Saturday, November 30, 2019

"The Political Foundations of Judicial Independence in Dictatorship and Democracy"

New from Oxford University Press: The Political Foundations of Judicial Independence in Dictatorship and Democracy by Brad Epperly.

About the book, from the publisher:
This book argues that explaining judicial independence-considered the fundamental question of comparative law and politics-requires a perspective that spans the democracy/autocracy divide. Rather than seeking separate explanations in each regime context, in The Political Foundations of Judicial Independence in Dictatorship and Democracy, Brad Epperly argues that political competition is a salient factor in determining levels of de facto judicial independence across regime type, and in autocracies a factor of far greater import. This is because a full " and then tested globally. Blending formal theory, observational and instrumental variables models, and elite interviews of leading Hungarian legal scholars and judges, Epperly offers a new framework for understanding judicial independence that integrates explanations of both de jure and de facto independence in both democratic and autocratic regimes.
Visit Brad Epperly's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 29, 2019

"Adventure Capital"

New from the University of California Press: Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris by Julie Kleinman.

About the book, from the publisher:
Paris’s Gare du Nord is one of the busiest international transit centers in the world. In the past three decades, it has become an important hub for West African migrants—self-fashioned adventurers—navigating life in the city.

In this groundbreaking work, Julie Kleinman chronicles how West Africans use the Gare du Nord to create economic opportunities, confront police harassment, and forge connections to people outside of their communities. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, including an internship at the French national railway company, Kleinman reveals how racial inequality is ingrained in the order of Parisian public space. She vividly describes the extraordinary ways that African migrants retool French transit infrastructure to build alternative pathways toward social and economic integration where state institutions have failed. In doing so, these adventurers defy boundaries—between migrant and citizen, center and periphery, neighbor and stranger—that have shaped urban planning and immigration policy. Adventure Capital offers a new understanding of contemporary migration and belonging, capturing the central role that West African migrants play in revitalizing French urban life.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 28, 2019

"To Serve the Enemy"

New from Oxford University Press: To Serve the Enemy: Informers, Collaborators, and the Laws of Armed Conflict by Shane Darcy.

About the book, from the publisher:
A constant yet oftentimes concealed practice in war has been the use of informers and collaborators by parties to an armed conflict. Despite the prevalence of such activity, and the serious and at times fatal consequences that befall those who collaborate with an enemy, international law applicable in times of armed conflict does not squarely address the phenomenon. The recruitment, use and treatment of informers and other collaborators is addressed only partially and at times indirectly by international humanitarian law.

In this book, Shane Darcy examines the development and application of the relevant rules and principles of the laws of armed conflict in relation to collaboration. With a focus on international humanitarian law as may be applicable to various forms of collaboration, the book also offers an assessment of the relevance of international human rights law.
Shane Darcy is a senior lecturer at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, in the National University of Ireland Galway, a globally recognized institution for teaching and research on human rights and humanitarian law.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

"'Red Tom' Hickey"

New from Texas A&M University Press: "Red Tom" Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism by Peter Buckingham.

About the book, from the publisher:
This is the fascinating biography of a bright young working man, Tom Hickey, who came to the United States from Ireland in 1892, became a machinist, and soon joined the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Labor Party. His party boss recognized the potential in this Irishman and even made him an “enforcer” against those who questioned the boss’s authority. The enforcer, though, eventually found himself forced out and moved west to start a new life. Ultimately, Hickey landed in Texas and saw an opportunity to use syndicalism as an organizing tool to build a state socialist party.

He did just that. Within a few years, Hickey transformed the faction-ridden Socialist Party of America in Texas into a force strong enough to threaten the Republican Party at the ballot box. He gained a large following thanks to a unique mixture of evangelical rhetoric and militant industrial unionism.

As biographer Peter H. Buckingham points out, Hickey failed to deliver his people into the Promised Land. Violence, poll taxes, voter suppression, and other forces made voting for socialist candidates problematic, and the Democratic Party soon co-opted the more appealing elements of socialism into watered-down, reformist planks for the Texan voter. By the time Hickey died of throat cancer in the mid-1920s, his moment had passed.

“Red Tom” Hickey is an important contribution to Texas and American history, capturing a moment in time that Buckingham argues was the second sustained crisis in American history: a democratic society wrestling with the effects of industrial capitalism.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

"Traveling with Sugar"

New from the University of California Press: Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic by Amy Moran-Thomas.

About the book, from the publisher:
Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a five-hundred-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction “sugar”—or, as some say in Belize, “traveling with sugar.” A decade in the making, this book unfolds as a series of crónicas—a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease. It profiles the careful work of those “still fighting it” as they grapple with unequal material infrastructures and unsettling dilemmas. Facing a new incarnation of blood sugar, these individuals speak back to science and policy misrecognitions that have prematurely cast their lost limbs and deaths as normal. Their families’ arts of maintenance and repair illuminate ongoing struggles to survive and remake larger systems of food, land, technology, and medicine.
Amy Moran-Thomas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 25, 2019

"Cold War Exiles and the CIA"

New from Oxford University Press: Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia by Benjamin Tromly.

About the book, from the publisher:
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA committed to supporting Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War Two or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA's Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA's patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 24, 2019

"The Life and Science of Harold C. Urey"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Life and Science of Harold C. Urey by Matthew Shindell.

About the book, from the publisher:
Harold C. Urey (1893–1981), whose discoveries lie at the foundation of modern science, was one of the most famous American scientists of the twentieth century. Born in rural Indiana, his evolution from small-town farm boy to scientific celebrity made him a symbol and spokesman for American scientific authority. Because he rose to fame alongside the prestige of American science, the story of his life reflects broader changes in the social and intellectual landscape of twentieth-century America. In this, the first ever biography of the chemist, Matthew Shindell shines new light on Urey’s struggles and achievements in a thoughtful exploration of the science, politics, and society of the Cold War era.

From Urey’s orthodox religious upbringing to his death in 1981, Shindell follows the scientist through nearly a century of American history: his discovery of deuterium and heavy water earned him the Nobel Prize in 1934, his work on the Manhattan Project helped usher in the atomic age, he initiated a generation of American scientists into the world of quantum physics and chemistry, and he took on the origin of the Moon in NASA’s lunar exploration program. Despite his success, however, Urey had difficulty navigating the nuclear age. In later years he lived in the shadow of the bomb he helped create, plagued by the uncertainties unleashed by the rise of American science and unable to reconcile the consequences of scientific progress with the morality of religion.

Tracing Urey’s life through two world wars and the Cold War not only conveys the complex historical relationship between science and religion in the twentieth century, but it also illustrates how these complexities spilled over into the early days of space science. More than a life story, this book immerses readers in the trials and triumphs of an extraordinary man and his extraordinary times.
Visit Matthew Shindell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 23, 2019

"The People Are King"

New from Oxford University Press: The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics by S. Elizabeth Penry.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the sixteenth century, in what is now modern-day Peru and Bolivia, Andean communities were forcibly removed from their traditional villages by Spanish colonizers and resettled in planned, self-governed towns modeled after those in Spain. But rather than merely conforming to Spanish cultural and political norms, indigenous Andeans adopted and gradually refashioned the religious practices dedicated to Christian saints and political institutions imposed on them, laying claim to their own rights and the sovereignty of the collective. The People Are King shows how common Andean people produced a new kind of civil society over three centuries of colonialism, merging their traditional understanding of collective life with the Spanish notion of the común to demand participatory democracy. S. Elizabeth Penry explores how this hybrid concept of self-rule spurred the indigenous rebellions that erupted across Latin America in the eighteenth century, not only against Spanish rulers, but against native hereditary nobility, for acting against the will of the comuneros.

Through the letters and documents of the Andean people themselves, The People Are King gives voice to a vision of community-based democracy that played a central role in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and continues to galvanize indigenous movements in Bolivia today.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 22, 2019

"The Universal Enemy"

New from Stanford University Press: The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity by Darryl Li.

About the book, from the publisher:
No contemporary figure is more demonized than the Islamist foreign fighter who wages jihad around the world. Spreading violence, disregarding national borders, and rejecting secular norms, so-called jihadists seem opposed to universalism itself. In a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the topic, The Universal Enemy argues that transnational jihadists are engaged in their own form of universalism: these fighters struggle to realize an Islamist vision directed at all of humanity, transcending racial and cultural difference.

