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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
Thinking through anti, post, and decolonial theories, this book examines, analyses, and conceptualises 'visibly Muslim' Lebanese women's lived experiences of discrimination, assault, wounding, and erasure. Based on in-depth research alongside over 100 Sunni and Shia participant between 2017 and 2019 it situates these experiences at the intersection of the local and the global and argues for their conceptualisation as a form of structural and lived anti-Muslim racism. In doing this, it discusses the convergences and divergences of anti-Muslim racism in Lebanon with anti-Muslim racism in other parts of both the global north and the global south. It examines the production of this racialisation as well as its workings across spheres of public, private, work, and state - including an analysis of internalised self-hate. It further explores various forms of resistance and negotiation and the contemporary possibilities and impossibilities of working beyond the epistemic framework of Eurocentric modernity. As the first in-depth and extensive study of anti-Muslim racism within Muslim-majority and Arab-majority spaces, it offers an urgent and timely redress to multiple gaps and biases in the study of the Muslim-majority and Arab-majority worlds as well as racialisation broadly and Islamophobia specifically.
Little known in America but venerated as a martyr in Iran, Howard Baskerville was a twenty-two-year-old Christian missionary from South Dakota who traveled to Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1907 for a two-year stint teaching English and preaching the gospel. He arrived in the midst of a democratic revolution-the first of its kind in the Middle East-led by a group of brilliant young firebrands committed to transforming their country into a fully self-determining, constitutional monarchy, one with free elections and an independent parliament. The Persian students Baskerville educated in English in turn educated him about their struggle for democracy, ultimately inspiring him to leave his teaching post and join them in their fight against a tyrannical shah and his British and Russian backers. "The only difference between me and these people is the place of my birth," Baskerville declared, "and that is not a big difference." In 1909, Baskerville was killed in battle alongside his students, but his martyrdom spurred on the revolutionaries who succeeded in removing the shah from power, signing a new constitution, and rebuilding parliament in Tehran. To this day, Baskerville's tomb in the city of Tabriz remains a place of pilgrimage. Every year, thousands of Iranians visit his grave to honor the American who gave his life for Iran. In this rip-roaring tale of his life and death, Aslan gives us a powerful parable about the universal ideals of democracy-and to what degree Americans are willing to support those ideals in a foreign land. Woven throughout is an essential history of the nation we now know as Iran-frequently demonized and misunderstood in the West. Indeed, Baskerville's life and death represent a "road not taken" in Iran. Baskerville's story, like his life, is at the center of a whirlwind in which Americans must ask themselves: How seriously do we take our ideals of constitutional democracy and whose freedom do we support?
Contributors to this special issue investigate the current state of People's Republic of China (PRC) history, positing that the methods Anglophone, non-Chinese scholars have developed and deployed over the last several decades led to important misreadings of the historical record. The contributors argue that Chinese people have, from the rise and fall of Maoist ideology to the subsequent post-disillusionment era, produced political subjectivities and revolutionary upheavals that challenged traditional societal and pedagogical systems. Therefore, producing better scholarship requires taking seriously the way PRC history is necessarily and profoundly political. Essay topics include the unattainable and unfilled aspirations that Maoism engendered, the problems that mark the practice of PRC history to this day, and the ideological approach that frames both how we read Mao-era sources and understand Maoist politics in general. Other topics include how US academia writes the history of the PRC-especially with the problematic dominance of social scientific methods-and the differences between labor in Maoist China and labor under capitalism. Contributors. Jeremy Brown, Alexander Day, Matthew D. Johnson, Fabio Lanza, Covell Meyskens, Sigrid Schmalzer, Aminda Smith, Jake Werner
While a positive correlation between capitalism and democracy has existed in Western Europe and North America, the example of late-industrializing nations such as Turkey has demonstrated that the two need not always go hand in hand, and sometimes the interests of business coincide more firmly with anti-democratic forces. This book explores the factors that compelled capitalists in Turkey to adopt a more pro-democratic ideology by examining a leading Turkish business lobby (TUESIAD) which has been pushing for democratic reform since the 1990s, despite representing some of the largest corporation owners in Turkey and having supported the state's authoritarian tendencies in the past such as the military coup of 1980. Drawing on roughly 70 interviews with influential members of TUESIAD and individuals close to them, the book reveals that business leaders were willing to break away from the state due to the conflict between their evolving economic needs and power with a political elite and state that were unwilling to cater to their demands. In so doing, the book provides a rich account of business-state relations in Turkey as well as providing a case study for the wider study of democracy and capitalism in developing nations.
