"The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic"

New from Oxford University Press: The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience by Lauren M. E. Goodlad.

About the book, from the publisher:

How did realist fiction alter in the effort to craft forms and genres receptive to the dynamism of an expanding empire and globalizing world? Do these nineteenth-century variations on the "geopolitical aesthetic" continue to resonate today? Crossing literary criticism, political theory, and longue duree history, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic explores these questions from the standpoint of mid-nineteenth-century novelists such as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Anthony Trollope as well as successors including E. M. Forster and the creators of recent television serials. By looking at the category of "sovereignty" at multiple scales and in diverse formal, geographic, and historical contexts, Lauren M. E. Goodlad shows that the ideological crucible for "high" realism was not a hegemonic liberalism. It was, rather, a clash of modern liberal ideals struggling to distintricate themselves from a powerful conservative vision of empire while striving to negotiate the inequalities of power along lines of race, gender, nationality, and ethnicity which a supposedly universalistic liberalism had helped to generate.

The material occasion for the mid-Victorian era's rich realist experiments was, thus, the transition from an informal empire of trade that could be celebrated as "liberal" to a neo-feudal imperialism that only Tories could warmly embrace. In this way the book places realism's "geopolitical aesthetic" at the heart of recurring modern experiences of breached sovereignty, forgotten history, and subjective exile. The Coda, titled "The Way We Historicize Now," concludes the book with connections to recent debates about "surface reading" "distant reading," and the hermeneutics of suspicion.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Love's Uncertainty"

New from the University of California Press: Love's Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China by Teresa Kuan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Love’s Uncertainty explores the hopes and anxieties of urban, middle-class parents in contemporary China. Combining long-term ethnographic research with analyses of popular child-rearing manuals, television dramas, and government documents, Teresa Kuan bears witness to the dilemmas of ordinary Chinese parents, who struggle to reconcile new definitions of good parenting with the reality of limited resources. Situating these parents’ experiences in the historical context of state efforts to improve "population quality," Love’s Uncertainty reveals how global transformations are expressed in the most intimate of human experiences. Ultimately, the book offers a meditation on the nature of moral agency, examining how people discern, amid the myriad contingencies of life, the boundary between what can and cannot be controlled.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Purging the Empire"

New from Oxford University Press: Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871-1914 by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick.

About the book, from the publisher:

While the fate of minorities under Nazism is well known, the earlier expulsions of Germany's unwanted residents are less well understood. Against a backdrop of raging public debate, and numerous claims of a 'state of exception', tens of thousands of vulnerable people living in the German Empire were the victims of mass expulsion orders between 1871 and 1914. Groups as diverse as Socialists, Jesuits, Danes, colonial subjects, French nationalists, Poles, and 'Gypsies' were all removed, under circumstances that varied from police actions undertaken by provincial governors through to laws authorising removals passed by the Reichstag.

Purging the Empire examines the competing voices demanding the removal or the preservation of suspect communities, suggesting that these expulsions were enabled by the decentralised and participatory nature of German politics. In a surprisingly responsive political system, a range of players, including the Kaiser, the Reichstag, the bureaucracy, provincial officials, and local police authorities were all empowered to authorise the expulsion of unwanted residents. Added to this, the German press, civic associations, chambers of commerce, public intellectuals, religious societies, and the grassroots membership of political parties all played an important role in advocating or denouncing the measures before, during and after their implementation. Far from revealing the centrality of authoritarian caprice, Germany's mass expulsions point to the diffuse nature of coercive sovereign power and the role of public pressure in authorising or censuring the removals that took place in a modern, increasingly parliamentary Rechtsstaat.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Great Divide"

New from Da Capo Press: The Great Divide: The Conflict between Washington and Jefferson that Defined a Nation by Thomas Fleming.

About the book, from the publisher:

History tends to cast the early years of America in a glow of camaraderie, when there were, in fact, many conflicts between the Founding Fathers—none more important than the one between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Their disagreement centered on the highest, most original public office created by the Constitutional Convention: the presidency. It also involved the nation’s foreign policy, the role of merchants and farmers in a republic, and the durability of the union. At its root were two sharply different visions of the nation’s future.

Acclaimed historian Thomas Fleming examines how the differing characters and leadership styles of Washington and Jefferson shaped two opposing views of the presidency—and the nation. This clash profoundly influenced the next two centuries of America’s history and persists in the present day.

