... Scholarship and Empathetic Methods Miriam Ticktin In Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, Keith Watenpaugh tells us that modern humanitarianism began in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the interwar period. This is the moment, in other words, that religiously- inspired...

...Veena Das Das discusses region as a source of theory and raises concerns about the current state of scholarship, especially (1) the censorship of ideas made possible by government control over research along with a public culture that is increasingly intolerant of differences in interpretation...

...Noaman G. Ali; Shozab Raza Abstract How can Marxism, a theory and practice that emerged from the European experience, speak to contexts outside that experience? Recent scholarship has returned to the moment of the 1960s and 1970s to examine how political movements in the global South that embraced...

...Mrinalini Sinha This essay responds to the mission statement of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and considers the place of region in the contemporary postnational and post-area studies moment of scholarship. In particular, it examines the possibilities of leveraging...

... theoretical directions that the book opens up, specifically as these may enrich interdisciplinary conversations in African studies. Of particular concern is the possibility of moving beyond postcolonial theory's founding critique of area studies scholarship. Beyond theory's critique of the geopolitics...

... a range of lateral networks that fall within the Third World or Global South. It is hence of particular relevance to those pursuing post–area studies scholarship and has much to say to the themes of this special issue on comparative literature across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Hofmeyr’s...

...Ahmad Dallal Available evidence suggests that the crisis of the humanities is more critical in the Arab world than it is in the West. This article provides a provisional sketch of the state of arts and humanities scholarship within university settings in the Arab world. The article also examines...

...Avner Wishnitzer The limited scholarship on late Ottoman nightlife focused mainly on street lighting and described it as a solution to the problem of darkness, the end of a dark age. However, as Wishnitzer shows in this article, the nightlife scene of the late nineteenth century did not develop...

... in their relationship to politics and the new public spaces? Building on recent scholarship, Mestyan argues that these were reconstituted as part of symbolic politics and served as a test period for using new technologies to synchronize collective action. He explores this process by historicizing the relationship...

... literary public, exemplified by Al-Punch , a newspaper born out of a controversy over who had a right to use the Urdu language. Pursuing cosmopolitan impulses while celebrating local culture, the paper invited readers’ collaboration by cultivating a witty and intimate style. While scholarship on South...

...Indrani Chatterjee This essay argues that a convergence of global and postcolonial scholarship has led to a dominant mode of reading precolonial records in ways that are colonial in their perspective and political purpose. It traces this dominance between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries...

... in matters of religion. This essay documents the prehistory of this iconic case to demonstrate that neither the controversy nor the judgment was novel, as scholarship has repeatedly claimed. Family law had historically been a contentious arena that enabled conversations between the state and religion, courts...

... and political engagement via civil society in mainstream scholarship. It argues for a productive synthesis of Indian and African postcolonial theories of democratic agency and political practice by analyzing the possibilities and limitations of Partha Chatterjee's notion of “political society” relative to local...

...Sahana Ghosh Abstract This introduction offers a critical survey of existing scholarship on security and surveillance, especially post-9/11. Presenting the five essays of this special section, it illustrates the new directions they provide for the study of civil-military relations and surveillance...

... within the scholarship on the development of architectural and town-planning theories during the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on Calcutta and Bombay—two central cities of the British Empire—as case studies, I will trace the history of how the housing market became a tradeable object...

... Willis would make use of Zalzala for his authoritative “Earthquakes in the Holy Land.” The chronological sections of Zalzala would become indispensable for future seismological scholarship. This article tracks Zalzala' s journey into seismology. Seismology's reception of Zalzala was possible by splitting...

... authentic protest to national trends in early twentieth-century British India. Affirming arguments that the qasbah derived significance from opposition to the large city, this essay adds nuance to existing scholarship by arguing that it was in a period of diminished distance between qasbah and city...

... unapologetically self-promotional, autobiographical persona. In conversation with recent scholarship on Muslim cosmopolitanism, women's autobiographical writing, and travel literature, this article points to the development of an influential project of Muslim cosmopolitanism in late colonial Sindh that blurred...

... consequently remained largely irrelevant to the modern conception of sovereignty in Africa. In this short commentary I will try to place Africanist scholarship in comparative perspective by elaborating on postcolonial sovereignties and the way in which these remain nested in both historical and contemporary...

...Eric Lewis Beverley Abstract Scholarship on modern South Asia, even in accounting for the fragility and capriciousness of colonial authority and exploring tensions between popular sovereignty and politics on the ground, tends to regard colonial or national states and institutions as the sole...