The importance of the region that is recognised today as Saudi Arabia (with its neighbours) can hardly be underestimated, let alone overlooked by the rest of the world, not merely because of its geographical location and religious significance to a large segment of the world's population due to the location of Islam's two holiest shrines in Makkah and al-Madinah, and for economic and political reasons too, for it has the world's largest known reserves of energy. This book attempts to trace and explain the rise, fall - then rise and fall again - and rise of the Saudi polity in the Arabian Peninsula, and explores the role played throughout these evengts by Shaykh Muhammad bin Abdal-Wahhab and his 'Call' for religious and social reform. Not since the writings of Philby five decades ago has a book exploring the history of such a politically important and sensitive region, and in such a comprehensive and academic manner, appeared on the scene. Supported by maps and illustrations, and written by an insider who has resided in the Kingdom for over four decades, the book is a fascinating eye-opener and historical reference, bringing almost all the known original indigenous Arabic and other source material into full purview.
The six-month siege of Khe Sanh in 1968 was the largest, most intense battle of the Vietnam War. For six thousand trapped U.S. Marines, it was a nightmare; for President Johnson, an obsession. For General Westmoreland, it was to be the final vindication of technological weaponry; for General Giap, architect of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, it was a spectacular ruse masking troops moving south for the Tet offensive. With a new introduction by Mark Bowden-best-selling author of Hu? 1968-Robert Pisor's immersive narrative of the action at Khe Sanh is a timely reminder of the human cost of war, and a visceral portrait of Vietnam's fiercest and most epic close-quarters battle. Readers may find the politics and the tactics of the Vietnam War, as they played out at Khe Sahn fifty years ago, echoed in our nation's global incursions today. Robert Pisor sets forth the history, the politics, the strategies, and, above all, the desperate reality of the battle that became the turning point of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
In Dreadful Desires Charlie Yi Zhang examines how the Chinese state deploys affective notions of love to regulate the population and secure China's place in the global economy. Zhang shows how the state frames love as a set of desires that encompass heteronormative intimacy, familial and communal attachment, upward mobility, and private property ownership. These desires-as circulated in performance in the nationalistic ceremony, same-sex romantic fan fiction, the wildly popular reality television dating show If You Are the One, and the cult of patriarchal personality around Xi Jinping-are explicitly based in oppressive systems of gender, class, and sexuality. Zhang contends that such desires connect love to economic survival and gender normativity in ways that underwrite Chinese neoliberalism at the expense of individual flourishing. By outlining how state-framed forms of love create desires that cannot be fulfilled, Zhang places China at the forefront of using affective attachments to nation, leader, and family in the global shifts toward exploitation and authoritarianism.
In Climatic Media, Yuriko Furuhata traces climate engineering from the early twentieth century to the present, emphasizing the legacies of Japan's empire building and its Cold War alliance with the United States. Furuhata boldly expands the scope of media studies to consider technologies that chemically "condition" Earth's atmosphere and socially "condition" the conduct of people, focusing on the attempts to monitor and modify indoor and outdoor atmospheres by Japanese scientists, technicians, architects, and artists in conjunction with their American counterparts. She charts the geopolitical contexts of what she calls climatic media by examining a range of technologies such as cloud seeding and artificial snowflakes, digital computing used for weather forecasting and weather control, cybernetics for urban planning and policing, Nakaya Fujiko's fog sculpture, and the architectural experiments of Tange Lab and the Metabolists, who sought to design climate-controlled capsule housing and domed cities. Furuhata's transpacific analysis offers a novel take on the elemental conditions of media and climate change.
Thoroughly updated and revised for 2024, JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY is the history of the Middle East through the lens of the Holy City and the Holy Land, from King David to the wars and chaos of today. The history of Jerusalem is the story of the world: Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths. The Holy City and Holy Land are the battlefields for today's multifaceted conflicts and, for believers, the setting for Judgement Day and the Apocalypse. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the 'centre of the world' and now the key to peace in the Middle East? Why is the Holy Land so important not just to the region and its many new players, but to the wider world too? Drawing on new archives and a lifetime's study, Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city and turbulent region through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the kings, empresses, amirs, sultans, caliphs, presidents, autocrats, imperialists and warlords, poets, prophets, saints and rabbis, conquerors and whores who created, destroyed, chronicled, and believed in Jerusalem and the Holy Land. A classic of modern literature, this is not only the epic story of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism, co-existence, power and myth, but also a freshly updated, carefully balanced history of the Middle East, from King David to the new players and powers of the twenty-first century, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the mayhem of today. This is how today's Middle East was forged, how the Holy Land became sacred and how Jerusalem became Jerusalem - the only city that exists twice - in heaven and on earth.