Visit Thomas Fleming's website.

Writers Read: Thomas Fleming.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Indian Asceticism"

New from Oxford University Press: Indian Asceticism: Power, Violence, and Play by Carl Olson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Throughout the history of Indian religions, the ascetic figure is most closely identified with power. A by-product of the ascetic path, power is displayed in the ability to fly, walk on water or through dense objects, read minds, discern the former lives of others, see into the future, harm others, or simply levitate one's body. These tales give rise to questions about how power and violence are related to the phenomenon of play.

Indian Asceticism focuses on the powers exhibited by ascetics of India from ancient to modern time. Carl Olson discusses the erotic, the demonic, the comic, and the miraculous forms of play and their connections to power and violence. He focuses on Hinduism, but evidence is also presented from Buddhism and Jainism, suggesting that the subject matter of this book pervades India's major indigenous religious traditions.

The book includes a look at the extent to which findings in cognitive science can add to our understanding of these various powers; Olson argues that violence is built into the practice of the ascetic. Indian Asceticism culminates with an attempt to rethink the nature of power in a way that does justice to the literary evidence from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain sources.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dachau and the SS"

New from Oxford University Press: Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence by Christopher Dillon.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dachau and the SS studies the concentration camp guards at Dachau, the first SS concentration camp and a national 'school' of violence for its concentration camp personnel. Set up in the first months of Adolf Hitler's rule, Dachau was a bastion of the Nazi 'revolution' and a key springboard for the ascent of Heinrich Himmler and the SS to control of the Third Reich's terror and policing apparatus. Throughout the pre-war era of Nazi Germany, Dachau functioned as an academy of violence where concentration camp personnel were schooled in steely resolution and the techniques of terror. An international symbol of Nazi depredation, Dachau was the cradle of a new and terrible spirit of destruction.

Combining extensive new research into the pre-war history of Dachau with theoretical insights from studies of perpetrator violence, this book offers the first systematic study of the 'Dachau School'. It explores the backgrounds and socialization of thousands of often very young SS men in the camp and critiques the assumption that violence was an outcome of personal or ideological pathologies. Christopher Dillon analyses recruitment to the Dachau SS and evaluates the contribution of ideology, training, social psychology, and masculine ideals to the conduct and subsequent careers of concentration camp guards. Graduates of the Dachau School would go on to play a central role in the wartime criminality of the Third Reich, particularly at Auschwitz. Dachau and the SS makes an original contribution to scholarship on the pre-history of the Holocaust and the institutional organisation of violence.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Patriotic Betrayal"

New from Yale University Press: Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism by Karen M. Paget.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this revelatory book, Karen M. Paget shows how the CIA turned the National Student Association into an intelligence asset during the Cold War, with students used—often wittingly and sometimes unwittingly—as undercover agents inside America and abroad. In 1967, Ramparts magazine exposed the story, prompting the Agency into engineering a successful cover-up. Now Paget, drawing on archival sources, declassified documents, and more than 150 interviews, shows that the Ramparts story revealed only a small part of the plot.

A cautionary tale, throwing sharp light on the persistent argument, heard even now, about whether America’s national-security interests can be advanced by skullduggery and deception, Patriotic Betrayal, says Karl E. Meyer, a former editorial board member of the New York Times and The Washington Post, evokes “the aura of a John le Carré novel with its self-serving rationalizations, its layers of duplicity, and its bureaucratic doubletalk.” And Hugh Wilford, author of The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, calls Patriotic Betrayal “extremely valuable as a case study of relations between the CIA and one of its front groups, greatly extending and enriching our knowledge and understanding of the complex dynamics involved in such covert, state-private relationships; it offers a fascinating portrayal of post-World War II U.S. political culture in microcosm."

Visit Karen M. Paget's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Soul, Self, and Society"

New from Oxford University Press: Soul, Self, and Society: The New Morality and the Modern State by Edward L Rubin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Political and social commentators regularly bemoan the decline of morality in the modern world. They claim that the norms and values that held society together in the past are rapidly eroding, to be replaced by permissiveness and empty hedonism. But as Edward Rubin demonstrates in this powerful account of moral transformations, these prophets of doom are missing the point. Morality is not diminishing; instead, a new morality, centered on an ethos of human self-fulfillment, is arising to replace the old one.

