front cover of The United States and the Armenian Genocide
The United States and the Armenian Genocide
History, Memory, Politics
Julien Zarifian
Rutgers University Press, 2024
During the first World War, over a million Armenians were killed as Ottoman Turks embarked on a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing. Scholars have long described these massacres as genocide, one of Hitler’s prime inspirations for the Holocaust, yet the United States did not officially recognize the Armenian Genocide until 2021. 
 
This is the first book to examine how and why the United States refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide until the early 2020s. Although the American government expressed sympathy towards the plight of the Armenians in the 1910s and 1920s, historian Julien Zarifian explores how, from the 1960s, a set of geopolitical and institutional factors soon led the United States to adopt a policy of genocide non-recognition which it would cling to for over fifty years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. He describes the forces on each side of this issue: activists from the US Armenian diaspora and their allies, challenging Cold War statesmen worried about alienating NATO ally Turkey and dealing with a widespread American reluctance to directly confront the horrors of the past. Drawing from congressional records, rare newspapers, and interviews with lobbyists and decision-makers, he reveals how genocide recognition became such a complex, politically sensitive issue. 
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The Universe, All at Once
Selected Poems
Salim Barakat
Seagull Books, 2024
A collection showcasing the latest poems of the Kurdish-Syrian maestro of Arabic style.

Salim Barakat, the captivating Kurdish-Syrian poet and novelist known for his mastery of Arabic style, is hailed as an enigmatic and intricate figure in contemporary Arabic literature. In The Universe, All at Once, he curates, in collaboration with translator Huda J. Fakhreddine, a selection from his later works, considering them the pinnacle of his poetic career. Drawn from pieces composed between 2021 and 2023, the poems in this collection vary from excerpts of an expansive book-length poem to concise, intense fragments. Fakhreddine expertly renders his writing in English, a courageous and praiseworthy attempt to challenge the barriers of the untranslatable.

This volume not only showcases the prolific author’s poetic evolution but also features a comprehensive interview with Barakat. Conducted by Fakhreddine, the interview delves into Barakat’s early influences, hobbies, talents, reader expectations, and reflections on displacement, childhood, and interpersonal connections. Together, The Universe, All at Once presents the best of Barakat’s latest poetry to his readers and allows invaluable insight into the writing processes and motivations of a visionary modern poet.
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Unrecognized
A Palestinian Bedouin Feminist in Israel
Lihi Ben Shitrit
Rutgers University Press, 2027

In 1998, when Mona Al-Habanin was twenty-eight years old and pregnant with her sixth child, she stood before a council of al-Naqab Bedouin shaykhs and faced the most difficult decision of her life: give up her children or be responsible for more killings in her tribe.

This book tells the extraordinary story of Mona Al-Habanin (b. 1970), the first Bedouin woman to run for elected office in Israel's Negev Desert. Through Mona's life, it illuminates Indigenous Bedouin women's traumas and resilience while documenting a genealogy of contemporary Palestinian Bedouin feminism. It traces her journey from desert tent dwelling through forced dislocation, her community's struggles with violence against women, and her battle for her children—against state-sanctioned tribal justice rooted in British colonial paradigms and Zionist settler-native relations—and to her turn to fierce and irreverent activism, taboo-breaking, and political trailblazing. This book tells the story of an unrecognized community under siege and of a new form of Indigenous feminism that bravely defies the violence of silencing. 

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front cover of Unveiling Desire
Unveiling Desire
Fallen Women in Literature, Culture, and Films of the East
Das, Devaleena
Rutgers University Press, 2018
In Unveiling Desire, Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow show that the duality of the fallen/saved woman is as prevalent in Eastern culture as it is in the West, specifically in literature and films. Using examples from the Middle to Far East, including Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Japan, and China, this anthology challenges the fascination with Eastern women as passive, abject, or sexually exotic, but also resists the temptation to then focus on the veil, geisha, sati, or Muslim women’s oppression without exploring Eastern women’s sexuality beyond these contexts. The chapters cover instead mind/body sexual politics, patriarchal cultural constructs, the anatomy of sex and power in relation to myth and culture, denigration of female anatomy, and gender performativity. From Persepolis to Bollywood, and from fairy tales to crime fiction, the contributors to Unveiling Desire show how the struggle for women’s liberation is truly global.  
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