Books published by Stanford University Press

The influential French philosopher, Derrida, discusses the analytic of death in Heidegger's Being and Time. This new book will not fail to set new standards for the discussion of Heidegger and for dealing with philosophical texts.

Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to stay. Governments and charities have adopted a range of strategies in response to this need. Some have sequestered refugees in massive camps of glinting metal. Others have hosted them in renovated office blocks and disused warehouses. They often end up in prefabricated shelters flown in from abroad. This book focuses on seven examples of emergency shelter, from Germany to Jordan, which emerged after the great "summer of migration" in 2015. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research into these shelters, the book reflects on their political implications and opens up much bigger questions about humanitarian action. By exploring how aid agencies and architects approached this basic human need, Tom Scott-Smith demonstrates how shelter has many elements that are hard to reconcile or combine; shelter is always partial and incomplete, producing mere fragments of home. Ultimately, he argues that current approaches to emergency shelter have led to destructive forms of paternalism and concludes that the principle of autonomy can offer a more fruitful approach to sensitive and inclusive housing practices.

North Korea may be known as the world's most secluded society, but it too has witnessed the rapid rise of new media technologies in the new millennium, including the introduction of a 3G cell phone network in 2008. In 2009, there were only 70,000 cell phones in North Korea. That number has grown tremendously in just over a decade, with over 7 million registered as of 2022. This expansion took place amid extreme economic hardship, and the ensuing possibilities of destabilization. Against this social and political backdrop, Millennial North Korea traces how the rapidly expanding media networks in North Korea impact their millennial generation, especially their perspective on the outside world. Suk-Young Kim argues that millennials in North Korea play a crucial role in exposing the increasing tension between the state and its people, between risktakers who dare to transgress strict social rules and compliant citizens accustomed to the state's centralized governance, and between thriving entrepreneurs and those left out of the growing market economy. Combining a close reading of North Korean state media with original interviews with defectors, Kim explores how the tensions between millennial North Korea and North Korean millennials leads to a more nuanced understanding of a fractured and fragmented society that has been frequently perceived as an unchanging, monolithic entity.

Disorder and Diagnosis offers a social and political history of medicine, disease, and public health in the Persian Gulf from the late nineteenth century until the 1973 oil boom. Foregrounding the everyday practices of Gulf residents--hospital patients, quarantined passengers, women migrant nurses, and others too often excluded from histories of this region--Laura Frances Goffman demonstrates how the Gulf and its Arabian hinterland served as a buffer zone between "diseased" India and white Europe, as a space of scientific translation, and, ultimately, as an object of development. In placing health at the center of political and social change, this book weaves the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula into global circulations of commodities and movements of people. As a collection of institutions and infrastructures, pursuits of health created shifting boundaries of rule between imperial officials, indigenous elites, and local populations. As a set of practices seeking to manipulate the natural world, health policies compelled scientists and administrators to categorize fluid populations and ambiguous territorialities. And, as a discourse, health facilitated notions of racial difference, opposing native uncleanliness to white purity and hygiene, and indigenous medicine to modern science. Disorder and Diagnosis examines how Gulf residents, through their engagements with health, fiercely contested and actively shaped state and societal interactions.