What role does Qatar play in the Middle East, and how does it differ from the other Gulf states? How has the ruling Al-Thani family shaped Qatar from a traditional tribal society and British protectorate to a modern state? How has Qatar become an economic superpower with one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world? What are the social, political, and economic consequences of Qatar's extremely rapid development? In this groundbreaking history of modern Qatar, Allen J. Fromherz analyzes the country's crucial role in the Middle East and its growing regional influence within a broader historical context. Drawing on original sources in Arabic, English, and French as well as his own fieldwork in the Middle East, the author deftly traces the influence of the Ottoman and British Empires and Qatar's Gulf neighbors prior to Qatar's meteoric rise in the post-independence era. Fromherz gives particular weight to the nation's economic and social history, from its modest origins in the pearling and fishing industries to the considerable economic clout it exerts today, a clout that comes from having the region's second-highest natural gas reserves. He also looks at what the future holds for Qatar's economy as the country tries to diversify beyond oil and gas. The book further examines the paradox of Qatar where monarchy, traditional tribal culture, and conservative Islamic values appear to coexist with ultramodern development and a large population of foreign workers who outnumber Qatari citizens. This book is as unique as the country it documents-a multifaceted picture of the political, cultural, religious, social, and economic makeup of modern Qatar and its significance within the Gulf Cooperation Council and the wider region.
India has long occupied an important place in Tibetan medicine's history and development. However, Indian Himalayan practitioners of Tibetan medicine, or amchi, have largely remained overlooked at the Tibetan medical periphery, despite playing a central social and medical role in their communities. Power and legitimacy, religion and economic development, biomedical encounters and Indian geopolitics all intersect in the work and identities of contemporary Himalayan amchi. This volume examines the crucial moment of crisis and transformation that occurred in the early 2000s to offer insights into the beginnings of Tibetan medicine's professionalization, industrialization, and official recognition in India and elsewhere. Based on fine-grained ethnographic studies in Ladakh, Zangskar, Sikkim, and the Darjeeling Hills, Healing at the Periphery asks how the dynamics of capitalism, social change, and the encounter with biomedicine affect small communities on the fringes of modern India, and, conversely, what local transformations of Tibetan medicine tell us about contemporary society and health care in the Himalayas and the Tibetan world. Contributors. Florian Besch, Calum Blaikie, Sienna R. Craig, Barbara Gerke, Isabelle Guerin, Kim Gutschow, Pascale Hancart Petitet, Stephan Kloos, Fernanda Pirie, Laurent Pordie
In a gripping, moment-by-moment narrative based on a wealth of
recently declassified documents and in-depth interviews, Bob Drury
and Tom Clavin tell the remarkable drama that unfolded over the
final, heroic hours of the Vietnam War. This closing chapter of the
war would become the largest-scale evacuation ever carried out, as
improvised by a small unit of Marines, a vast fleet of helicopter
pilots flying nonstop missions beyond regulation, and a Marine
general who vowed to arrest any officer who ordered his choppers
grounded while his men were still on the ground.
How did the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution affect everyone's lives? Why did people re/negotiate their identities to adopt revolutionary roles and duties? How did people, who lived with different self-understandings and social relations, inevitably acquire and practice revolutionary identities, each in their own light?This book plunges into the contexts of these concerns to seek different relations that reveal the Revolution's different meanings. Furthermore, this book shows that scholars of the Cultural Revolution encountered emotional and intellectual challenges as they cared about the real people who owned an identity resource that could trigger an imagined thread of solidarity in their minds.The authors believe that the Revolution's magnitude and pervasive scope always resulted in individualized engagements that have significant and differing consequences for those struggling in their micro-context. It has impacted a future with unpredictable collective implications in terms of ethnicity, gender, memory, scholarship, or career. The Cultural Revolution is, therefore, an evolving relation beneath the rise of China that will neither fade away nor sanction integrative paths.
This book comprises several specialized studies written between 1977 and 1997 most of which have been published in french such as French presence in the Punjab, french search for manuscripts in the 18th century paintings, french patronage of a school of painting in Punjab, the numismatic collection of Genaral Court, indian influence on Albert Camus and Andre Malraux in Gandhara. Some papers study french who took up service with the native states,with Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan in Mysore and Ranjit Singh in Punjab. There is the biography of Bnnou Pan Dei of Chamba as an example of franco indian family.
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