The state of lebanon

Lebanon gained its formal political independence in 1943. During the dozen years that followed, women and men across class, sectarian, geographic, and ideological divides built, challenged, and reformed the institutional arrangements that would shape the country. With this book, Ziad Abu-Rish tra...

The american yawp, second edition

"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." —Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"  The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively written American history textbook. Over 500 historians contributed their expertise to create the book th...

Genre bending

Detective, horror, fantasy, romance, science fiction, spy thrillers, westerns, zombie novels. In recent decades, acclaimed and ambitious writers of literary fiction have increasingly gravitated to popular fiction genres. In this comprehensive account, Jeremy Rosen describes literary fiction's emb...

Plots and deeds

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland.  Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies ...

The american yawp

"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook. Over 300 historians joined together to create the book t...

Anteaesthetics

In Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its san...

True materialism

In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in both Marxism and German Idealism across the humanities, but the discourse around the two traditions has grown stagnant and is still defined by the same century-old debates—materialism versus idealism, history versus logic, revolution ver...

Behind our backs

In this daring study, Amy De'Ath develops a new type of literary criticism attuned to the way our lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions – by what happens "behind our backs." Challenging the symptomatic interpretive methods of Western Marxism, De'Ath argues that value-critical accou...

Harvests of liberation

In the first half of the twentieth century, a major change occurred in Egyptian nationalist understandings of imperialism and economic sovereignty. Where once the volatilities of foreign markets and capital were seen as the main threat, over time large landowners and their imperial allies were ta...

Labors of division

One of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that peasants simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from modernity to ant...

Torikaebaya monogatari

Torikaebaya monogatari is a twelfth-century Japanese tale like no other. As suggested by its title, which literally translates to "if only I could exchange them" (torikaebaya) "story" (monogatari), it follows the complications that arise when a nobleman has his two children swap genders—his son l...

Accelerant

Between the late 1940s and the end of the twentieth century, natural gas became Iran's bedrock energy source. Billed as a futuristic fuel for a future world power, gas became an avenue for the country's developmentalist ambitions. The ability to build technologically sophisticated infrastructures...

A nation within

The presence of hundreds of thousands ethnic Koreans in Japan, or "zainichi Koreans," is one of the visible legacies of Japanese colonialism. A surprising and influential group among zainichi Koreans that persists to this day is Chongryon, the only pro–North Korean diasporic group based in a capi...

Good change

Few countries serve as a more useful case study for understanding the global tension between liberal and illiberal conceptions of democracy than Poland. Under the populist Law and Justice (PiS) –led government, a large part of the Polish electorate welcomed the party's "Good Change"—as it describ...

Clawing back

The impulse to redistribute wealth is said to be a tool to counter inequalities, applied by the state or society to curb the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation and free trade. In settings where previous political regimes are reformed, or toppled and replaced by new ones, redistribution can...

Archive wars

The production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state building. Following the 1991 Gulf Wa...

The reeducation of race

World War II produced a fundamental shift in modern racial discourse. In the postwar period, racism was situated for the first time at the center of international political life, and race's status as conceptual common sense and a justification for colonial rule was challenged with new intensity. ...

Of effacement

In Of Effacement, David Marriott endeavors to demolish established opinion about what blackness is and reorient our understanding of what it is not in art, philosophy, autobiography, literary theory, political theory, and psychoanalysis. With the critical rigor and polemical bravura which he disp...

Who wrote this?

Would you read this book if a computer wrote it? Would you even know? And why would it matter? Today's eerily impressive artificial intelligence writing tools present us with a crucial challenge: As writers, do we unthinkingly adopt AI's time-saving advantages or do we stop to weigh what we gai...

Recording history

A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually...

The politics of american foreign policy

In this provocative book, Peter Gries directly challenges the widely held view that partisan elites on Capitol Hill are out of touch with a moderate American public. Dissecting a new national survey, Gries shows how ideology powerfully divides Main Street over both domestic and foreign policy and...

Of god who comes to mind

The thirteen essays collected in this volume investigate the possibility that the word "God" can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth century, in a meaningful way. Nine of the essays appear in English translation for the first time. Among Levinas's writings, this volume distinguishes it...

The spirit of utopia

I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for ...

Anthropology's politics

U.S. involvement in the Middle East has brought the region into the media spotlight and made it a hot topic in American college classrooms. At the same time, anthropology—a discipline committed to on-the-ground research about everyday lives and social worlds—has increasingly been criticized as "u...

Homo academicus

In this highly original work, Pierre Bourdieu turns his attention to the academic world of which he is part and offers a brilliant analysis of modern intellectual culture. The academy is shown to be not just a realm of dialogue and debate, but also a sphere of power in which reputations and caree...

Formations of the secular

Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and th...

The man without content

Schools and societies

Schools and Societies provides a synthesis of key issues in the sociology of education, focusing on American schools while offering a global, comparative context. Acknowledged as a standard text in its first two editions, this fully revised and updated third edition offers a broader sweep, strong...