As the university transformed itself into a center of innovation, and biotechnology became a billion-dollar industry, commercialization of university inventions became both lucrative and urgent. In the US, this shift decisively converted the academic scientist into an entrepreneur. From there, legal structures that facilitated university scientists' patenting and commercialization spread across the world, including to Japan, where earlier modes of doing science made such diffusion more difficult--and more interesting. Cosmopolitan Scientists delineates what happens when global policies diffuse to different cultural and institutional contexts. Instead of simply accepting or resisting the change, Japanese university scientists creatively enacted the new rules, making unique local variations of the global policy - thus making it Japanese. Drawing on vivid accounts from bioscientists who experienced and enacted the shift towards commercialization, the book offers an insider's view into the way scientists navigate the complex and shifting landscape of science, innovation and economic policy. In so doing it also tells a broader story of how the global rules can be successfully "naturalized" - modified, settled down, and made local.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans had come to see the Alps as the ideal place to fashion an alternative to the era's dominant energy source: coal. After 1850, Alpine water increasingly became "white coal" a power source with the revolutionary economic potential of fossil fuel. In this book, Marc Landry shows how dam-building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the Alps into Europe's "battery"--an energy landscape designed to store and produce electricity for use throughout the Continent. These stores of energy played an important role in supplying the war economies of west-central Europe in both world wars as demand for munitions and other factory production necessitated access to electrical energy and the conservation of coal. Through historical research conducted in archives across Europe--especially in Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, and Italy--Landry shows how and why Europeans thoroughly transformed the Alps in order to generate hydroelectricity, and explores the effects of its attendant economic and military advantages across the turbulent twentieth century. Landry surveys the environmental and energy changes wrought by dam-building, demonstrating that with global warming, melting glaciers, and calls for a green energy transition, the future of white coal is once again in question in twenty-first-century Europe.

Contested City offers a history of state-society relations in Baghdad, exploring how city residents managed through periods of economic growth, sanctions, and war, from the from the oil boom of the 1950s through the withdrawal of US troops in 2011. Interactions between citizens and their rulers shaped the social fabric and political realities of the city. Notably, low-ranking Ba'th party officials functioned as crucial intermediaries, deciding how regime policies would be applied. Charting the social, economic, and political transformations of Iraq's capital city, Alissa Walter examines how national policies translated into action at the local, everyday level. With this book, Walter reveals how authoritarian governance worked in practice. She follows shifts in mid-century housing and urban development, the impact of the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars on city life, and the manipulation of food rations and growth of black markets. Reading citizen petitions to the government, Walter illuminates citizens' self-advocacy and the important role of low-ranking party officials and state bureaucrats embedded within neighborhoods. The US occupation and ensuing sectarian fighting upended Baghdad's neighborhoods through violent displacement and the collapse of basic state services. This power vacuum paved the way for new power brokers, including militias and neighborhood councils, to compete for influence on the local level.

The story they have chosen to tell is wrong. It is time to tell a better story. Keith Richotte begins his playful, unconventional look at Native American and Supreme Court history with a question: When did plenary power-the federal government's self-appointed, essentially limitless authority over Native America-become constitutional? When the Supreme Court first embraced this massive federal authority in the 1880s it did not bother to find any justification for the decision, which was rooted in racist ideas about tribal nations. However, by the 21st century, the Supreme Court began telling a different story. It was claiming the U.S. Constitution as the source of federal plenary power over Native America. So, when did the Supreme Court change its story? Just as importantly, why did it change its story? And what does this change mean for Native America, the Supreme Court, and the rule of law? Richotte uses the genre of trickster stories to uncover the answers to these questions and offer an alternative understanding. More than corrective constitutional history, The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told provides an irreverent synthesis of Native American legal history across more than 100 years, reflecting on race, power, and sovereignty along the way. Engaging with the story of plenary power from an Indigenous perspective, Richotte shows, opens possibilities that are otherwise foreclosed. Through the genre of trickster stories we are able to imagine a future that is more just and equitable, and that better fulfills the text and the spirit of the Constitution.

