Results by title

The State of Islam tells the story of Pakistan through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the global rise of militant Islam.

Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined ‘political’ realm, Saadia Toor highlights the significance of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. This extra dimension allows Toor to explain how the struggle between Marxists and liberal nationalists was influenced and eventually engulfed by the agenda of the religious right.

Timely and unique, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the roots of modern Pakistan and the likely outcome of current power struggles in the country.

How seventeenth-century Europeans, following Jesuit missionary Martino Martini, saw their continent as historically, environmentally, and culturally intertwined with China.

The Tartar Moment focuses on understanding how the Manchu conquest of the Ming Empire in 1644 transformed European science, technology, and politics for over a century. Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh argues that seventeenth-century European natural philosophers found the nomadic takeover of a seemingly eternal empire deeply relevant for their own concerns. They began to reevaluate how they thought about the roles of astronomy, history-writing, agriculture, and military technologies in ensuring the long-term survival of a state. 

The book’s narrative center is the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini, who first grasped the global significance of the Tartar War and its aftermath. Giovannetti-Singh situates Martini as a broker bridging multiple worlds, each grappling with new forms of turbulence. Martini’s writings reinterpreted Chinese knowledge and culture for diverse European audiences urgently seeking order in an age of uncertainty. China ceased to be imagined as a timeless Other and instead appeared as a civilization that, like Europe, confronted recurring disorder and crafted philosophical solutions to maintain stability. During this period, Europeans selectively appropriated Chinese methods of reading the heavens, cultivating the earth, and governing the state.

 

By tracing how Martini recognized, theorized, and recounted crises in Ming, Manchu, and European contexts, The Tartar Moment shows that the 1640s and 1650s were not simply years of collapse but of intense creativity in interpreting and responding to disorder.

A film-by-film introduction to Taiwan cinema and cultures

Finalist: 2025 British Comparative Literature Association First Book Prize | July 22, 2025

Fusako Innami offers the first comprehensive study of touch and skinship—relationality with the other through the skin—in modern Japanese writing. The concept of the unreachable—that is, the lack of characters’ complete ability to touch what they try to reach for—provides a critical intervention on the issue of intimacy. Touch has been philosophically addressed in France, but literature is an effective—or possibly the most productive—venue for exploring touch in Japan, as literary texts depict what the characters may be concerned with but may not necessarily say out loud. Such a moment of capturing the gap between the felt and the said—the interaction between the body and language—can be effectively analyzed by paying attention to layers of verbalization, or indeed translation, by characters’ utterances, authors’ depictions, and readers’ interpretations. Each of the writers discussed in this book—starting with Nobel prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko—presents a particular obsession with objects or relationality to the other constructed via the desire for touch.

In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated in engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. The book thereby not only bridges cultural gaps beyond geographic and linguistic constraints, but also aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive and stimulating intellectual dialogues. Through close readings of the authors’ treatment of touch, Innami develops a theoretical framework with which to examine intersensorial bodies interacting with objects and the environment through touch.

The large number of Vietnamese refugees that resettled in the United States since the fall of Saigon have become America’s fastest growing immigrant group. Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies traces the ideologies, networks, and cultural sensibilities that have long influenced and continue to transform social, political, and economic developments in Vietnam and the U.S.

Moving beyond existing approaches, the editors and contributors to this volume—the first to craft a working framework for researching, teaching, and learning about this dynamic community—present a new Vietnamese American historiography that began in South Vietnam. They provide deep-dive explorations into community development, political activism, civic participation and engagement, as well as entrepreneurial endeavors. Chapters offer new concepts and epistemological approaches to how legacy and memory is nurtured, produced and circulated in the Vietnamese diaspora.

Toward a Framework for Vietnamese American Studies seeks to better understand the rapidly changing landscape of Vietnamese American diaspora.

Contributors: Duyen Bui, Christian Collet, Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox, Elwing Suong Gonzalez, Tuan Hoang, Jennifer A. Huynh, Y Thien Nguyen, Nguyen Vu Hoang, Van Nguyen-Marshall, Thien-Huong Ninh, Hai-Dang Phan, Ivan V. Small, Quan Tue Tran, Thuy Vo Dang, and the editors

Intermedia art—an avant-garde multimedia practice that combines sound and moving images—took root in Japan alongside other places in the 1960s. In Transpacific Experiments, Miki Kaneda analyzes intermedia as a practice that gives form to errant possibilities, unfolding in spaces of the everyday, to offer nuanced insights into the global flow of ideas, influence, and discourses of appropriation. The stories of intermedia art throughout the study offer feminist and transnational perspectives on experimental music and art that disorient existing narratives about the experimental and political in unexpected ways.

Transpacific Experiments contends that social, cultural, and political arrangements local to Japan had a greater influence on the transnational experimental music scene than previously acknowledged. Kaneda’s perspective extends, exceeds, and at times unsettles frameworks for experimental practices, revealing the limitations of any single political or aesthetic lens.