"Debt and Refuge"

New from Stanford University Press: Debt and Refuge: Syrian Farmworkers and the Politics of Displacement in Lebanon by China Sajadian.

About the book, from the publisher:

Lebanon hosts the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, including up to 1.5 million displaced Syrians. Many are Syrian farmworkers, who for decades have sustained Lebanon's agricultural system through their seasonal labor. Debt and Refuge traces how the lives of these farmworkers-turned-refugees were transformed by the war in Syria and Lebanon's devastating financial collapse, revealing the slow economic violence that can push people off their land, into waged work, and into cycles of debt.

Drawing on fieldwork centered in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, China Sajadian documents how Syrian farmworkers' debts―to labor brokers, landlords, and relatives―bound them to networks that exploited their labor and also sustained them in the face of profound uncertainty. In contrast to humanitarian portrayals of refugees as uprooted victims awaiting asylum or return, Sajadian locates their predicaments within a longer history of rural migration and familial division across the Lebanese–Syrian border. Linking together the politics of mass displacement, mass indebtedness, and our global food system, she makes a case for radically rethinking forced migration as an agrarian question of labor and feminist question of social reproduction. Written with both ethnographic intimacy and analytical depth, Debt and Refuge offers a deeply human portrait of the gendered politics of displacement and why they matter to the future of our agricultural systems and human mobility―in Lebanon, Syria, and beyond.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Being and Becoming Good"

New from Oxford University Press: Being and Becoming Good: On the Diversity of Human Goodness and Virtue by Anne Jeffrey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Aristotelian Naturalism is an ethics on which moral goodness is a species of natural goodness-the kind of goodness we find on display creatures whose habits and activities enable them to thrive. What it takes for humans to be good is to have habits and engage in activities that contribute to human flourishing. The primary aim of this book is to present a revisionist version of Aristotelian Naturalism enriched by empirical evidence and responsive to criticisms from feminist and disability ethics. Pluralist Aristotelian Naturalism holds that human goodness is not a single, unitary ideal to which all humans should aim, instead admitting of real diversity, just as goodness in general admits of diversity across various species. Consequently, there are various sets of human virtues that promote human flourishing in its many forms.

Being and Becoming Good explicates an Aristotelian methodology of ethics on which philosophical reasoning is used to integrate observational evidence about the shape life forms take and the dispositions that contribute to good human lives. Observing what humans are and do in order to thrive in a wide array of bodies, social-political contexts, and environments, puts pressure on the standard Aristotelian Naturalist singular ideal of human goodness as depicted by a flourishing neurotypical, able-bodied, resource-rich mature adult. There is substantial variation in human forms of life and human flourishing, and so no one human good or single set of virtues. Instead, there is a diversity of forms of human goodness, all equally valuable. Moreover, the achievement of one kind of human goodness changes what we are able to do and be. By being good in one way, humans acquire the capacity to be good in another way. Most of us, for most of our lives, are simultaneously being good and becoming good.

Visit Anne Jeffrey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Diasporic Connections"

New from Columbia University Press: Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism by Reighan Gillam.

About the book, from the publisher:

There is a common narrative of Brazilian racial exceptionalism―that Brazilian society is more racially harmonious than other multiracial countries or, more simply, that Brazil is less racist than the United States. Many Brazilians even point to anti-Black violence in the United States to exceptionalize their own country, minimizing the structural barriers facing Afro-Brazilians and the degree to which racial inequality and prejudice permeate Brazilian society. Reighan Gillam offers a new perspective by showing how Afro-Brazilians draw on African American history and culture to argue that Brazil is typical, not exceptional, emphasizing common experiences across the African diaspora.

Diasporic Connections explores how Afro-Brazilians find parallels with African Americans in performance, films, print culture, and everyday conversation. Gillam considers cases such as a staging of Katori Hall’s play The Mountaintop and the appearance of Black Power figures at lectures and in films. She examines how Afro-Brazilian activists seek to instill the energy of the Black freedom struggle into local social movements, underscoring that lessons from the United States are applicable to Brazil while insisting on their own agency. Discussions of Black representation on television, the visibility of mixed-race people, and the shared experiences of Black women across national boundaries all call Brazilian exceptionalism into question. Based on textual analysis, ethnography, and close interpretation of key works, this book highlights how Afro-Brazilians reframe Brazil’s racial politics as unexceptional and reveals the surprising ways that diasporic ties are forged.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Inner Worlds"

New from the University of Michigan Press: Inner Worlds: Interiority and Capitalist Modernity in Japan by Richard M Reitan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Inner Worlds examines the emergence and operation of representations of interiority—consciousness, “folk mind,” “spirit”—in Japan from its industrial revolution to the rise of fascism during the interwar period. These representations functioned to reproduce the capitalist system by containing its excesses. Thus, poverty in the 1880s was ostensibly the result of defects in one’s innate mental character. A degenerate “crowd mind” explained the strikes and riots of the early twentieth century. State subversion during the 1930s supposedly reflected an attenuated “folk spirit.” By locating the roots of capitalism’s excesses not within the socioeconomic order itself but within a defective interiority, ideologies of interiority operated to contain disruptions to Japan’s socioeconomic order, conceal its defects, and sustain the capitalist system. Inner Worlds reveals how interiority was constituted in ways consistent with both the demands of the emerging capitalist order of the late nineteenth century and the conditions that coalesced to form a fascist conjecture in the 1930s.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Property Values"

New from Princeton University Press: Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner by Joshua Specht.