Much has been written to try to understand the ideological characteristics of the current Russian government, as well as what is happening inside the mind of Vladimir Putin. Refusing pundits' clichés that depict the Russian regime as either a cynical kleptocracy or the product of Putin's grand Machiavellian designs, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime offers a critical genealogy of ideology in Russia today. Marlene Laruelle provides an innovative, multi-method analysis of the Russian regime's ideological production process and the ways it is operationalized in both domestic and foreign policies. Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime reclaims the study of ideology as an unavoidable component of the tools we use to render the world intelligible and represents a significant contribution to the scholarly debate on the interaction between ideas and policy decisions. By placing the current Russian regime into a broader context of different strains of strategic culture, ideological interest groups, and intellectual history, this book gives readers key insights into how the Russo-Ukrainian War became possible and the role ideology played in enabling it.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans had come to see the Alps as the ideal place to fashion an alternative to the era's dominant energy source: coal. After 1850, Alpine water increasingly became "white coal" a power source with the revolutionary economic potential of fossil fuel. In this book, Marc Landry shows how dam-building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the Alps into Europe's "battery"--an energy landscape designed to store and produce electricity for use throughout the Continent. These stores of energy played an important role in expanding the war economies of Austria-Hungary, France, Italy, and Germany as demand for munitions and other factory production necessitated access to electrical energy. Through historical research conducted in archives across Europe, especially in Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, and Italy, Landry analyzes government and corporate documents, conference proceedings, trade journals, and private holdings to show how and why Europeans thoroughly transformed the Alps in order to generate hydroelectricity, and the effects of its attendant economic and military advantages across the turbulent twentieth century. Landry surveys the environmental and energy changes wrought by dam building, demonstrating that with global warming, melting glaciers, and calls for a green energy transition, the future of white coal is once again in question in twenty-first-century Europe.

Because whiteness is not a given for Brazilians in the U.S., some immigrants actively construct it as a protective mechanism against the stigma normally associated with illegality. In The Borders of Privilege, Kara Cebulko tells the stories of a group of 1.5 generation Brazilians to show how their ability to be perceived as white - their power without papers - shaped their everyday interactions. By strategically creating boundaries with other racialized groups, these immigrants navigated life-course rituals like college, work, and marriage without legal documentation. Few identify as white in the U.S., even as they benefit from the privileges of whiteness. The legal exclusion they feel as undocumented immigrants from Latin America makes them feel a world apart from their white citizen peers. However, their constructed whiteness benefitted them when it came to interactions with law enforcement and professional advancement, challenging narratives that frame legality as a "master-status." Understanding these experiences requires us to explore interlocking systems of power, including white supremacy and capitalism, as well as global histories of domination. Cebulko traces the experiences of her interviewees across various stages of life, applying a "power without paper" lens, and making the case for integrating this perspective into future scholarship, collective broad-based movements for social justice, and public policy.

Energy history is an approach to understanding the past that takes changes in the human exploitation of Earth's energies as its object of inquiry. This interdisciplinary field documents and analyses how humans thought about, harnessed, stored, and exploited stocks and flows of energy. In recent decades, in response to evidence of the effect of fossil fuel use in our climatic system and coinciding with an energy turn across the humanities, a new urgency and purpose has been ascribed to such work. Energy's History challenges abstract and universalizing conceptions of energy's history-making capacities. This collection contains twelve chapters which present, analyze, and contextualize a primary source. The contributors focus on ideas, events, and statements that recorded and critiqued the distinct historical paths of energy, thereby broadening the scope of where and what constitutes energy history. As energy's world-making has enmeshed ever more of the planet into a dangerous compact with fossil fuels, energy histories must be revised within this new energy-historical reality. This volume both presents persuasive visions of energy-driven development beyond the Western capitalist model and provides an expansive and critical account of the ways in which energy histories have shaped the past and impact the present.

A digital world in relentless movement--from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing--has been captured and reinvented as a monoculture by Silicon Valley "big tech" and venture capital firms. Yet, very little is discussed in the public sphere about existing alternatives. Based on long-term field research across San Francisco, Tokyo, and Shenzhen, Common Circuits explores a transnational network of hacker spaces that stand as potent, but often invisible alternatives to the dominant technology industry. In what ways have hackers challenged corporate projects of digital development? How do hacker collectives prefigure more just technological futures through community projects? Luis Felipe R. Murillo responds to these urgent questions with an analysis of the hard challenges of collaborative, autonomous community-making through technical objects conceived by hackers as convivial, shared technologies. Through rich explorations of hacker space histories and biographical sketches of hackers who participate in them, Murillo describes the social and technical conditions that allowed for the creation of community projects, such as anonymity and privacy networks to counter mass surveillance; community-made monitoring devices to measure radioactive contamination; and small-scale open hardware fabrication for the purposes of technological autonomy. Murillo shows how hacker collectives point us toward brighter technological futures--a renewal of the "digital commons"--where computing projects are constantly being repurposed for the common good.

