"Mastering the Body"

New from Cornell University Press: Mastering the Body: Daily Life, Inequality, and Slavery in Roman Homes and Society by F. Mira Green.

About the book, from the publisher:

Mastering the Body offers an innovative exploration of the intimate, bodily routines that shaped―and were shaped by―Roman society. From kitchens to chamber pots, F. Mira Green uncovers how eating, digesting, and excreting were not just biological necessities but deeply embedded social practices that reinforced hierarchies and power structures in Roman households.

Drawing on archaeological evidence and material culture from Pompeii and Herculaneum and literary works from the Latin authors Seneca, Juvenal, and Apuleius, Mastering the Body reveals how elite Roman men used dietary habits and domestic labor to assert status and mastery. Domestic tools and spaces―designed for bodily care―encoded nonverbal messages of dominance and submission, and when considered with theories of embodiment, materiality, and sensory experience, illustrate the feedback loops between daily routines and the perpetuation of slavery and inequality. Ultimately, Mastering the Body is an invitation to rethink the role of the digesting body in ancient history by asking not only what digestion has to do with Roman society, but also how the body's most basic functions were central to its social order.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rival Civilisations"

New from Princeton University Press: Rival Civilisations: The Rise of Japan and Visions of World Order in Britain by Chika Tonooka.

About the book, from the publisher:

How British intellectuals of the twentieth century reckoned with the emergence of an Asian power

Most historians of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe point to the persistence of racialised and hierarchical views of non-Europeans as “uncivilised.” Yet these accounts overlook the profound intellectual impact of what contemporaries called the “awakening of Asia.” In Rival Civilisations, Chika Tonooka shows how the rise of Japan after 1905 compelled British intellectuals to rethink fundamental questions about world order and human difference. Juxtaposing Japanese and British sources, Tonooka offers an innovative history of British Eurocentrism—its ebbs and flows and emergent pluralist alternatives—through the lens of British debates on Japan.

Tonooka describes how British intellectuals and commentators grappled with such issues as whether civilisation was singular or plural; whether the civilising mission in Asia might be more successfully undertaken as the “yellow man’s burden”; whether non-Christians could be moral; and whether a world converging along Western lines was likely and even desirable. Even at the Empire’s peak, British thinkers began to grasp that Britain could no longer take its civilisational preeminence for granted. But Tonooka also considers what these debates on Japan missed, arguing that British civilisational discourse consistently overlooked what she demonstrates to be the paradoxical nature of global modernity. As a result, these British blind spots repeatedly foreclosed anticipations of critical world political challenges that lay ahead. Her original and rigorous analysis will enable readers to identify analogous blind spots over the rise of China and its consequences for the global order.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Return from the Soviet Union to Franco's Spain during the Cold War"

New from Oxford University Press: The Return from the Soviet Union to Franco's Spain during the Cold War by Glennys Young.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book tells the story of how and why Spaniards who had been catapulted to the USSR by the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Second World War came home. It examines the repatriation, mainly during the Cold War, of Spaniards in the USSR--nearly three thousand children evacuated there during the Spanish Civil War (and their caretakers), communists in exile, Republican aviators and sailors, and prisoners of war who had been soldiers and officers in the 'Blue Division' (the 250th Infantry Division of the Nazi Wehrmacht) that fought against the USSR.

In the post-war years, as the Cold War escalated, the repatriation of this politically, socially, and culturally diverse contingent of Spaniards mattered not just in Spain and the Soviet Union, but to people around the world. Yet there were formidable obstacles to repatriation, among them that Spain and the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations.

For the first time, Glennys Young reveals the behind-the-scenes negotiations between Spain and the Soviet Union that allowed thousands of Spaniards to set foot on Spanish soil during the first full decade of the Cold War. Using archival records from various countries, and incorporating interviews with the child evacuees, the book demonstrates the unrecognized political, social, cultural, and personal consequences of the repatriation of Spanish nationals, chiefly from 1954-1960, and the return of some of them to the Soviet Union during that period or shortly thereafter. It examines what repatriation as a political, social, psychological, and physical process meant for Spain during the Franco era, for the Soviet Union before and after Stalin's death, and for the Cold War. It also places the repatriation of Spaniards from the Soviet Union in comparison to the return of Italian, German, and Japanese prisoners of war and civilians. The narrative moves beyond state institutions to examine how individuals implemented, shaped, and circumvented state policy. In making repatriation possible, personal connections were vital, even between individuals and officials of hostile countries and opposing allegiances.

In so doing, the book offers a unique and valuable perspective on Cold War history: Soviet and Spanish politics and society influenced each other in unrecognized and unanticipated ways, even though the two countries did not have diplomatic relations.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Great Horse Flu"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America by Thomas G. Andrews.

