"Zoning Faith"

New from NYU Press: Zoning Faith: How City Politics Shape Muslim Communities in Chicago by Sultan Tepe.

About the book, from the publisher:

An intriguing look at how the city's built environment influences the shape of Muslim communities in Chicago

Zoning Faith offers a rare in-depth look at three distinct Muslim communities in Chicago, one Shia Muslim, one Sunni, and one Black Muslim community. The volume explores how these communities navigate their social and political environments, and how their experiences in urban settings help to explain the emergence of new Islamic organizations, practices, and theologies in America.

Zoning Faith provides the first comprehensive spatial examination of Muslims' experiences in global cities. Although cities play a crucial role in the enactment of faith, they are often treated as places Muslims happen to live, or as places that are transformed as many Muslims come to inhabit them. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which cities may transform faith groups in meaningful ways, from zoning regulations and debates about where a mosque can be situated to how a building’s structure can influence prayer and communal life. This book pays careful attention to the intersections of urban space and religion, approaching “built spaces” as profoundly political and particularly illuminating of the experiences of minority faiths.

Drawing on a multi-year and multi-site ethnography, the volume provides a previously unobtainable, in-depth look at how Muslim communities in Chicago defy the expectations of conventional places of worship. Crossing the boundaries of urban studies, theological studies, architecture, and public policy, Zoning Faith offers new insights into how Islam is vernacularized and grounded in the US in many different ways.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The French Médersa"

New from Cornell University Press: The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa by Samuel D. Anderson.

About the book, from the publisher:

The French Médersa explores how the French state pursued a century-long project of bicultural Franco-Muslim education in its northwest African colonies, resulting in a new type of school, the médersa, that combined French and Islamic curricula. French officials frequently described these schools and their students as "hyphens," drawing connections between larger French and Islamic forces.Samuel D. Anderson highlights this hyphenating idea, situating Franco-Muslim education between beliefs about not only France and Islam but also about tradition and modernity and about North and West Africa.

The médersa project had two goals: to create an elite class of Muslims friendly to the French imperial project and, subsequently, to mold Islam into a form that could be more easily controlled. A total of ten médersas opened across Algeria, Senegal, French Soudan, and Mauritania and closed only in the 1950s. The graduates of these schools, the medérsiens, went on to shape their societies profoundly but not always in the ways the French anticipated.

Drawing on archival and oral sources from Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and France, The French Médersa proposes new ways to approach trans-Saharan history. Anderson argues that across northwest Africa, and for more than a century, Franco-Muslim education was central to the history of French empire and Islamic education alike.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Adventures in the Archaic"

New from the University of Chicago: Adventures in the Archaic: Primitivism, Degrowth, and the French Social Sciences, 1945–1975 by Ryan L. Allen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examines how four intellectuals with ties to the French social sciences articulated a new primitivist sensibility between 1945 and 1975.

We tend to associate primitivism with the nostalgic idealization of origins, often aimed at parts of the world that are viewed as closer to that idealized past than modern post-industrial society. Primitivist impulses still exist in popular culture, whether in paleo diets or returns to foraging, and they can also be seen in intellectual and political circles in debates around the possibility of degrowth. In this book, historian Ryan L. Allen examines primitivism anew through four fascinating figures: Georges Bataille, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Devereux, and Mircea Eliade.

In the postwar period, Allen shows, the French social sciences reappraised the primitive and archaic from anthropological, sociological, psychiatric, and religious angles. These four thinkers sought past alternatives to midcentury hypermodernization and capitalist excess. They put forth trenchant critiques of contemporary society and sought in the archaic past a way to imagine a more sustainable future. Adventures in the Archaic rehabilitates these thinkers, showing how their critique of growth and consumerism was nourished by an engagement with primitive cultures as potential sources of cultural and ecological wisdom. As we confront planetary crisis, Allen suggests, there is still much we can learn from these iconoclastic approaches.

Visit Ryan Allen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Search for a Rational Faith"

New from Oxford University Press: The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity by Daniel K. Williams.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Enlightenment and Darwinism posed threats to traditional Christianity. So why have so many highly educated Americans remained committed believers?

The Search for a Rational Faith challenges popular theories of secularization with a sweeping 400-year history of Anglo-American Protestant defenses of the Christian faith. Through a detailed study of the arguments of those who found Christian faith compatible with Enlightenment reason, Daniel K. Williams explains why Christian faith has continued to remain a viable intellectual option in the United States even for educated people who accept modern science.