The psychic life of power

As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what "one" is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent upon that very power is quite another. If, following Foucault, we under...

The burnout society

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personal...

Portraits of unbelonging

A profound examination of how photographs can both sever and connect, tracing the paths of Ottoman Armenians across state and family archives.  In 1896 the Ottoman sultan issued a decree that allowed Armenians—and only Armenians—to emigrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return t...

Forms of time, newton to austen

Between 1700 and 1800, the English-speaking world came to terms with one of modernity's most fundamental ideas: the separation of time from its measure, or what Newton described as the distinction between "absolute" and "relative" time. Jesse Molesworth argues that most experienced this encounter...

Reinventing caste

This book reveals that caste, usually assumed to be a feature of Hindu society, was in fact a trans-religious phenomenon in colonial India, as it is today. Even in an Islamic religious milieu that was supposedly more egalitarian than hierarchical Hinduism, colonial Indian subjects thought and act...

Lahore after modernism

In the decades after independence in 1947, architects in Pakistan were enlisted to build a postcolonial future—a new world after empire. But the debris of the past could not be so easily swept aside. The recalcitrance of local and regional histories was fiercely evident in Lahore, the centuries-o...

Making common sense

Common sense is supposed to be so obvious it can go without saying. And yet, it has been hard to pin down, partly because its contents are vague and inconsistent, and partly because it has always been difficult to say what kind of sense common sense is. Making Common Sense is an historical accoun...

Decolonial endurance

What does it mean to live through a world coming undone? How do people carry on amid rupture, loss, and grief? Decolonial Endurance explores these questions through the turbulent lives of Indigenous Lisu subsistence farmers in China's Eastern Himalayas, bordering Myanmar and Tibet. Like many of C...

Beyond the stadium

There are two popular and competing viewpoints on sports. Many consider them a mere distraction from important social and political problems. Others champion sports as a powerful force for good: teaching character, promoting peace, and encouraging racial and gender equality. Andrew Bertoli shows ...

Delivering knowledge

This book offers a new perspective on the history of early modern Jewish communities by centering the experiences of Jewish midwives. In the wake of the Thirty Years' War, as cities and towns across northern and central Europe placed new emphasis on the regulation of healthcare and childbirth, Je...

Currency of nihilism

What happens to economic life when meaning and value come apart? Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche, E.M. Cioran, and Jean Baudrillard, this book shows how the latest trends in digital finance restage the dilemmas of nihilism in new ways. From cryptocurrencies and meme stocks to Silicon Valley ventur...

In the shadow of the holocaust

A first-of-its kind collection of short stories that provides an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union.  A death camp survivor asks a local woman to write down in Russian his story, which he conveys in Yiddish. The Jewish po...

Colonial surveillance

In order to compete with Western powers, Japan began to rapidly modernize its governing institutions, in the process creating a national population registration and identification bureaucracy, the Koseki system, in 1871. A few decades later, when Japan began to extract natural resources from and ...

Crisiswork

The world's attention has often turned to Lebanon in moments of crisis, including, recently, during the Beirut Port Explosion in 2020 and the 2024 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Less told is the story of how such major events, and other predicaments from Lebanon's long history, have mobilized a thr...

Empire of manners

It is easy to believe that manners are empty gestures, little more than social artifice or practiced etiquette whose sole purpose is to project civility and facilitate social interaction. But if we look more closely, they can tell us much more than we might first suppose, revealing what conventio...

Enduring hostility

A timely and rigorous analysis of a half-century of American policymakers' shifting perceptions of Iran, and how they have driven US-Iran relations.  US–Iran hostility has endured for longer than the Cold War. Momentous geopolitical shifts, changing leaderships, and evolving domestic priorities h...

Worthy of justice

Over the past three decades, jurisdictions across the United States have developed alternatives to traditional criminal procedures and punishments for adults accused of crimes that are associated with substance use and mental health disorders. The Veterans Treatment Court (VTC) is one example of ...

Ignorance unmasked

We live in an age of ignorance. This book offers a guide to how we got here—and how we might escape.  From obfuscations of climate science to the myriad deceptions inhering in language, Ignorance Unmasked explores how agnotology—the study of ignorance—can help us better grasp: Why don't we know w...

The birth of tragedy / unpublished basel writings (winter 1869/70–fall 1873)

During his early years in Basel, as professor of classical philology, Nietzsche develops an original understanding of ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, and culture, alongside a biting critique of contemporary German society and a call for its reform. These years see him publish his first book, Th...

Political undesirables

Political Undesirables considers the legal making and unmaking of citizenship in Iraq, focusing on the mass denaturalization and deportation of Iraqi Jews in 1950–51 and Iraqis of Iranian origin in the early 1980s. Since the formation of the modern state of Iraq under British rule in 1921, practi...