"White Lies"

New from Oxford University Press: White Lies: Dismantling Ten Cultural Myths About Race by Greg Garrett.

About the book, from the publisher:

A timely analysis of the myths that underpin white supremacy--and how to counteract them

For centuries, white men in the West have cultivated and perpetuated a set of false narratives about Black people in order to subjugate and maintain power over them. Some of these myths originated abroad but flourished in America, while others were cultivated solely on American soil. All of them, however, continue to find expression in the present as white supremacy strains to maintain its privilege.

These myths have been expressed in almost every form of discourse, from court rulings and sermons to literature and film to material culture and textbooks. They vary from the biological--Black Africans and their descendants are mentally inferior to whites--to the anthropological--Black Africans are incapable of governing themselves and require the supervision of whites--and all have helped to perpetuate Black Americans' enslavement, imprisonment, and exclusion.

White Lies analyzes ten of the most dangerous and pervasive of these myths and observes how they still emerge in political discourse, legislation, pop culture, and religion. This racist rhetoric is present in the words of Abraham Lincoln, George Wallace, and Donald Trump, and the power of white Christian nationalism often evokes these myths, sometimes so subtly listeners may not be conscious of how they are being manipulated. White Lies connects the dots between past narratives, images, and ideas, and present speech about violence, urban life, the suburbs, voter and welfare fraud, and white saviors. It explores myths that individuals and communities may employ to avoid confronting racism, including the notion that America is either post-racial or that white people are the group most liable to suffer discrimination. While these myths continue to spread, White Lies also notes some of the powerful competing narratives which seek to correct them.

Follow Greg Garrett on Facebook.

The Page 99 Test: Entertaining Judgment.

Writers Read: Greg Garrett (June 2017).

The Page 99 Test: Living with the Living Dead.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lies That Bind Us"

New from Cornell University Press: The Lies That Bind Us: Nationalism and History Textbooks by Ahsan I. Butt.

About the book, from the publisher:

In The Lies That Bind Us, Ahsan I. Butt explores how history textbooks become battlegrounds of national belonging, borders, and memory.

History education has always sparked fierce debate. Disagreements erupt not just over what to include but whose version to tell―how proud or shameful episodes are portrayed; who bears responsibility; and which voices are heard or silenced. These fights are typically domestic, but when a state's past involves international conflict, the stakes―and the critics―multiply.

Butt delves into such flashpoints in his analysis of the politics of history textbooks. He first disaggregates national identity into three dimensions: boundaries of membership, space, and time. He then considers how each dimension is addressed in narratives of race and immigration across US history textbooks; territorial conflicts in Argentinean and Chilean textbooks; and finally, imperial legacies and independence struggles in Indian and Pakistani textbooks. As book bans and curriculum wars roil classrooms worldwide, The Lies That Bind Us exposes the varieties of nationalism driving textbook battles and how they shape not just which histories students learn but what kind of nation a country becomes.

Visit Ahsan I. Butt's homepage.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Perturbed System"

New from the University of Chicago Press: A Perturbed System: Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World by Susannah Crockford.

About the book, from the publisher:

A moving study of how religion shapes Western climate discourse.

Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we’ve built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate change as anything but the end of the world, an apocalypse with all its biblical trappings. Why?

In A Perturbed System, anthropologist Susannah Crockford argues that we must understand the climate emergency as a spiritual crisis, a result of Christian colonialism that we (religious or not) still struggle to describe without religious language. Climate discourse in the United States and northern Europe, Crockford shows, is framed by the same theological motifs that drove extraction, including ideas about prophecy, mediation, sacrifice, original sin, cult, messiah, and apocalypse. By listening to people on the edge of the crisis, A Perturbed System reveals a world in transition, what happens when worlds end—ecologically, socially, politically, and personally—and how we might live through these endings together.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rebellious Follower"

New from Oxford University Press: Rebellious Follower: China's Search for Science, Technology, and Innovation by Andrew B. Kennedy.

About the book, from the publisher:

How does China pursue science, technology, and innovation? China has emerged as a leading technology power in recent years, and its policies shape issues ranging from geopolitical rivalry to climate change to artificial intelligence. Yet if China's pursuit of science, technology, and innovation (STI) is important, its path is also puzzling. Since 1949, China's party-state has adopted a bewildering array of policymaking approaches in an effort to transform the country into a world science and technology leader. How can we understand the remarkably winding road China has travelled?

