An anthropologist deconstructs the notion of masculinity using twenty years of field research in the Cairo neighborhood of al-Zawiya. Watching the revolution of January 2011, the world saw Egyptians, men and women, come together to fight for freedom and social justice. These events gave renewed urgency to the fraught topic of gender in the Middle East. The role of women in public life, the meaning of manhood, and the future of gender inequalities are hotly debated by religious figures, government officials, activists, scholars, and ordinary citizens throughout Egypt. Live and Die Like a Man presents a unique twist on traditional understandings of gender and gender roles, shifting the attention to men and exploring how they are collectively “produced” as gendered subjects. It traces how masculinity is continuously maintained and reaffirmed by both men and women under changing socio-economic and political conditions. Over a period of nearly twenty years, Farha Ghannam lived and conducted research in al-Zawiya, a low-income neighborhood not far from Tahrir Square in northern Cairo. Detailing her daily encounters and ongoing interviews, she develops life stories that reveal the everyday practices and struggles of the neighborhood over the years. We meet Hiba and her husband as they celebrate the birth of their first son and begin to teach him how to become a man; Samer, a forty-year-old man trying to find a suitable wife; Abu Hosni, who struggled with different illnesses; and other local men and women who share their reactions to the uprising and the changing situation in Egypt. Against this backdrop of individual experiences, Ghannam develops the concept of masculine trajectories to account for the various paths men can take to embody social norms. In showing how men work to realize a “male ideal,” she counters the prevalent dehumanizing stereotypes of Middle Eastern men all too frequently reproduced in media reports, and opens new spaces for rethinking patriarchal structures and their constraining effects on both men and women. Praise for Live and Die Like a Man “In a book that lives up to its name, anthropologist Ghannam explores what it means to be a man . . . . Her thick descriptions, amassed over 20 years of research, will make readers laugh, cry, and gasp at the lives of these individuals . . . . By examining the construct of manhood, Ghannam is charting new territory in Middle Eastern studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” —CHOICE “With its focus on masculinity, Farha Ghannam’s thoughtful ethnography, Live and Die Like a Man, makes important interventions into the anthropological scholarship on gender, childhood, and family in the Middle East . . . . Her ethnographic sensibility perfectly grasps the dynamic and complex intertwining of male and female ways of being and self-presentation and how that interrelationship forms men’s lives.” —International Journal of Middle East Studies

"A deeply moving, funny, and brilliantly written account from one of India’s most original new voices." —Katherine Boo Like Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’s Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology, became a butcher, a tailor, and an electrician’s apprentice; now he is a homeless day laborer in the heart of old Delhi. How did he end up this way? In an astonishing debut, Aman Sethi brings him and his indelible group of friends to life through their adventures and misfortunes in the Old Delhi Railway Station, the harrowing wards of a tuberculosis hospital, an illegal bar made of cardboard and plywood, and into Beggars Court and back onto the streets. In a time of global economic strain, this is an unforgettable evocation of persistence in the face of poverty in one of the world’s largest cities. Sethi recounts Ashraf’s surprising life story with wit, candor, and verve, and A Free Man becomes a moving story of the many ways a man can be free.

This second volume of Robert A. Hill's monumental ten-volume survey of Marcus Mosiah Garvey's extraordinary mass movement of black social protest covers a period of rapid growth. The Universal Negro Improvement Association, with its "Africa for the Africans" program of racial nationalism, rapidly gained in strength in the aftermath of Garvey's successful meeting in Carnegie Hall in August 1919, and culminated in its spectacular First International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World in 1920. Hill has compiled a wealth of archival documents and original manuscripts, with descriptive source notes and explanatory footnotes. He provides a fascinating account of the spread of Garvey's movement, which was seen-and feared-by officials in America, Europe, and colonial governments in Africa and the Caribbean as the major ideological force promoting radical consciousness among blacks. Hill continues the comprehensive outline begun in Volume I of Garvey's Black Star Line, the all-black merchant marine, and documents the beginnings of Garvey's proposals for massive loans to the Liberian government. These controversial financial schemes led to Garvey's reputation as a swindler, and Volume II details the first charges of fraud. The federal investigation of Garvey broadened and deepened during 1919--1920, with J. Edgar Hoover--then an assistant to the attorney general--continuing to search tor grounds to deport Garvey. Included here are numerous repons from government agents and informers, which provide a valuable ponrait of day-to-day UNIA operations. Volume II ends with the UNIA's 1920 convention, presented by Garvey as a turning point in the history of black-white relations. The legislation and the elective offices produced by that convention were intended to form a virtual government in exile for Africa, fulfilling Garvey's ambition to practice statecraft and create the symbols of black nationhood and sovereignty. This volume is the second of six that focus on America; the seventh and eighth focus on Africa, and the last two on the Caribbean. Hill has brought together far more than a portrait of a single intriguing historical figure. Garvey's movement was a mass social phenomenon, an Afro-American protest movement with strong links to African and Caribbean nationalism in the first decades of the twentieth century.