Words in Motion

by Gluck, Carol; Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt

• ISBN13: 9780822345190
• ISBN10: 0822345196
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-11-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

On the premise that words have the power to make worlds, each essay in this book follows a word as it travels around the globe and across time. Scholars from five disciplines address thirteen societies to highlight the social and political life of words in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The approach is consciously experimental, in that rigorously tracking specific words in specific settings frequently leads in unexpected directions and alters conventional depictions of global modernity.Such words assecurityin Brazil,responsibilityin Japan,communityin Thailand, andhijabin France changed the societies in which they moved even as the words were changed by them. Some words threatened to launch wars, asinjurydid in imperial Britainrs"s relations with China in the nineteenth century. Others, such assecularism, worked in silence to agitate for political change in twentieth-century Morocco. Words imposed or imported from abroad could be transformed by those who wielded them to oppose the very powers that first introduced them, as happened in Turkey, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Taken together, this selection of fourteen essays reveals commonality as well as distinctiveness across modern societies, making the world look different from the interdisciplinary and transnational perspective of "words in motion."Contributors. Mona Abaza, Itty Abraham, Partha Chatterjee, Carol Gluck, Huri Islamoglu, Claudia Koonz, Lydia H. Liu, Driss Maghraoui, Vicente L. Rafael, Craig J. Reynolds, Seteney Shami, Alan Tansman, Kasian Tejapira, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Table of Contents

Introduction

Words in Motion

Works in Motion

Words with Shadows

Segurança/Security in Brazil and the United States

Adat/Indigenous: Indigeneity in Motion

Words That Expand

Ada/Custom in the Middle East and South Asia

Sekinin/Responsibility in Modern Japan

Words Unspoken

Ilmaniyya, Laïcité, Secularisme/Secularism in Morocco

Saburaimu/Sublime: A Japanese Word and Its Political Afterlife

Words That Cover

Aqalliyya/Minority in Modern Egyptian Discourse

Hijâb/Headscarf: A Political Journey

Fear Words

Injury: Incriminating Words and Imperial Power

Conjuracion/Conspiracy in the Philippine Revolution of 1896

Terrorism: State Sovereignty and Militant Politics in India

Words That Set Standards

Komisyon/Commission and Kurul/Board: Words that Rule

Chumchon/Community in Thailand

Thammarat/Good Governance in Glocalizing Thailand

Notes on Contributors

Index

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