{"title":"Cultures Of History","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"ethical-soundscape-book-charles-hirschkind-9780231138192","title":"The Ethical Soundscape","description":"Charles Hirschkind's unique study explores how a popular Islamic media form--the cassette sermon--has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades. An essential aspect of what is now called the Islamic Revival, the cassette sermon has become omnipresent in most Middle Eastern cities, punctuating the daily routines of many men and women. Hirschkind shows how sermon tapes have provided one of the means by which Islamic ethical traditions have been recalibrated to a modern political and technological order--to its noise and forms of pleasure and boredom, but also to its political incitements and call for citizen participation. Contrary to the belief that Islamic cassette sermons are a tool of militant indoctrination, Hirschkind argues that sermon tapes serve as an instrument of ethical self-improvement and as a vehicle for honing the sensibilities and affects of pious living. Focusing on Cairo's popular neighborhoods, Hirschkind highlights the pivotal role these tapes now play in an expanding arena of Islamic argumentation and debate--what he calls an \"Islamic counterpublic.\" This emerging arena connects Islamic traditions of ethical discipline to practices of deliberation about the common good, the duties of Muslims as national citizens, and the challenges faced by diverse Muslim communities around the globe. The Ethical Soundscape is a brilliant analysis linking modern media practices of moral self-fashioning to the creation of increasingly powerful religious publics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49567592218897,"sku":"GOR006839121","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50313310273809,"sku":"CIN0231138199VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53351629127953,"sku":"CIN0231138199A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231138199.jpg?v=1750738644"},{"product_id":"against-history-against-state-book-shail-mayaram-9780231127318","title":"Against History, Against State","description":"Reassessing conventional South Asian historiography from a subaltern perspective, Against History, Against State examines how conceptions of history and memory clash. For nearly a millennium, the Meos of northwest India-one of the largest Muslim populations in South Asia-endured a succession of brutally oppressive regimes, from the Arab conquest in the eighth century through the establishment of the Turkish Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, the regional Rajput kingdoms, and the era of British imperialism. Unwilling to abandon their ethnic and religious identity, the Meos developed an independent oral tradition that enabled them to challenge state formation for centuries. By creating an alternate record of their past through songs and stories, the Meos were able to successfully retain a degree of cultural sovereignty. But their quest for autonomy was stigmatized, even criminalized, while histories-written by the literate, ruling elite-transformed ethnic prejudice into historical fact. This pioneering study, based on a decade of intensive research, explores the Meo community through their oral tradition, revealing sophisticated modes of collective memory and self-governance. Against History, Against State reveals the remarkable complexity and resilience of a transgressive culture that has survived on the margins of Hinduism and Islam.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49585382752529,"sku":"GOR013314686","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231127316.jpg?v=1751133732"},{"product_id":"nakba-book-ahmad-h-sa-di-9780231135795","title":"Nakba","description":"For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past.  By focusing on memories of the Nakba or \"catastrophe\" of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress.  The book's essays consider the ways in which Palestinians have remembered and organized themselves around the Nakba, a central trauma that continues to be refracted through Palestinian personal and collective memory. Analyzing oral histories and written narratives, poetry and cinema, personal testimony and courtroom evidence, the authors show how the continuing experience of violence, displacement, and occupation have transformed the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine into symbols of what has been and continues to be lost. Nakba brings to light the different ways in which Palestinians experienced and retain in memory the events of 1948. It is the first book to examine in detail how memories of Palestine's cataclysmic past are shaped by differences of class, gender, generation, and geographical location. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present. Contributors: Lila Abu Lughod, Columbia University; Diana Keown Allan, Harvard University; Haim Bresheeth, University of East London; Rochelle Davis, Georgetown University; Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley; Isabelle Humphries, University of Surrey; Lena Jayyusi, Zayed University; Laleh Khalili, SOAS, University of London; Omar Al-Qattan, filmmaker; Ahmad H. 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Therefore this book also bears on the centrality of language to the modern human condition.  Though Tamil oratory is a relatively new practice in south India, the Dravidian (or Tamil nationalist) style employs archaic forms of Tamil that suggest an ancient mode of speech. Beginning with the advent of mass democratic politics in the 1940s, a new generation of politician adopted this style, known as \"fine,\" or \"beautiful Tamil\" (centamil), for its distinct literary virtuosity, poesy, and alluring evocation of a pure Tamil past. Bernard Bate explores the centamil phenomenon, arguing that the genre's spectacular literacy and use of ceremonial procession, urban political ritual, and posters, praise poetry are critical components in the production of a singularly Tamil mode of political modernity: a Dravidian neoclassicism. 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Yet this historical specificity of decolonization on the very making of a nationalized cartography of modern South Asia has largely gone unexamined. In this remarkable study based on more than two years of ethnographic and archival research, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar argues that the combined interventions of the two postcolonial states were enormously important in shaping these massive displacements. She examines the long, contentious, and ambivalent process of drawing political boundaries and making distinct nation-states in the midst of this historic chaos.  Zamindar crosses political and conceptual boundaries to bring together oral histories with north Indian Muslim families divided between the two cities of Delhi and Karachi with extensive archival research in previously unexamined Urdu newspapers and government records of India and Pakistan. She juxtaposes the experiences of ordinary people against the bureaucratic interventions of both postcolonial states to manage and control refugees and administer refugee property. As a result, she reveals the surprising history of the making of the western Indo-Pak border, one of the most highly surveillanced in the world, which came to be instituted in response to this refugee crisis, in order to construct national difference where it was the most blurred.  In particular, Zamindar examines the \"Muslim question\" at the heart of Partition. From the margins and silences of national histories, she draws out the resistance, bewilderment, and marginalization of north Indian Muslims as they came to be pushed out and divided by both emergent nation-states. It is here that Zamindar asks us to stretch our understanding of \"Partition violence\" to include this long, and in some sense ongoing, bureaucratic violence of postcolonial nationhood, and to place Partition at the heart of a twentieth century of border-making and nation-state formation.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50919268122897,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50919269007633,"sku":"CIN0231138474VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51816661221649,"sku":"CIN0231138474G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53605458805009,"sku":"GOR012003798","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231138474.jpg?v=1751389042"},{"product_id":"autobiography-of-an-archive-book-nicholas-b-dirks-9780231169677","title":"Autobiography of an Archive","description":"The decades between 1970 and the end of the twentieth century saw the disciplines of history and anthropology draw closer together, with historians paying more attention to social and cultural factors and the significance of everyday experience in the study of the past. 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