From the seventeenth-century New England Puritans who founded Harvard College to the twentieth-century university professors who believed that Christian theism was the only viable grounding for morality in the atomic age, faith and reason have been an integral part of the Anglo-American experience. This book chronicles that story.

It is a story that intersects with the spiritual lives of well-known figures such as Isaac Newton, John Locke, John Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King Jr., all of whom wrestled with the question of the reason to believe. It is the story of Christian apologists who crafted intellectually sophisticated defenses of the faith. And above all, it is the story of the development of an idea-the idea that there is a rational basis for Christian belief.

This book shows how that idea was transmitted from England to America in the seventeenth century and how it continued to develop and transform over the next four centuries in response to the Enlightenment, Darwinian evolution, historical criticism of the Bible, new theories of religious epistemology, and the ethical challenge of the civil rights movement. The Search for a Rational Faith is the story of what that idea meant in the past and what it still means today, in a new era of secularization.

Visit Daniel K. Williams's website.

The Page 99 Test: God's Own Party.

The Page 99 Test: Defenders of the Unborn.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Becoming Zimbabwean"

New from the University of Virginia Press: Becoming Zimbabwean: A History of Indians in Rhodesia by Trishula Rachna Patel.

About the book, from the publisher:

The first comprehensive history of Indian migrants and their descendants in Zimbabwe

Becoming Zimbabwean tells the long-overdue story of the Indian community in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Centering the stories of individuals and families, and building on a foundation of extensive archival research, Trishula Rachna Patel—a Zimbabwean of Indian origin herself—shows that the history of Indians in Zimbabwe is not of a transient diaspora but one of deliberate permanence.

Indians initially played a critical part in the settler colonial process in Southern Rhodesia, but as new generations were born and raised, their politics and social lives evolved to localized forms of citizenship. Eventually, they functioned as part of the resistance to the Rhodesian white minority government, either through participation in the system as nonwhites or by joining the Black anticolonial nationalist movement. They did all this through their shops, African-rooted institutions that became social, economic, and political spaces through which Indians became Zimbabwean. In this highly readable and authoritative study, Patel makes clear that Zimbabwe cannot be properly understood without accounting for the substantial Indian community that has woven itself into the fabric of the nation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Two Rivers Entangled"

New from Stanford University Press: Two Rivers Entangled: An Ecological History of the Tigris and Euphrates in the Twentieth Century by Dale J. Stahl.

About the book, from the publisher:

During the twentieth century, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers underwent a profound physical transformation, one that mirrored the region's political shift from imperial rule to nation-state. Here, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey took shape in the wake of the Ottoman Empire, and the two rivers became sites of economic development planning and large-scale environmental engineering. It is a modern conceit that industrial, technological societies transcend ecological change, that technology and ecology operate separately. With this book, Dale J. Stahl instead centers riverine ecologies within the context of social and political projects and shows how natural processes encounter human intentions to manage, control, or modernize.

Weaving imperial and national histories with ecological ones, Two Rivers Entangled undermines familiar accounts of the invention of states, the advance of nations, and the triumphs of technical expertise. Stahl entangles a wide range of human and nonhuman actors―knitting together the movement of engineers and bureaucrats with that of salt particles, linking the disappointment of revolutionaries to the dissolution of unreliable rock, and following the flow of water over embankments and into poetry. Ultimately, this book offers an alternative account of twentieth-century Middle Eastern history, one subject as much to ecological change as to human visions and intentions.

Visit Dale J. Stahl's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Nation Unraveled"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era by Sarah Jones Weicksel.

About the book, from the publisher:

During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, mended, lost, and stole, Americans expressed their allegiances, showed their love, confronted their social and economic challenges, subverted expectations, and, ultimately, preserved their history. As the collections they left behind make clear, Civil War Americans believed clothing was not merely a reflection of one’s class, gender, race, military rank, political ideology, or taste. Instead, Northerners and Southerners alike understood that clothing—from the weave of a fabric to the style and make of a coat—had the power to affect people’s way of living through the war’s tumult.

In this compelling and well-illustrated history, Sarah Jones Weicksel reveals the meanings clothing had for Civil War Americans. Contributing to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of the Civil War, Weicksel invites readers to understand how the war penetrated daily life by focusing on the intimate, visceral, material experiences that shaped how people moved through the world.