In 2019, after decades of ecological damage from oil, Waorani people took to the streets of Amazonian Ecuador to protest drilling on their ancestral lands. Working with international activists, lawyers, and other Indigenous groups, they successfully sued the government for selling oil concessions without prior consent. Placing their struggle for territorial autonomy in the global spotlight, this unprecedented legal victory for environmental rights by an Indigenous people reflected the new forms of collaboration emerging in contemporary Amazonia. Translating Worlds, Defending Land explores how Waorani collaborations, whether with environmentalists or academic researchers, bring about new possibilities, challenges, and imaginative horizons. Based on fieldwork over a period of twenty-five years, Casey High interrogates what these engagements mean for Indigenous communities and how they offer critical reflection on collaboration as a concept, method, and practice. The alliances, misunderstandings, and conflicts that emerge in these contexts challenge the assumption that productive collaborations reflect--or require--shared purposes, generating important implications for an engaged anthropology open to reconsidering what constitutes ethnographic knowledge and who it is for. As some young Waorani adults become not just community leaders or environmental citizens, but also skilled researchers and ethnographers, translating between Indigenous understandings of land and the Western language of conservation, they create a powerful new voice in international environmental politics.

In the years following World War I, as connections between the Middle East and South Asia began to proliferate, Egypt and India lay squarely at the heart of these increasingly complex and multilateral relations. East of Empire traces a series of intersecting narratives between 1919 and the mid-1940s as anti-colonial nationalism gained momentum across the East, and political crises mounted within Europe. Historian Erin M.B. O'Halloran documents the friendships, rivalries, cultural exchanges and shifting political alliances which came to animate the interwar project of "Easternism" a humanist, cosmopolitan vision of the world whose centre of gravity lay beyond Europe, in the great city of Cairo. Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sa'ad Zaghlul, this book introduces other historical personages: Eastern feminists, pro-Palestinian activists, Egyptian surrealists, Italian spies, Arab poets and British propagandists. In revealing their layered relationships with one another, the book also demonstrates their role in shaping political developments on three continents during a moment of profound global entanglement and political upheaval. Drawing on a broad cross-section of Indian, Arab, British and European sources, East of Empire transcends archival partitions to tell a powerful and nearly forgotten set of stories about the rise of anti-colonial nationalism and the end of empire across the Middle East and South Asia.

Dire reports of surging deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon appear often in international headlines, with commentators decrying the destruction of tree-covered habitats as an act of environmental vandalism. Although forest losses are alarming, broader trends are bending in the direction of forest recovery. In this book, Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate address the long-term recovery of forests in Latin America. The authors synthesize trends in demography, agricultural development, and technological change, and argue that slower population growth and increasing crop and tree yields--in conjunction with protecting local ownership of natural resources--have encouraged forest transition. This book explores how market forces, ownership arrangements, and the enforcement of property rights have influenced this shift from net deforestation to net afforestation. Forest transitions have happened before, such as the recovery of tree-covered habitats in Europe and the United States. Signs of a similar transformation in land use are now present in Latin America. Ending deforestation requires a strengthening of forest dwellers' property rights while ensuring that biodiversity conservation is no longer treated as a value-less externality. The resulting forest landscape, actively managed for ecosystem services, will be more resilient, as is needed to overcome climate change.

In this book, Daina Sanchez examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Assumptions that Indigenous peoples have disappeared altogether, or that Indigenous identities are fixed, persist in the popular imagination. This is far from the truth. Sanchez demonstrates how Indigenous immigrants continually remake their identities and ties to their homelands while navigating racial and social institutions from the U.S. and Latin America, and in doing so transform notions of Indigeneity and push the boundaries of Latinidad. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork between Los Angeles, California and San Andrés Solaga, a Zapotec townin the Mexican state of Oaxaca, The Children of Solaga centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and adds a much needed transnational dimension to the study of Indigenous immigrant adaptation and assimilation. Sanchez, herself a diasporic Solagueña, argues that the lived experiences of Indigenous immigrants offer a unique vantage point from which to see how migration across settler-borders transforms processes of self-making among displaced Indigenous people. Rather than accept attempts by both the Mexican and U.S. states to erase their Indigenous identity or give in to anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant prejudice, Oaxacan immigrants and their children defiantly celebrate their Indigenous identity through practices of el goce comunal ("communal joy") in their new homes.

As weavers, garment workers, and peddlers, Syrian immigrants in the Americas fed the early twentieth-century transnational textile trade. These migrants and the commodities they produced--silk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothing--moved along steamship routes from Beirut through Marseille and Madeira to New York City, New England, and Veracruz. As migrants and merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of work, Syrian textile manufacturing expanded across the hemisphere. Unmentionables offers a history of global textile industry and Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it. Stacy Fahrenthold examines how Arab workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation. She writes women workers, the majority of the Syrian garment workers, back into US labor history. She also situates the rise of Syrian American industrial elites, who exerted supply chain power to combat labor uprisings, resist unionization, and stake claim on the global textile industry. Critiquing the hegemony of the Syrian peddler in histories of this diaspora, Unmentionables introduces alternative narrators: union activists who led street demonstrations; women garment workers who shut down kimono factories; child laborers who threw snowballs at police; and the diasporic merchant capitalists who contended with all of them.

Deeply informed by jazz as music and sociality, Fumi Okiji explores black movement of thought as marked by a failure to be adequately disturbed by contradiction. The tarrying with the negative so crucial to European critical theory cannot quite account for the exorbitance characteristic of black thought. This is an orientation that allows for an oversubscription of intention, sense and logic, against the parsimony prized by the dialectical form. Attending to the black immoderation that registers as nonsense or deafening feedback from the perspective of European thought, Okiji tunes in to moments from the Haitian revolutionary forces' singing of "La Marseillaise" to Cecil Taylor's synesthetic poetics to the aporetic mien of the orisha Esu. She brings our attention to a galaxy of intimacies that flash up with such improvisatory and untimely thought. Extending the encounter between black study, Frankfurt School critical theory, and sound studies developed in Jazz as Critique, and drawing Yoruba aesthetics into this cluster, On Black Exorbitance is both a statement of non-citizenry and a preparation for practices of intoxication.

Against the backdrop of the global refugee crisis, Unsettled Families investigates the parameters that Global North governments and international humanitarian organizations use to deem certain displaced families worthy of resettlement--fewer than 1% globally--and a vast majority as fraudulent and ineligible. The book shows that "fraud" as a category is not as self-evident as it may at first appear. Nor is "the family." Based on long-term fieldwork between Nairobi, Kenya and Columbus, Ohio, Sophia Balakian tells stories of Somali and Congolese refugees navigating a complicated global assemblage of humanitarian agencies, governmental immigration bureaucracies, and national security regimes as they seek permanent, new homes. Viewing the concepts of "fraud" and "family" from different vantage points in this context, the categories begin to blur out of focus, sometimes to evaporate altogether; what seems to be contained within them scatter outside their received boundaries. Balakian argues that the very practices deemed "fraudulent" are often understood by refugees to be moral actions in an unequal world, fulfilling familial obligations to kin and community outside normative, Western frameworks. Bringing questions of kinship into current discussions on humanitarianism, Balakian locates "family" as a crucial category in producing, policing, and contesting the boundaries of nation-states, and of the nature of securitized humanitarianism in the 21st century.