About the book, from the publisher:

A wide-ranging history of American land ownership, from westward expansion to the suburban housing crisis

From its very beginnings, the United States has defined itself by its relationship to land. Settlers saw the continent as the raw material for building a prosperous life while their leaders viewed it as a means for building a people. In the 1950s, the suburban home became a place for Americans to create a personal utopia of lawns and living rooms, of washing machines and dishwashers. Property Values traces how land and its ownership became inextricably tied to the American ideal of independence—and demonstrates why the Homestead Act and a thirty-year mortgage have far more in common than you think.

In this engaging book, Joshua Specht uncovers the history behind the American conviction that widespread land ownership is a fundamental requirement for a flourishing democratic society. We meet the nineteenth-century settler farmers whose dreams of new social and political forms were built on vast quantities of land taken from native peoples, and the European immigrants who came seeking a better life as land-owning citizens. For FDR, homeownership offered a path out of the depths of the Great Depression. For George W. Bush, it gave people a permanent stake in the American dream. Specht charts how the vision of plenty that first drew homesteaders westward gave way to one of scarcity and exclusion as new neighbors came to be seen as a threat to property values and a system meant to promote ownership put it squarely out of reach for many.

Taking readers from the rent wars of the early 1840s through the financial crisis of the late 2000s, Property Values reveals why housing affordability has posed significant challenges to the nation’s politics and promise since the founding, and why the American story has always been one about land.

Visit Joshua Specht's website.

The Page 99 Test: Red Meat Republic.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Pakistan's Foreign Policy"

New from Oxford University Press: Pakistan's Foreign Policy: Security, State, and Society by Wali Aslam.

About the book, from the publisher:

Pakistan's foreign policy challenges over nearly eight decades stem directly from its persistent civil-military imbalance. The military employs a narrative of existential threats from all directions to strengthen its domestic control. Drawing on Ontological Security Theory, Post-structuralist Discourse Theory, and the concept of 'fantasy,' this study critically examines the narratives crafted by Pakistan's ruling elites, particularly the military, since the country's inception. The analysis reveals a pervasive 'siege mentality' narrative that fosters anxiety and insecurity among the populace. Ongoing tensions along Pakistan's eastern and western borders are used to justify tight domestic control, reinforced by fantasies portraying the military as the nation's sole protector against insecurity.

Drawing on extensive primary data, this book demonstrates how this narrative legitimises the military's outsized influence over foreign and domestic policy, while justifying a disproportionately large defence budget that primarily benefits the military elite. At the same time, much of society remains impoverished, malnourished, and undereducated. Decades of poorly managed foreign policy, driven by a strategy of 'controlled chaos,' have trapped the military and the nation in a cycle of inescapable consequences.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Night Hawk"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture by Matthew Warner Osborn.

About the book, from the publisher:

Unmasks the long-forgotten story of how a flying, superhuman vigilante played a pivotal role in the founding of the American labor movement.

On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia’s night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the announcement of his arrival appeared under the title “The Night-Hawk, No. 1” with a cryptic epigraph from Romeo and Juliet: “I’ll be a candleholder and look on.” Who and what was the Night Hawk? As Matthew Warner Osborn reveals, this was the sobriquet of a mysterious columnist for the weekly Mechanics’ Free Press, the first radical socialist newspaper in America. Dressed in a mysterious cloak, the Night Hawk soared over Philadelphia, revealing the evil crimes of prominent gentlemen, fighting murderous criminals, and calling out fraudulent moral authorities.

The Night Hawk was the ingenious invention of an impoverished actor, Cornelius A. Logan, who created the character as a public champion of Philadelphia’s Working Men’s movement, the first successful American labor party. The Night Hawk’s nocturnal adventures transformed their socialist ideology into an entertaining fantasy that dramatized the struggle against industrial exploitation and the degradation of working people. The success of the character made Logan into a celebrity, and he went on to become a popular and innovative comedian on the antebellum stage.

