11 minute read
University of North Carolina Press
October 2022
314 pages Memoir Rights: World
October 2022
185 pages Medicine Rights: World
The Other Side of Silence
A Memoir of Exile, Iran, and the Global Women’s Movement
MAHNAZ AFKHAMI
When a phone rings in the early hours of a November 1978 New York hotel room, Mahnaz Afkhami, the first Minister of Women’s Affairs for Iran, learns she can never go home again: her country has fallen to Ayatollah Khomeini. A member of the Shah’s government, Mahnaz struggles to rebuild her life in the United States even as she faces exile and a death warrant from the Islamic revolution. Refusing to remain silent, she reemerges as an architect of the women’s movement in the global South—only to encounter familial, cultural, political, and organizational hurdles that threaten to derail her quest to empower women and change the structure of human relations. A skilled storyteller who has spent a lifetime living in two worlds, Mahnaz shares with humor, honesty, and compassion her unexpected and meteoric rise from unassuming English professor to a champion of women’s rights in Iran.
Born in Kerman, Iran, Mahnaz Afkhami is the Founder and President of Women’s Learning Partnership, Executive Director of the Foundation for Iranian Studies, and former Minister for Women’s Affairs in Iran.
Accidental Kindness
A Doctor’s Notes MICHAEL STEIN
When we go to the doctor, when we’re hurting, we tend to think in terms of cause and condemnation. We often look for relief not only from physical symptoms but also from our self-blame. We want from our doctor’s kindness under any of its many names: empathy, caring, compassion, humanity. We look for safety and forgiveness. But we often forget that doctors, too, are often in need of forgiveness—from their patients and from themselves.using a series of moving, oftentimes autobiographical essays that examine medical and psychological history, clinical mistakes, and how one stumbles into kindness and forgiveness, Michael Stein examines the oft-times conflicting goals of patients and medicine. Kindness should not become the patient’s forbidden or unrealistic expectation, yet the aim of this book is to leave the reader with new knowledge of and insights into what they might hope for, and what might go wrong, or right, in the most intimate patient-doctor moments.
Michael Stein, M.D., is the award-winning author of six novels and four books of non-fiction, most recently Broke: Patients Talk About Money With Their Doctor.
August 2022
328 pages, 20 illustrations Media Studies Rights: World
June 2022
414 pages International Affairs Rights: World excluding World Preserving Data at the End of the World
BRIAN MICHAEL MURPHY
Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America’s most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. We the Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family, while contemporary technologists seek ever denser and more durable materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.
Brian Michael Murphy is dean of the college and director of the MFA in Public Action at Bennington College.
Hungary’s Cold War
CSABA BÉKÉS
In this magisterial and pathbreaking work, Csaba Békés shares decades of his research to provide a sweeping examination of Hungary’s international relations with both the Soviet Bloc and the West from the end of World War II to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Unlike many studies of the global Cold War that focus on East-West relationships— often from the vantage point of the West—Békés grounds his work in the East, drawing on little-used, non-English sources. As such, he offers a new and sweeping Cold War narrative using Hungary as a case study, demonstrating that the East-Central European states have played a much more important role in shaping both the Soviet bloc’s overall policy and the East-West relationship than previously assumed. Similarly, he shows how the relationship between Moscow and its allies, as well as among the bloc countries, was much more complex than it appeared to most observers in the East and the West alike.
Csaba Békés is research professor for the Centre of Social Sciences, founding director of the Cold War History Research Center, and professor of history at Corvinus University of Budapest.
January 2023
320 pages, History/Iran/Cold War Rights: World
December 2022
280 pages History/Brazil Rights: World Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954 DAVID S. PAINTER and GREGORY BREW
While it only lasted three years, the Iranian crisis was a pivotal chapter in the history of the postwar world. Beginning with the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry in spring 1951 and ending with the reversal of nationalization following the overthrow of nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953, the crisis confirmed the dominance of Western corporations over the resources of the Global South for the next twenty years and was a crucial turning point in the global Cold War. Drawing on newly declassified documents from British, American, and Iranian sources, Gregory Brew and David Painter examine the oil crisis and 1953 coup, embracing a global approach that promises to be the first and only single volume that has drawn from all available documentary sources, providing an accessible and concise narrative that demystifies the complex stories of oil, diplomacy, espionage, Iranian politics, and Anglo-American relations bound up in the Mosaddeq moment.
David S. Painter is associate professor of international history at Georgetown University. Gregory Brew is a Henry A. Kissinger Postdoctoral Fellow at International Security Studies and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University.
Guaraná
How the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant Captivated Brazil
SETH GARFIELD
The history of Brazil is refracted in Seth W. Garfield’s chronicle of guaraná, a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine that packs the highest caffeine kick of any plant in the world, as it transformed from a pre-Columbian cultivar to a multibillion-dollar soft drink industry and a quintessential and beloved taste of Brazil. For Garfield, guaraná pitches the seemingly contradictory ideals of pristine nature and communal harmony against modernity’s promises of scientific experimentation and capitalist development, the polestar of Brazilian politics. Brazilian scientists, folklorists, literati, and culinarians elevated guaraná as a hallowed local flora and food of national distinction. But unlike kola nuts, guaraná could not compete in the global supply chain due to challenges with labor, transportation, and its dedicated use in the domestic market. Perhaps, Garfield muses, it is guaraná’s “unglobal” profile itself that allows it so successfully to play the role of authenticity and to offer the quintessential Brazilian taste.
