"African Pharmakon"

New from the University of Chicago Press: African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine from Slavery to the Return by Nana Osei Quarshie.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores how psychiatry in Ghana was never just about medicine; it was about migration, exile, and the politics of who gets to stay and who must be cast out.

For centuries, mental distress in West Africa has been subject to a mix of healing, harming, ritual, and regulation. In African Pharmakon, Nana Osei Quarshie questions conventional narratives about colonial psychiatry. Instead of displacing African therapeutic traditions, he argues, European psychiatric institutions in fact built upon them, adapting long-standing techniques of social control and healing.

With a focus on Ghana, Quarshie explores the shifting landscape of West African mental health practices, tracking their transformation from shrine-based rituals to colonial asylums and modern psychiatric institutions. Combining extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, including the first scholarly examination of patient records from the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, Quarshie identifies five enduring techniques that have shaped the treatment of mental distress: spiritual pawning, logging, manhunting, mass expulsion, and pharmacotherapy.

Rejecting the simplistic opposition of Indigenous healing versus colonial oppression, African Pharmakon provides a nuanced account of how psychiatric care in Ghana became a tool of empowerment as well as exclusion. This pioneering study reframes our understanding of psychiatry and mental health governance in West Africa, past and present.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Premodern Origins of Jihadi-Salafism"

Coming soon from Edinburgh University Press: The Premodern Origins of Jihadi-Salafism by Jaan Islam.

About the book, from the publisher:

What is Jihadi-Salafism and how does it relate to classical Islam? Scholars of Terrorism Studies argue that ‘Jihadism’ and Salafism are derivatives of Wahhābism and lie on the ideological margins of the Islamic tradition. This book challenges this narrative, demonstrating that concepts associated with the terms – including ‘divine sovereignty’, ‘jihad’ and ‘the caliphate’ – are utilised by Salafi Ulama in connection with the following disparate classical Islamic traditions: Shāfiʿite legal theory during the Mongol invasions; Ottoman and Indian anti-colonial Ḥanafite thought; Mālikite and Shāfiʿite ‘political jurisprudence’; and the literalism of the Yemeni luminary Muḥammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1834).

This is the first book to disaggregate linear histories of Jihadi-Salafism by shifting the focus from Wahhābism to Sunnism, including Māturīdite and Ashʿarite doctrinal schools and the ‘four schools’ of law. Based on archival research and interviews, it examines the thought of diverse Ulama, ranging from ʿAbdullah ʿAzzām to Abū Muḥammad al-Maqdisī. It highlights their profound commitment to the classical Islamic sciences, as well as their distinct interpretations of historical crises that befell the premodern Umma, ultimately articulating a vision for its future.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Creating an Informed Citizenry"

New from the University of Virginia Press: Creating an Informed Citizenry: Knowledge and Democracy in the Early American Republic by George D. Oberle III.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examining the early debates in the United States over how best to educate the constituents of the new nation.

When the founding fathers of the United States inaugurated a system of government that was unprecedented in the modern world, they knew that a functioning democracy required an educated electorate capable of making rational decisions. But who would validate the information that influenced citizens’ opinions? By spotlighting various institutions of learning, George Oberle provides a comprehensive look at how knowledge was created, circulated, and consumed in the early American republic.

Many of the founders, including George Washington, initially favored the creation of a centralized national university to educate Americans from all backgrounds. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, politicians moved away from any notion of publicly educated laypeople generating useful knowledge. The federal government ultimately founded the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, to be run by experts only. Oberle’s insightful analysis of the competing ideas over the nature of education offers food for thought as we continue to grapple with a rapidly evolving media landscape amid contested meanings of knowledge, expertise, and the obligations of citizenship.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Divine Hiddenness and Evidence for God"

New from Oxford University Press: Divine Hiddenness and Evidence for God by Charity Anderson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Along with the problem of evil, divine hiddenness presents one of the most important philosophical challenges to religious belief. Theists and nontheists alike grapple with the question of why God's existence isn't more obvious. The aim of this book is to formulate the problem of divine hiddenness as an evidential argument. A central theme is that we can make progress understanding the epistemic import of divine hiddenness if we model the hiddenness argument using Bayesian methods. One advantage to using evidential tools to frame the topic is that theists can agree with some of the core ideas that motivate interest in the topic: such as, that it is surprising that God's existence is not more obvious than it is. This is a thought with which theists can agree-without being pressured into atheism. The approach allows individuals on both sides of the issue to find more common ground.

