Bøger udgivet af Stanford University Press

"The seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire was rife with polemical debate, around worshipping at saints' graves, medical procedures, smoking tobacco, and other everyday practices. Fueling these debates was a new form of writing, the pamphlet - a cheap, short, and mobile text that provided readers with simplified legal arguments. These pamphlets were more than simply a novel way to disseminate texts, they made a consequential shift in the way Ottoman subjects communicated. This book offers the first comprehensive look at a new communication order that flourished in seventeenth-century manuscript culture. Through the example of the pamphlet, Nir Shafir investigates the political and cultural institutions used to navigate, regulate, and encourage the circulation of information in a society in which all books were copied by hand. He sketches an ecology of books, examining how books were produced, the movement of texts regulated, education administered, reading conducted, and publics cultivated. Pamphlets invited both the well and poorly educated to participate in public debates, thus expanding the Ottoman body politic. They also spurred an epidemic of fake authors and popular forms of reading. Thus, pamphlets became both the forum and the fuel for the polarization of Ottoman society. Based on years of research in Islamic manuscript libraries worldwide, this book illuminates a vibrant and evolving premodern manuscript culture"--

"In a world marked by extreme divisions--from global conflicts to grave human rights violations--public figures struggle to find words that capture humanity's inclination to fracture itself. Throughout history, humanity has been plagued by unspeakable horrors like slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, rampant refugee crises, femicide, and state brutality, all rooted in the belief in an irreconcilable "other." We yearn for a language that is capacious enough to make sense of all kinds of oppressions--whether tied to religion, ethnicity, ancestry, sexual orientation, ability, or gender. Terms like tribalism, prejudice, stigma, and caste have all been used to ignite change. They all, however, fall short. Belonging without Othering is a profound exploration arguing that the struggles faced by marginalized groups can only be fully grasped through the lenses of othering and belonging. Social justice lion and scholar john a. powell, and acclaimed researcher Stephen Menendian, the main champions of these ideas, unearth the mechanisms of othering, drawing on examples from around the world and throughout history. In a time when diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are being contested, and activists narrowly concentrate on specific and sometimes conflicting communities, this book offers an approach that encourages us to turn toward one another--even if it involves questioning seemingly tolerant and benevolent forms of othering. Crucially, the authors assert that there's no inherent or inevitable notion of an "other." The authors make a compelling case for a true "belongingness paradigm," one that liberates us from rigid self-concepts while celebrating our rich diversity. This paradigm hinges on transitioning from narrow to expansive identities that bind people together in unprecedented ways. As the threat of authoritarianism grows across the globe, powell and Menendian make the case that belonging without othering is the natural but not the inevitable next step of our long journey toward creating truly equitable democracies"--

"Governments across the globe find themselves in an exploratory phase as they probe the limits of their sovereignty in the cyber domain. Cyberspace is a singular environment that is forcing states to adjust their behavior to fit a new arena beyond the four traditional domains (air, sea, space, and land) to which the classic understanding of state sovereignty applies. According to Lucie Kadlecovâa, governments must implement a more adaptive approach to keep up with rapid developments and innovations in cyberspace in order to truly retain their sovereignty. This requires understanding the concept of sovereignty in a more creative and flexible manner. Kadlecovâa argues that the existence of sovereignty in cyberspace is the latest, remarkable stage in the evolution of this concept. Through a close study of the most advanced transatlantic cases of state sovereignty in cyberspace--the Netherlands, the US, Estonia, and Turkey--Cyber Sovereignty reveals how states have pursued new methods and tactics to fuel the distribution of authority and control in the cyber field, imaginatively combining modern technologies with legal frameworks. In times of booming competition over cyber governance between democracies and authoritarian regimes worldwide, cyber sovereignty is a major topic of interest, and concern, for the international community"--

"This book tells the story of how early modern poets used the theological concept of grace to reimagine their political communities. The Protestant belief that salvation was due to sola gratia, or grace alone, was originally meant to inspire religious reform. But, as Deni Kasa shows, poets of the period used grace to interrogate the most important political problems of their time, from empire and gender to civil war and poetic authority. Kasa examines how four writers - John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, and Abraham Cowley - used the promise of grace to develop idealized imagined communities, and not always egalitarian ones. Kasa analyzes the uses of grace to make new space for individual and collective agency in the period, but also to validate domination and inequality, with poets and the educated elite inserted as mediators between the gift of grace and the rest of the people. Offering a literary history of political identity in a pre-secular age, Kasa argues that early modern poets mapped the promise of salvation onto the most important political problems of their time in ways missed by literary critics and historians of political thought. Grace, Kasa demonstrates, was an important means of expression and a way to imagine impossible political ideals"--

