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City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Translation/transnation Ser. #41)
By Robyn Creswell. 2019
How poetic modernism shaped Arabic intellectual debates in the twentieth century and beyondCity of Beginnings is an exploration of modernism…
in Arabic poetry, a movement that emerged in Beirut during the 1950s and became the most influential and controversial Arabic literary development of the twentieth century. Robyn Creswell introduces English-language readers to a poetic movement that will be uncannily familiar—and unsettlingly strange. He also provides an intellectual history of Lebanon during the early Cold War, when Beirut became both a battleground for rival ideologies and the most vital artistic site in the Middle East. Arabic modernism was centered on the legendary magazine Shi‘r (“Poetry”), which sought to put Arabic verse on “the map of world literature.” The Beiruti poets—Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, and Unsi al-Hajj chief among them—translated modernism into Arabic, redefining the very idea of poetry in that literary tradition. City of Beginnings includes analyses of the Arab modernists’ creative encounters with Ezra Pound, Saint-John Perse, and Antonin Artaud, as well as their adaptations of classical literary forms. The book also reveals how the modernists translated concepts of liberal individualism, autonomy, and political freedom into a radical poetics that has shaped Arabic literary and intellectual debate to this day.Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River
By Sudipta Sen. 2019
A sweeping, interdisciplinary history of the world’s third-largest river, a potent symbol across South Asia and the Hindu diaspora Originating…
in the Himalayas and flowing into the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges is India’s most important and sacred river. In this unprecedented work, historian Sudipta Sen tells the story of the Ganges, from the communities that arose on its banks to the merchants that navigated its waters, and the way it came to occupy center stage in the history and culture of the subcontinent. Sen begins his chronicle in prehistoric India, tracing the river’s first settlers, its myths of origin in the Hindu tradition, and its significance during the ascendancy of popular Buddhism. In the following centuries, Indian empires, Central Asian regimes, European merchants, the British Empire, and the Indian nation-state all shaped the identity and ecology of the river. Weaving together geography, environmental politics, and religious history, Sen offers in this lavishly illustrated volume a remarkable portrait of one of the world’s largest and most densely populated river basins.A Garland of Bones: Child Runaways in India (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)
By Jonah Steinberg. 2019
An intimate portrait of India’s child runaways, and the sociopolitical forces shaping their lives This intimate portrait examines the tracks,…
journeys, and experiences of child runaways in northern India. Jonah Steinberg situates children’s decisions to leave home and flee for the city in their larger cultural, social, and historical contexts, and considers histories of landlessness and debt servitude in narratives of child dislocation. The resulting work is an original perspective on the sociological trends in postcolonial India and a unique treatment of a population of individuals who live on the margin of society.In 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halévy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty…
years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen, a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than a simple travelogue, it is a work of trickster-tales, thick anthropological descriptions, and reflections on Jewish–Muslim relations. At its heart lies the fractious and intimate relationship between the Yemeni coppersmith and the "enlightened" European scholar and the collision between the cultures each represents. The book thus offers a powerful indigenous response to European Orientalism. This edition is the first English translation of Habshush's writings from the original Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew and includes an accessible historical introduction to the work. The translation maintains Habshush's gripping style and rich portrayal of the diverse communities and cultures of Yemen, offering a potent mixture of artful storytelling and cultural criticism, suffused with humor and empathy. Habshush writes about the daily lives of men and women, rich and poor, Jewish and Muslim, during a turbulent period of war and both Ottoman and European imperialist encroachment. With this translation, Alan Verskin recovers the lost voice of a man passionately committed to his land and people.The Benghazi Report: Review of the Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Facilities in Benghazi, Libya, September 11-12, 2012
By Roger Stone, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. 2014
On September 11, 2012, a squad of armed militants in Libya attacked the American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, killing U.S.…
ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other American diplomats. Although the vicious attack was initially reported as a protest against an anti-Islamic video, later evidence suggested that it may have been a coordinated terrorist attack-perhaps even tied to al-Qaeda. This begged the question: Did the White House brush off a terrorist attack in order to save face? Since then, the incident has developed into a full-blown partisan debate over whether the government was involved in a cover-up or not, and worse, whether the attack could have been prevented.The Benghazi Report is the Senate committee's findings-the culmination of over a year's worth of investigations and interviews, presented in full. Readers of The Benghazi Report will find many of the revelations shocking. Did the White House manipulate the facts? Why was the disclosure of information so unnecessarily slow? What is the connection between the mysterious deaths of fifteen Libyans who had been assisting the FBI's investigation and a trail of incompetence left by foreign governments unwilling cooperate? Were the attacks were preventable?Featuring an introduction by bestselling author Roger Stone, this report represents a landmark in the ongoing struggle for more transparency from the U.S. government.The Tokyo Trial, Justice, and the Postwar International Order (New Directions in East Asian History)
