By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

UCLA International Institute, September 29, 2024 — One doesn’t typically encounter the topics of Buddhist women, university-community educational partnerships, judicial territory and Hannah Arendt in the same sentence, much less the same academic unit of UCLA. But this intersection of ideas is the norm at the multidisciplinary International Institute, where four scholars recently published or will publish new books on these respective topics this fall.

Buddhist women leaders

A new work by Stephanie Balkwill, associate professor of Asian languages and cultures and director of the Center for Buddhist Studies, “The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism and Governance in the Sixth Century” (UC Press, open access, 2024), was released this past August.

The book explores the life and rule of Empress Dowager Ling, one of the first Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia, against the broader world of imperial China under the rule of the Northern Wei dynasty. Building on largely untapped Buddhist materials, the book reveals Dowager Ling’s story as one of reinvention — of religious, ethnic and gender norms — in a rapidly changing multicultural society.

“The only woman from medieval China who is commonly discussed in both academic and popular communities is the famous Empress Wu Zhao, who ruled China from 690 to 705 CE, whereas the women I wrote about for my Ph.D. had done very similar things as Empress Wu Zhao, but they did so almost 200 years earlier,” said Balkwill.

“To me, it mattered to tell a story that commonly used sources in the study of medieval China do not adequately tell… 'In The Women Who Ruled China,' I use predominantly Buddhist sources — canonical texts, art historical pieces and archeological remains — to argue that China’s early medieval period was a high point for the diversity of roles available to women, even if normative historiography considers the period a sort of historical dark age.”

University-community educational partnerships

Also in August, a new volume edited by Marjorie Elaine, professor of education and associate vice provost of the International Institute was released, “University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal” (co-edited with Mara Welsh Mahmood and John Cano; Palgrave McMillan, open access, 2024). Elaine will participate in a book talk on the volume at UCLA on October 1.

The work explores University-Community Links, a network of innovative in- and out-of-school programs in California, Germany, Italy, Spain, Uganda and Uruguay. UC Links connects university faculty and students with young people and their families in afterschool programs in urban communities worldwide.

Several chapters describe the UC Links network, including the core commitments shared by its programs (play, collaboration, intergenerational learning and social justice), how the programs were transformed by the coronavirus epidemic, and their impact on participants’ teaching and learning. Other chapters document individual programs and their respective work in transforming pedagogy and learning around the globe.

Said Elaine of the volume, “This book is the result of a long labor of love. As co-editor, I helped guide 15 authorship teams detail their innovative, long-term, community-engaged research. This research involved designing, implementing and studying afterschool programs for youth in diverse urban communities. One chapter concerns a program that I directed for 11 years at the UCLA Community School: a joyful, play-based afterschool program for immigrant youth.”

Judicial territory

Associate professor of geography and global studies program faculty member Shaina Potts published her first monograph, “Judicial Territory: Law, Capital and the Expansion of American Empire” (Duke, 2024), just last week.

The book explores the transnational extension of U.S. domestic law and judicial authority over economic relations involving foreign — especially postcolonial — governments. It documents how U.S. common law gradually became an important tool for bolstering the power of both private American capital and U.S. geopolitical interests far beyond official U.S. borders.

More than the mere modernization of jurisdictional rules in the face of globalization, the application of U.S. commercial law abroad under the banner of “rule of law” extended what Potts calls “judicial territory.” As a result, it actively reconfigured national territoriality and sovereignty for all nation-states and helped construct the U.S.-led international economic order following World War II.

“I first stumbled upon this topic by chance,” said Potts, “when I heard about the bizarre case of a Ghanaian court holding an off-duty Argentine naval ship hostage in the port of Tema on behalf of a group of Wall St. hedge funds, who turned out to be suing Argentina in federal New York courts.

“I discovered that such lawsuits are far from rare, and the naïve question I started with was simply: How did it come to be that U.S. courts can tell other governments what to do? Trying to answer this question to my own satisfaction eventually led me to an interdisciplinary examination of the changing treatment of foreign sovereign economic activity in U.S. law,” said the financial and economic geographer.

Hannah Arendt and the idea of solidarity

David Kim says of his soon-to-be released monograph (slated for October 8), “Arendt's Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World” (Stanford, 2024), “This was not a book I wanted to write, the primary reason being that the concept of solidarity is considered by social scientists and humanists alike to be one of the most opaque and difficult to understand across disciplines.”

“Reading Arendt’s oeuvre, I realized that she, too, wavered from one conception of solidarity to another. For her, as for many others, there were many different types of solidarity,” continued the professor of European languages and transnational studies and associate vice provost of the International Institute. “In the course of studying the concept,” Kim reflected ruefully, “I realized that I had to write this book in order to bring clarity for my own thinking and, hopefully, for others.”

“Arendt’s Solidarity” examines the German Jewish philosopher's lifelong struggle with the deceptively straightforward yet divisive concept of solidarity and in so doing, re-thinks the entirety of her work. Drawing upon a variety of published and unpublished sources, Kim shows how Arendt refutes solidarity as an effective political force against anti-Semitism, racial injustice or social inequality.

He relates this conceptual conundrum to every major concern of Arendt’s work: Christian neighborly love, friendship, Jewish assimilation, Zionism, National Socialism, the American republic, Black Power, revolution, violence and the human world. Kim also places Arendt’s thoughts on the topic in dialogue with dissenting voices, such as those of Thomas Mann, Gershom Scholem, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, James Forman and Ralph Ellison.