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Cosmopolitan Maternalisms: Migration, Kinship, and Coorg Mothering in Modernity

Bittiandra Chand Somaiah (author), Veena Ravi Poonacha (foreword)

This women-centred study examines social reconstructions of immigrant mothering among a middle-class minority community of first-generation Coorg women “Kodavathees” in urban Karnataka, Singapore, and Sydney through conceptual lenses of new cosmopolitanisms and new maternalisms.

Cosmopolitan Maternalisms explores how Kodavathee immigrant mothering is practised with a pragmatic awareness of adapting the ways of the ancestors to the promises and pitfalls associated with living in modernity. As a member of this community, which possesses martial and agricultural traditions, and as an immigrant mother herself, Bittiandra Chand Somaiah engages in maternal conversations and in-depth qualitative interviews with forty-three mothers. The book emphasizes the socio-cultural processes associated with cosmopolitanization that accomplish mothering in general and that affect these Kodavathee mothers specifically. Cosmopolitan Maternalisms makes sense of the gendered and globalized convictions, contradictions, and aspirations shared by these mothers who are poised to slowly challenge the heteronormative maternal pedestals and patriarchal structures of middle-class transnational India.

Global South Rising?: BRICS and the Reconfiguration of Knowledge Systems

Ari Sitas and Wiebke Keim (editors)

Global South Rising? addresses a provocative question: Can BRICS reshape global knowledge hierarchies? The contributors examine the BRICS’ rise in the context of its ambition to reconfigure not only the global economy, but also intellectual power structures. As they assess the bloc’s performance, they highlight its challenges to dominant Western epistemologies and its potential to amplify the agency of the Global South. In the process, they invite readers to rethink concepts of power, knowledge, and global cooperation.

A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (hardcover)

Annemarie Schimmel

Annemarie Schimmel, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Persian literature, provides a comprehensive introduction to the complicated and highly sophisticated system of rhetoric and imagery used by the poets of Iran, Ottoman Turkey, and Muslim India. She shows that these images have been used and refined over the centuries and reflect the changing conditions in the Muslim world.

According to Schimmel, Persian poetry does not aim to be spontaneous in spirit or highly personal in form. Instead it is rooted in conventions and rules of prosody, rhymes, and verbal instrumentation. Ideally, every verse should be like a precious stone — perfectly formed and multifaceted — and convey the dynamic relationship between everyday reality and the transcendental.

Persian poetry, Schimmel explains, is more similar to medieval European verse than Western poetry as it has been written since the Romantic period. The characteristic verse form is the ghazal — a set of rhyming couplets — which serves as a vehicle for shrouding in conventional tropes the poet’s real intentions.

Because Persian poetry is neither narrative nor dramatic in its overall form, its strength lies in an “architectonic” design; each precisely expressed image is carefully fitted into a pattern of linked figures of speech. Schimmel shows that at its heart Persian poetry transforms the world into a web of symbols embedded in Islamic culture.

A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (paperback)

Annemarie Schimmel

Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire

Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa

In the nineteenth century, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the North Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks in contest over the meanings of slavery and freedom. Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves mines multinational archives to illuminate the Atlantic reverberations of US mercantile projects, “free labor” experiments, and slaveholding in western Indian Ocean societies. Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa profile transnational human rights campaigns. They show how the discourses of poverty, kinship, and care could be adapted to defend servitude in different parts of the world, revealing the tenuous boundaries that such discourses shared with liberal contractual notions of freedom. An intercontinental cast of empire builders and émigrés, slavers and reformers, a “cotton queen” and courtesans, and fugitive “slaves” and concubines populates the pages, fleshing out on a granular level the interface between the personal, domestic, and international politics of “slavery in the East” in the age of empire. By extending the transnational framework of US slavery and abolition histories beyond the Atlantic, Gunja SenGupta and Awam Amkpa recover vivid stories and prompt reflections on the comparative workings of subaltern agency.

Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways

Mattie Armstrong-Price

Respectability on the Line offers a social and cultural history of railway labor in Britain and colonial India from the 1840s through World War I. The book treats the railway industry as a microcosm through which to study the history of capitalism in the liberal imperial era. Using company records, Mattie Armstrong-Price shows how executives shaped the domestic and working lives of higher-grade employees with an eye to cultivating their respectability. Meanwhile workers’ writings reveal how railway towns provided opportunities for some employees to maintain non-heteronormative living arrangements. The book tracks these histories of everyday life while also outlining stories of early trade unionism. In Britain, railway unionists established benefit funds that mimicked company-sponsored provident funds, while in colonial India workers fought to gain access to company benefits on equal terms. This comparative study shows how industrial labor was made through conflict, subversion, and accommodation across an uneven imperial field.

Religion, Orientalism and Modernity: Mahdi Movements of Iran and South Asia

Geoffrey Nash

Analyses modernity and Orientalist discourses in Iranian millenarian movements.

• Employs historical and discourse analysis to probe the conflict between orthodox and heterodox religious movements in 19th- and 20th-century Iran.
• Links the conflict between orthodoxy and heterodoxy to the impact of modernity on Iran’s society and religion and to colonisation on India’s Muslims.
• Broadens the scope of this conflict to include Palestine, Central Asia and Turkey.
• Presents a postcolonial analysis of the new movements and their broader relationship to the Islamic world during the age of imperialism.