In recent years, debates over healthcare have accompanied rapid advances in technology, from the expansion of telehealth services to artificial intelligence driven diagnostics. In this book, Shawn Bender delves into the world of Japanese robots engineered for care. Care robots (kaigo robotto) emerged early in the 21st century, when roboticists began converting assembly line technologies into responsive machines for older adults and people with disabilities. These robots are meant to be felt and programmed to feel. While some greet them with enthusiasm, others fear that they might replace a fundamentally human task. Based on fieldwork in Japan, Denmark, and Germany, Bender traces the emergence of care robots in Japan and examines their impact on therapeutic practice around the world. Social science scholarship on robotics tends to be either speculative--imagining life together with robots--or experimental--observing robot-human interaction in laboratories or through short-term field studies. Instead, Bender follows roboticists developing technologies in Japan, and travels with the robots themselves into everyday sites of care, tracking the integration of robots into institutional care and the connection of care practice to robotics development. By exploring the application of Japanese robotics across the globe, Feeling Machines highlights the entanglements of therapeutic practice and technological innovation in an age of more-than-human care.

Severo Sarduy was among the most important figures in twentieth-century Latin American fiction and a major representative of the literary tendency to which he gave the name Neobaroque. While most of Sarduy's literary work is available in English, his theoretical writings have largely remained untranslated. This volume--presenting Sarduy's central theoretical contribution, Barroco (1974), alongside other related works--remedies that oversight. Barroco marks a watershed in postwar thought on the Baroque, both in French post-structuralism and in the Latin American context. Sarduy traces a double history, reading events in the history of science alongside developments in the history of art, architecture, and literature. What emerges is a theory of the Baroque as decentering and displacement, as supplement and excess, a theory capacious enough to account for the old European Baroque as well as its queer, Latin American and global futures. In addition to Barroco, this volume includes texts spanning Sarduy's career, from 1960s essays published originally in Tel Quel to late works from the 1980s and '90s. It thus offers a complete picture of Sarduy's thinking on the Baroque.

For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel's arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labor-Zionist commitment to abstaining from hiring outside labor. But beginning in the late 1980s, the region's agrarian economy was rapidly transformed by the removal of state protections, a shift to export-oriented monoculture, and an influx of disenfranchised, ill-paid migrants from northeast Thailand (Isaan). Capitalist Colonial, Matan Kaminer's ethnography of the region and its people, argues that the paid and unpaid labor of Thai migrants has been essential to resolving the clashing demands of the bottom line and Zionist ideology here, as elsewhere in Israel's farm sector. Kaminer's account mobilizes capitalism and colonialism as a combined analytical frame to comprehend the forms of domination prevailing in the Arabah. Emplacing the findings of fieldwork as a farm laborer within the ecological, economic, and political histories of the Arabah and Isaan, Kaminer draws surprising connections between the violent takeover of peripheral regions, the imposition of agrarian commodity production, and the emergence of transnational labor flows. Insisting on the liberatory possibilities immanent in the "interaction ideologies" found among both migrant workers and settler employers, and raising the question of the place of migrants who are neither Jewish nor Arab in visions of decolonization, this book demonstrates anthropology's ongoing relevance to the struggle for local and global transformations.

Despite focused efforts to stop the perpetration of campus sexual violence, the statistic that one in four college women will experience such violence has remained steady over the last 60 years. The number of higher education institutions under federal Title IX investigation for mishandling sexual violence cases also continues to grow. In Hear Our Stories, Jessica Harris demonstrates how preventive efforts often fall short because they lack intersectional perspectives, and often obscure how sexual violence is imbued with racial significance. Drawing on interviews with Women of Color student survivors, staff, and documents from three different universities, this book analyzes sexual violence on the college campus from an intersectional lens, centering the stories of Women of Color. Harris explores the intersectional realities of campus sexual violence, including survivors racialized and gendered experiences with campus rape culture, institutional betrayal, prevention programming, reporting and disclosing, and feminist and anti-racist movements. Hear Our Stories challenges dominant approaches to campus sexual violence that too-often stall the implementation of more effective sexual violence prevention and response efforts that offer transformative outcomes for all students.