Anthropologist and attorney Darryl Li reconceptualizes jihad as armed transnational solidarity under conditions of American empire, revisiting a pivotal moment after the Cold War when ethnic cleansing in the Balkans dominated global headlines. Muslim volunteers came from distant lands to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina alongside their co-religionists, offering themselves as an alternative to the US-led international community. Li highlights the parallels and overlaps between transnational jihads and other universalisms such as the War on Terror, United Nations peacekeeping, and socialist Non-Alignment. Developed from more than a decade of research with former fighters in a half-dozen countries, The Universal Enemy explores the relationship between jihad and American empire to shed critical light on both.
--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 21, 2019

"Israel Has a Jewish Problem"

New from Oxford University Press: Israel Has a Jewish Problem: Self-Determination as Self-Elimination by Joyce Dalsheim.

About the book, from the publisher:
Examining the production and assimilation of Jews as "the nation" in the modern state of Israel, this book shows how identity is constrained through myriad struggles over the meanings and practices of being Jewish. Based on years of ethnographic engagement, the book employs Franz Kafka's writing as a theoretical lens in order to frame the seemingly bizarre and self-contradictory processes it describes. While other scholars have explained Jewish identity conflicts in Israel in terms of a dichotomy between the secular and the religious, this book suggests that such an analysis is inadequate. Instead, it traces these struggles to the definition of "religion" itself. It suggests that the problem lies in the way modern identity categories at once disarticulate "religion" from "nation" and at the same time conflate those categories in the figure of the Jew. The struggles over Jewishness that are part of the process of producing the ethnos for the ethno-national state call into question the notion that self-determination in the form of the nation-state is a liberating process. Modern democratic nation-states are meant to liberate citizens because they are understood to be ruled by "the people" and for "the people." But if "the people" exists for the state and its projects, then there is little liberating about the formula of sovereign citizenship. Instead, self-determination becomes a form of self-elimination, narrowing the possible forms of Jewishness. The case of Israel demonstrates that the classic "Jewish Question" in Europe has been transformed but not answered by political sovereignty.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

"The Typographic Imagination"

New from Columbia University Press: The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media by Nathan Shockey.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the early twentieth century, Japan was awash with typographic text and mass-produced print. Over the short span of a few decades, affordable books and magazines became a part of everyday life, and a new generation of writers and thinkers considered how their world could be reconstructed through the circulation of printed language as a mass-market commodity. The Typographic Imagination explores how this commercial print revolution transformed Japan’s media ecology and traces the possibilities and pitfalls of type as a force for radical social change.

Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he considers the meanings and functions of print as a staple commodity and as a ubiquitous and material medium for discourse and thought. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Typographic Imagination brings into conversation a wide array of materials, including bookseller trade circulars, language reform debates, works of experimental fiction, photo gazetteers, socialist periodicals, Esperanto primers, declassified censorship documents, and printing press strike bulletins. Combining the rigorous close analysis of Japanese literary studies with transdisciplinary methodologies from media studies, book history, and intellectual history, The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformations of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

"Fifth Sun"

New from Oxford University Press: Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend.

About the book, from the publisher:
In November 1519, Hernando Cortés walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story--and the story of what happened afterwards--has been told many times, but always following the narrative offered by the Spaniards. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were intrigued by the Roman alphabet and, unbeknownst to the newcomers, they used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl. Until recently, these sources remained obscure, only partially translated, and rarely consulted by scholars.

For the first time, in Fifth Sun, the history of the Aztecs is offered in all its complexity based solely on the texts written by the indigenous people themselves. Camilla Townsend presents an accessible and humanized depiction of these native Mexicans, rather than seeing them as the exotic, bloody figures of European stereotypes. The conquest, in this work, is neither an apocalyptic moment, nor an origin story launching Mexicans into existence. The Mexica people had a history of their own long before the Europeans arrived and did not simply capitulate to Spanish culture and colonization. Instead, they realigned their political allegiances, accommodated new obligations, adopted new technologies, and endured.

This engaging revisionist history of the Aztecs, told through their own words, explores the experience of a once-powerful people facing the trauma of conquest and finding ways to survive, offering an empathetic interpretation for experts and non-specialists alike.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Waste Siege"

New from Stanford University Press: Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.

About the book, from the publisher:
Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 18, 2019

"Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India"

New from Oxford University Press: Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India: A History by Pradip Ninan Thomas.

About the book, from the publisher:
This book, on the history of telecommunications in India is the first of its kind to intentionally link the past and present, the continuities and discontinuities between telecommunications in the era of the British Raj and telecommunications in 21st century India. Beginning with the history of the telegraph, it explores in separate chapters, the history of oceanic cables and wireless in the context of the political economy and compulsions of Empire to control global flows of communications. Telecommunications was vital to the Imperial project and connecting their Jewel in the Crown, India, was a key priority. However inter-colonial rivalries outside and within India and contestations between private and public ownership of telecommunications made that task difficult. This book explores these contestations and the changing priorities related to telecommunications in the era of the British and in modern Independent India. It makes the case that history is absolutely critical to understanding the present and the imprint of the past continues to shape the Indian state's engagements with telecommunications.
Pradip Ninan Thomas is at the School of Communications and Arts, University of Queensland. He has written extensively on the media in India, the political economy of communications, communications and social change and the media and religion. He was the Vice President of the International Association for Media & Communication Research (2012-2016).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Are Men Animals?: How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short"

New from Basic Books: Are Men Animals?: How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short by Matthew Gutmann.

About the book, from the publisher:
“Boys will be boys,” the saying goes — but what does that actually mean? A leading anthropologist investigates

Why do men behave the way they do? Is it their male brains? Surging testosterone? From vulgar locker-room talk to mansplaining to sexual harassment, society is too quick to explain male behavior in terms of biology.

In Are Men Animals?, anthropologist Matthew Gutmann argues that predatory male behavior is in no way inevitable. Men behave the way they do because culture permits it, not because biology demands it. To prove this, he embarks on a global investigation of masculinity. Exploring everything from the gender-bending politics of American college campuses to the marriage markets of Shanghai and the women-only subway cars of Mexico City, Gutmann shows just how complicated masculinity can be. The result isn’t just a new way to think about manhood. It’s a guide to a better life, for all of us.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 17, 2019

"A Biography of Loneliness"

New from Oxford University Press: A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion by Fay Bound Alberti.

About the book, from the publisher:
Despite 21st-century fears of an 'epidemic' of loneliness, its history has been sorely neglected. A Biography of Loneliness offers a radically new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. Using letters and diaries, philosophical tracts, political discussions, and medical literature from the eighteenth century to the present, historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not an ahistorical, universal phenomenon. It is, in fact, a modern emotion: before 1800, its language did not exist. And where loneliness is identified, it is not always bad, but a complex emotional state that differs according to class, gender, ethnicity and experience.

Looking at informative case studies such as Sylvia Plath, Queen Victoria, and Virginia Woolf, A Biography of Loneliness charts the emergence of loneliness as a modern and embodied emotional state.
Visit Fay Bound Alberti's website.

The Page 99 Test: This Mortal Coil.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 15, 2019

"Inventing Disaster"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood by Cynthia A. Kierner.

About the book, from the publisher:
When hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other disasters strike, we count our losses, search for causes, commiserate with victims, and initiate relief efforts. Amply illustrated and expansively researched, Inventing Disaster explains the origins and development of this predictable, even ritualized, culture of calamity over three centuries, exploring its roots in the revolutions in science, information, and emotion that were part of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and America.

Beginning with the collapse of the early seventeenth-century Jamestown colony, ending with the deadly Johnstown flood of 1889, and highlighting fires, epidemics, earthquakes, and exploding steamboats along the way, Cynthia A. Kierner tells horrific stories of culturally significant calamities and their victims and charts efforts to explain, prevent, and relieve disaster-related losses. Although how we interpret and respond to disasters has changed in some ways since the nineteenth century, Kierner demonstrates that, for better or worse, the intellectual, economic, and political environments of earlier eras forged our own twenty-first-century approach to disaster, shaping the stories we tell, the precautions we ponder, and the remedies we prescribe for disaster-ravaged communities.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America"

New from the University of California Press: Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America by Rebecca J. Lester.

About the book, from the publisher:
When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old—and again when she was eighteen—she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating disorders—their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination.

Famished, the culmination of over two decades of anthropological and clinical work, as well as a lifetime of lived experience, presents a profound rethinking of eating disorders and how to treat them. Through a mix of rich cultural analysis, detailed therapeutic accounts, and raw autobiographical reflections, Famished helps make sense of why people develop eating disorders, what the process of recovery is like, and why treatments so often fail. It’s also an unsparing condemnation of the tension between profit and care in American healthcare, demonstrating how a system set up to treat a disease may, in fact, perpetuate it. Fierce and vulnerable, critical and hopeful, Famished will forever change the way you understand eating disorders and the people who suffer with them.
Rebecca J. Lester is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and a licensed clinical social worker. She is the author of numerous academic articles and the award-winning book Jesus in Our Wombs.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 14, 2019

"Arab Routes"

New from Stanford University Press: Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California by Sarah M. A. Gualtieri.

About the book, from the publisher:
Los Angeles is home to the largest population of people of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, Syrian and Lebanese migration, in particular, to Southern California has been intimately connected to and through Latin America. Arab Routes uncovers the stories of this Syrian American community, one both Arabized and Latinized, to reveal important cross-border and multiethnic solidarities in Syrian California.

Sarah M. A. Gualtieri reconstructs the early Syrian connections through California, Texas, Mexico, and Lebanon. She reveals the Syrian interests in the defense of the Mexican American teens charged in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder, in actor Danny Thomas's rise to prominence in LA's Syrian cultural festivals, and in more recent activities of the grandchildren of immigrants to reclaim a sense of Arabness. Gualtieri reinscribes Syrians into Southern California history through her examination of powerful images and texts, augmented with interviews with descendants of immigrants. Telling the story of how Syrians helped forge a global Los Angeles, Arab Routes counters a long-held stereotype of Arabs as outsiders and underscores their longstanding place in American culture and in interethnic coalitions, past and present.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

"Black Radical"

New from Liveright: Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter by Kerri K. Greenidge.

About the book, from the publisher:
This long-overdue biography reestablishes William Monroe Trotter’s essential place next to Douglass, Du Bois, and King in the pantheon of American civil rights heroes.

William Monroe Trotter (1872– 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of black liberation that prefigured leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. Synthesizing years of archival research, historian Kerri Greenidge renders the drama of turn- of- the- century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure, whose prophetic, yet ultimately tragic, life offers a link between the vision of Frederick Douglass and black radicalism in the modern era.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

"The Far Right Today"

New from Polity: The Far Right Today by Cas Mudde.

About the book, from the publisher:
The far right is back with a vengeance. After several decades at the political margins, far-right politics has again taken center stage. Three of the world’s largest democracies – Brazil, India, and the United States – now have a radical right leader, while far-right parties continue to increase their profile and support within Europe.

In this timely book, leading global expert on political extremism Cas Mudde provides a concise overview of the fourth wave of postwar far-right politics, exploring its history, ideology, organization, causes, and consequences, as well as the responses available to civil society, party, and state actors to challenge its ideas and influence. What defines this current far-right renaissance, Mudde argues, is its mainstreaming and normalization within the contemporary political landscape. Challenging orthodox thinking on the relationship between conventional and far-right politics, Mudde offers a complex and insightful picture of one of the key political challenges of our time.
--Marshal Zeringue

"Captives of Liberty"

New from the University of Pennsylvania Press: Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution by T. Cole Jones.

About the book, from the publisher:
Contrary to popular belief, the American Revolutionary War was not a limited and restrained struggle for political self-determination. From the onset of hostilities, British authorities viewed their American foes as traitors to be punished, and British abuse of American prisoners, both tacitly condoned and at times officially sanctioned, proliferated. Meanwhile, more than seventeen thousand British and allied soldiers fell into American hands during the Revolution. For a fledgling nation that could barely afford to keep an army in the field, the issue of how to manage prisoners of war was daunting.

Captives of Liberty examines how America's founding generation grappled with the problems posed by prisoners of war, and how this influenced the wider social and political legacies of the Revolution. When the struggle began, according to T. Cole Jones, revolutionary leadership strove to conduct the war according to the prevailing European customs of military conduct, which emphasized restricting violence to the battlefield and treating prisoners humanely. However, this vision of restrained war did not last long. As the British denied customary protections to their American captives, the revolutionary leadership wasted no time in capitalizing on the prisoners' ordeals for propagandistic purposes. Enraged, ordinary Americans began to demand vengeance, and they viewed British soldiers and their German and Native American auxiliaries as appropriate targets. This cycle of violence spiraled out of control, transforming the struggle for colonial independence into a revolutionary war.