"Chinese workers helped build the modern world. They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the construction of the Panama Canal, among many other projects. While most investigations of Chinese workers focus on migrant labor, Chinese Workers of the World explores Chinese labor under colonial regimes within China thorough examination of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, constructed between 1898-1910. The Yunnan railway--a French investment in imperial China during the age of "railroad colonialism"--connected French-colonized Indochina to Chinese markets with a promise of cross-border trade in tin, silk, tea, and opium. However, this ambitious project resulted in fiasco. Thousands of Chinese workers died during the horrid construction process, and costs exceeded original estimates by 74%. Drawing on Chinese, French, and British archival accounts of day-to-day worker struggles and labor conflicts along the railway, Selda Altan argues that long before the Chinese Communist Party defined Chinese workers as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement in the 1920s, the modern figure of the Chinese worker was born in the crosscurrents of empire and nation in the late-nineteenth century. Yunnan railway workers contested the conditions of their employment with the knowledge of a globalizing capitalist market, fundamentally reshaping Chinese ideas of free labor, national sovereignty, and regional leadership in East and Southeast Asia"--

"China's rise and its importance to international relations as a discipline-defining phenomenon is well recognized. Yet when scholars analyze China's foreign relations, they typically focus on Beijing's military power, economic might, or political leaders. As a result, most traditional assessments miss a crucial factor: China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). In China's Rising Foreign Ministry, Dylan M.H. Loh upends conventional understandings of Chinese diplomacy by underlining the importance of the ministry and its diplomats in contemporary Chinese foreign policy. The book explains how MOFA gradually became the main interface of China's foreign policy and the primary vehicle through which the idea of 'China' is produced, articulated, and represented on the world stage. Through a multi-year and multi-sited fieldwork study of China's MOFA, this groundbreaking book investigates the practices and experiences of the actors that produce diplomacy and documents the ministry's evolution into one of the most significant institutions in China's rise. A theoretically innovative and ambitious book, China's Rising Foreign Ministry contributes an original reading of Chinese foreign policy, with wide-ranging implications for international relations. By shedding light on the dynamics of Chinese diplomacy and how assertiveness is constructed, Loh provides readers with a comprehensive appraisal of China's foreign ministry and the role it performs in China's re-emergence"--

""Tribes" appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as "tribal" have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by "subaltern" groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, this book draws on fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research to argue that statemaking is intertwined inextricably with the politics of tribal resistance in the margins of modern India. Uday Chandra demonstrates how the modern Indian state and its tribal or adivasi subjects have made and remade each other throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, historical processes of modern statemaking shaping and being shaped by myriad forms of resistance by tribal subjects. Accordingly, tribal resistance, whether peaceful or violent, is better understood vis-áa-vis negotiations with the modern state, rather than its negation, over the past two centuries. How certain people and places came to be seen as "tribal" in modern India is, therefore, tied intimately to how "tribal" subjects remade their customs and community in the course of negotiations with colonial and postcolonial states. Ultimately, the empirical material unearthed in this book requires rethinking and rewriting the political history of modern India from its "tribal" margins"--

"Anxieties about the fate of reading in the digital age reveal how deeply our views of the moral and intellectual benefits of reading are tied to print. These views take root in a conception of reading as an immersive activity, exemplified by the experience of "losing oneself in a book." Against the backdrop of digital distraction and fragmentation, such immersion leads readers to become more focused, collected, and empathetic. How did we come to see the printed book as especially suited to deliver this experience? Print-based reading practices have historically included a wide range of modes, not least the disjointed scanning we associate today with electronic text. In the context of religious practice, literacy's benefits were presumed to lie in such random-access retrieval, facilitated by indexical tools like the numbering of Biblical chapters and verses. It was this didactic, hunt-and-peck reading that bound readers to communities. Exploring key evolutions in print in 17th- and 18th-century France, from typeface, print runs, and format to editorial organization and punctuation, this book argues that typographic developments upholding the transparency of the printed medium were decisive for the ascendancy of immersive reading as a dominant paradigm that shaped modern perspectives on reading and literacy"--

"Digital spaces are saturated with metaphor: we have pages, sites, mice, and windows. Yet, in the world of digital textuality, these metaphors no longer function as we might expect. Martin Paul Eve calls attention to the digital-textual metaphors that condition our experience of digital space, and traces their history as they interact with physical cultures. Eve posits that digital-textual metaphors move through three life phases. Initially they are descriptive. Then they encounter a moment of fracture or rupture. Finally, they go on to have a prescriptive life of their own that conditions future possibilities for our text environments - even when the metaphors have become untethered from their original intent. Why is "whitespace" white? Was the digital page always a foregone conclusion? Over a series of theses, Eve addresses these and other questions in order to understand the moments when digital-textual metaphors break and to show us how it is that our textual softwares become locked into paradigms that no longer make sense. Contributing to book history, literary studies, new media studies, and material textual studies, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History provides generative insights into the metaphors that define our digital worlds"--