Religion, Orientalism and Modernity explores the emergence of the revolutionary Babis and reformist Baha’is and their conflict with mainstream Shi’a Muslims in Iran, and of the parallel Ahmadi movement in North India. It gives fresh insights into the writings that defined these innovatory movements, penned on the one hand by their proponents, and on the other by western interpreters.

Comparing these movements shows that, together, they define important aspects of Islamic modernity. A focus on two case studies (Babis and Baha’is in Iran, and Ahmadis in India) reveals similarities and differences in their responses to a perceived need for change and renewal of religious authority.

Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas

Nikita Kaur Simpson

In Tension, Nikita Kaur Simpson examines the effects of rapid development in the Himalayas on the minds and bodies of the Gaddi people who inhabit them through attention to the multifaceted state of distress they call “tension.” This “tension” takes many forms: Kamzori, or weakness, in the bodies of elderly women; “Future tension” accumulating in the minds of young girls; or Opara, or black magic, afflicting whole families. Through her long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Simpson follows the ways in which Gaddi people tie this distress to broader structural changes, such as land dispossession and caste, class, tribal and gender inequality, which are growing alongside modernity and prosperity. In doing so, she shows how “tension” acts as an everyday diagnostic of the problems of cultural, economic and environmental change as they shape intimate life. At once a lived historical account, a cartography of care relations, and a multi-sensory exploration of the intimate experiences of atmosphere and body, Tension puts forth a novel theory of distress, that inequality is often determined by who is made to feel, hold, and absorb distress.

Shelter for the Night: On Afghanistan, Language, and Detours

Fatima Mojaddedi

Shelter for the Night is an ethnographic meditation on language and psychic life in 2010s Afghanistan, where militarized violence has collapsed social worlds. Across Kabul and the countryside, in poetic and probing style, the book unpacks the precarious relationship between language, violence, and the self. As social and political worlds fracture through militarized violence, economic speculation, interpersonal sabotage, and ruptures in shared understanding, people are set on unexpected detours to discontinuity. Encounters in political life, love, and translation become fragmented, difficult to parse, and entangled in symbolic violence. Yet amid the harsh realities of contemporary life in Kabul, Mojaddedi finds moments of wonder and rich inner lives of reflexivity, understanding, and social connection. From narratives of modernist ambition and political violence to tragic romance and urbanite translators and their rural interlocutors, Shelter for the Night looks at the challenges of articulating the unspeakable to make a bold claim for the importance of thinking about the contemporary world starting from Afghanistan.

The Divine Names: A Mystical Theology of the Names of God in the Qurʾan

ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī (author), Yousef Casewit (translator), Philippa Byrne (foreword)

A Sufi scholar’s philosophical interpretation of the names of God.

The Divine Names is a philosophically sophisticated commentary on the names of God. Penned by the seventh-/thirteenth-century North African scholar and Sufi poet ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī, The Divine Names expounds upon the one hundred and forty-six names of God that appear in the Qurʾan, including The All-Merciful, The Powerful, The First, and The Last. In his treatment of each divine name, al-Tilimsānī synthesizes and compares the views of three influential earlier authors, al-Bayhaqī, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn Barrajān.

Al-Tilimsānī famously described his two teachers Ibn al-ʿArabī and al-Qūnawī as a “philosophizing mystic” and a “mysticizing philosopher,” respectively. Picking up their mantle, al-Tilimsānī merges mysticism and philosophy, combining the tenets of Akbarī Sufism with the technical language of Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Avicennan philosophy as he explains his logic in a rigorous and concise way. Unlike Ibn al-ʿArabī, his overarching concern is not to examine the names as correspondences between God and creation, but to demonstrate how the names overlap at every level of cosmic existence. The Divine Names shows how a broad range of competing theological and philosophical interpretations can all contain elements of the truth.

The Book of Monasteries

Al-Shābushtī (author), Hilary Kilpatrick (translator), Wiebke Denecke (foreword)

A literary tour of Christian monasteries of the medieval Middle East.

The Book of Monasteries takes readers on a tour of the monasteries of the Middle East by presenting the rich variety of poetry and prose associated with each monastery. Starting with Baghdad, readers are taken up the Tigris into the mountains of south-eastern Anatolia before moving to Palestine and Syria, along the Euphrates down to the old Christian center of Ḥīrah and onward to Egypt. For the literary anthologist al-Shābushtī, who was Muslim, monasteries were important sites of interactions with Christian communities that made up about half the population of the Abbasid Empire at the time.

Each section in this anthology covers a specific monastery, beginning with a discussion of its location and the reason for its name. Al-Shābushtī presents poems, anecdotes, and historical reports related to each. He selects heroic and spectacular incidents, illustrations of caliphal extravagance, and events that gave rise to memorable verse. Important political personalities and events that were indirectly linked with monasteries also appear in the collection, as do scenes of festive court life and gruesome murders. Al-Shābushtī uses these accounts not to teach history but to offer a meditation on the splendor of Abbasid culture as well as moral and philosophical lessons: the ephemerality of power; the virtues of generosity and tolerance; the effectiveness of eloquence in prose and poetry; the fleeting nature of pleasure and beauty. Translated into English for the first time, The Book of Monasteries offers an entertaining panorama of religious, political, and literary life during the Abbasid era.