Rebellious Follower: China's Search for Science, Technology, and Innovation illuminates major shifts in Chinese STI policymaking since the communist revolution, leveraging concepts from political science and public policy. Focusing on the "policy paradigms" that have driven Chinese policymaking in the STI domain, the book highlights two globally influential paradigms from the past century. The book explores how Chinese policymakers have resisted these belief systems at times while adapting them at others. In that way, they have made their country a rebellious follower of foreign ideas.

This new theoretical framework offers fresh insights into critical episodes in Chinese history, ranging from the formation of China's scientific establishment in the 1950s to the rise of "innovation-driven development" in the 21st century. Combining cutting-edge theoretical analysis with broad historical scope, the book offers a unique perspective on China's rise as a world leader in science, technology, and innovation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"China's Aristocratic Age"

New from Princeton University Press: China's Aristocratic Age: Politics and Power in the Springs-and-Autumns Period by Yuri Pines.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new perspective on the Springs-and-Autumns period, China’s longest experiment with polycentrism

The Springs-and-Autumns period (770–453 BCE)—the longest aristocratic age in Chinese history—marks a break from what is often associated with the normative orientations of Chinese political life. During this era, political fragmentation was regarded as acceptable, many states transitioned to oligarchic forms of rule, political participation by lower strata was allowed, pedigree mattered more than ability in determining an individual’s career, and the concept of the Mandate of Heaven had little to do with the notion of universal rule. Indeed, in many respects, the politics of this period inverted traditional Chinese political values. In China’s Aristocratic Age, Yuri Pines offers a new history of the Springs-and-Autumns period, arguing that it should be considered on its own terms rather than simply as a precursor for the centralized and bureaucratized Warring States era that followed.

Pines draws on textual, archaeological, and paleographic sources, many of them newly discovered, to examine the political dynamics of the era, which he terms China’s longest experiment with a polycentric world and society. Efforts during this period to establish a viable multistate order, overcome the weaknesses of monarchial rule, and moderate coercive methods of governance have been largely regarded as unsuccessful. Pines explores the consequences of these perceived failures and analyzes the ways negative views of China’s polycentrism contributed to its later quest for political unity and centralization. Pines’s account sheds new light on the Springs-and-Autumns period both within its own contemporaneous context and within the long durée of Chinese history.

Visit Yuri Pines's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Everlasting Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Crime Gone Viral"

New from NYU Press: Crime Gone Viral: Eyewitnessing in a Digital Age by Karen G. Weiss.

About the book, from the publisher:

Highlights crime eyewitnesses who use digital technologies to record, share, and watch crime online

In the digital age, crime and efforts to control crime have been transformed by the ability of ordinary citizens to “witness” crime remotely and intervene through smartphones and computer screens. Crime Gone Viral shines a spotlight on the digital witnesses who record, share and watch crime online to elucidate how their responses impact crime outcomes. With the ability to see crime for themselves and digitally intervene from afar, digital witnesses play outsized roles in social control as both capable guardians who help, and as incapable guardians who make matters worse. Digital witnesses also play important roles as storytellers who inform and shape public perceptions about crime and criminal justice.

By placing crime witnesses front and center, Weiss provides a bold and critical framework that challenges existing criminological research that assumes third parties deter crime by virtue of their presence and problematizes traditional ways of thinking about third party social control. Drawing from original survey data and providing examples of real-life criminal cases from both traditional news media and social media to illustrate and analyze digital responses to crime, Weiss identifies three digital witness types: Samaritans, Voyeurs, and Vigilantes. Together, these witness types form the basis of a theoretical framework meant to provide a more nuanced understanding of third-party participation in social control and punishment in the digital age. Ultimately, Crime Gone Viral provides a necessary and comprehensive understanding of crime in the 21st century aimed at developing a theoretical, empirical, and practical understanding of what it means to witness crime in a digital age.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unruly Fertility"

New from Stanford University Press: Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics by T.D. Harper-Shipman.

About the book, from the publisher:

As sexual and reproductive repression increases around the world, engaging with reproductive politics has become acutely urgent. This reproductive repression exists alongside pervasive economic precarity, untenable costs of living, and pressing demands for higher labor productivity. What feels like the emergence of a novel reproductive and economic dystopia, however, is a long-lasting reality for poor Black women globally. Comparing Senegal and North Carolina, T.D. Harper-Shipman shows how states and markets turn to poor Black women's fertility to assuage economic and social crises that would otherwise expose the failings of modern political economy. Moving through formative moments that draw reproductive health, gender, race, and labor into closer proximity―from the transatlantic slave trade through to the present―Harper-Shipman argues that reproductive health policies are instruments for national and international elites to regulate resource distribution and recreate future stores of differentiated labor across time and space.

Unruly Fertility attends to the innovative and unconventional forms of resistance that poor Black women use to decouple their productive and reproductive labor from state efforts to manage their fertility. These discreet forms of resistance establish new possibilities that scaffold decolonial reproductive politics. Harper-Shipman compels us to view reproductive politics as an enduring battle over which bodies deserve the fruits of modernity, and which bodies get perpetually marked as the vehicles for carrying all of humanity forward.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Subversion and Seduction"

New from Oxford University Press: Subversion and Seduction: China's Economic Statecraft by Audrye Wong.

About the book, from the publisher:

China has consistently sought to wield economic clout in its quest for global geopolitical influence. Yet, as the book shows in convincing detail, this use of economic statecraft has seen varying degrees of effectiveness, with results less successful than commonly assumed.

Subversion and Seduction examines the reasons why economic statecraft only works some of the time, showing that outcomes depend on both the inducement strategy and the target country's political setting. Audrye Wong folds China's numerous economic inducements into two strategic categories--"subversive carrots" and "legitimate seduction"--and then examines how public accountability mechanisms in recipient countries can facilitate or impede the effectiveness of such inducements. Drawing on detailed case studies, extensive field research, and a survey experiment, she diagnoses China's setbacks in gaining geoeconomic influence, but also highlights its successes in achieving short-term transactional goals and driving wedges between and within countries. Her analysis emphasizes the important role recipient countries can play in shaping and constraining China's influence. By developing a theory of China's economic statecraft, the book sheds light on how and when China can use its economic might to reshape US-China relations and the international system as a whole.

Visit Audrye Wong's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Order of Business"

New from Columbia University Press: Monstrous Conceptions: A History of Race, Disability, and Reproductive Medicine in the United States by Miriam Rich.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the nineteenth century, American medical practitioners helped craft a new science of monsters. The term “monstrous birth” had long been applied to newborns with congenital conditions such as anencephaly. When practitioners redefined “monstrosity” in scientific terms, they claimed to be stripping away its fraught connotations. Instead, recast as a biological phenomenon, the monster gained new social and cultural salience. Monstrosity gave form to pervasive ideas about the meaning of racial difference, the fragility of racial order, and the peril of racial degeneration.

Miriam Rich explores the history of monstrosity as a modern scientific category, tracing the practices that transformed newborn bodies into medical specimens across the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Monstrous Conceptions vividly examines experiences of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care; the preparation and display of anatomical specimens; and the production and circulation of scientific knowledge. It shows how diverse laywomen and their families engaged with medical meaning making even as predominantly white, male practitioners increasingly sought to assert authority over reproduction. Rich also reveals how the nineteenth-century category of biological monstrosity helped lay the groundwork for the American eugenics movement―and contributed to ideas about deviant and defective bodies that still haunt us today. Shedding new light on intertwined historical conceptions of race, sex, and disability, Monstrous Conceptions illuminates how medical science produced enduring notions of human difference.

Visit Miriam Rich's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Post-Liberal Peace"

New from Cornell University Press: A Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management by Monalisa Adhikari.

About the book, from the publisher:

In A Post-Liberal Peace, Monalisa Adhikari shows how rising powers like India and China are reshaping global peace governance. Over recent decades, both countries have deepened engagement with institutions built on liberal principles, including those related to peacebuilding. Their growing role raises critical questions about how their approaches diverge from liberal models and their impact on the domestic politics of conflict-affected states.

Focusing on India and China's involvement in peace processes in Nepal and Myanmar, Adhikari demonstrates that these powers advance distinctive, state-centered programs that privilege regional stakeholders, stability, development, and pragmatism. Operating under conditions of "negotiated coexistence" with liberal peacebuilders, their initiatives neither fully align with nor openly contest existing actors, limiting cooperation while avoiding confrontation. This pluralized form of international engagement enables domestic elites to resist external pressures, producing hybrid peace orders that incorporate some liberal elements yet remain largely at the status quo―and often illiberal.

Rich with archival and interview evidence, A Post-Liberal Peace sheds light on alternative forms of peacebuilding and their on-the-ground effects in an increasingly multipolar world.

--Marshal Zeringue