CSSAAME 41:3: Covid Roundtable: Pandemic Biopolitics, Ruptures, Risks
The conversation that we have captured here reflects the nuanced and thought-provoking ideas and scholarship of the participants—Banu Subramaniam, Julie Livingston, Omar Dewachi, and Sunil Amrith—who all study the body and biopolitics. Their approaches range across global histories of medicine and science, anthropology, and feminist studies of science, environmental and transnational histories of migration, and studies of war and humanitarianism, but they share a broad interest in the shifting power of the state and in consequences of capitalism.
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Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires
Challenging conventional narratives of Afghanistan as a perennial war zone, and the rule of law as a secular-liberal monopoly,this book presents an account of the first Muslim-majority country to gain independence, codify its own laws, and ratify a constitution after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. If Afghanistan seems an unexpected candidate for this distinction, it is because historical approaches to Afghan law and governance before the Soviet invasion of 1979 remain few and far between. Based on archival research in six countries…
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Art, Activism, and the Presence of Memory in Palestine: Interview with Palestinian Artist Rana Bishara
I created this specific artwork, among others dedicated to prisoners, when I was following a major hunger strike by Palestinian political prisoners in August 2016. As an artist I felt a moral duty to get involved and to support their families. I went regularly to meetings and demonstrations both in historic Palestine and in the solidarity tents set up in Bethlehem's Manger Square and Dheisheh refugee camp, near where I was living at the time. I created and shared online and via social media this art piece in solidarity. After forty days on hunger strike, the prisoners had just escalated the strike by refusing to drink water. I inserted barbed wire in a water glass to show…
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