By Aleksandra Babovic. 2019
Fully utilizing the latest archival material, this book provides a comprehensive, multi-dimensional and nuanced understanding of the Tokyo Tribunal by…
delving into the temporal aspects that extended the relevance and reverberations of the Tribunal beyond its end in 1948. With this as a backdrop, this book contributes to the study of Japanese postwar diplomacy. It shows the Tokyo Tribunal is still very much an experiment in progress, and how the process itself has helped Japan to quickly shed its imperial past and remain ambiguous as to its war responsibilities. From a wider vantage point, this book augments the existing scholarship of international criminal law and justice, offering a clear framework as to the limits of what international criminal tribunals can accomplish and offers a must-read for academics and students as well as for practitioners, journalists and policymakers interested in international criminal law and US-Japanese diplomatic history,Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China
By Alec Ash. 2016
"One of the best [books] I’ve read about the individuals who make up a country that is all too often…
regarded as a monolith.” -Jonathan Fenby, Financial TimesIf China will rule the world one day, who will rule China? There are more than 320 million Chinese between the ages of sixteen and thirty. Children of the one-child policy, born after Mao, with no memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre, they are the first net native generation to come of age in a market-driven, more international China. Their experiences and aspirations were formed in a radically different country from the one that shaped their elders, and their lives will decide the future of their nation and its place in the world.Wish Lanterns offers a deep dive into the life stories of six young Chinese. Dahai is a military child, netizen, and self-styled loser. Xiaoxiao is a hipster from the freezing north. "Fred,” born on the tropical southern island of Hainan, is the daughter of a Party official, while Lucifer is a would-be international rock star. Snail is a country boy and Internet gaming addict, and Mia is a fashionista rebel from far west Xinjiang. Following them as they grow up, go to college, find work and love, all the while navigating the pressure of their parents and society, Wish Lanterns paints a vivid portrait of Chinese youth culture and of a millennial generation whose struggles and dreams reflect the larger issues confronting China today.The Blasphemer: The Price I Paid for Rejecting Islam
By Waleed Al-Husseini. 2017
The Infuriating Tale Of A Young Palestinian Punished For Exercising His Freedom Of Speech.Like many of his generation, Waleed Al-Husseini…
began a blog in his twenties. However, unlike many, Waleed also had the misfortune of having been a blogger in Palestine; worse yet, he often criticized Islam and its adherents-and declared himself an apostate-in his writings. The Palestinian Authority did not take well to this and eventually put Waleed in jail without a trial or even a wisp of legal justification. As if this was not bad enough, they placed Waleed in solitary confinement. This state of affairs continued for 11 months. Over the course of this time, Waleed was tortured and suffered innumerable indignities and deprivations simply for having the audacity to speak his mind. Eventually his unjust imprisonment began to draw international attention from foreign governments and human rights organizations, which pressured the Palestinian Authority and finally forced it to provide him a trial and parole. After being paroled, Waleed fled Palestine, first to Jordan and then to France, where he has become an outspoken advocate for freedom of speech and a critic of the state of contemporary Islam. The Blasphemer is a sobering, impassioned recounting of this Kafkaesque experience as well as a searing polemic against the corruption and hypocrisy that define contemporary Palestine.Chasing China: How I Went to China in Search of a Fortune and Found a Life
By Mark Kitto. 2009
An astonishing, cautionary tale of how Westerner Mark Kitto built a successful media empire in China, creating and running 3…
magazines, only to have the state take his business, and his livelihood, away. "I had fought off attacks from jealous rivals and been investigated by every bureau with the slightest connection to publishing, and by many who did not: nine in total. I had paid over 1 million Yuan in fines, and who knows how much more in administration fees to government 'agencies.' I had been accused of being a pimp, a China 'splittist,' a Falun Gong supporter, a pornographer and a spy. My staff had been extradited, my office computers confiscated, and my magazines impounded at the printers. I had got them all back. I had been through eight government publishing partners before China Intercontinental Press, and half a dozen advertising agencies.” -Mark Kitto on his experience as a business owner in ChinaThis book explains the dynamics behind the economic transformation from the colonial era to the post-independence period in Indonesia and…
Vietnam. It analyses the different Vietnamese and Indonesian government approaches to the economic legacies of colonialism remaining in these countries after independence. It also demonstrates that despite critical differences between the two nation-states, the Vietnamese and Indonesian leaderships were pursuing similar long-term goals: to create a truly independent national economy. The book discusses the way in which the Indonesian government established complete economic control, resembling the socialist transformation of North Vietnam in the 1950s, and the various means by which the government of South Vietnam concentrated economic power in its own hands during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It also explores how the Indonesian government was determined remove the economic legacy of Dutch colonialism by placing the entire economy under strong state control and ownership in accordance with the spirit of Guided Democracy and Guided Economy in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. This book is a point of reference for students, researchers and academics interested in a comparative analysis of the economic systems implemented by the colonial and fascist powers in Indonesia and Vietnam.Xi Jinping's Governance and the Future of China
