"Harvests of Liberation"

New from Stanford University Press: Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt by Ahmad Shokr.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the first half of the twentieth century, a major change occurred in Egyptian nationalist understandings of imperialism and economic sovereignty. Where once the volatilities of foreign markets and capital were seen as the main threat, over time large landowners and their imperial allies were targeted as the principal obstacles to the country's industrial progress. The perceived locus of imperial domination shifted from the realm of circulation to the realm of production. Harvests of Liberation situates this transformation in the midcentury dynamics of agrarian capitalism in Egypt. Ahmad Shokr tells a story of decolonization through the lens of cotton, Egypt's prized export. He follows a range of actors—colonial advisors, nationalist leaders, agrarian reformers, merchant-financiers, landowners, and rural workers—whose interactions moved the levers of the cotton trade from institutions that facilitated accumulation on an imperial scale to new sites of control within the nation-state. Amidst depression and war, the transformation of Egypt's cotton economy prompted nationalists to embrace policies of land reform and industrialization and adopt a new conception of history. Ultimately, Shokr argues, these efforts set the stage for the construction of a postcolonial republic under Gamal Abdel Nasser, where national liberation became equated with national development.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Freedom Enterprise"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit by Kendra D. Boyd.

About the book, from the publisher:

Traces the rise and fall of the historic Black business community in Detroit

The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers are well-known, countless African Americans also left the South to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and viewed business as key to Black liberation. Detroit’s status as a mecca for Black entrepreneurship illuminates this overlooked aspect of the Great Migration story. In Freedom Enterprise, Kendra D. Boyd uses “migrant entrepreneurship” as a lens through which to understand the entwined histories of Black-owned business, racial capitalism, and urban space.

Freedom Enterprise follows Black Southerners’ journeys to Detroit during the initial wave of migration in the 1910s and 1920s, through their efforts to build a prosperous Black business community in the 1930s and 1940s, to the destruction of that community through urban renewal projects and freeway construction in the 1950s and 1960s. Combining business and social history methods to analyze an eclectic archive, Boyd chronicles migrant entrepreneurs’ experiences, highlighting tales of racial and economic violence, Black women’s business organizing, illegal business, communist entrepreneurs, and cooperative economics.

Boyd uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine migrant entrepreneurs’ experiences in twentieth-century America. In the Jim Crow South, African Americans worried about white mobs taking away their property, wealth, and lives. Though they sought refuge in Detroit, migrant entrepreneurs subsequently faced the loss of their livelihoods and the businesses they had spent decades building to the bulldozers of state-sponsored urban redevelopment initiatives. Southern migrants’ “freedom enterprise”—their undertaking of attaining freedom through business—was curtailed by the reality of operating within the confines of US racial capitalism.

In tracing Black entrepreneurs across the Great Migration, Freedom Enterprise provides important insights into African Americans’ activism for racial and economic justice and continued racialized wealth disparities.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Karl Marx in America"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Karl Marx in America by Andrew Hartman.

About the book, from the publisher:

The vital and untold story of Karl Marx’s stamp on American life.

To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.

In Karl Marx in America, historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.

After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society.

The Page 99 Test: A War for the Soul of America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Challenging Knowledge"

New from Oxford University Press: Challenging Knowledge: How We (Sometimes) Don't Know What We Think We Know by Jody Azzouni.

About the book, from the publisher:

Starting-point epistemology (SPE) is a new position in epistemology that, coupled with agent-centered rationality-the idea that a rational agent is one who cleaves to their own picture of rationality-is the key to resolving philosophical scepticism. SPE acknowledges that metacogntively-sophisticated agents know that they know things, and know some things about the methods by which this happens. Agent-centered rationality implies that a metacognitively-sophisticated agent should only desert a knowledge claim because of a challenge they recognize to be fatal to that claim. Scepticism is metacognitive pathology. Except in those rare cases when an individual is cognitively damaged, sceptical arguments should fail.

In Challenging Knowledge Jody Azzouni studies the various ways the cognitively healthy can protect themselves from prematurely denying what they take themselves to know. A sceptical position results from an agent's failure to correctly monitor their own processes of knowledge gathering. These scenarios are characterized as cases that are "logically compatible" with the evidence had by that agent, but logical possibility is not coextensive with epistemic possibility. The former allows cases that no agent should regard as challenging their knowledge claims, and excludes cases that every agent should be concerned with. Giving in to logically-possible scenarios illustrates an agent's failure to stand their ground when inappropriately challenged; e.g., yielding their knowledge claims in cases where they know the scenarios being presented are too remote to take seriously. Azzouni shows how the arguments for Cartesian and Pyrrhonian scepticism turn on failures to appropriately evaluate one's knowledge-gathering methods.

Visit Jody Azzouni's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Underworld Work"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans by Ahmad Greene-Hayes.

About the book, from the publisher:

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans.

When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.

Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms—ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more—to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.

Visit Ahmad Greene-Hayes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Iroquoia"

New from Cornell University Press: Iroquoia: Haudenosaunee Life and Culture, 1630–1783 by Kelly Y. Hopkins.

