
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Arab uprisings of 2010–11 left indelible imprints on the Middle East. Yet, these events have not reshaped the region as pundits once predicted. With this volume, top experts on the region offer wide-ranging considerations of the characteristics, continuities, and discontinuities of the contemporary Middle East, addressing topics from international politics to political Islam, hip hop to human security. This book engages six themes to understand the contemporary Middle East—the spread of sectarianism, abandonment of principles of state sovereignty, the lack of a regional hegemonic power, increased Saudi-Iranian competition, decreased regional attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and fallout from the Arab uprisings—as well as offers individual country studies. With analysis from historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, and up-to-date discussions of the Syrian Civil War, impacts of the Trump presidency, and the 2020 uprisings in Lebanon, Algeria, and Sudan, this book will be an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand the current state of the region.
"If California were its own country, it would have the world's fourth largest immigrant population. How these newcomers are integrated into the state will not only shape its schools, workforce, business, public health, politics, and culture, but also that of the entire country, and beyond. This is the contention that David FitzGerald and John Skrentny open with in this unique volume. Composed of a who's who of top immigration scholars from across the state, Immigrant California addresses comprehensively the issues related to the process of becoming Californian, and, ultimately, becoming American"--
The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"--or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.
Featuring insights from a wide range of disciplines and a number of esteemed scholars, this volume explores cultural contexts that explain origins and changes in political economic interests and values.
Partition--the physical division of territory along ethno-religious lines into separate nation-states--is often presented as a successful political "solution" to ethnic conflict. In the twentieth century, at least three new political entities--the Irish Free State, the Dominions (later Republics) of India and Pakistan, and the State of Israel--emerged as results of partition. This volume offers the first collective history of the concept of partition, tracing its emergence in the aftermath of the First World War and locating its genealogy in the politics of twentieth-century empire and decolonization. Making use of the transnational framework of the British Empire, which presided over the three major partitions of the twentieth century, contributors draw out concrete connections among the cases of Ireland, Pakistan, and Israel--the mutual influences, shared personnel, economic justifications, and material interests that propelled the idea of partition forward and resulted in the violent creation of new post-colonial political spaces. In so doing, the volume seeks to move beyond the nationalist frameworks that served in the first instance to promote partition as a natural phenomenon.
Throughout Latin America, the idea of "justice" serves as the ultimate goal and rationale for a wide variety of actions and causes. In the Chilean Atacama Desert, residents have undertaken a prolonged struggle for their right to groundwater. Family members of bombing victims in Buenos Aires demand that the state provide justice for the attack. In Colombia, some victims of political violence have turned to the courts for resolution, while others reject the state's ability to fairly adjudicate their grievances and have constructed a non-state tribunal. In each of these examples, the protagonists seek one main thing: justice. A Sense of Justice ethnographically explores the complex dynamics of justice production across Latin America. The chapters examine (in)justice as it is lived and imagined today and what it means for those who claim and regulate its parameters, including the Brazilian police force, the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal in Colombia, and the Argentine Supreme Court. Inextricable as "justice" is from inequality, violence, crime, and corruption, it emerges through memory, in space, and where ideals meet practical limitations. Ultimately, the authors show how understanding the dynamic processes of constructing justice is essential to creating cooperative rather than oppressive forms of law.