By Zhou Xinmin. 2017
Over the past few years, growing changes have quietly begun to reshape China under the governance of Xi Jinping. President…
Xi has developed his philosophical thinking on governing into a system to address the pressing issues of China, to develop and improve Chinese socialism, and to achieve modernization in all areas. Zhou Xinmin’s new book, Xi Jinping’s Governance and the Future of China, explains the characteristics and patterns of President Xi’s governing philosophy from the perspective of the core capabilities required of the Chinese leadership.The book unpacks the core tenets of President Xi’s governance philosophy to provide a road map to convert his philosophical systems into actionable policies. Xinmin explains the achievements, the strategies, and the development of the president’s governing theories, and showcases the vision and capacities of the new generation of the Communist Party of China’s leadership. The book also serves as a useful guide to global leaders who benefit from understanding the perspective that President Xi brings to international conversation. Xinmin’s essential work gives a simple analysis of the theoretical aspects of President Xi’s administrative approach and demonstrates how those theories are applied to the practical policies of the current Chinese leadership. Xi Jinping’s Governance and the Future of China is a must-read for anyone looking to gain a deeper understanding of the modern People’s Republic of China from a Chinese perspective.Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother
By Xinran. 2010
Following her internationally bestselling book The Good Women of China, Xinran has written one of the most powerful accounts of…
the lives of Chinese women. Her searing stories of mothers who have been driven to abandon their daughters or give them up for adoption is a masterful and significant work of literary reportage and oral history. Xinran has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers—students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants—who have given up their daughters. Whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions, or hideous economic necessity, these women had to give up their daughters for adoption; others even had to watch as their baby daughters were taken away at birth and drowned. Xinran beautifully portrays the “extra-birth guerrillas” who travel the roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold on to more than one baby; naïve young girl students who have made life-wrecking mistakes; the “pebble mother” on the banks of the Yangzte River still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they can’t produce a male heir; and Little Snow, the orphaned baby fostered by Xinran but confiscated by the state. For parents of adopted Chinese children and for the children themselves, this is an indispensable, powerful, and intensely moving book. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is powered by love and by heartbreak and will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page.Full Moon over Noah's Ark: An Odyssey to Mount Ararat and Beyond
By Rick Antonson. 2016
Acclaimed travel writer Rick Antonson sets his adventurous compass on Mount Ararat, exploring the region’s long history, religious mysteries, and…
complex politics.Mount Ararat is the most fabled mountain in the world. For millennia this massif in eastern Turkey has been rumored as the resting place of Noah’s Ark following the Great Flood. But it also plays a significant role in the longstanding conflict between Turkey and Armenia.Author Rick Antonson joined a five-member expedition to the mountain’s nearly 17,000-foot summit, trekking alongside a contingent of Armenians, for whom Mount Ararat is the stolen symbol of their country. Antonson weaves vivid historical anecdote with unexpected travel vignettes, whether tracing earlier mountaineering attempts on the peak, recounting the genocide of Armenians and its unresolved debate, or depicting the Kurds’ ambitions for their own nation’s borders, which some say should include Mount Ararat.What unfolds in Full Moon Over Noah’s Ark is one man’s odyssey, a tale told through many stories. Starting with the flooding of the Black Sea in 5600 BCE, through to the Epic of Gilgamesh and the contrasting narratives of the Great Flood known to followers of the Judaic, Christian and Islamic religions, Full Moon Over Noah’s Ark takes readers along with Antonson through the shadows and broad landscapes of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Armenia, shedding light on a troubled but fascinating area of the world.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan, 1919-1937
By Cloé Drieu. 2018
Between the founding of Soviet Uzbekistan in 1924 and the Stalinist Terror of the late 1930s, a nationalist cinema emerged…
in Uzbekistan giving rise to the first wave of national film production and an Uzbek cinematographic elite. In Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan Cloé Drieu uses Uzbek films as a lens to explore the creation of the Soviet State in Central Asia, starting from the collapse of the Russian Empire up through the eve of WWII. Drieu argues that cinema provides a perfect angle for viewing the complex history of domination, nationalism, and empire (here used to denote the centralization of power) within the Soviet sphere. By exploring all of film’s dimensions as a socio-political phenomenon—including film production, film reception, and filmic discourse—Drieu reveals how nation and empire were built up as institutional realities and as imaginary constructs. Based on archival research in the Uzbek and Russian State Archives and on in-depth analyses of 14 feature-length films, Drieu’s work examines the lively debates within the totalitarian and so-called revisionist schools that invigorated Soviet historiography, positioning itself within contemporary discussions about the processes of state- and nation-building, and the emergence of nationalism more generally. Revised and expanded from the original French, Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan helps us to understand how Central Asia, formerly part of the Russian Empire, was decolonized, but later, in the run-up to the Stalinist period and repression of the late 1930s, suffered a new style of domination.During the 1970s and early 1980s, Egypt experienced swift economic growth resulting from a regional oil boom. Oddly, this economic…
