Words in Motion

<div>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.<p>Such words as <i>security</i> in Brazil <i>responsibility</i> in Japan <i>community</i> in Thailand and <i>hij?b</i> in France changed the societies in which they moved even as the words were changed by them. Some words threatened to launch wars as <i>injury</i> did in imperial Britain's relations with China in the nineteenth century. Others such as <i>secularism</i> 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.</p><p><i>Contributors</i>. 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</p></div>