About the book, from the publisher:

Seven years after the US Civil War and nearly 150 years before COVID, horses near Toronto began falling deathly ill with a sickness soon diagnosed as influenza. It took just a few weeks for this mutant flu variant to spread throughout southeastern Canada and into the northeastern US, infecting more than 90 percent of horses, donkeys, and mules wherever it struck. By the time the outbreak relented more than a year later, the Great Horse Flu of 1872 to 1873 had convulsed nearly every corner of North America and parts of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America.

This little-known scourge paralyzed the continent’s horse-powered economy at a critical political moment. As hundreds of thousands of animals died and entire cities ground to a halt, the outbreak exposed the fragility of industrial capitalism and the US’s deep dependence on animal labor. The Great Horse Flu triggered catastrophes such as the Great Boston Fire, unleashed seething social and racial conflict, stoked partisan divides, and set the stage for the Panic of 1873. In the hands of Bancroft Prize–winning historian Thomas G. Andrews, the gripping story of this animal plague becomes a revelatory history of American Reconstruction itself—its possibilities, limitations, and demise—while also illuminating the grave perils that novel viral variants pose to animals, humans, and the world we share.

Visit Thomas G. Andrews's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Remedying the Body"

New from Stanford University Press: Remedying the Body: Plastic Surgery and the Politics of Embodiment in Korea by So-Rim Lee.

About the book, from the publisher:

Plastic surgery has exploded in popularity in the recent decades, with South Korea emerging as a leader of the global beauty economy. In Remedying the Body, So-Rim Lee explores a cultural discourse of plastic surgery in South Korea through the feminist politics of care. Pulling together archival and cultural materials from the 1950s to the 2020s, Lee takes Korea as a paradigmatic example to reimagine coalitional ways of surviving a world governed by oppressive bodily norms.

Drawing from the Korean term koch'ida ("to cure or mend"), Lee uses "remedy" to name a broad spectrum of medical interventions performed to change the bodily appearance to arrive at a bodily norm. Remedy, however, is much more than medical treatment alone. This book contends that remedy is also a critical cultural ethos, a social performance of subjectivity, and a material practice of embodiment where state biopolitics and individual desire for belonging are inextricably entangled.

So-Rim Lee is the Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.

--Marshal Zeringue

"21st Century Yakuza"

New from Oxford University Press: 21st Century Yakuza: Death of Japanese Organised Crime by Martina Baradel.

About the book, from the publisher:

Once dominant and institutionalised, the Yakuza, one of Japan's best known criminal organisations, is now shrinking under the combined pressure of legal exclusion, social stigmatisation, and market regulation. Their membership has dropped from more than 80,000 in 2009 to fewer than 20,000 in 2025. Yet their disappearance is far from complete. Based on extensive fieldwork with active and former members, police officers, lawyers, and journalists, Martina Baradel examines how these organisations adapt to repression and explores what happens when a mafia begins to die.

21st Century Yakuza illuminates how Japan's model of regulatory saturation has dismantled the Yakuza's organisational capacity but left behind governance vacuums in markets the state struggles to control. This book demonstrates how the Yakuza persist through symbolic and residual forms of authority even as their formal power erodes, and how their decline has fragmented the criminal underworld. It traces the transformation of the Yakuza from territorially embedded brokers of governance to marginal actors in a more decentralised criminal landscape, including the delegation of trading activities to non-affiliated networks.

Through a sharp lens on criminal decline and adaptation, 21st Century Yakuza offers a compelling portrait of a fading underworld and the new forms of disorder emerging in its wake. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the shifting boundaries of law, authority, and illicit power in contemporary Japan.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unsettling Sovereignty"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Unsettling Sovereignty: International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and US Extraterritorial Power in Postwar Oceania by M. X. Mitchell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Marshall Islanders and their ancestral lands and waters played important roles in reshaping the United States’ offshore power, state sovereignty, and the international politics of decolonization.

In the years following World War II, the United States conducted sixty-seven devastating nuclear blasts in the Marshall Islands―yet the archipelago was never a US territory. Working through the United Nations, US diplomats engineered a new, one-of-a-kind extraterritorial status, called strategic trusteeship, to control the Native lands, waters, and peoples of the Marshall, Caroline, and Northern Mariana Islands. Strategic trusteeship permitted the US to militarize a vast expanse of Western Oceania. This novel and racialized legal form of international dependency was integral to US nuclear weapons detonations and damage in the region.

