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Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962

Recalling how they lived in a single house that was occupied by several Jewish and Muslim families, in the generation before Algerian independence, Joelle Bahloul's informants build up a multi-voice microhistory of a way of life that came to an end in the early l960s. Uprooted and dispersed, these former neighbors constantly refer back to the architecture of the home itself, which, with its internal boundaries and shared spaces, structures their memories. Here, in miniature, is a domestic history of North African Muslims, Jews and Christians living under French colonial rule.

Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World

Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived.

Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt

The central question of the Arab Spring—what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East—has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations’ secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West’s long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In Questioning Secularism, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.

The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood

Today we are accustomed to psychiatrists being summoned to scenes of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, war, and other tragic events to care for the psychic trauma of victims--yet it has not always been so. The very idea of psychic trauma came into being only at the end of the nineteenth century and for a long time was treated with suspicion. The Empire of Trauma tells the story of how the traumatic victim became culturally and politically respectable, and how trauma itself became an unassailable moral category.

Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt

Why do young Saudis, night after night, joyride and skid cars on Riyadh’s avenues? Who are these “drifters” who defy public order and private property? What drives their revolt? Based on four years of fieldwork in Riyadh, Pascal Menoret’s Joyriding in Riyadh explores the social fabric of the city and connects it to Saudi Arabia’s recent history. Car drifting emerged after Riyadh was planned, and oil became the main driver of the economy. For young rural migrants, it was a way to reclaim alienating and threatening urban spaces.

Imagined Communities

What makes people love and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name? While many studies have been written on nationalist political movements, the sense of nationality—the personal and cultural feeling of belonging to the nation—has not received proportionate attention. In this widely acclaimed work, Benedict Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the ‘imagined communities’ of nationality.

Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order

Both on the continent and off, “Africa” is spoken of in terms of crisis: as a place of failure and seemingly insurmountable problems, as a moral challenge to the international community. What, though, is really at stake in discussions about Africa, its problems, and its place in the world? And what should be the response of those scholars who have sought to understand not the “Africa” portrayed in broad strokes in journalistic accounts and policy papers but rather specific places and social realities within Africa?

"Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage,"

In this article, Riles draws on ethnography in the particular zone of engagement between anthropologists, on the one hand, and human rights lawyers who are skeptical of the human rights regime, on the other hand. She argues that many of the problems anthropologists encounter with the appropriation and marginalization of anthropology’s analytical tools can be understood in terms of the legal character of human rights. In particular, discursive engagement between anthropology and human rights is animated by the pervasive instrumentalism of legal knowledge.