In illuminating this history, Jones contends that the violence of the Revolutionary War had a profound impact on the character and consequences of the American Revolution. Captives of Liberty not only provides the first comprehensive analysis of revolutionary American treatment of enemy prisoners but also reveals the relationship between America's political revolution and the war waged to secure it.
--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 11, 2019

"Opening the Gates to Asia"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion by Jane H. Hong.

About the book, from the publisher:
Over the course of less than a century, the U.S. transformed from a nation that excluded Asians from immigration and citizenship to one that receives more immigrants from Asia than from anywhere else in the world. Yet questions of how that dramatic shift took place have long gone unanswered. In this first comprehensive history of Asian exclusion repeal, Jane H. Hong unearths the transpacific movement that successfully ended restrictions on Asian immigration.

The mid-twentieth century repeal of Asian exclusion, Hong shows, was part of the price of America’s postwar empire in Asia. The demands of U.S. empire-building during an era of decolonization created new opportunities for advocates from both the U.S. and Asia to lobby U.S. Congress for repeal. Drawing from sources in the United States, India, and the Philippines, Opening the Gates to Asia charts a movement more than twenty years in the making. Positioning repeal at the intersection of U.S. civil rights struggles and Asian decolonization, Hong raises thorny questions about the meanings of nation, independence, and citizenship on the global stage.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 10, 2019

"The Morals of the Market"

New from Verso: The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism by Jessica Whyte.

About the book, from the publisher:
The fatal embrace of human rights and neoliberalism

Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “civilisation”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects.
Jessica Whyte is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 9, 2019

"Lakota America"

New from Yale University Press: Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power by Pekka Hämäläinen.

About the book, from the publisher:
The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America’s history

This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas’ roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America’s great commercial artery, and then—in what was America’s first sweeping westward expansion—as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains.

The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen’s deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
Pekka Hämäläinen is the Rhodes Professor of American History and Fellow of St. Catherine’s College at Oxford University. He has served as the principal investigator of a five-year project on nomadic empires in world history, funded by the European Research Council. His previous book, The Comanche Empire, won the Bancroft Prize in 2009.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Into the Field"

New from Stanford University Press: Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan by Miriam Kingsberg Kadia.

About the book, from the publisher:
In the 1930s, a cohort of professional human scientists coalesced around a common and particular understanding of objectivity as the foundation of legitimate knowledge, and of fieldwork as the pathway to objectivity. Into the Field is the first collective biography of this cohort, evocatively described by one contemporary as the men of one age.

At the height of imperialism, the men of one age undertook field research in territories under Japanese rule in pursuit of "objective" information that would justify the subjugation of local peoples. After 1945, amid the defeat and dismantling of Japanese sovereignty and under the occupation and tutelage of the United States, they returned to the field to create narratives of human difference that supported the new national values of democracy, capitalism, and peace. The 1968 student movement challenged these values, resulting in an all-encompassing attack on objectivity itself. Nonetheless, the legacy of the men of one age lives on in the disciplines they developed and the beliefs they established about human diversity.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 8, 2019

"Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question"

New from the University of California Press: Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question by Lázaro Lima.

About the book, from the publisher:
Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question tells the story of the country’s first Latina Supreme Court Associate Justice’s rise to the pinnacle of American public life at a moment of profound demographic and political transformation. While Sotomayor’s confirmation appeared to signal the greater acceptance and inclusion of Latinos—the nation’s largest “minority majority”—the uncritical embrace of her status as a “possibility model” and icon paradoxically erased the fact that her success was due to civil rights policies and safeguards that no longer existed.

Being Brown analyzes Sotomayor’s story of success and accomplishment, despite seemingly insurmountable odds, in order to ask: What do we lose in democratic practice when we allow symbolic inclusion to supplant the work of meaningful political enfranchisement? In a historical moment of resurgent racism, unrelenting Latino bashing, and previously unimaginable “blood and soil” Nazism, Being Brown explains what we stand to lose when we allow democratic values to be trampled for the sake of political expediency, and demonstrates how understanding “the Latino question” can fortify democratic practice.

