Four CSSH authors read and respond to Sumit Guha’s “Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World.”
Category: Under the Rubric
CSSH has a longstanding tradition of juxtaposing essays for comparative effect. Our readers enjoy this ritual, but we often wonder what our authors think of it. Under the Rubric gives CSSH authors a chance to respond directly to each other’s work, drawing additional insight and inspiration from the arguments they’ve made.
“An Immense Enlargement of Life”
Courtney Handman and Divya Cherian discuss Occult Knowledge, AI, Secret Languages, Interoperability … and Owls
Engineering Ecology, with Alice Rudge and Sarah Vaughn
CSSH brings Sarah E. Vaughn and Alice Rudge into conversation on “the afterlives of innovation, of care, of collaborations with human and non-human partners, and of failed attempts to know and control” in the geographically distant sites of Guyana, West Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Minding the Gaps
CSSH authors Danna Agmon and Zehra Hashmi tell us why certain kinds of evidence go missing and what the resulting gaps mean.
Borderland Beliefs
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky and Mathijs Pelkmans discuss questions of sincerity, rumor, and religious hierarchy at the frontiers of Muslim-Christian conversion in late imperial Russia and contemporary Kyrgyzstan.
Youth against Empire
CSSH authors Stacey Hynd and Myles Osborne discuss their research on local insurgencies, global cultures of resistance, and anti-colonial youth politics in the 1950s.
Understanding “Cultural Understanding”: Julie Gibbings and Jacob Tropp follow the concept from coffee plantations to Indian reservations, counterinsurgency campaigns, and the careers of international development experts
In our Spring 2020 issue, Julie Gibbings and Jacob Tropp guide us through several telling cases of cultural, or intercultural, understanding. Our editors saw “expediency” as a theme that unites the essays, but there are many others. Tropp and Gibbings tell us more.
Anti-Caste Activism and Dwindling Numbers: David Mosse and Michal Kravel-Tovi discuss Diasporic Anxieties among British South Asians and American Jews
CSSH authors David Mosse and Michal Kravel-Tovi share insights into diasporic anxieties by comparing the contests that arise when ethno-religious communities (Hindus, Jews) reproduce themselves, simultaneously, in diaspora settings (Britain, the US) and in homeland states (India, Israel).
Revisionist Tendencies: Johanna Bockman and Mathieu Hikaru Desan Reflect on Socialism and Its Classification Struggles
Socialism is alive and well on the pages of CSSH, and its fortunes in the larger world have improved in recent years. Even the “failed” socialisms of the past are attracting new attention. It would seem that much we thought was decided in the history of socialism is worth reconsidering.
Variations in the Language of Socialism
James Ferguson and Laurence Coderre tell us more about Commodities and the Proletariat.