Virtual Library

Using ethnographic data, this article explores how Muslim women teachers from low-income Pakistani communities employ the notion of “wisdom” to construct and perform their educated subjectivity in a transnational women’s education project. Through Butler’s performativity framework, I demonstrate how local and global discourses overlap to shape narratives that define individual rights as well as family honor as part of the educated subjectivity of Pakistani Muslim women.

War, defeat, and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While “America” offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, “Asia” exposed the traumata of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a resurgent postwar Japan lurked a postimperial specter whose haunting presence both complicated and confounded the spiritual rehabilitation of the nation.

Asia and Postwar Japan examines Japanese deimperialization from 1945 until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on the thought and activism of progressive activists and intellectuals as they struggled to overcome rigid preconceptions about “Asia,” as they grappled with the implications of postimperial responsibility, and as they forged new regional solidarities and Asian imaginaries. Simon Avenell reveals the critical importance of Asia in postwar Japanese thought, activism, and politics—Asia as a symbolic geography, Asia as a space for grassroots engagement, and ultimately, Asia as an aporia of identity and the source of a new politics of hope.

In this article, I consider anthropology's engagement with human rights today. Through the lens of my experience in a case brought before the International Labor Organization by a community in Chiapas, Mexico, I consider the ethical, practical, and epistemological questions that arise in research defined by rights activism. I argue that the critical engagement brought about by activist research is both necessary and productive. Such research can contribute to transforming the discipline by addressing the politics of knowledge production and working to decolonize our research process. Rather than seeking to avoid or resolve the tensions inherent in anthropological research on human rights, activist research draws them to the fore, making them a productive part of the process. Finally, activist research allows us to merge cultural critique with political action to produce knowledge that is empirically grounded, theoretically valuable, and ethically viable. 

On the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for thirty-seven days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists, and online warriors prompting an unprecedented awakening among China's educated, urban women. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest challenge to China's authoritarian regime today.

Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their "joy of betraying Big Brother," as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, and describing how the Communist regime has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.

This first collection of essays to focus exclusively on queer, lesbian, and gay documentary argues that documentary films and videos speak with a sense of political and social urgency, acting as testaments to the importance of reclaiming history and asserting the importance of these points of view. 

From film festivals to university campuses, from private homes to first-run theaters, people everywhere are viewing and discussing gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, and transgender films and videos. Between the Sheets, In the Streets considers these videos and films, testifying to the unavoidable connections between sexuality (the sheets) and activism (the streets) for all who identify as gay, lesbian, or queer in the 1990s.

The activist documentary program Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle, which ran from 1967 to 1980 and produced films in both French and English, stands out as a particularly influential and original part of the National Film Board of Canada's critically acclaimed body of work. The films produced by this program were among the first to add portable video to the tested arsenal of 16mm, and challenged audiences, subjects, and filmmakers to confront sexism, poverty, and marginalization in the hope of developing community as well as political awareness and empowerment.

Pioneering participatory, social change-oriented media, the program had a national and international impact on documentary film-making, yet this is the first comprehensive history and analysis of its work. The volume's contributors study dozens of films produced by the program, their themes, aesthetics, and politics, and evaluate their legacy and the program's place in Canadian, Québécois, and world cinema. An informative and nuanced look at a cinematic movement, Challenge for Change reemphasizes not just the importance of the NFB and its programs but also the role documentaries can play in improving the world.

A hidden history connects India and the United States, the world’s two largest democracies. From the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, activists worked across borders of race and nation to push both countries toward achieving their democratic principles. At the heart of this shared struggle, African Americans and Indians forged bonds ranging from statements of sympathy to coordinated acts of solidarity. Within these two groups, certain activists developed a colored cosmopolitanism, a vision of the world that transcended traditional racial distinctions. These men and women agitated for the freedom of the “colored world,” even while challenging the meanings of both color and freedom.

Colored Cosmopolitanism is the first detailed examination of both ends of this transnational encounter. Nico Slate tells the stories of neglected historical figures, like the “Eurasian” scholar Cedric Dover, and offers a stunning glimpse of people we thought we knew. Prominent figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Swami Vivekananda, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr. emerge as never before seen. Slate reveals the full gamut of this exchange—from selective appropriations, to blatant misunderstandings, to a profound empathy—as African Americans and South Asians sought a united front against racism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression.

Social movements such as environmentalism, feminism, nationalism, and the anti-immigration movement are a prominent feature of the modern world and have attracted increasing attention from scholars in many countries. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, first published in 1996, brings together a set of essays that focus upon mobilization structures and strategies, political opportunities, and cultural framing and ideologies. The essays are comparative and include studies of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. Their authors are amongst the leaders in the development of social movement theory and the empirical study of social movements.

At a time when a global consensus on human rights standards seems to be emerging, this rich study steps back to explore how the idea of human rights is actually employed by activists and human rights professionals. Winifred Tate, an anthropologist and activist with extensive experience in Colombia, finds that radically different ideas about human rights have shaped three groups of human rights professionals working there--nongovernmental activists, state representatives, and military officers. Drawing from the life stories of high-profile activists, pioneering interviews with military officials, and research at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Counting the Dead underscores the importance of analyzing and understanding human rights discourses, methodologies, and institutions within the context of broader cultural and political debates.