Being Brown provides the historical vocabulary for understanding why the Latino body politic is central to the country’s future and why Sonia Sotomayor’s biography provides an important window into understanding America, and the country’s largest minority majority, at this historical juncture. In the process, Being Brown counters “alternative facts” with historical precision and ethical clarity to invigorate the best of democratic practice at a historical moment when we need it most.
Visit Lázaro Lima's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, November 7, 2019

"Partitioning Palestine"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire by Penny Sinanoglou.

About the book, from the publisher:
Partitioning Palestine is the first history of the ideological and political forces that led to the idea of partition—that is, a division of territory and sovereignty—in British mandate Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Inverting the spate of narratives that focus on how the idea contributed to, or hindered, the development of future Israeli and Palestinian states, Penny Sinanoglou asks instead what drove and constrained British policymaking around partition, and why partition was simultaneously so appealing to British policymakers yet ultimately proved so difficult for them to enact. Taking a broad view not only of local and regional factors, but also of Palestine’s place in the British empire and its status as a League of Nations mandate, Sinanoglou deftly recasts the story of partition in Palestine as a struggle to maintain imperial control. After all, British partition plans imagined space both for a Zionist state indebted to Britain and for continued British control over key geostrategic assets, depending in large part on the forced movement of Arab populations. With her detailed look at the development of the idea of partition from its origins in the 1920s, Sinanoglou makes a bold contribution to our understanding of the complex interplay between internationalism and imperialism at the end of the British empire and reveals the legacies of British partitionist thinking in the broader history of decolonization in the modern Middle East.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

"Aiding and Abetting"

New from Stanford University Press: Aiding and Abetting: U.S. Foreign Assistance and State Violence by Jessica Trisko Darden.

About the book, from the publisher:
The United States is the world's leading foreign aid donor. Yet there has been little inquiry into how such assistance affects the politics and societies of recipient nations. Drawing on four decades of data on U.S. economic and military aid, Aiding and Abetting explores whether foreign aid does more harm than good. Jessica Trisko Darden challenges long-standing ideas about aid and its consequences, and highlights key patterns in the relationship between assistance and violence. She persuasively demonstrates that many of the foreign aid policy challenges the U.S. faced in the Cold War era, such as the propping up of dictators friendly to U.S. interests, remain salient today. Historical case studies of Indonesia, El Salvador, and South Korea illustrate how aid can uphold human freedoms or propagate human rights abuses. Aiding and Abetting encourages both advocates and critics of foreign assistance to reconsider its political and social consequences by focusing international aid efforts on the expansion of human freedom.
Visit Jessica Trisko Darden's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

"The Duty to Vote"

New from Oxford University Press: The Duty to Vote by Julia Maskivker.

About the book, from the publisher:
What do we owe those in our communities? What do we owe strangers? In a sense, those who vie for political office locally and nationally do so, at least in part, from duty and obligation to their fellow citizens, to many they do not know and may never meet. In a democratic society, those who wish to participate in politics have the unbridled freedom to do exactly that: whether as leaders, or those who campaign for politicians, or as people who simply struggle to have their voice heard in everything from town hall meetings to protests. But by the same logic, we also have the freedom not to participate: the freedom not to care to be heard at all.

Not so, says Julia Maskivker: such logic collapses when applied to the act of voting. Not only should we vote if we can--we must vote. Even when confronted with two unappealing candidates, or with ballot propositions whose effects we will barely feel, or with the fact that our single vote might never tip an election, we must vote. We have a duty of conscience to vote with care when doing so comes at so small a cost. Maskivker, a political theorist and philosopher, argues that those fortunate to live in democratic societies with freely elected leaders all share, simply, a moral obligation to vote.

The book's argument adds a fresh and uncompromising perspective to voting ethics literature, which is dominated by views that reject the morality and rationality of voting. Maskivker's line of reasoning contends that the duty to vote is a "duty of common pursuit," which helps society to achieve good governance. She compares voting to Samaritan justice, showing that the same duty of assistance that would compel us to help a stranger in need also obligates us to vote to save our fellow citizens from injustice at the hands of bad or even evil leaders.