About the book, from the publisher:

Iroquoia highlights the innovation of the Haudenosaunee peoples in retaining sovereignty over their homelands through seven generations of social and environmental change following European contact and the settler invasion. Kelly Y. Hopkins argues that Haudenosaunee men and women incorporated articles of European manufacture into their daily lives to fulfill conventional social and cultural needs. They used new trade items and alliances to enhance their lives and to pursue goals specific to their communities. In Iroquoia, Hopkins explores how engagement in the global market economy irreversibly transformed the local environment, severed Indigenous relationships and responsibilities to human and other-than human kin, and challenged longstanding social and economic relationships within Haudenosaunee communities. While settler expansion, violence, and imperial terraforming threatened Indigenous communities, food sovereignty, and water management, The People of the Longhouse produced distinctive new material cultures and new land use practices that incorporated features of the colonial settlement template into longstanding subsistence and settlement patterns. Haudenosaunee peoples employed these survivance strategies to control the scale and scope of European intrusion into their homelands.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Playing through Pain"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Playing through Pain: The Violent Consequences of Capitalist Sport by Daniel Sailofsky.

About the book, from the publisher:

For many fans and casual observers, professional sports and violence are deeply connected. Violence on the field has real consequences for players, notably in the form of life-altering injuries from concussions. Off the field, in the last several decades, scores of athletes have committed violent acts, from domestic abuse and sexual assault to animal abuse and murder. Beyond athletes, sport also serves as a site of political and structural violence, from the displacement and hyperpolicing of everyday people for mega-events to the “sportswashing” of environmentally harmful industries.

Daniel Sailofsky examines the endemic violence in professional sports and argues that—while related to masculinity, misogyny, and individual factors like alcohol consumption and gambling—it is most intimately tied to capitalism and to capitalist modes of consumption and profit. Sailofsky explains how capitalism creates the conditions for violence to thrive and uncovers how sports leaders—coaches, league officials, and team owners—obfuscate these relationships to avoid accountability.

From minor league baseball exploitation to spectator hooliganism, Sailofsky shows the connections between the business of sports and violence, but also, more importantly, he imagines new forms of sport that are not places of harm.

Visit Daniel Sailofsky's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe"

New from Oxford University Press: The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats by Blessing-Miles Tendi.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe: Gender, Coups, and Diplomats argues the 2017 coup that ousted long time Zimbabwean president Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and the generality of coups, cannot be accurately and rigorously understood without examining the crucial role of gender and women's politics in military seizures of power.

Tendi's findings show that the politics of gender and women pervade military coup causes, dynamics, justifications, and international responses to coups. Contrary to influential representations of Zimbabwe's 2017 coup and other recent coups as markedly different from past coups, Tendi draws on deep gendered histories of military coups in Africa to argue that in reality there are significant continuities in coup characteristics across time. This highly original account of the 2017 Zimbabwean coup identifies the motives, dynamics, and trigger of the coup and demonstrates the centrality of gender and women's politics in these factors and processes. Additionally, despite the existence of an international anti-coup norm and democracy promotion in Africa by Western states, Zimbabwean coup makers were largely not publicly condemned or penalised by Western and African diplomats, for staging the coup.

Visit Blessing-Miles Tendi's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sex Is a Spectrum"

New from Princeton University Press: Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary by Agustín Fuentes.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why human biology is far more expansive than the simple categories of female and male

Being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture, and while there are important differences between women and men, there is a lot more variation and overlap than we may realize. Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex, drawing on the latest science to explain why the binary view of the sexes is fundamentally flawed—and why having XX or XY chromosomes isn’t as conclusive as some would have us believe.

In this lively and provocative book, leading biological anthropologist Agustín Fuentes begins by tracing the origin and evolution of sex, describing the many ways in the animal kingdom of being female, male, or both. Turning to humans, he presents compelling evidence from the fossil and archaeological record that attests to the diversity of our ancestors’ sexual bonds, gender roles, and family and community structures, and shows how the same holds true in the lived experiences of people today. Fuentes tackles hot-button debates around sports and medicine, explaining why we can acknowledge that females and males are not the same while also embracing a biocultural reality where none of us fits neatly into only one of two categories.

Bringing clarity and reason to a contentious issue, Sex Is a Spectrum shares a scientist’s perspective on why a binary view of sex and gender is not only misguided but harmful, and why there are multitudes of ways of being human.

The Page 99 Test: Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You.

The Page 99 Test: Why We Believe.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Nietzsche's Earthbound Wisdom"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Nietzsche's Earthbound Wisdom: The Philosopher, the Poet, and the Sage by Keith Ansell-Pearson.

About the book, from the publisher:

An incisive exploration of Nietzsche as a bold, visionary poet-philosopher.

Today, Nietzsche is justly celebrated for his rich, philosophical naturalism, but Keith Ansell-Pearson warns that we must not overlook the visionary dimension of his thinking and his focus on the need to cultivate a new care of the self and care of life. In Nietzsche’s Earthbound Wisdom, Ansell-Pearson recovers Nietzsche’s love for a philosophy that guides us through our passions, one that opens us more fully to the possibilities of life and the joy of knowledge.

Ansell-Pearson offers close readings of Nietzsche’s texts in conversation with philosophical and literary figures including Augustine, Baudelaire, Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Emerson, Flaubert, Stendhal, and more. Throughout, Ansell-Pearson examines Nietzsche’s sophisticated critique of literary naturalism and his alternative conception of the poet as a seer who has a deep longing for a new earth.

Visit Keith Ansell-Pearson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue