"The Brothel and Beyond"

New from Penn State University Press: The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice by Saundra Weddle.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Brothel and Beyond deepens our understanding of women’s engagement in urban life through a close study of Venice’s sex trade. Centering questions of gender, agency, and mobility, it reveals how sex workers were embedded in the social and spatial fabric of the city.

From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the Venetian government attempted to control commercial sex by segregating it in municipal brothels in Rialto and later by minimizing the public’s contact with sex workers, limiting their profits, and cracking down on recruitment. These decentralized efforts proved ineffective, and women who performed this labor lived and worked throughout the city. This book traces the diffusion of sex work from the brothels to the alleys, gondola landings, taverns, bathhouses, and peripheral squares of Venice. Saundra Weddle uses legislation, criminal records, contemporary chronicles, and other archival sources to reconstruct the networks of sex workers, procuresses, clients, landlords, and others who facilitated or profited from their labor. Using maps and photographs of key sites, Weddle demonstrates how the built environment both constrained and enabled women’s practices, offering an alternative urban history that foregrounds embodied experiences and vernacular spaces.

By assigning new meanings to everyday locations and spatial conditions, this study challenges monument- and elite-centered narratives of Venice and redefines the place of women within its urban history. It will be of interest to scholars of architectural and urban history, women and gender studies, early modern social history, and Italian studies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rewriting Rights"

New from Oxford University Press: Rewriting Rights: Making Reasonable Mistakes in a Social Context by Renée Jørgensen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Promising, consenting, and even attacking someone are ways to 'rewrite' our rights, permitting others to treat us in ways that would otherwise have violated the duties they owe us. When unsure whether such a change has been made, we face 'normative opacity'. Incorrect guesses cause injurious mistakes, thus requiring an urgent assessment of the responsibility we have to each other in responding to normative opacity. Rewriting Rights highlights the social dimension of this question: at scale, any bias in the error tendencies of the rules we use yields uneven distributions of actual harm. At the individual level this problem is intractable: we can't do better than responsibly following our best evidence, even when this predictably leads us to make mistakes that injure marginalised groups-in particular women and Black men-at disproportionate rates. Analogizing the problem to safe driving, Jørgensen argues that we must coordinate to adequately control the risks we pose to each other.

The book's main project is to construct and defend a standard for navigating uncertainty about rights-changes that is not overly demanding but avoids compounding extant gender and racial bias. It offers a characterization that is essentially social, mediated by convention, and communicated through social signals. Jørgensen argues that when carefully constrained, social norms can significantly resolve normative opacity-and urges that it is only by recognizing this that we can reform the unjust norms that shape our conception of which mistakes are reasonable.

Visit Renée Jørgensen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Property Disobedience as Protest"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Property Disobedience as Protest: Rethinking Political Nonviolence by William E. Scheuerman.

About the book, from the publisher:

William E. Scheuerman’s book explores when, if ever, politically motivated property harms are justifiable

In 2020, Black Lives Matter activists toppled Confederate monuments and occasionally vandalized police vehicles and stations. Climate activists have damaged natural gas pipelines and famous artworks. In Hong Kong, pro-democracy students targeted businesses sympathetic to the mainland government. On January 6, 2021, far-right groups at the US Capitol mistreated public and private property as part of their efforts to disrupt finalizing election results. Property damage constitutes an increasingly commonplace feature of global political protest. How then to interpret and evaluate its proliferation? The media regularly describes such acts as “violent,” as do most scholars. However, William E. Scheuerman’s book pushes back against conflating politically motivated violations of property rights with violence. Political violence has no place in democratic politics. Yet indiscriminately grouping property damage together with acts destructive of and harmful to persons is conceptually confusing and politically misleading. After all, Americans celebrate the Boston Tea Party. So why do most of us now categorically condemn many seemingly parallel acts?

Scheuerman tackles challenging and politically timely questions. When, if ever, are politically motivated property harms justifiable? What standards should we expect of those pursuing them to meet, under democratic conditions? How are those standards undermined by the rise of authoritarian populism around the world? Focusing on identifiably nonviolent varieties of what Scheuerman calls property disobedience, his book explores a variety of real-life examples, both past and present, to understand how and why such acts may be politically justifiable―or should instead be viewed as beyond the pale.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reimagining Aid"

New from Stanford University Press: Reimagining Aid: Foreign Donors, Women’s Health, and New Paths for Development in Cambodia by Mary-Collier Wilks.

