"Darwinism’s Generations"

New from Oxford University Press: Darwinism’s Generations. The Reception of Darwinian Evolution in Britain, 1859-1909 by Martin Hewitt.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Reception of Darwinian Evolution in Britain, 1859-1909: Darwinism's Generations uses the impact of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) in the 50 years after its publication to demonstrate the effectiveness of a generational framework for understanding the cultural and intellectual history of Britain in the nineteenth century. It challenges conventional notions of the 'Darwinian Revolution' by examining how people from across all sections of society actually responded to Darwin's writings. Drawing on the opinions and interventions of over 2,000 Victorians, drawn from an exceptionally wide range of archival and printed sources, it argues that the spread of Darwinian belief was slower, more complicated, more stratified by age, and ultimately shaped far more powerfully by divergent generational responses, than has previously been recognised. In doing so, it makes a number of important contributions. It offers by far the richest and most comprehensive account to date of how contemporaries came to terms with the intellectual and emotional shocks of evolutionary theory. It makes a compelling case for taking proper account of age as a fundamental historical dynamic, and for the powerful generational patternings of the effects that age produced. It demonstrates the extent to which the most common sub-periodisation of the Victorian period are best understood not merely as constituted by the exigencies of events, but are also formed by the shifting balance generational influence.

Taken together these insights present a significant challenge to the ways historians currently approach the task of describing the nature and experience of historical change, and have fundamental implications for our current conceptions of the shape and pace of historical time.

Visit Martin Hewitt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Under the Nuclear Shadow"

New from Princeton University Press: Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security by Fiona S. Cunningham.

About the book, from the publisher:

How and why China has pursued information-age weapons to gain leverage against its adversaries

How can states use military force to achieve their political aims without triggering a catastrophic nuclear war? Among the states facing this dilemma of fighting limited wars, only China has given information-age weapons such a prominent role. While other countries have preferred the traditional options of threatening to use nuclear weapons or fielding capabilities for decisive conventional military victories, China has instead chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counterspace capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries. In Under the Nuclear Shadow, Fiona Cunningham examines this distinctive aspect of China’s post–Cold War deterrence strategy, developing an original theory of “strategic substitution.” When crises with the United States highlighted the inadequacy of China’s existing military capabilities, Cunningham argues, China pursued information-age weapons that promised to rapidly provide credible leverage against adversaries.

Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese-language sources and interviews with security experts in China, Cunningham provides a rare and candid glimpse from Beijing into the information-age technologies that are reshaping how states gain leverage in the twenty-first century. She offers unprecedented insights into the trajectory of China’s military modernization, as she details the strengths and weaknesses of China’s strategic substitution approach. Under the Nuclear Shadow also looks ahead at the uncertain future of China’s strategic substitution approach and briefly explores too how other states might seize upon the promise of emerging technologies to address weaknesses in their own military strategies.

Visit Fiona S. Cunningham's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Moral Issues"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Moral Issues: How Public Opinion on Abortion and Gay Rights Affects American Religion and Politics by Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp.

About the book, from the publisher:

A new perspective on how beliefs about abortion and gay rights reshaped American politics.

Many believe that religious and partisan identities undergird American public opinion. However, when it comes to abortion and gay rights, the reverse may be closer to the truth.

Drawing on wide-ranging evidence, Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp show that views on abortion and gay rights are just as durable and politically impactful—and often more so—than political and religious identities. Goren and Chapp locate the lasting strength of stances on abortion and gay rights in the automatic, visceral emotions that the media has primed since the late 1980s. Moral Issues examines how attitudes toward these moralized issues affect, and can sometimes even disrupt, religious and partisan identities. Indeed, over the last thirty years, these attitudes have accelerated the rise of the religious “nones,” who have no religious affiliation, and promoted moral sorting into the Democratic and Republican parties.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rules to Infinity"

New from Oxford University Press: Rules to Infinity: The Normative Role of Mathematics in Scientific Explanation by Mark Povich.

About the book, from the publisher:

One of the central aims of science is to provide explanations of natural phenomena. What role does mathematics play in achieving this aim? How does mathematics contribute to the explanatory power of science? Rules to Infinity defends the thesis that mathematics contributes to the explanatory power of science by expressing conceptual rules that allow for the transformation of empirical descriptions. It claims that mathematics should not be thought of as describing, in any substantive sense, an abstract realm of eternal mathematical objects, as traditional Platonists have thought.