In this erudite new work, Elliot R. Wolfson explores philosophical gnosis in the writings of Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod. The juxtaposition of these three extraordinary, albeit relatively neglected, philosophers provides a prism through which Wolfson scrutinizes the interplay of ethics, politics, and theology. The bond that ties together the diverse and multifaceted worldviews promulgated by Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod is the mutual recognition of the need to enunciate a response to the calamities of the twentieth century based on an incontrovertible acknowledgement of the decadence and malevolence of human beings, without, however, succumbing to acrimony and despair. The speculation of each of these philosophers on melancholia and the tragicomedy of being is unquestionably intricate, exhibiting subtle variations and idiosyncrasies, but we can nevertheless identify a common denominator in their attempt to find the midpoint positioned between hope and hopelessness. As Wolfson articulates, Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod exemplify a philosophical sensibility informed by a nocturnal seeing, which is not merely a seeing in the night but rather a seeing of the night. Ultimately, the book reveals the the potential for these thinkers' ideas to enhance our moral sensitivity and to encourage participation in the ongoing struggle for meaning and decency in the present.

Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are what we call digital humanities, characterized by the self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate humanities practices amid another technological revolution. Engaging with writers such as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson who confronted the new media of their day, Fyfe shows how we have inherited Victorian anxieties about quantitative and machine-driven reading, professional obsolescence in the face of new technology, and more--telling a longer history of how writers, readers, and scholars adapt to dramatically changing media ecologies, then and now. The result is a predigital history for the digital humanities through nineteenth-century encounters with telecommunication networks, privacy intrusions, quantitative reading methods, remediation, and their effects on literary professionals. As Fyfe demonstrates, well before computers, the Victorians were already digital.

Since Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting airstrikes in southern Somalia and deploying heavy-handed police tactics at home. As the hunt for suspects has expanded within Kenya, Kenyan Muslims have been subject to disappearances and extrajudicial killings at the hands of U.S.-trained Kenyan police. War-Making as Worldmaking explores the entanglement of militarism, imperialism, and liberal-democratic governance in East Africa today. Samar Al-Bulushi argues that Kenya's emergence as a key player in the "War on Terror" is closely linked--but not reducible to--the U.S. military's growing proclivity to outsource the labor of war. Attending to the cultural politics of security, Al-Bulushi illustrates that the war against Al-Shabaab has become a means to produce new fantasies, emotions, and subjectivities about Kenya's place in the world. Meanwhile, Kenya's alignment with the U.S. provides cover for the criminalization and policing of the country's Muslim minority population. How is life lived in a place that is not understood to be a site of war, yet is often experienced as such by its targets? This book weaves together multiple scales of analysis, asking what a view from East Africa can tell us about the shifting configurations and expansive geographies of post 9/11 imperial warfare.

Fear of cancel culture has gripped the world, and it turns out to be an old fear in a new get-up. In this incisive new work, Adrian Daub analyzes the global spread of cancel culture discourse as a moral panic, showing that, though its object is fuzzy, talk of cancel culture in global media has become a preoccupation of an embattled liberalism. There are plenty of conservative voices who gin up worries about cancel culture to advance their agendas. But more remarkable perhaps is that it is centrist, even left-leaning, media that has taken up the rallying cry and really defined the outlines of what cancel culture is supposed to be. Media in Western Europe, South America, Russia, and Australia have devoted as much--in some cases more--attention to this supposedly American phenomenon than most US outlets. From French crusades against "le wokisme" via British fables of the "loony left" to a German obsession with campus anecdotes to a global revolt against "gender studies" countries the world over have developed culture war narratives in conflict with the US, and, above all, its universities--narratives that they themselves borrowed from the US. Who exactly is afraid of cancel culture? To trace how various global publics have been so quickly convinced that cancel culture exists and that it poses an existential problem, Daub compares the cancel culture panic to moral panics past, investigating the powerful hold that the idea of "being cancelled" has on readers around the world. A book for anyone wondering how institutions of higher learning in the US have become objects of immense interest and political lightning rods; not just for audiences and voters in the US, but worldwide.