In Unsettling Sovereignty, M. X. Mitchell recounts this untold legal history, exploring how nuclear weapons changed claims and practices of sovereignty from the 1940s to the present. US nuclear blasting in the Marshall Islands troubled conventional renderings of state sovereignty under international law. The explosions, disastrous for Marshallese communities and their ancestral atolls, also caused hazardous nuclear fallout, which spread around the globe. Islanders and their allies turned to law, using legal wrangling over blasting and fallout to raise new questions about the location, time, and subjects of state violence in a period of decolonization; the intersections between race, Indigeneity, and wide-scale technogenic harm; and the pitfalls and unfulfilled promises of international law. Mitchell shows that the Marshallese people and their lands and waters were, and remain, central to redefining sovereignty in an era of boundless pollution and climate change.

Visit M. X. Mitchell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine"

New from NYU Press: Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Race, Labor, and Jewish Radicalism in Los Angeles by Caroline Luce.

About the book, from the publisher:

How a cohort of young Jewish radicals from the borderlands of Eastern Europe was critical in reshaping multiracial left-wing activism in southern California

Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine offers a novel account of Eastern European Jewish immigration and Yiddish public culture in Southern California. It traces the journeys of a cohort of young Jewish radicals as they moved from the borderlands of the Russian empire to the borderlands of the American southwest, exploring their engagement with well-known labor and left-wing movements in Los Angeles.

Much of the book is focused on Boyle Heights, a residential neighborhood east of the L.A. River once home to the highest concentration of Jews west of Chicago as well as to dozens of other diasporic communities, showing how the neighborhood’s particular ethno-racial diversity shaped Yiddish public culture. Rich with new details drawn from previously untranslated Yiddish sources, it examines new relationships and tensions that emerged as the Jewish radicals worked to forge multiracial coalitions in the workplace and the community, including with their Mexican, Asian, and African-American neighbors. It frames the community as a site of convergence, where multiple marginalized populations cultivated their own modes of belonging in overlapping ways, as well as of divergence, where residents’ experiences were differentiated by international and domestic political-economic developments.

The book decenters traditional narratives of Jewish immigration and acculturation focused on cities of the northeast, moving Jewish workers in the west from the margins to the center of American Jewish history. It showcases the variety of organizing practices through which Jewish radicals recreated Yiddish public culture in LA, offering a new perspective on the relational dynamics of race and place-making in the American west. Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine recovers the contributions of Eastern European Jewish radicals and trade unionists, demonstrating the ways in which immigrant workers shaped the city of Los Angeles.

Visit Caroline Luce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Street Knowledge"

New from Princeton University Press: Street Knowledge: The Hidden Ways Social Change Happens by Darien Pollock.

About the book, from the publisher:

A philosophical framework for resistance that connects Socrates to the street

Does social change happen “top down” or “bottom up”—brought about by those who hold power or by those who struggle against the powerful? In Street Knowledge, Darien Pollock argues that the most powerful change comes from the bottom up. “Street culture” supplies the creative activity that inspires not only political change but any kind of positive social change. Pollock argues that part of what prevents progressive social change is that people in power only legitimize and respond to ideas and arguments that are legible to them; marginal actors—those with street knowledge—are forced to develop ways of making ideas that are illegible to the broader public meaningful and useful. At its best, street knowledge can be used to address civic injustice, cultural hegemony, and economic exploitation.

Reading Plato, Marx, DuBois, Derrida, and others, Pollock discovered that academic philosophy has had a street orientation all along. The core qualities he associated with the “street disposition”—the psychological and spiritual capacity to resist an unjust social arrangement—were already represented in Plato’s Republic. Drawing on the late Congressman John Lewis’s idea of “good trouble” as well as Socrates, Pollock argues that “the street” should be understood as a universal feature of the human condition—with the potential to emerge anywhere at any time. Street knowledge, Pollock contends, lays the foundation for a radically new way of doing philosophy and achieving social justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Equal Subjection"

New from Oxford University Press: Equal Subjection: What Justice Demands of Political Leaders by Claudio López-Guerra.

About the book, from the publisher:

Politicians like to claim that they are “in it together” or “in the same boat” with their subjects. In fact, they are not. Should they be? To what extent?

This book offers the first systematic treatment of these questions. It contends that, under the status quo, rulers do not have enough skin in the game; they do not bear the consequences of their decisions in office as much as justice demands. López-Guerra defends equal subjection, a novel understanding of political equality that requires rulers to cast their lot with the ruled as equal users of the goods and services that they have a duty to provide for all. He proposes an original way of aligning the interest of rulers and subjects that would mitigate the principal-agent problem in politics and also make societies intrinsically more just.

Authoritarianism is on the rise. What is to be done? Political philosophers are back in the business of thinking seriously and creatively about the design of better political institutions, but their ingenuity remains confined to the choice of decision-making schemes, neglecting the importance of decision-bearing rules. This book makes the case for an original idea that expands the limits of our political imagination.

--Marshal Zeringue