This view, which Mark Povich calls "mathematical normativism," is updated with contemporary philosophical tools, which are used to form the argument that normativism is compatible with mainstream semantic theory. This allows the normativist to accept that there are mathematical truths, while resisting the Platonistic idea that there exist abstract mathematical objects that explain such truths. There is a distinction between scientific explanations that are in some sense distinctively mathematical--those that explain natural phenomena in some uniquely mathematical way--and those that are only standardly mathematical, and Povich defends a particular account of this distinction.

Rules to Infinity compares normativism to other prominent views in the philosophy of mathematics, such as neo-Fregeanism, fictionalism, conventionalism, and structuralism, and offers an entry point into debates at the forefront of philosophy of science and mathematics as it defends its novel positions.

Visit Mark Povich's website. Rules to Infinity is an open access title: read it here.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reversing Deforestation"

New from Stanford University Press: Reversing Deforestation: How Market Forces and Local Ownership Are Saving Forests in Latin America by Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dire reports of surging deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon appear often in international headlines, with commentators decrying the destruction of tree-covered habitats as an act of environmental vandalism. Although forest losses are alarming, broader trends are bending in the direction of forest recovery. In this book, Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate address the long-term recovery of forests in Latin America. The authors synthesize trends in demography, agricultural development, and technological change, and argue that slower population growth and increasing crop and tree yields—in conjunction with protecting local ownership of natural resources—have encouraged forest transition. This book explores how market forces, ownership arrangements, and the enforcement of property rights have influenced this shift from net deforestation to net afforestation. Forest transitions have happened before, such as the recovery of tree-covered habitats in Europe and the United States. Signs of a similar transformation in land use are now present in Latin America. Ending deforestation requires a strengthening of forest dwellers' property rights while ensuring that biodiversity conservation is no longer treated as a value-less externality. The resulting forest landscape, actively managed for ecosystem services, will be more resilient, as is needed to overcome climate change.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Live Stock and Dead Things"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Live Stock and Dead Things: The Archaeology of Zoopolitics between Domestication and Modernity by Hannah Chazin.

About the book, from the publisher:

Reconceptualizes human-animal relationships and their political significance in ancient and modern societies.

In Live Stock and Dead Things, Hannah Chazin combines zooarchaeology and anthropology to challenge familiar narratives about the role of nonhuman animals in the rise of modern societies. Conventional views of this process tend to see a mostly linear development from hunter-gatherer societies, to horticultural and pastoral ones, to large-scale agricultural ones, and then industrial ones. Along the way, traditional accounts argue that owning livestock as property, along with land and other valuable commodities, introduced social inequality and stratification. Against this, Chazin raises a provocative question: What if domestication wasn’t the origin of instrumentalizing nonhuman animals after all?

Chazin argues that these conventional narratives are inherited from conjectural histories and ignore the archaeological data. In her view, the category of “domestication” flattens the more complex dimensions of humans’ relationship to herd animals. In the book’s first half, Chazin offers a new understanding of the political possibilities of pastoralism, one that recognizes the powerful role herd animals have played in shaping human notions of power and authority. In the second half, she takes readers into her archaeological fieldwork in the South Caucasus, which sheds further light on herd animals’ transformative effect on the economy, social life, and ritual. Appealing to anthropologists and archaeologists alike, this daring book offers a reconceptualization of human-animal relationships and their political significance.

Visit Hannah Chazin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism"

New from Oxford University Press: The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism: Knowledge Providers and Propagandists in the 'Third Reich' by Baijayanti Roy.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism is the first detailed and critical study of the intellectual and political connections that existed between some German scholars specializing on India, non-academic 'India experts,' Indian anti-colonialists and various organs of the Nazi state. It explores the ways in which different knowledge discourses pertaining to India, particularly its colonization and the anti-colonial movement, were used by these individuals for a number of German organisations to fulfil the demands of Nazi politics. This monograph also inspects the links between the knowledge providers and embodiments of National Socialist politics like the Nazi party and its affiliates. In this study, Baijayanti Roy aims to ascertain whether such political engagements were actually more rewarding for the scholars than their 'practical services' to the state in the form of strategic deployment of their knowledge of India.