The book further explores issues of voter incompetence, and how citizens' ignorance can be partly overcome through political reform. Although uninformed voting may lead to bad governance, voting judiciously can be an effective path to justice. In a time of polarization and political turmoil, The Duty to Vote offers a stirring reminder that voting is fundamentally a collective endeavor to protect our communities, and that we all must vote in order to preserve the free societies within which we live.
Visit Julia Maskivker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, November 4, 2019

"On the Backs of Tortoises"

New from Yale University Press: On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galapagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden by Elizabeth Hennessy.

About the book, from the publisher:
An insightful exploration of the iconic Galápagos tortoises, and how their fate is inextricably linked to our own in a rapidly changing world

The Galápagos archipelago is often viewed as a last foothold of pristine nature. For sixty years, conservationists have worked to restore this evolutionary Eden after centuries of exploitation at the hands of pirates, whalers, and island settlers. This book tells the story of the islands’ namesakes—the giant tortoises—as coveted food sources, objects of natural history, and famous icons of conservation and tourism. By doing so, it brings into stark relief the paradoxical, and impossible, goal of conserving species by trying to restore a past state of prehistoric evolution. The tortoises, Elizabeth Hennessy demonstrates, are not prehistoric, but rather microcosms whose stories show how deeply human and nonhuman life are entangled. In a world where evolution is thoroughly shaped by global history, Hennessy puts forward a vision for conservation based on reckoning with the past, rather than trying to erase it.
Elizabeth Hennessy is a geographer and assistant professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is on the steering committee of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, November 3, 2019

"Crafting Masculine Selves"

New from Oxford University Press: Crafting Masculine Selves: Culture, War, and Psychodynamics in Afghanistan by Andrea Chiovenda.

About the book, from the publisher:
Against the backdrop of four decades of continuous conflict in Afghanistan, the Pashtun male protagonists of this book carry out their daily effort to internally negotiate, adjust (if at all), and respond to the very strict cultural norms and rules of masculinity that their androcentric social environment enjoins on them. Yet, in a widespread context of war, displacement, relocation, and social violence, cultural expectations and stringent tenets on how to comport oneself as a "real man" have a profound impact on the psychological equilibrium and emotional dynamics of these individuals. This book is a close investigation into these private and at times contradictory aspects of subjectivity. Stemming from five years of research in a southeastern province of Afghanistan, it presents a long-term, psychodynamic engagement with a select group of male Pashtun individuals, which results in a multilayered dive not only into their inner lives, but also into the cultural and social environment in which they live and develop. Behind the screen of what often seems like outward conformity, Andrea Chiovenda is able to point to areas of strong inner conflict, ambivalence, and rebellion, which in turn will serve as the seeds for cultural and social change. These dynamics play out in a setting in which what was considered legitimate and justifiable violence on the battlefield has now spilled over into everyday life, even among non-combatants.
--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, November 2, 2019

"Imperial Bodies"

New from Stanford University Press: Imperial Bodies: Empire and Death in Alexandria, Egypt by Shana Minkin.

About the book, from the publisher:
At the turn of the twentieth century, Alexandria, Egypt, was a bustling transimperial port city, under nominal Ottoman and unofficial British imperial rule. Thousands of European subjects lived, worked, and died there. And when they died, the machinery of empire had to negotiate for space, resources, and control with the nascent national state. Imperial Bodies shows how the mechanisms of death became a tool for exerting both imperial and national governance.

Shana Minkin investigates how French and British power asserted itself in Egypt through local consular claims of belonging manifested within the mundane caring for dead bodies. European communities corralled imperial bodies through the bureaucracies and rituals of death—from hospitals, funerals, and cemeteries to autopsies and death registrations. As they did so, imperial consulates pushed against the workings of both the Egyptian state and each other, expanding their governments' material and performative power. Ultimately, this book reveals how European imperial powers did not so much claim Alexandria as their own, as they maneuvered, manipulated, and cajoled their empires into Egypt.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, November 1, 2019

"The Labor of Lunch"

New from the University of California Press: The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools by Jennifer E. Gaddis.

About the book, from the publisher:
There’s a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation’s school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it’s no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower “lunch ladies” to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children?

The Labor of Lunch aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Jennifer E. Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and moral heft, The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.
Visit Jennifer E. Gaddis's website.

--Marshal Zeringue