A harbinger of the superheroes we know today, the Night Hawk promises to illuminate dark secrets from the past, but he can also shed light on our present. He ignites our need to see corrupt elites unmasked and held accountable for their actions, all while protecting the innocent and oppressed. Americans have always loved to fantasize about powerful superheroes who hide behind masks while chasing bad guys, and Osborn shows in this entertaining history how the Night Hawk was perhaps the first standard bearer for that enduring mystique.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Great Communion of Scholars"

New from LSU Press: The Great Communion of Scholars: Evangelical Southerners and the Birth of Modern Intellectual Authority by Joel R. Iliff.

About the book, from the publisher:

While the modern university is typically viewed as secular, Joel R. Iliff argues in The Great Communion of Scholars that the Protestant architects of the modern university in both the U.S. South and Germany consciously patterned their creation on the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints. By attempting to counteract the perceived secularization of their societies, a network of Awakened Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to the development of modern institutions of higher education and attendant notions of intellectual and moral authority.

Beginning in the 1820s, white southern evangelicals looked abroad and found allies among contemporary religious Awakening movements in Germany. Evangelical southerners and Awakened Germans shared a desire to restore not only intellectual and spiritual order but also social and political order in the wake of the lingering upheavals wrought by the Enlightenment. Eventually, southerners drew analogies between their domestic opponents in the North and the opponents of the Awakened, thus creating the perception of a transatlantic battle between infidelity and orthodoxy, of which the American sectional conflict became one theater. This discourse culminated in the revolutions of 1848 and the American Civil War, which both evangelical southerners and Awakened Germans interpreted as religious struggles with global ramifications.

Ultimately, the transnational, ecumenical impulse that fueled the communion of scholars, which reached its zenith in the mid-nineteenth century, proved unstable. It fatefully collapsed over the issue of American slavery when Black evangelical abolitionists in the North waged a successful campaign to brand southern slaveholders, ironically enough, as analogous to the religious radicals and infidels that conservative Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic so feared. By exploring the role that antebellum evangelicalism played in the development of the modern university, Iliff not only dismantles much of what we think we know about the South, American religion, and the origins of the modern higher education but also recovers a lost period in Western intellectual history.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Weaponized Policing"

New from NYU Press: Weaponized Policing: Police Violence in São Paulo and LA by Sebastián Sclofsky.

About the book, from the publisher:

How police reproduce social, spatial, and racial inequalities in two global cities

From Donald Trump to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, political leaders endorsing “law and order”―specifically through aggressive policing strategies― have supported the formation of carceral states in self-proclaimed democracies. In Weaponized Policing, Sebastián Sclofsky provides a comparative lens on this dynamic, taking a look at police-civilian violence in the United States and Brazil, and its impact on people’s understanding of race, space, and citizenship.

The book argues that the socio-economic transformations of the last half-century, marked by the rise of neoliberal capitalism, have produced extreme levels of inequality, and created new forms of vulnerability that are managed and reproduced by police. The pacifying processes conducted by the police in their production and reproduction of social order produce the categories of black, poor, and periphery, transforming these subjects into the ultimate “other” against whom police intervention and violence is deemed necessary and justified for the sake of the city’s well-being.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with politicians, police officers, community activists, and low-income residents of São Paulo’s periphery and neighborhoods in South L.A., Sclofsky follows the stories of individuals who live, and are policed, on the “peripheries.” He argues that, in both countries, aggressive policing creates authoritarian enclaves within faulty democracies. As a result, residents of color are criminalized, individual rights are systematically violated, and a sense of second-class citizenship is developed―even when people live in a country where political rights are supposedly guaranteed, and free and fair elections do take place.

Visit Sebastián Sclofsky's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cancelled Futures"

New from Princeton University Press: Cancelled Futures: Class, Race, and Place in Post-Industrial Britain by Amit Singh.

About the book, from the publisher:

How race, class, gender, and place shape the ways working-class young people in Britain envision their transition from education to work

How do the effects of deindustrialisation and neoliberalism influence young people’s perceptions of work and education? In Cancelled Futures, Amit Singh examines how experiences of class-based inequality work through race, place, and gender in different ways. Moving beyond the usual framing of race versus class and the populist fixation with the white working class, Singh shows the intractable challenges that Black, Asian, and white young people share when they envision their futures in changing labour market conditions. Drawing on extensive interviews with sixty-two young working-class Britons, he describes the range of strategies they employ in the absence of viable economic opportunities—and the uneven results that follow.

Singh offers a vivid nationwide portrait, bringing together seemingly divergent locations and their youth—those living in proximity to the extraordinary wealth and perceived opportunity of the City of London, in the former northern mill town of Rochdale, and in the forgotten seaside town of Morecambe Bay—and captures the empathetic sense of struggle that many cultivate. Singh reveals that although the unique features of place raise distinctive racial and gendered reckonings with their circumstances and hopes, these young people have in common an increasingly fading sense of the future. Singh shows that they do not cling to the illusion that hard work pays off or the myth of meritocracy, but seek only to realise some sense of dignity and meaning amid a future that feels not just confusing but altogether absent.

--Marshal Zeringue