About the book, from the publisher:

It was long assumed that Western liberal democracy and free-market capitalism held all the answers for development and national progress. Today, in the face of growing inequality and global power imbalances, this post–Cold War narrative has faltered. New players on the international scene, many from South and East Asia, have emerged to vie for influence and offer new models of development. Despite these recent changes, however, prominent international aid organizations still work under the assumption there are one-size-fits-all best practices. In Reimagining Aid, Wilks takes readers to Cambodia, a country at the heart of this transformation. Through a vivid, multi-sited ethnography, the book investigates the intricate interplay between aid donors from Japan and the United States, their competing priorities, and their impact on women's health initiatives in Cambodia. Cambodian development actors emerge not just as recipients of aid, but as key architects in redefining national advancement in hybrid, regional terms that juxtapose "Asia" to the "West." This book is a clarion call for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars to rethink what development means in a multipolar world. A must-read for anyone invested in Southeast Asia's role in global affairs and evolving definitions of gender in development, Reimagining Aid is a powerful reminder that the next chapter of global advancement is being written in unexpected places.

Visit Mary-Collier Wilks's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Winning It Back"

New from Cornell University Press: Winning It Back: Restoration Presidents and the Cycle of American Politics by David A. Crockett.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Winning It Back, David A. Crockett explores why presidents who promise to set things aright―to "restore"―so often usher in the opposite.

Since the earliest days of the United States, presidencies have seemingly unfolded in a cyclical manner, with features from prior eras recurring in later ones. Building on the idea of "political time"―that presidential terms fall within particular regime cycles―Crockett shows that presidents often fall into one of two roles: opposition presidents and restoration presidents. Opposition presidents belong to the political party not representing the dominant governing philosophy of a specific political era―for example, Republican presidents during the New Deal era (e.g., Eisenhower, Nixon) and Democratic presidents during the Reagan era (e.g., Clinton, Obama). Restoration presidents, conversely, belong to the dominant party, come to power after opposition presidents and, as such, face the task of "restoring" the dominant party's governing agenda.

But that return is rarely smooth. Restoration presidents―like Kennedy after Eisenhower, or George W. Bush after Clinton―inherit both the hope of a comeback and the burden of pent-up expectations. Crockett argues that these leaders often overreach in their urgency to restore what was, inadvertently setting the stage for backlash and, eventually, the unraveling of their own political order.

With sharp historical analysis and a wide-angle view of presidential politics from Jackson to today, Winning It Back offers timely insights on leadership legacies and the risks of nostalgia―and a clarion call for what (and who) may come next.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Windrush Cricket"

New from Oxford University Press: Windrush Cricket: Imperial Culture, Caribbean Migration, and the Remaking of Postwar England by Michael Collins.

About the book, from the publisher:

How did the 'quintessentially English' game of cricket come to be so important across Britain's Caribbean empire? As empire declined and gave way to complex patterns of migration, what part did cricket play in the life of the Windrush generation in post-war Britain?

Following the work of the great Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James, much has been written about the profound importance of cricket for the development of social and cultural life within the Anglophone Caribbean. And yet, from at least the 1930s, black West Indian cricketers were celebrated far beyond the Caribbean, in England and across empire. Cricket was in fact a major factor shaping imperial ideas about black people--how they looked and behaved, what their imagined characteristics and traits were--placing the West Indies, as the Caribbean islands were then known, within a racialised, hierarchical structure of cricket-loving peoples, alongside the colonies of white settlement: South Africa, New Zealand, Australia.

During World War II, black West Indians played prominent roles in the surprisingly large amount of cricket played in England, part of a wider propaganda effort to promote the idea of a multiracial empire, united in common cause against fascism. For post-Windrush arrivals after 1948, cricket was not just a peripheral pastime or a recreational footnote. Cricket was a cornerstone of black West Indian social and cultural life and self-empowerment in England, integral to the earliest creation of social and community groups and the development of support networks. Watching the West Indies international cricket team win on the field of play was just one part of the Windrush story. Through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the growth of an extensive network of Windrush cricket teams and clubs, and, by the 1970s, the evolution of Caribbean cricket leagues and competitions, created a subtle and multifaceted sense of being a West Indian in England. In due course, the children of Windrush migrants would seek to play cricket for England, challenging the very notion of what it means to be English.

Interweaving extensive archival and oral history research into an engaging, often surprising narrative about empire and postwar Britain, Windrush Cricket challenges a range of orthodoxies, arguing that cricket constituted a foundational, yet almost entirely ignored aspect of the way in which Windrush migrants settled and made new lives in postwar England.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Jim Crow in the Asylum"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South by Kylie M. Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is a complicated history of racism and psychiatric healthcare in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The asylums of the Jim Crow era employed African American men and women; served as places of treatment and care for African Americans with psychiatric illnesses; and, inevitably, were places of social control. Black people who lived and worked in these facilities needed to negotiate complex relationships of racism with their own notions of community, mental health, and healing.

