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Winner, Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, 2014
Winner, Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, 2015
Winner, Drake University Emerging Writers Award, 2015

The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the child of Bangladeshi immigrants, the poet in turn explores her own losses, as well as the complexities of bearing witness to the atrocities these war heroines endured.

Throughout the volume, the narrator endeavors to bridge generational and cultural gaps even as the victims recount the horror of grief and personal loss. As we read, we discover the profound yet fragile seam that unites the fields, rivers, and prisons of the 1971 war with the poet’s modern-day hotel, or the tragic death of a loved one with the holocaust of a nation.

Moving from West Texas to Dubai, from Virginia to remote villages in Bangladesh and back again, the narrator calls on the legacies of Willa Cather, César Vallejo, Tomas Tranströmer, and Paul Celan to give voice to the voiceless. Fierce yet loving, devastating and magical at once, Seam is a testament to the lingering potency of memory and the bravery of a nation’s victims.

Secularizing Islamists? provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama‘at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism.

This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.

 A Chinese-language collection of writing from Lu Zhi, who devoted his life to the revolutionary cause and published numerous articles in Jiefang Daily,People’s Daily, and other newspapers.

Selected Writings of Lu Zhi is divided into three parts, featuring the author’s views on the construction of the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, political and cultural work in the army, and the economic development of the new China. Lu Zhi’s writings not only embody the “Yan’an Spirit” but also allow readers to gain insight into his personal experiences and the revolutionary atmosphere in China during the 1940s and 1950s. This collection also provides scholars with valuable primary historical materials and serves as an important reference for the study of China’s revolutionary history and the development of socialist economic construction.

The most comprehensive anthology of primary sources on Sri Lanka’s links with the Islamic world ever assembled in English.

Sri Lanka is an underappreciated focal point of global history. Known to Persian and Arab traders as Serendib, the island has long been a site of intensive cultural and material exchange, as well as a holy place—Islamic tradition holds that the biblical Adam arrived there after his expulsion from Eden. Assembling centuries of texts, this volume presents an array of sources from the Indian Ocean.

Serendipitous Translations gathers travelogues, literary works, commercial records, inscriptions, religious tracts, pilgrim manuals, and more—an unprecedented range of Muslim voices from Sri Lanka between the 1200s and 1990s. These works vividly document medieval pilgrimages, maritime mysticism, diplomatic encounters, colonial-era commerce, and the bustling everyday affairs of a cosmopolitan Asian nexus. Expert translations bring Arabic, Malay, Turkish, Urdu, Dhivehi, Sinhala, Arabic-Tamil, and Tamil texts to readers of English for the first time. Editor Nile Green situates these texts in their Indian Ocean contexts by introducing the broad sweep of Sri Lanka’s story. An invaluable collection, Serendipitous Translations is the most comprehensive anthology of primary sources ever assembled on Sri Lanka’s thousand-year links to the Muslim world.

Analyzing a Chinese city’s dazzling rise to global megacity status

Until around 1990, Shanghai was China’s premier but sluggish industrial center. Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the joint impact of global forces and state power has turned Shanghai into a dynamic megacity. Shanghai’s remarkable growth in economy, infrastructure, and global presence has prompted questions about the Shanghai “miracle.” This collection places the city’s unprecedented rise in a rare comparative examination of U.S. cities, as well as with Asian megacities Singapore and Hong Kong, providing a nuanced account of how Shanghai’s politics, economy, society, and space have been transformed by macro- and micro-level forces.

How China’s borderlands transformed politically and culturally throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

China’s land borders, shared with fourteen other nations, are the world’s longest. Like all borders, they are not just lines on a map but also spaces whose histories and futures are defined by their frontier status. An ambitious appraisal of China’s borderlands, Shifting Sands addresses the full scope and importance of these regions, illustrating their transformation from imperial backwaters to hotbeds of resource exploitation and human development in the age of neoliberal globalization.

Xiaoxuan Lu brings to bear an original combination of archival research, fieldwork, cartography, and landscape analysis, broadening our understanding of the political economy and cultural changes in China’s borderlands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While conventional wisdom looks to the era of Deng Xiaoping for China’s “opening,” Lu shows the integration of China’s borderlands into national and international networks from Sun Yat-sen onward. Yet, while the state has left a firm imprint on the borderlands, they were hardly created by China alone. As the Chinese case demonstrates, all borderlands are transnational, their physical and socioeconomic landscapes shaped by multidirectional flows of materials, ideas, and people.

Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality, and the true story of yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and more entertaining than most of us realize.

To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation—to acquire power, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated, Sinister Yogis tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.

This book debuts selected poetry by Kim Nam-ju (1946–1994) in English translation, along with the original Korean. Referred to as the “Che Guevara of South Korea,” and self-described a “warrior poet,” Kim Nam-ju remains, to this day, an enduring voice of the 1970s and 80s cultures of anti-authoritarian resistance in South Korea. Kim was arrested in 1979 for his involvement with the “South Josǒn” National Liberation Front, a leftist underground group organizing against the Yushin regime. Kim wrote prolifically while in prison (1979-1988), at times by etching his poems into scraps of foil, milk carton, or cigarette packages. The work he produced in prison alone totals around 360 poems. This bilingual volume selects 65 poems from Kim's oeuvre, sampling across many different chapters of the poet’s career. Readers will find autobiographical reflections on his childhood, love poems, missives from the prison cell, commemorations of the Kwangju Uprising, the poet’s calls to arms, and more. 

이 책은 김남주 시인(1946~1994)의 시 65편을 한국어 원문과 함께 영문 번역으로 처음 선보인다. ‘한국의 체 게바라’로 불리며 스스로를 ‘전사 시인’이라 칭했던 김남주는 오늘날까지도 한국의 1970·80년대 반독재 저항운동을 대표하는 사라지지 않는 목소리로 남아 있다. 김남주는 유신정권에 맞서 결성된 좌파 지하조직 ‘남조선민족해방전선준비위원회’에 가담한 혐의로 1979년에 체포되었다. 1979년부터 1988년에 이르는 수감 기간에도 꾸준히 창작 활동을 이어갔으며, 때로는 은박지 조각이나 우유곽, 담뱃갑 등에 시를 새겨 집필하기도 하였다. 이 시기에 쓴 작품만 해도 360여 편에 이른다.  이 영역시집은 시인의 전체 작품 중에서 65편의 시를 엄선하여 시인의 생애와 창작 활동의 다양한 시기를 아우르는 시적 여정을 한눈에 보여준다. 독자들은 시인의 어린 시절에 대한 자전적인 회고, 사랑의 시, 옥중 서한,  5·18 광주항쟁을 추모하는 시, 민중의 투쟁을 촉구하는 시 등 다양한 작품을 만나볼 수 있을 것이다. 

English-Korean Bilingual Edition 
영-한 이중언어판

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)