Divine Hiddenness and Evidence for God advances discussion on several fronts. It uncovers various difficulties that arise in selecting which hiddenness facts to focus on and relocates disagreement to evaluation of the significance of the evidence. A central hiddenness fact concerns the distribution of theistic belief. One result of examining this data in the context of an evidential argument from hiddenness is that some facts which are typically advanced as challenges to theism-such as that there is non-belief-can turn out to have a different impact when we look at more robust data.

The book as a whole raises an important methodological question: can there be evidence against God for theists? While some theists have taken a hard stance against claims that anything is evidence against God, this work suggest theists are better off conceding that some phenomena are evidence against God, and that theists should be open to the possibility that divine hiddenness is among such evidence.

Visit Charity Anderson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Chinese American Mothering"

New from NYU Press: Chinese American Mothering: Toy Len Goon's Legacy and the Myth of the Model Minority by Andrea Louie.

About the book, from the publisher:

A journey from Chinese immigrant to “U.S. Mother of the Year” unpacks the roots of the model minority myth and its legacy

In 1952, Toy Len Goon, a Chinese immigrant widow who raised eight children while running their family laundry, was selected as U.S. Mother of the Year by the American Mother’s Committee of the Golden Rule Foundation. In Chinese American Mothering, Andrea Louie argues that Toy Len Goon's selection for this honor was more than an acknowledgement of her having raised eight successful children while running a business; rather she was chosen precisely because she was a Chinese American woman who could exemplify both the virtues of mothering and of American upward mobility. Her selection for the Mother of the Year honor can only be understood within the context of shifting representations of Chinese Americans during the Cold War era, and the accompanying assumptions about the strategic role that positive representations of Chinese Americans could have in extending U.S. influence in Asia.

Drawing upon immigration records, interviews, and secondary sources, as well as her positionality as Toy Len Goon’s granddaughter, Louie tells an expanded version of Toy Len Goon’s life story. Ultimately, Chinese American Mothering addresses themes of migration, gender, racialization, Americanization, and “success” through the evolving lens of the model minority myth.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Unruly Facts of Race"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate by Sunmin Kim.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reveals the surprising historical roots of US immigration policy and discourse.

Unfortunately, we’re all too familiar with the US’s legacy of maligning immigrants. Some Americans see immigrants as inherently threatening, a blank screen onto which the nation’s worst fears are projected. But this phenomenon is neither timeless nor static. Instead, it arose and transformed alongside the unprecedented arrival of immigrants in the early twentieth century—and the federal government’s response. In The Unruly Facts of Race, sociologist Sunmin Kim explains how American ideas about race and ethnicity were transformed in the early twentieth century as an unintended consequence of anti-immigrant mobilization.

Kim presents a wealth of archival evidence, including the proceedings of the 1907 Dillingham Commission, to reconstruct how competing racialized visions of nationhood evolved in the early twentieth-century immigration debate. Immigration restrictionist politicians believed that the United States should be a White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant nation. However, when they mobilized researchers—some of whom were women and/or immigrants—to gather data at a massive scale to rationalize their aims, they were met with unruly facts that did not support their racial project. Newer European immigrants, as the data showed, were not much different from descendants of earlier immigrants from northern Europe. When facts failed to support the vilification of immigrants, exclusionist politicians instead turned to race as a marker of ineluctable difference to justify their aims. This led to a new principle of national belonging: the United States transitioned to a country that encompassed various European groups, including Catholics and Jews, but excluded non-White immigrants, as they were deemed too different to become a part of the nation.

Kim’s analysis shows that throughout US history, the opportunity for belonging for some immigrants was predicated on the exclusion of others. His focus on the role of facts in the early twentieth century provides a refreshing take on why the so-called “nation of immigrants” has always demonized some immigrants while cherishing others, highlighting the selection and control of immigrants as the core principles of the American nation-building project. Amid a vitriolic explosion of American immigration discourse, Kim offers a needed corrective to and context for debates around who belongs in the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Brown and Blue"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935–2025 by Brian D. Behnken.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book offers a sweeping history of Mexican American interactions with law enforcement and the criminal justice system in the US Southwest. Looking primarily at Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, Brown and Blue tells a complex story: Violent, often racist acts committed by police against Mexican American people sparked protests demanding reform, and criminal justice authorities sometimes responded positively to these protests with measures such as recruiting Mexican Americans into local police forces and altering training procedures at police academies.

Brian D. Behnken demonstrates the central role that the struggle for police reform played in the twentieth-century Chicano movement, and the ways its relevance continues to the present. By linking social activism and law enforcement, Behnken illuminates how the policing issues of today developed and what reform remains to be done.

The Page 99 Test: Fighting Their Own Battles.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield"

New from Oxford University Press: Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield: Outside Wartime by Mirko Palestrino.

About the book, from the publisher:

Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield rethinks hegemonic understandings of military victory as the outcome of war by focusing on the relationship between victory and time. While International Relations and War Studies increasingly recognise that the boundaries between war and peace are blurry, military victory is still conceptualised as an event that brings war to cessation and restores peace.

Instead, this book argues that victory is a temporal, sense-making device. It shows that victory is produced just as much outside the battlefield as on it, during both wartime and peacetime. Palestrino demonstrates that the end of war has little to do with warfighting. Wars are made to end through a series of victory practices that seek to clearly mark a conflict's temporal boundaries to convince key audiences of its definitive outcome.

Analysing exhibitions of military tattoos, war memorials, commemoration rituals, doctrine manuals, history textbooks and videogames, this book shows that, as soon as we stop looking for victory in the usual places, a plurality of wartimes comes to the surface and the assumption that victory ends war is cast into doubt. It also shows that attending to these victory practices and their politics is important because they can appear to be peaceful yet conceal overlooked forms of violence.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Growing People"

New from Columbia University Press: Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey by Natalia Rogach Alexander.

About the book, from the publisher:

John Dewey is among history’s most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human development, whose vision of the centrality of education to democracy, philosophy, and flourishing can still inspire us today.

What can we learn from this great thinker as we face challenges such as widespread drudgery and disaffection, estrangement among individuals and groups, and a crisis of democracy? This book supplies the answers, offering a bold new account of Dewey as an educational theorist who is essential for our troubled times.

Revealing the true scope of Dewey’s educational vision, this book provides a new perspective on a neglected aspect of the philosophical tradition. Growing People presents an alternative canon―running from Plato to Rousseau to Du Bois―that recasts philosophy in terms of education and, in so doing, opens new pathways for social critique and the liberation of human potential.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Special Damage"

New from Stanford University Press: Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law by Jessica Lake.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from "civilised" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving "special damage." Smith should have lost her case, but her action set off a remarkable reform movement.

In Special Damage, Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Drawing upon original archival material, she tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called "whores." Lake reveals, for the first time, the cases brought by women that spurred and benefitted from these reforms. In doing so, she details how debates about women, speech, and reputation circulated through transnational common law networks, connecting countries, colonies, and continents.

The Slander of Women movement furthered legal protections for women, but also created links between ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization. Special Damage tells a compelling story that questions the costs and compromises of legal progress in a patriarchal and unequal "civilised" New World.

--Marshal Zeringue