Visit Sarah Jones Weicksel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Eroding Democracy from the Outside In"

New from Oxford University Press: Eroding Democracy from the Outside In: International Organizations and Democratic Backsliding by Anna M. Meyerrose.

About the book, from the publisher:

The end of the Cold War gave way to a fundamental shift in the structure of the international system. It was an era characterized above all by liberal triumphalism in which Western politicians and policymakers turned to international organizations (IOs) to spread and reinforce liberal values. These IOs, backed by the West, proliferated at exceedingly high rates, with democracies in particular becoming fully integrated members. Scholars agreed with policymakers, finding overwhelming evidence that these IOs were positive forces for democracy, and for several decades liberal democracy appeared ascendant. However, beginning around 2010, liberal democracy's forward march abruptly halted, and ongoing evidence of democratic backsliding ---an historically unprecedented phenomenon in which democratically elected officials erode liberal democratic institutions--- calls into question the post-Cold War narrative of liberal democratic triumphalism.

What explains democracy's sudden reversal of fortune and the emergence of this new form of democratic regression on the heels of unmatched international integration and support for liberal democracy? Eroding Democracy from the Outside In proposes a novel international-level theory of democratic backsliding. In the decades after the Soviet Union fell, IOs became not only much more common, but a certain subset of these organizations also gained unprecedented power and influence over domestic affairs and substantive, highly salient economic and political policy outcomes. One unintended consequence of this increased delegation of economic and political policy authority to powerful IOs has been that over time core domestic representative institutions, such as political parties and legislatures, have been eroded, while power has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of executives who represent their states at the international level. These weak institutions, unable to either represent citizens' wide-ranging interests or act as a check on growing executive power, have paved the way for would-be autocrats to consolidate their hold on the state. The result all too often has been democratic backsliding.

Visit Anna M. Meyerrose's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Radioactive Governance"

New from NYU Press: Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan by Maxime Polleri.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examines the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster

The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into the power plant’s surrounding environment when back-up systems failed and could not sufficiently cool the nuclear reactors. At least 164,000 people were permanently or temporarily displaced.

Radioactive Governance offers an ethnographic look at how the disaster was handled by Japan. Unlike prior nuclear-related narratives, such as those surrounding Chernobyl or Hiroshima, which focused on themes of harm, trauma, and victimization, the Japanese government consistently put forward a discourse of minimal or no radiation-related dangers, a gradual bringing home of former evacuees, a restarting of nuclear power plants, and the promotion of a resilient mindset in the face of adversity. This narrative worked to counter other understandings of recovery, such as those of worried citizens unsuccessfully fighting for permanent evacuation because they were afraid to go back to their homes.

Providing a rich theorization of how both governments and citizens shape narratives about catastrophic events, Radioactive Governance not only displays how Fukushima became a story of hope and resilience rather than of victimization, but also how radioactive governance shifted from the nuclear secrecy that characterized the Cold War era to relying on international organizations and domestic citizens to co-manage the aftermath of disasters.

Visit Maxime Polleri's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine?"

New from Princeton University Press: What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine?: A Philosophy of Addiction by Hanna Pickard.

About the book, from the publisher:

A revolutionary new paradigm for understanding addiction

Why do people with addiction use drugs self-destructively? Why don’t they quit out of self-concern? Why does the rat in the experiment, alone in a cage, press the lever again and again for cocaine—to the point of death? In this pathbreaking book, Hanna Pickard proposes a new paradigm for understanding the puzzle of addiction. For too long, our thinking has been hostage to a false dichotomy: either addiction is a brain disease, or it is a moral failing. Pickard argues that it is neither, and that both models stifle addiction research and fail people who need help.

Drawing on her expertise as an academic philosopher and her clinical work in a therapeutic community, Pickard explores the meaning of drugs for people with addiction and the diverse factors that keep them using despite the costs. People use drugs to cope with suffering—but also to self-harm, or even to die. Some identify as “addicts," while others are in denial or struggle with cravings and self-control. Social, cultural, and economic circumstances are crucial to explaining addiction—but brain pathology may also matter. By integrating addiction science with philosophy, clinical practice, and the psychology and voices of people with addiction themselves, Pickard shows why there is no one-size-fits-all theory or ethics of addiction. The result is a heterogeneous and humanistic paradigm for understanding and treating addiction, and a fresh way of thinking about responsibility, blame, and relationships with people who use drugs.

Visit Hanna Pickard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue