"Need/Emergency"

New from Stanford University Press: Need/Emergency: Political Theater in Exigent Times by Benjamin Lewis Robinson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Modern politics is preoccupied with states of emergency. Yet emergency politics obscures underlying socioeconomic, infrastructural, and ecological conditions of need. Prompted by Hannah Arendt's claim that theater is "the political art par excellence," Benjamin Lewis Robinson treats this political perplexity as a theatrical problem. In the company of political thinkers including Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School, Rosa Luxemburg and Martin Heidegger, Robinson revisits the entwined histories of politics and theater, analyzing plays that stage the political scene as an always asymmetrical coupling of need and emergency.

In Arendt's view, the defining tendency in modern politics is for need to emerge where it has no right to appear, posing a threat to politics as such. In contrast, the works of theater addressed in Need/Emergency concern moments when, whether it ought to or not, need does appear―demanding justice. Writing in exigent times, Elfriede Jelinek, Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, and Friedrich Hölderlin produced formally innovative political theater. Not reducible to the drama of emergency, these plays bring into focus the very need for politics. Moving fluently between theory and theater, Robinson offers a critical study of biopolitics and emergency politics in times of poverty, plague, infrastructural predation, and forced displacement, from the French Revolution to the climate crisis.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Greenlining of Staten Island"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Greenlining of Staten Island: Environmental Preservation and Racial Segregation, 1945–1995 by Patrick D. Nugent.

About the book, from the publisher:

Illuminates how borough residents, urban planners, and politicians used environmental policy to cement a racially restrictive landscape.

Though it was once home to the world’s largest landfill, today Staten Island boasts thousands of acres of parklands, dozens of public-private conservation arrangements, and four ecological zoning districts. In this book, Patrick D. Nugent details the political forces that gave rise to this wealth of greenery in a famously dense city. He demonstrates how postwar economic and political trajectories intersected in the 1960s with the rising consciousness of environmentalism to create a distinctive laboratory in Staten Island, where white communities and politicians heeded the rising call for the preservation of green space―but often as a tool to maintain racial segregation. Ecological zoning, public-private park management, conservation easement, environmental litigation, and other strategies created a lush, discriminatory landscape. Nugent refers to these policies as greenlining.

The Greenlining of Staten Island shows that the political and environmental history of Staten Island is key to understanding how environmentalism has been used to reinforce racial discrimination, not just in New York City, but nationwide. By the mid-1970s, conservationists had embraced urban planning that preserved low-density housing districts and bolstered the sprawling and segregated landscape that took shape in metropolitan America over the coming decades. In exploring the gap between the modern environmental movement’s ambitious goals and its tangible outcomes, Nugent excavates important lessons for contemporary city dwellers debating zoning reform and planning for climate change’s impending effects.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712"

New from Oxford University Press: Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662–1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange by Nat Cutter.

About the book, from the publisher:

From the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth century, a wide network of English-speaking men, women, and children took up residence in the Ottoman Maghrebi regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. There they formed expatriate communities, engaged with the societies around them, and undertook their businesses, from trading to captivity redemption to international politics.

Moving beyond official diplomatic records and printed texts, this book delves into thousands of personal letters and financial records, where we find friendship, conflict, adoration, derision, manipulation, and scandal across cultures and countries. In so doing, it offers new ways of thinking about British-Maghrebi relations in a transitional age for global trade and military-naval power, moving beyond plaintive consular complaints, gunboat diplomacy, and brutal captivity to accommodate positive cooperation and mutual benefit.

These expatriates became embedded mediators, hybridised European and Ottoman cultural forms, and experienced distanciation from both homeland and hostland to enjoy and manipulate both. For them, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were not solely sites for danger or exploitation but, as peace was progressively established with each regency, increasingly places for pragmatic cooperation, personal and professional advancement, commercial success, and enjoyment.

Expansive networks of correspondence and cooperation around the Maghreb, Mediterranean, and Britain embedded the expatriates in a cross-cultural trade in material goods and information and allowed them to manipulate the course of trade and diplomacy between Britain and the Maghreb. The expatriates were less marginal, miserable, and misbehaving Britons and more embedded, canny, Mediterranean actors.

Visit Nat Cutter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers"

New from NYU Press: Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers: Jewish Life in Small-Town Vermont by Margaret K. Nelson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Provides a rare study of Jews in small town America

For many years, histories of Jews in the United States focused on Jewish migrants who settled in large cities. Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers offers a rare study of Jews in small town America, illuminating the experiences of Jewish families in towns where they constituted one of, at most, a few Jewish families. In particular, the volume explores the occupational niches of Jews in rural Vermont, from peddling to the ownership of junk yards and dry goods stores that were disparagingly known as “the Jew Store.”

The book also looks specifically at the experiences of Jewish women and children in families headed by men in these occupations. These families lived in communities where they were often isolated from relatives and friends, and without a Jewish congregation. Margaret K. Nelson carefully investigates various aspects of this small-town experience, including how generations of immigrants were regarded by others, how they held onto the practice of their religion, and how they were able to socially integrate into their communities.

By narrating the trajectory of Jewish immigrant experiences through men’s occupations, the volume places the experiences of Jews in Vermont alongside those of other marginalized groups, particularly the families of Chinese restaurant owners and South Asian motel managers, as they established and sustained their own distinctive economic activities in small towns.

Showcasing the largely unexplored history of Jews in very small towns, Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers provides a novel account of Jewish community and belonging as minorities in rural communities.

Learn more about Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Parenting Out of Control.

The Page 99 Test: Like Family.

The Page 99 Test: Keeping Family Secrets.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Pierogi"

New from Columbia University Press: Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food by Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann.

About the book, from the publisher:

Today, pierogi are the most recognizable Polish food in the United States and a symbol of Polish American identity. How did this humble dish attain such lofty status?

Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann explores the surprising history of pierogi, tracing how Polish cuisine evolved in the multiethnic landscape of the United States. When Polish immigrants crossed the ocean, they brought with them their traditional cuisine, which came to signify enduring attachment to homeland, family, religion, and culture. In time, they as well as new generations and new immigrant waves gradually transformed Polish American culinary culture, reflecting food trends and changes in the United States, Poland, and the world.

Pierogi takes readers into the kitchens where Polish American families, friends, and community organizations carry on the custom of cooking and eating together. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann highlights small- and large-scale pierogi producers who adapted traditional dishes for the US market and food celebrities who mainstreamed them, and she traces the symbolic representation of pierogi in popular culture. She also shares personal stories, from her family’s resourcefulness in communist-era Poland facing near-constant food shortages to her experiences as an immigrant to the United States in the 1980s. Drawing on sources from historical and recent cookbooks to interviews with Polish American entrepreneurs and community members, this book offers new insights for anyone interested in East Central European and American foodways.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Social Ladders"

New from Oxford University Press: Social Ladders: Urban Inequality and the Ideal of Social Mobility by Anthony Miro Born.

About the book, from the publisher:

Social Ladders offers a new understanding of a core ideal in political, public, and academic discourses on low-income neighbourhoods: that of promoting upward mobility. It explores the contradictions between the lofty promises of social mobility in marginalised areas, its ambivalent politics and its complex manifestations in people's lived experiences. The analysis put forward in this book invites readers to fundamentally question upward mobility as an effective strategy for enhancing social justice in marginalised neighbourhoods.

Drawing on international case studies as well as in-depth fieldwork in Germany, the book depicts the ideal of social mobility from multiple perspectives. Social Ladders, then, is not only an account of how the language of social mobility is used and abused as a way of ignoring the primary needs and problems of disadvantaged communities. It also argues that to understand its divisive nature and hidden costs, we need to hear from more than just the few who have 'made it' up the ladder to social and economic success. We must also include the voices of those commonly seen as having been 'left behind'.

Visit Anthony Miro Born's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fate in My Hands"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union by Yana Skorobogatov.

About the book, from the publisher:

A striking examination of the death penalty in the Soviet Union that documents in heart-rending detail how its citizens, hopeful for a new life post-Stalin, lost faith that their transgressions could be forgiven.

From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly forty thousand citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period―women and men of all ages and backgrounds―who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness.

Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. She offers a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Politics of Counter-Terror"

New from Stanford University Press: The Politics of Counter-Terror: Islam and Security in the Postcolonial Muslim State by Nicholas Chan.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is a fundamental paradox in counter-terrorism: while Muslim state elites insist that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, the way Muslim states deal with terrorism has everything to do with Islam. In countries like Morocco and Tunisia, terrorism is treated by governments as if it is a religious problem. Elsewhere, in Malaysia, Islamic actors are relied upon to conduct "deradicalization" programs, Islamic institutions are the key authors of counter-radicalization materials, and Islamic expertise is often considered interchangeable with counter-terror expertise. These findings draw attention to a security logic whereby Islam and Islamic interventions have become central to solving the problem of terrorism. In this theoretically innovative and empirically rich book, Nicholas Chan argues that Malaysia's "Islamized" counter-terrorism is an outcome filtered through a matrix of factors, including postcolonial elite status-seeking, modernist state-building, and the immediacies of governmental problem-solving. Chan fills a void in the Western-centric Global War on Terror literature that often fails to examine what happens when Muslim actors must wage a "war" not of their making but strongly tied to their identity, security, and status. This book's original findings will interest scholars and students of security, international relations, area studies, and Muslim politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"This One Will Be Different"

New from Oxford University Press: This One Will Be Different: False Promises and Fiscal Realities of Publicly Funded Stadiums by J.C. Bradbury.

About the book, from the publisher:

For more than a century, America's sports stadiums have evolved from modest, private ballparks into billion-dollar play-palaces for the rich-built increasingly on the backs of taxpayers. Government commitments to major-league venues are approaching $50 billion, and a looming wave of new construction threatens to double public outlays by the end of the next decade. Elected leaders justify the massive subsidies by arguing that stadiums are economic catalysts, despite overwhelming evidence that sports venues are unwise public investments.

Why does this keep happening? The refrain is always the same: This one will be different. The Atlanta Braves's Truist Park in Cobb County, Georgia is the latest example. Marketed as a game-changing mixed-use development that would create a year-round economic hub, the project has fallen far short of its boosters' lofty projections-just like all the venues that came before it.

In This One Will Be Different, sports economist J.C. Bradbury draws from decades of academic research and his up-close and personal experiences with the Cobb Braves stadium deal to elucidate why publicly funded venues never deliver on their promises. Moving beyond the standard explanations of monopoly leagues and special-interest lobbying, Bradbury reveals how pliable politicians-drawn to the prestige and perks of professional sports-buck the will of their constituents to approve increasingly generous taxpayer handouts to billionaire team owners.

Authoritative yet accessible, this book blends economic analysis, political insight, and vivid storytelling to examine why politicians continue to fall for the stadium grift and presents practical steps for reform. Bradbury argues that improved transparency, greater understanding, and giving voters a direct say at the ballot box have the potential to break the stadium subsidy cycle.

Visit J.C. Bradbury's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Silk Roads, Steppe Roads"

New from Princeton University Press: Silk Roads, Steppe Roads: History Unearthed from the Tombs of Medieval China by Jonathan Karam Skaff.

About the book, from the publisher:

An innovative study of medieval Chinese tombs that provides new insights into the history of Eurasian cultural contact and exchange

Silk Roads, Steppe Roads takes the reader on a journey to three sites in northwestern China and Mongolia to investigate medieval Chinese tombs containing evidence of Eastern Eurasian cultural contacts and exchanges. The construction, artifacts, and texts on paper and stone found at these tombs of the Sui (581–618) and early Tang (618–907) dynasties reveal glimpses of people, rituals, and objects that were in motion on the Silk and Steppe roads until being laid to rest over a millennium ago.

Jonathan Karam Skaff shows how the major transit hubs of the Silk and Steppe roads were particularly active sites of cultural contestation, experimentation, and mutual influence that had an impact on the historical development of China and Inner Asia. Challenging the idealized image of the Silk Road, he also examines travel permits and sales contracts that document the trade of enslaved people over the route.

Innovatively drawing on both textual and archaeological sources, Silk Roads, Steppe Roads shows how Eurasian peoples, despite believing their societies to be unique, spun overlapping and entangled webs of culture.

--Marshal Zeringue