growth hardly registered in Egyptian public discourse, which continuously claimed that the country was experiencing multiple economic, social, and cultural crises. This book sets out to investigate this discrepancy and to offer a revisionist history of the period. It documents the massive socio-economic mobility in Egypt by analysing relevant statistical data and ethnographic evidence, indicating the changes in the employment structure and the spread of mass consumption. Relli Shechter further examines a wide array of cultural resources, such as Egyptian academic writing, the press, the cinema, and the literature, in which critics lamented 'what went wrong' in Egypt. By doing so, he offers a local version of a wider Middle Eastern and international story: the global formation of middle-class societies whose members strove for respectable lives with only partial success.Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India
By Arnab Dey. 2018
Arnab Dey examines the intersecting role of law, ecology, and agronomy in shaping the history of tea and its plantations…
in British east India. He suggests that looking afresh at the legal, environmental, and agro-economic aspects of tea production illuminate covert, expedient, and often illegal administrative and commercial dealings that had an immediate and long-term human and environmental impact on the region. Critiquing this imperial commodity's advertised mandate of agrarian modernization in colonial India, Dey points to numerous tea pests, disease ecologies, felled forests, harsh working conditions, wage manipulation, and political resistance as examples of tea's unseemly legacy in the subcontinent. Dey draws together the plant and the plantation in highlighting the ironies of the tea economy and its consequences for the agrarian history of eastern India.Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China
By Jenny Huangfu Day. 2018
Prior to the nineteenth century, the West occupied an anomalous space in the Chinese imagination, populated by untamable barbarians and…
unearthly immortals. First-hand accounts and correspondence from Qing envoys and diplomats to Europe unraveled that perception. In this path-breaking study, Jenny Huangfu Day interweaves the history of Qing legation-building with the personal stories of China's first official travelers, envoys and diplomats to Europe. She explores how diplomat-travelers navigated the conceptual and physical space of a land virtually unmapped in the Chinese intellectual tradition and created a new information order. This study reveals the fluidity, heterogeneity, and ambivalence of their experience, and the layers of tension between thinking, writing, and publishing about the West. By integrating diplomatic and intellectual history with literary analysis and communication studies, Day offers a fundamentally new interpretation of the Qing's engagement with the West.Iran's Troubled Modernity: Debating Ahmad Fardid's Legacy (The Global Middle East #5)
By Ali Mirsepassi. 2019
Ahmad Fardid (1910–94), the 'anti-Western' philosopher known to many as the Iranian Heidegger, became the self-proclaimed philosophical spokesperson for the…
Islamic Republic, famously coining the term 'Westoxification'. Using new materials about Fardid's intellectual biography and interviews with thirteen individuals, Ali Mirsepassi pieces together the striking story of Fardid's life and intellectual legacy. Each interview in turn sheds light on Iran's twentieth-century intellectual and political self-construction and highlights Fardid's important role and influence in the creation of Iranian modernity. The Fardid phenomenon was unique to the Iranian story, and yet contributed to a broader twentieth-century Heideggerian tradition that marked the political destiny of other countries under a similar ideological sway. Through these accounts, Mirsepassi cuts to the nerve of how deadly political 'authenticity movements' take hold of modern societies and spread their ideology. Combining a sociological framework with the realities of lived experience, he examines Iran's recent and astonishing upheavals, experiments, and mass mobilizations.In this book historians and social scientists examine boycotts from the eighteenth century to the present day. Employed in struggles…
against British rule in the American colonies, against racial discrimination in the United States during the Civil Rights movement, and Apartheid in South Africa, today it is Israel that is the focus of a campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Boycotts have featured in campaigns undertaken by labour, consumer and nationalist movements. Jews were the focus of some boycotts instigated by nationalist movements in Central and Eastern Europe and Jewish businesses were targeted by the National Socialist regime in Germany. In this collection, contributors explore the history of past boycott movements and examine the different narratives put forward by proponents and opponents of the current BDS movement directed against Israel: one which places the movement within a history of struggles for ‘human rights’; the other which regards BDS as the latest manifestation of an antisemitic tradition.Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk (Echoes Of Classics Ser.)
By Lu Xun. 2014
A collection of essays by Lu Xun, one of the most influential figures of modern Chinese literature. In this classic…
and beautiful collection, Lu Xun recounts the stories of his childhood and youth in Shaoxing, China. A revolutionary thinker and writer, and one of the architects of the May 4th Movement, his stories reveal the beauty, joy, and struggle of life in early twentieth-century China.