Seth W. Garfield, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, is author of In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region.
November 2022
History/Vietnam Rights: World
September 2022
205 pages Military History Rights: World excluding World BRIAN CUDDY and FREDRIK LOGEVALL, editors
Co-edited by Pulitzer Prize winner Fred Logevall, this anthology is the first book to examine the Vietnam War from a regional perspective rather than throough a U.S. lens, despite the fact that it was fought entirely in the Pacific world and deeply affected every aspect of life for those that lived through and were born after what was ultimately a civil war that reverberated across the Asia Pacific region. The time is ripe for a post-colonial interpretation of a struggle rooted in Indochinese and not American history, and Fred Logevall, Brian Cuddy, and the contributors in this volume highlight the ripple effects the war had across the Pacific world.
Brian Cuddy is Lecturer in security studies at Macquarie University and historian of twentieth century international politics and US foreign relations. Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer professor of international affairs and professor of history at Harvard University.
The Tormented Alliance
American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949
ZACH FREDMAN
During World War II and the months following Japan’s surrender, more than 120,000 American troops served in China. In 1942, Chinese soldiers and officials welcomed them with ten-course banquets toasting Sino-American friendship, and civilians gathered in the streets to greet arriving GIs. Yet a short three years later, Chinese interpreters and laborers were walking out of their US Army jobs on strike, locals rioted as they protested widespread sexual misconduct by American servicemen, and fistfights and shootings broke out across the country between Chinese soldiers and their supposed American allies. Initial enthusiasm for the US marines who arrived to assist the Chinese Nationalists in reasserting control over formerly Japanese-occupied territory quickly gave way to outrage over American misconduct and violations of Chinese sovereignty. Fredman shows how the day-to-day encounters between ordinary American soldiers and the Chinese people eventually poisoned relationships at all levels of contact, from soldiers and officials, to interpreters, hostel workers, farmers, beggars, and thieves. Through their stories, drawn from both Chineseand English-language sources from six countries, Fredman demonstrates how the initially amicable American military presence in China became a de facto occupation.
Zach Fredman is assistant professor of humanities at Duke Kunshan University.
December 2022
250 pages History/Mexico Rights: World excluding World
July 2022
376 pages, 12 illustrations, 4 maps, 1 table History/South Asia Rights: World Four Centuries of Extractivism in a Small Mexican Mining Town
DAVIKEN STUDNICKI-GIZBERT
This longue-durée history of extractivism from the time of the Spanish Conquest to the present day tells the story of Cerro de San Pedro, a small gold- and silver-mining district in northern Mexico. Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert portrays Cerro de San Pedro as a prototypical mine whose history exemplifies larger trends and patterns that have unfolded across the Americas. He reveals how colonial, national, and business regimes repeatedly transgressed the limits of environmental and human exhaustion—with significant ecological, economic, and political consequences.
Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, author of A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, is associate professor of history at McGill University.
Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia
ELIZABETH LHOST
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But qazis and muftis, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere, they resisted the colonial state’s authority over personal law and rejected legal codification by embracing flexibility and possibility. With postcards, letters, and telegrams, they made everyday Islamic law vibrant and resilient and challenged the hegemony of the Anglo-Indian legal system. Following these developments from the beginning of the Raj through independence, Elizabeth Lhost rejects narratives of stagnation and decline to show how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change. The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life, even beyond colonial courtrooms and the confines of family law. Lhost shows how ordinary Muslims shaped colonial legal life and how their diversity and difference have contributed to contemporary debates about religion, law, pluralism, and democracy in South Asia and beyond.
Elizabeth Lhost is lecturer in history and postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College.
July 2022
208 pages, 35 illustrations, 2 maps History/Film Rights: World Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II
DENISE KHOR
Despite the rise of the Hollywood system and hostility to Asian migrant communities in the early twentieth-century United States, Japanese Americans created a thriving cinema culture that produced films and established theaters and exhibition companies to facilitate their circulation between Japan and the United States. Drawing from a fascinating multilingual archive including the films themselves, movie industry trade press, Japanese American newspapers, oral histories, and more, this book reveals the experiences of Japanese Americans at the cinema and traces an alternative network of film production, exhibition, and spectatorship. In doing so, Denise Khor recovers previously unknown films such as The Oath of the Sword (1914), likely one of the earliest Asian American film productions, and illuminates the global circulations that have always constituted the multifaceted history of American cinema. Khor opens up transnational lines of inquiry and draws comparisons between early Japanese American cinema and Black cinema to craft a broad and expansive history of a transnational public sphere shaped by the circulation and exchange of people, culture, and ideas across the Pacific.
Denise Khor is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