Kylie M. Smith mixes exhaustive archival research, interviews, and policy analysis to offer a comprehensive look at how racism affected Black Southerners with mental illness during the Jim Crow era. Complicated legal, political, and medical changes in the late twentieth century turned mental health services into a battlefield between political ideology and psychiatric treatment approaches, with the fallout having long-term consequences for patient outcomes. Smith argues that patterns of racially motivated abuse and neglect of mentally ill African Americans took shape during this era and continue to the present day. As the mentally ill become increasingly incarcerated, Jim Crow in the Asylum reminds readers that, for many Black Southerners, having a mental illness was—and still is—tantamount to committing a crime.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Death and Life of Gentrification"

New from Princeton University Press: The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea by Japonica Brown-Saracino.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative account of what is gained and what is lost when a word that once narrowly referred to neighborhood change takes on a life all its own

Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification in the 1960s to mark the displacement of working-class residents in London neighborhoods by the professional classes. The Death and Life of Gentrification traces how the word has far outgrown Glass’s meaning, becoming a socially charged metaphor for cultural appropriation, upscaling, and the loss of authenticity.

In this lively and insightful book, Japonica Brown-Saracino traces how a concept originally intended to describe the brick-and-mortar transformation of neighborhoods has come to characterize transformations that have little to do with cities. She describes how journalists, artists, filmmakers, novelists, and academics use gentrification as a symbolic device to mourn how everyday pleasures and forms of self-expression—from music to marijuana, kale, and tattoos—entered the domain of the elite. She weighs the implications of turning to gentrification as a tool to tell stories, entertain audiences, and communicate political messages. Relying on vivid examples, the book reveals how the term today expresses widespread ambivalence about rising economic inequality and unease with a variety of forms of social change. This pathbreaking book forces us to think about whether the wide-ranging way we use gentrification dilutes its meaning and stymies efforts to identify and resist urban displacement.

Drawing on everything from film and television to novels and art, The Death and Life of Gentrification sheds critical light on the changing meaning of gentrification in contemporary life. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in gentrification and urban dynamics, as well as for readers curious about attitudes about growing income inequality and the evolution and circulation of ideas.

The Page 99 Test: A Neighborhood That Never Changes.

The Page 99 Test: How Places Make Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Belonging on Both Shores"

New from Stanford University Press: Belonging on Both Shores: Mobility, Migration, and the Bordering of the Persian Gulf by Lindsey R. Stephenson.

About the book, from the publisher:

For most of their history, the people around the Persian Gulf littoral were socially intertwined and economically interdependent. But the twentieth century ushered in nationalization projects, British imperial intervention, and border regulations, all of which posed challenges to everyday mobility in this oceanic world. Those crossing the water became the primary foil for bordering spaces, restricting and regulating movement, and defining difference more generally. Belonging on Both Shores tells the story of people's struggles to move freely between Iran and the Arab shores of the Gulf as the unregulated mobility that had characterized everyday life in the nineteenth century was increasingly policed in the twentieth.

Using a wide range of Arabic, Persian, and English sources, Lindsey Stephenson demonstrates how state officials refined notions of territorial belonging against the movement of Iranians, the most visible mobile "group" in the Persian Gulf arena. Engaging migrant voices, Stephenson narrates how Iranians challenged a perceived requirement to belong to a single place and highlights the techniques these migrants employed to remain connected to both shores. Tracing the movement of Iranians across and around the Persian Gulf and investigating how the technologies of state and mobility transformed fluidity and people's understanding of movement, this book tells a new story of how the modern Gulf was formed.

Visit Lindsey Stephenson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hobbes on Sex"

New from Oxford University Press: Hobbes on Sex by Susanne Sreedhar.

About the book, from the publisher:

Why care what Hobbes thought about sex? Contemporary scholars have largely dismissed Hobbes's brief, and somewhat scattered, remarks about gender and sexuality as peripheral to his central concerns. In Hobbes on Sex, the first book-length study of Hobbes's writings on these topics, Susanne Sreedhar challenges this dismissal.

Far from being haphazard or tangential, Hobbes's views on sex are integral to his broader philosophical-political project. Drawing out the underlying logic of his claims, this volume reconstructs a coherent, substantive, and distinctive account of sexual normativity from Hobbes's various remarks. It argues that, in stark contrast to many of his contemporaries and the traditions from which he emerges, Hobbes is logically committed to a view it calls sexual positivism. According to Hobbes, the nature and status of gender and sexuality--from the proper organization of marriage and the family, to prohibitions on sexual behaviors, to the differences between men and women, to the legitimacy of female rule--are entirely a matter of positive (i.e., civil) law. Because matters of gender and sexuality are the result of human action for Hobbes, they are fundamentally contingent and revisable. This contingency stands in contrast with the pervasive and entrenched ways both natural patriarchalism and sexual moralism were enthroned in much of early modern political theorizing. The volume argues that Hobbes's sexual positivism dethrones sex from its usual prominent position in the history of philosophy. By systematically stripping gender and sexuality of their privileged status, whether as a source of normativity or as a topic of inquiry, this dethroning of sex strikes at the heart of beliefs about human nature, moral knowledge, and social and political institutions that are widely accepted even today. This novel interpretation of Hobbes's views on sexual normativity not only challenges traditional understandings of the trajectory of early modern political thought, but it also suggests a new understanding of his place in the intellectual history of sex.

Visit Susanne Sreedhar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue