"The Search for World Democracy"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Search for World Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Politics of Space by Adam Dahl.

About the book, from the publisher:

An incisive conceptual history of global democracy in the transnational political thought of W.E.B. Du Bois.

The Search for World Democracy traces the language of “world democracy” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s oeuvre, stretching from his early sociological writings to his later work on world peace and anticolonialism with and against the United Nations. Drawing on original archival research, several lesser-known writings, and most centrally Du Bois’s unpublished 1937 manuscript A World Search for Democracy, Adam Dahl places his unique approach to democratic theory within the transatlantic debates about the transformation of European imperial order in the twentieth century. Dahl shows how Du Bois’s vision of the spatial scale of democracy situated struggles for popular control, decolonization, industrial democracy, and racial enfranchisement in their shifting, multidimensional geographic contexts. Less a specific model of global governance than a radical politics of space and scale, Du Bois’s idea of world democracy challenges the boundaries between domestic and international politics by linking local sites of democratic struggle within and against the global color line. The Search for World Democracy shows how, for Du Bois, the radical transformation of the United States into a multiracial democracy would require an equally dramatic transformation of the imperial lineages of world politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Domesticated"

New from Oxford University Press: Domesticated: How Cultivated Species Altered Ancient Silk Road Societies by Alicia R. Ventresca-Miller.

About the book, from the publisher:

Domesticated uses novel archaeological methods to rewrite the narrative of the rise of social complexity in the western and eastern Eurasian steppe. Through the study of ancient proteins, DNA, and isotopes, as well as traditional archaeology, Alicia R. Ventresca-Miller tracks the adoption of domesticated animals and plants to show how cultivated species transformed societies during the eras preceding the Silk Road networks. Economies in this region shifted from hunting and gathering to the use of ruminant livestock, horse dairying and riding, and finally to the cultivation of grains, marking major thresholds in human history. Ventresca-Miller proposes a model for how this happened--from the initial introduction of the animal or plant to their acceptance, solidification, and intensification--and shows how each stage of development impacted the ways local communities interacted, settled in the landscape, and gave rise to new social structures.

The management of domesticated species and the alteration of landscapes allowed communities in north-central Asia to build complex societies and long-distance trading networks, which linked cities and supported Empires. In Domesticated, a nuanced narrative emerges, one that situates north-central Asia as a vital locale for the study of the adoption of domesticated species and underscores how these developments contributed to alternative forms of social complexity.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Irreconcilable"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Contemporary Canada by Joseph Weiss.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since the early 2000s, the Canadian government has attempted reconciliation with Indigenous Nations through varied efforts: treaty processes, government commissions, rebranding campaigns for settler-owned businesses, workshops for state and local officials, school curriculum changes, and a recently christened national holiday. However, Joseph Weiss argues, these state-driven initiatives reinforce Indigenous subordination to the settler state. This incisive study of the varied responses from both Indigenous Nations and individuals illuminates how reconciliation is implicated in ongoing colonial erasure.

Critically engaging with a variety of fields, including Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, political theory, semiotics, and museum studies, Weiss captures the multiple scales at which these contested dynamics unfold and explores their underlying technologies of erasure. Irreconcilable unpacks how reconciliation offers amends for anti-Indigenous violence while disavowing responsibility for that violence, and argues that settler promises of reconciliation cannot be reconciled to the fact of Indigenous sovereignty. Nevertheless, Weiss illustrates how Indigenous Peoples refuse erasure at every turn, instead building alternate futures and lived worlds that are not always already colonially overdetermined.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lowest Freedom"

New from Columbia University Press: The Lowest Freedom: Racial Capitalism and Black Thought in the Nineteenth Century by Justin Leroy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Throughout the nineteenth century, Black thinkers grappled with the material limits of freedom. They insisted that emancipation without economic self-determination would reproduce the inequalities of slavery, arguing that true freedom required not only civil rights and suffrage but also defending the rights of workers and curbing the power of capital. They concluded that free Black life could not flourish in conditions of labor exploitation and economic deprivation.

The Lowest Freedom is an intellectual history of how economic dispossession shaped the meaning of freedom in Black thought from antebellum abolitionism to the rise of Jim Crow. Justin Leroy argues that figures such as Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Maria Stewart, David Walker, and Ida B. Wells developed a critique of racial capitalism that remains underappreciated. Their theories spanned the eras of slavery and freedom, connecting the North and the South, by illuminating the political economy of racial domination and the interwoven relationship between race and capitalism. By situating their work within broader debates about land, labor, and capital, Leroy provides a new framework for understanding how freedom was theorized, contested, and ultimately constrained in the aftermath of slavery. Bridging Black studies, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism, The Lowest Freedom offers a reinterpretation of African American political thought that places the struggle for economic justice at its core.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Accelerant"

New from Stanford University Press: Accelerant: Energy Infrastructures and the Natural World in Making Modern Iran by Ciruce A. Movahedi-Lankarani.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between the late 1940s and the end of the twentieth century, natural gas became Iran's bedrock energy source. Billed as a futuristic fuel for a future world power, gas became an avenue for the country's developmentalist ambitions. The ability to build technologically sophisticated infrastructures served as a powerful tool of state legitimation, both before and after the 1979 Revolution, and tied top-down politics of modernization to bottom-up feelings of national belonging.

Accelerant analyzes the interwoven histories of energy, development, and the environment in Iran. Following the movement of natural gas from underground deposits, through infrastructures of refining and distribution, and into everyday life, Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani explores the roles of development planners, oil firms, industrialists, engineers, and consumers―as well as the mountain ranges, sedimentary rock, and natural gas itself―to show how natural gas emerged as a crucial enabler of industrialization and a strong impetus for resource nationalism. Tracing the transformation of gas from a waste product into a vital resource, this book offers a history of anticolonial developmentalism in Iran―revealing a key driver toward intensified energy use that suggests why and how societies in the Global South became voracious consumers of fossil fuel energy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Contexts of Justice"

New from Oxford University Press: Contexts of Justice: Native Peoples, Political Theory, and Fair Treatment by Burke A. Hendrix.

About the book, from the publisher:

Non-Indigenous citizens of the United States and Canada often argue that it is unfair for Indigenous peoples to have distinctive political and property rights within countries purportedly dedicated to equal treatment. Yet Indigenous nations in the United States and Canada have long made claims for a more contextually rich sense of fairness, and their legal and political successes in these efforts - difficult, uneven, and partial as they has been - have allowed them to continue to exist into the present. Their fairness arguments have thus found traction even in the face of longstanding political animosity.

Situated within debates on ideal and non-ideal theory, this book begins from arguments of this kind, and seeks to show why they are defensible within a contextually-rich theory of political fairness for Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada. Structured to be accessible to political theorists and their students with little background in Indigenous politics, the book argues that this broader conception of fairness applies in relation to political sovereignty, ownership rights, cultural choices, and - uncomfortably - racially-inflected standards of tribal membership. Seeking to outline parameters for potential future political orders, it argues that such a contextually-rich standard of fairness is likely to be required long into the future as well, given the unavoidably variegated texture of human social order.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unearthed"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Unearthed: Science and Environment Across Mineral Frontiers by Patrick Anthony.

About the book, from the publisher:

How nineteenth-century environmental sciences laid the groundwork for global mineral extraction.

Unearthed depicts a pivotal moment during the nineteenth century: As European and settler schemes to govern ever larger territories intensified, the earth and atmospheric sciences were also becoming more global in scope, assembling models of the planet while making use of militarized or highly industrialized systems. These efforts were informed by the physique du monde, or global physics, of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), a program of vast data collection that spanned four hemispheres that aimed to determine general, scientific laws about the planet and its environments.

Using Humboldt’s itineraries as a frame, Unearthed traces an information order that linked far-flung industrial sites and frontier stations, from Prussian provinces to the Spanish and Russian empires. Humboldt intersected with Saxon miners, Mexican cartographers, and Siberian surveyors, among other itinerant Germans who mobilized the labor and resources of widespread mining operations for global surveys of earth and air. Interweaving the histories of capital and climate, Patrick Anthony takes readers from mines to mountains to show how the sciences of Humboldt’s circuits both measured and made modern natures. These sciences of the mineral frontier, he argues, ultimately laid the groundwork for carbon-intensive economics and a logic of unending extraction. Wide-ranging and ambitious, Unearthed will interest scholars working in the history of science, global history, and the environmental humanities.

Visit Patrick Anthony's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Offshore Oildom"

New from LSU Press: Offshore Oildom: America’s Energy Expansion into the Ocean by Tyler Priest.

About the book, from the publisher:

Offshore Oildom tells the riveting story of the United States’ quest to secure the oil riches of the sea. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, Tyler Priest reveals how the offshore oil industry emerged from an ambitious project to incorporate the ocean’s submerged lands into the territory of the United States. These lands were frontier spaces, beyond traditional jurisdiction and control. Efforts to commandeer them for oil and gas extraction thus required new institutions of governance.

From the titanic struggle over the tidelands starting in the 1930s to Project Independence in the 1970s, the process of establishing an offshore dominion of oil provoked intractable conflicts over money, values, and power. It pitted coastal states against their land-locked counterparts and captains of industry against federal civil servants and coastal communities. It stoked partisan and internecine warfare. It set off an international race to annex offshore territory, complicating U.S. foreign-policy objectives. It weighed on the minds of Supreme Court justices and troubled every occupant of the White House from Franklin Roosevelt forward. The modern environmental movement was born in opposition to offshore oil just as the 1970s energy crisis compelled the acceleration of drilling in the ocean.

Creating and governing an offshore oildom involved nothing less than redrawing the territorial borders of the nation, rebuilding the political foundations of the U.S. energy system, and testing the environmental limits of resource extraction. This history is essential to understanding the tension between energy security and environmental protection in modern America.

Visit Tyler Priest's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Blame the Intern"

New from Princeton University Press: Blame the Intern: On (Not) Breaking into the Creative Economy by Alexandre Frenette.

About the book, from the publisher:

An inside look at the work lives of college interns and their uncertain path to paid employment

While generations of young adults used to spend their summers working as lifeguards or camp counselors, college students today are more likely to seek office experience as interns. Blame the Intern takes readers into the workspaces of the music industry to show how internships, especially unpaid ones, are problematic introductions to the working world that often provide little valuable training and are unlikely to lead to a job.

Since the 1980s, shifts in labor markets and careers have made employers less prone to invest in training entry-level employees who may quickly change jobs anyway. In recent decades, higher education has filled the gap, fueling an explosive growth of internships to facilitate the transition from college to a career. Drawing on in-depth interviews with interns, record label employees, and college personnel, as well as his own experiences as an unpaid intern at two music industry firms in New York City, Alexandre Frenette sheds light on who benefits from the intern economy, who suffers, and why. He finds that internships are rife with ambiguity because employers are neither trained nor greatly rewarded to mentor and colleges are ill-equipped to provide workplace guidance. As a result, there is little consensus about what interns should be doing or what benefits they should be gaining from their experience, which can often lead to inequality, exploitation, and disappointment.

Timely and provocative, Blame the Intern demonstrates how employers and institutions of higher learning are redefining what it means to break in—and reveals what happens when few can.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Governing Islam in Austria and Germany"

New from Oxford University Press: Governing Islam in Austria and Germany: From Colonial Times to the Present by Farid Hafez.

About the book, from the publisher:

Governing Islam in Austria and Germany argues that the foundations of contemporary policies towards Islam in Austria and Germany are deeply rooted in colonial practices from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author Farid Hafez traces how colonial knowledge and governing techniques vis-à-vis Muslims--acquired during the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the German Kaiserreich's rule over Tanzania and parts of Togo and Cameroon--shaped both the Nazi regime's approach to Muslims and postwar European policies. Hafez introduces the theory of Islampolitik, a concept that examines how modern European states regulate and govern their Muslim populations.

Islampolitik is not simply administrative or cultural policy; it is a mode of governance aimed at managing a constructed, racialized version of Muslim identity and Islam. Colonial legacies still inform the racial politics of religion in Europe, positioning Muslim populations as subjects of control. Governing Islam in Austria and Germany: From Colonial Times to the Present offers a new methodological lens to analyze Austria and Germany's contemporary policies toward Muslims, uncovering the ways in which past imperial logics underpin state administration and religious education. Bridging colonial history, racial politics, and contemporary politics, Hafez shows how Muslim communities were not only managed but strategically incorporated into imperial and national frameworks.

Visit Farid Hafez's website.

--Marshal Zeringue