This volume assembles texts dedicated to the linguistic and educational aspects of missionary and colonial enterprises, taking into account all continents and with an extended diachronic perspective (15th–20th centuries). Strictly speaking, this “linguistics” is contemporary to the colonial era, so it is primarily the work of missionaries of Catholic orders and Protestant societies. It can also belong to a retrospective outlook, following decolonization. In the first category, one mostly finds transcription, translation, and grammatization practices (typically, the production of dictionaries and grammar books). In the second category, one finds in addition descriptions of language use, of situations of diglossia, and of contact between languages. Within this framework, the volume focuses on educational and linguistic policies, language teaching and learning, and the didactics that were associated with them.

After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Since the triumph of Castro, politicians and historians have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin powerfully challenges these views in this classic work. In doing so, he uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries holding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of equality; and of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the region.

With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin argues that the Latin American Cold War was a struggle not between political liberalism and Soviet communism but two visions of democracy—one vibrant and egalitarian, the other tepid and unequal—and that the conflict’s main effect was to eliminate homegrown notions of social democracy. Updated with a new preface by the author and an interview with Naomi Klein, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest order—a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond.

“This work admirably explains the process in which hopes of democracy were brutally repressed in Guatemala and its people experienced a civil war lasting for half a century.”—International History Review

 

“A richly detailed, humane, and passionately subversive portrait of inspiring reformers tragically redefined by the Cold War as enemies of the state.”—Journal of American History

The League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives explores the dramatic and engaging story of a global institution that brought together activists across geographical and political borders for the goal of eradicating colonial rule worldwide. The League against Imperialism attracted anticolonial activists like India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, as well as prominent figures like Albert Einstein, Ernst Toller, Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair, Mohandas Gandhi, and Madame Sun Yat-Sen. This volume is the first to capture the global history of the LAI by bringing together contributions by scholars researching the movement from various regions, languages, and archives. Told primarily from the perspectives of those on the peripheries of empires, the volume argues that interwar anti-imperialism was central to the story of transnational activism during the interwar years and remained an inspiration for many who took on leadership roles during decolonization across the global south.

Whiteness is not innate – it is learned. The systems of white domination that prevail across the world are not pregiven or natural. Rather, they are forged and sustained in social and political life.

Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project – taught within education institutions and through public discourse – in active service of the settler colonial state.

To see whiteness as learned is to recognize that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism.

The Riveting Memoir of an American Volunteer in the French Foreign Legion during the 1925 Revolt in Syria
 “You see there was down South a girl I liked. And she is now married . . . not to me.” So Bennett J. Doty confessed when he sailed for France and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in 1924. A World War I veteran and University of Virginia student, Doty first trained in Morocco and Algeria before being shipped off to the French-controlled State of Syria. There, he and his fellow “bleus,” who hailed from Belgium, Poland, Italy, Senegal, Spain, Germany, Russia, and other countries, found themselves at the spearhead of the attempt to quell the revolt against French rule in the area. The fighting, mostly against the Druze, was fierce, merciless, and unrelenting. Fought in villages and at isolated outposts, there was no quarter. Entire villages were razed, fields destroyed, and prisoners were not taken by either side. In the engagement where Doty and several other of his “copains”—“buddies”—earned the Croix de Guerre, his unit became isolated and withstood days of attacks which claimed more than half of the Legionnaires until they were finally relieved by a French colonial column. With the immediate fighting over, the Legion was put to heavy manual labor under the hot desert sun. Doty became disillusioned, and with four other soldiers, fled in an attempt to reach British-controlled Jordan. They were caught, tried, and Doty was sentenced to eight years in a French prison. When word reached the United States, diplomatic efforts ultimately gained Doty a pardon and honorable discharge from service. 
            Originally published in 1928, Legion of the Damned, Doty’s acclaimed account of his time in the Legion, is a remarkable memoir that requires no additional drama to allow the reader to experience the desperation, exhilaration, fear, and disgust of a colonial war. Here, Doty shows how drunken, unruly, vicious veterans would transform into capable, cool, and orderly soldiers as soon as a battle began—the élan that earned the French Foreign Legion its reputation as a legendary fighting unit.
 

The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War has long remained buried under the narrative of Bandung, homogenising and subverting the different visions of post-colonial worldmaking that co-existed alongside the Bandung project. This book turns the lens on these other visions, and the transnational interactions which emerged from various other gatherings of the 1950s and 1960s that existing beyond the realm of high diplomacy, while blurring the lines between state and non-state projects. It examines how Afro-Asianism was lived by activists, intellectuals, cultural figures, as well as political leaders in building a post-imperial world – particularly women. As a whole, this collection of essays examines the diversity of Afro-Asian ideals that emerged through such movements, untangling the personal relationships, political competition, racial hierarchies, and solidarities that shaped them. By visualising political Afro-Asianism and its proponents as a living network, a fuller picture of decolonization and the Cold War is brought into view.

Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize

“Remarkable and pathbreaking…A radical rethink of colonial historiography and a compelling argument for the reassessment of the historical traditions of Hindustan.”
—Mahmood Mamdani

“The brilliance of Asif’s book rests in the way he makes readers think about the name ‘Hindustan’…Asif’s focus is Indian history but it is, at the same time, a lens to look at questions far bigger.”
—Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books

“Remarkable…Asif’s analysis and conclusions are powerful and poignant.”
—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, The Wire

“A tremendous contribution…This is not only a book that you must read, but also one that you must chew over and debate.”
—Audrey Truschke, Current History

Did India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have a shared regional identity prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth century? Manan Ahmed Asif tackles this contentious question by inviting us to reconsider the work and legacy of the influential historian Muhammad Qasim Firishta, a contemporary of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir. Inspired by his reading of Firishta and other historians, Asif seeks to rescue our understanding of the region from colonial narratives that emphasize difference and division.

Asif argues that a European understanding of India as Hindu has replaced an earlier, native understanding of India as Hindustan, a home for all faiths. Turning to the subcontinent’s medieval past, he uncovers a rich network of historians of Hindustan who imagined, studied, and shaped their kings, cities, and societies. The Loss of Hindustan reveals how multicultural Hindustan was deliberately eclipsed in favor of the religiously partitioned world of today. A magisterial work with far reaching implications, it offers a radical reinterpretation of how India came to its contemporary political identity.