This book provides a detailed history of Hindu goddess traditions with a special focus on the local goddesses of Andhra Pradesh, past and present. The antiquity and the evolution of these goddess traditions are illustrated and documented with the help of archaeological reports, literary sources, inscriptions and art. Tracing the symbols and images of goddess into the brahmanical (Saiva and Vaisnava), Buddhist, and Jaina religious traditions, the book argues effectively how and with what motivations goddesses and their symbolizations were appropriated and transformed. The book also examines the evolution of popular Hindu goddesses such as Durga and Kali, discussing their tribal and agricultural backgrounds. It also deals extensively with how and in what circumstances women are deified and shows how these deified women cults share characteristics with the village goddesses.

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.

Chris Hughes, the "Daily Mirror's" defence correspondent, was the first western reporter into Iraq after 9/11, the first into Saddam's secret bunker and the only one to visit Osama bin Laden's mountain lair. He was also the only western journalist present when American Marines killed and wounded unarmed demonstrators in Fallujah, sparking the savage insurgency. He's survived carjackings and missile attacks, watched mothers weep over the skeletons of sons dragged from mass graves and joined mercenaries flying crates of guns out of Baghdad. Hughes has been to every major troublespot in Iraq in a dozen visits, mixing with the SAS, British mercenaries and ordinary Iraqis; in "Road Trip To Hell", he tells their stories with wit and irreverence in a very readable style. He admits he's no expert on the Middle East - 'I wanted to call this book "Clueless in Gaza",' he writes, 'but George W Bush rarely invades places with potential for witty literary allusion' - but he has a fine eye for detail and black humour and gives a unique insight into a terrible, crazy war.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the 2020 Cundill History Prize 'Riveting and original ... a work enriched by solid scholarship, vivid personal experience, and acute appreciation of the concerns and aspirations of the contending parties in this deeply unequal conflict ' Noam Chomsky The twentieth century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been a century of denial: denial of statehood, denial of nationhood and denial of history. The Hundred Years War on Palestine is Rashid Khalidi's powerful response. Drawing on his family archives, he reclaims the fundamental right of any people: to narrate their history on their own terms. Beginning in the final days of the Ottoman Empire, Khalidi reveals nascent Palestinian nationalism and the broad recognition by the early Zionists of the colonial nature of their project. These ideas and their echoes defend Nakba - the Palestinian term for the establishment of the state of Israel - the cession of the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan and Egypt, the Six Day War and the occupation. Moving through these critical moments, Khalidi interweaves the voices of journalists, poets and resistance leaders with his own accounts as a child of a UN official and a resident of Beirut during the 1982 seige. The result is a profoundly moving account of a hundred-year-long war of occupation, dispossession and colonialisation.