Arif Dirlik

Roxann Prazniak

This unique work opens a field of inquiry around place-based critiques of global capital as it focuses on the interactions between local issues and international financial flows. Framing their discussions around the concept of place-based imagination, the contributors examine such cases as indigenous movements against land degradation, ethnic pluralism and union organizing, ethnic diversity and the challenges of state and capital to cultural identity, and women's networks through non-governmental organizations. This ambitious study will be an invaluable resource and launching point for scholars and students in ethnic and identity studies and will interest all readers exploring the production of place and identification.

Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization

From the perspective of village activists across China, this book tells the stories of farmers and rural laborers who raised the banner of opposition to constitutional reform during the first decade of the twentieth century. The author brings to life the stories of the Camel King of Zunhua county, Qu Shiwen and the Four Mountains of Laiyang county, and many others who criticized government modernization efforts, known collectively as the New Policy. Using county archives--including oral histories--as well as memoirs, periodical literature, missionary records, and official documents both Chinese and foreign, Of Camel Kings and Other Things constructs, from fragmented sources, a coherent historical view vital to our understanding of China's twentieth-century crises and the dilemmas of modernity itself.

Rural Rebels Against Modernity in Late Imperial China

Of Camel Kings and Other Things

An era rich in artistic creations and political transformations, the Mongol period across Eurasia brought forth a new historical consciousness visible in the artistic legacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Historicity of the present, cultivation of the secular within received cosmologies, human agency in history, and naturalism in the representation of social and organic environments all appear with consistency across diverse venues. Common themes, styles, motifs, and pigments circulated to an unprecedented extent during this era creating an equally unprecedented field of artistic exchange. Exploring art’s relationship to the unique commercial and political circumstances of Mongol Eurasia, Sudden Appearances rethinks many art historical puzzles including the mystery of the Siyah Kalem paintings, the female cup-bearer in the Royal Drinking Scene at Alchi, and the Mongol figures who appear in a Sienese mural. Drawing on primary sources both visual and literary as well as scholarship that has only recently achieved critical mass in the areas of Mongolian studies and Eurasian histories, Roxann Prazniak orchestrates an inquiry into a critical passage in world history, a prelude to the spin-off to modernity. Sudden Appearances highlights the visual and emotional prompts that motivated innovative repurposing of existing cultural perspectives and their adjustment to expanding geographic and social worlds. While early twentieth-century scholarship searched for a catholic universalism in shared European and Chinese art motifs, this inquiry looks to the relationships among societies of central, western, and eastern Asia during the Mongol era as a core site of social and political discourse that defined a globalizing era in Eurasian artistic exchange. The materiality of artistic creativity, primarily access to pigments, techniques, and textiles, provides a path through the interconnected commercial and intellectual byways of the long thirteenth century. Tabriz of the Ilkhanate with its proximity to the Mediterranean and al-Hind seas and relations to the Yuan imperial center establishes the geographic and organizational hub for this study of eight interconnected cities nested in their regional domains. Avoiding the use of modern geographic markers such as China, Europe, Middle East, India, Sudden Appearances shifts analysis away from the limits of nation-state claims toward a borderless world of creative commerce.

The Mongol Turn in Commerce, Belief, and Art

Sudden Appearances

Alexander Woodside

This book offers historical and comparative analyses of changes in agrarian society forced by the globalization of capitalism, and the implications of these changes for human welfare globally. The book gives special attention to recent economic development and urbanization in the People s Republic of China which have had a major impact on contemporary transformations globally. Case studies from South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America in turn place these transformations in a comparative global perspective. The contributors include distinguished scholars from the UN, PRC, India, Zimbabwe, and Latin America who are also active in policy issues."

Roxann Prazniak

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