As Rubin explains, changes in morality have gone hand in hand with changes in the prevailing mode of governance throughout the course of Western history. During the Early Middle Ages, a moral system based on honor gradually developed. In a dangerous world where state power was declining, people relied on bonds of personal loyalty that were secured by generosity to their followers and violence against their enemies. That moral order, exemplified in the early feudal system and in sagas like The Song of Roland, The Song of the Cid, and the Arthurian legends has faded, but its remnants exist today in criminal organizations like the Mafia and in the rap music of the urban ghettos. When state power began to revive in the High Middle Ages through the efforts of the European monarchies, and Christianity became more institutionally effective and more spiritually intense, a new morality emerged. Described by Rubin as the morality of higher purposes, it demanded that people devote their personal efforts to achieving salvation and their social efforts to serving the emerging nation-states. It insisted on social hierarchy, confined women to subordinate roles, restricted sex to procreation, centered child-rearing on moral inculcation, and countenanced slavery and the marriage of pre-teenage girls to older men.

Our modern era, which began in the late 18th century, has seen the gradual erosion of this morality of higher purposes and the rise of a new morality of self-fulfillment, one that encourages individuals to pursue the most meaningful and rewarding life-path. Far from being permissive or a moral abdication, it demands that people respect each other's choices, that sex be mutually enjoyable, that public positions be allocated according to merit, and that society provide all its members with their minimum needs so that they have the opportunity to fulfill themselves. Where people once served the state, the state now functions to serve the people. The clash between this ascending morality and the declining morality of higher purposes is the primary driver of contemporary political and cultural conflict.

A sweeping, big-idea book in the vein of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, Charles Taylor's The Secular Age, and Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, Edward Rubin's new volume promises to reshape our understanding of morality, its relationship to government, and its role in shaping the emerging world of High Modernity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Invaders"

New from Harvard University Press: The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction by Pat Shipman.

About the book, from the publisher:

With their large brains, sturdy physique, sophisticated tools, and hunting skills, Neanderthals are the closest known relatives to humans. Approximately 200,000 years ago, as modern humans began to radiate out from their evolutionary birthplace in Africa, Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe—descendants of a much earlier migration of the African genus Homo. But when modern humans eventually made their way to Europe 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals suddenly vanished. Ever since the first Neanderthal bones were identified in 1856, scientists have been vexed by the question, why did modern humans survive while their evolutionary cousins went extinct?

The Invaders musters compelling evidence to show that the major factor in the Neanderthals’ demise was direct competition with newly arriving humans. Drawing on insights from the field of invasion biology, which predicts that the species ecologically closest to the invasive predator will face the greatest competition, Pat Shipman traces the devastating impact of a growing human population: reduction of Neanderthals’ geographic range, isolation into small groups, and loss of genetic diversity.

But modern humans were not the only invaders who competed with Neanderthals for big game. Shipman reveals fascinating confirmation of humans’ partnership with the first domesticated wolf-dogs soon after Neanderthals first began to disappear. This alliance between two predator species, she hypothesizes, made possible an unprecedented degree of success in hunting large Ice Age mammals—a distinct and ultimately decisive advantage for humans over Neanderthals at a time when climate change made both groups vulnerable.

The Page 99 Test: The Animal Connection.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dealing in Desire"

New from the University of California Press: Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work by Kimberly Kay Hoang.

About the book, from the publisher:

This captivating ethnography explores Vietnam’s sex industry as the country ascends the global and regional stage. Over the course of five years, author Kimberly Kay Hoang worked at four exclusive Saigon hostess bars catering to diverse clientele: wealthy local Vietnamese and Asian businessmen, Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad), Western businessmen, and Western budget-tourists. Dealing in Desire takes an in-depth and often personal look at both the sex workers and their clients to show how Vietnamese high finance and benevolent giving are connected to the intimate spheres of the informal economy. For the domestic super-elite who use the levers of political power to channel foreign capital into real estate and manufacturing projects, conspicuous consumption is a means of projecting an image of Asian ascendancy to potential investors. For Viet Kieus and Westerners who bring remittances into the local economy, personal relationships with local sex workers reinforce their ideas of Asia’s rise and Western decline, while simultaneously bolstering their diminished masculinity. Dealing in Desire illuminates Ho Chi Minh City’s sex industry as not just a microcosm of the global economy, but a critical space where dreams and deals are traded.

Visit Kimberly Kay Hoang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue