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Three hundred million Chinese have left the countryside for the cities since the 1980s, in a flood wave of labor migration that has fueled China’s rise. Known as ‘battlers,’ they belong to a new underclass who face exploitation, discrimination, and harrowing insecurity. And they write poetry.

Battler poetry speaks of being ground down in the factory workshop, of being forced into sex work, of being robbed of your youth. It has made its way into mass media and labor activism, and developed uneasy relations with the literary establishment. It aligns with writing elsewhere in the world that shows the power of poetry as an expression of sociopolitical identity.

Who are China’s battler poets? Where do they find the time and energy, after a 12-hour shift on the assembly line or on a courier moped in big-city traffic? What is their poetry like? Where is it published? Who reads it? What happens when it travels abroad? How has the Chinese state responded? What can battler poetry tell us about the nexus of aesthetics and social experience, in a world where inequality reigns?

China’s Battler Poetry tells the gripping story of an ‘unlikely’ genre. Building on textual and cultural analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and the collection of underground source material, it sits at the interface of the humanities and social science. It is driven by a desire to understand poetry as both art and social practice, looking at its words through the lifeworlds of its authors and the other way around.

From the late nineteenth century onward, men and women throughout the Middle East discussed, debated, and negotiated the roles of young girls and women in producing modern nations. In Palestine, girls' education was pivotal to discussions about motherhood. Their education was seen as having the potential to transform the family so that it could meet both modern and nationalist expectations.

Ela Greenberg offers the first study to examine the education of Muslim girls in Palestine from the end of the Ottoman administration through the British colonial rule. Relying upon extensive archival sources, official reports, the Palestinian Arabic press, and interviews, she describes the changes that took place in girls' education during this time. Greenberg describes how local Muslims, often portrayed as indifferent to girls' education, actually responded to the inadequacies of existing government education by sending their daughters to missionary schools despite religious tensions, or by creating their own private nationalist institutions.

Greenberg shows that members of all socioeconomic classes understood the triad of girls' education, modernity, and the nationalist struggle, as educated girls would become the "mothers of tomorrow" who would raise nationalist and modern children. While this was the aim of the various schools in Palestine, not all educated Muslim girls followed this path, as some used their education, even if it was elementary at best, to become teachers, nurses, and activists in women's organizations.

This indispensable and unique volume is at once a history of and a pathfinder for the future of the Great Law, the governing principles behind the long-standing Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Focused on the Duck Creek Oneida people of Wisconsin, Seeds of Tomorrow draws together a wide range of tribal voices, from elders and community members to young people and academic experts. This collection chronicles the history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s revolutionary governing principles, outlines the current state of tribal government, and proposes a vision for a political future that draws on traditional Indigenous practices and knowledge. This guide toward stronger sovereignty, revitalized community ties, and a healthier and more self-determined future based on traditional structures of governance is indigenization in practice: a model not just for Duck Creek Oneida but for Indigenous nations everywhere.

Contributors: Kenzie Allen, Marley Atkinson, Marena Bridges, Robert “Bob” Brown, Breann Clark, Julie Clark, Carol Cornelius, Margaret Cornelius, Randy Cornelius, Michele Doxtater, Richard “Lotni” Elm-Hill, Jennifer “Jen” Falck, William Gollnick, Joie Guiterrez, Gerald L. Hill, Jo Anne House, Toni M. House, Nicholas Metoxen, Paul Ninham, Saniya Ninham, John III Powless, Mark Powless, Nina Powless, Artley Skenandore, Lois Stevens, Vernon Stevens, Amelia “Mia” Webster, Grace Webster, Hunter D. Webster, Rebecca M. Webster, Arthur Wilbur, Jameson Wilson