The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism offers case studies of four organisations which incorporated such complicated entanglements of knowledge and power: the India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie in Munich, the Special Department India of the German Foreign Ministry, the Seminar for Oriental languages and its successor institutions at the University of Berlin, and the Indian Legion of the German Army. The knowledge networks underlying these organisations were dominated by German Indologists, but non-specialist knowledge providers, both German and Indian were also included.

The Nazi regime expected all scholars and intellectuals to engage in Kulturpolitik (cultural politics), which entailed propagating the glories of the 'Reich' and its supreme leader as well as collecting 'politically valuable' knowledge within and outside Germany. For the four organizations concerned, this meant conducting pro-German and from around 1938, anti-British propaganda aimed at Indians.

Loosely following an analogy provided by Herbert Mehrtens in the context of natural sciences, this monograph posits that there were 'patterns of collaboration' between the knowledge providers and the representatives of the Nazi regime. At the core of these 'patterns' was, to borrow Mitchell Ash`s theory, an exchange of resources and capital in which scholars and experts offered their knowledge of Indian languages, history and culture to authorities like the Foreign Ministry, the SS and the Army. In return, they received increased professional opportunities, financial remuneration or in some cases, increased power and influence.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Pacific's New Navies"

New from Cambridge University Press: The Pacific's New Navies: An Ocean, its Wars, and the Making of US Sea Power by Thomas M. Jamison.

About the book, from the publisher:

The initial creation of the United States' ocean-going battlefleet – otherwise known as the 'New Navy' – was a result of the naval wars and arms races around the Pacific during the late-nineteenth century. Using a transnational methodology, Thomas Jamison spotlights how US Civil War-era innovations catalyzed naval development in the Pacific World, creating a sense that the US Navy was falling behind regional competitors. As the industrializing 'newly-made navies' of Chile, Peru, Japan, and China raced against each other, Pacific dynamism motivated investments in the US 'New Navy as a matter of security and civilizational prestige. In this provocative exploration into the making of modern US navalism, Jamison provides an analysis of competitive naval build-ups in the Pacific, of the interactions between peoples, ideas, and practices within it, and ultimately the emergence of the US as a major power.

Tommy Jamison is a military historian and Asst. Professor of Strategic Studies in the Defense Analysis Dept., Naval Postgraduate School.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Radical Solidarity"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico's Independence by Lisa G. Materson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Radical Solidarity tells the riveting story of Ruth Reynolds (1916–89), a white pacifist from South Dakota who became a stalwart ally of nationalist revolutionaries during Puerto Rico’s long struggle for independence. Reynolds dedicated her life to ending US control of the archipelago. She testified before Congress and the UN, organized fellow North Americans, investigated the brutal tactics used by the colonial state to quash independence sentiment, and was incarcerated as a political prisoner.

Lisa G. Materson introduces the concept of “radical solidarity” to describe Reynolds’s powerful model for globally engaged activism. Guided by her vision of allyship, Reynolds developed deep bonds with the Puerto Rican nationalist women with whom she was imprisoned, collaborated across ideological divides with revolutionary leaders, and established lasting relationships with civil rights lawyers, political exiles, and New Left activists. Her radical solidarity enabled her to remain a tireless champion for Puerto Rico’s independence through five decades of hope, disappointment, and political change. Her life reveals the price paid by those who supported an independent Puerto Rico and sheds light on the possibilities of working across differences in the face of US state-sanctioned violence and colonialism.

Visit Lisa G. Materson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"From Small Talk to Microaggression"

New from the University of Chicago Press: From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale by Michael Lempert.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction.

In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as “scaled.” Focusing on the sciences of interaction in midcentury America, Lempert traces how they harnessed diverse tools and media technologies, from dictation machines to 16mm film, to study communication “microscopically.” In looking closely, many hoped to transform interaction: to improve efficiency, grow democracy, curb racism, and much else. Yet their descent into a microworld created troubles, with some critics charging that these scientists couldn’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, “micropolitics,” and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences.

Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them—and with each other—across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect the ethics and politics of language and communication today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Thanks for Nothing"

New from Oxford University Press: Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood since 1980 by Nicholas H. Wolfinger and Matthew McKeever.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1980, single mother families were five times more likely than two-parent families to be poor. Forty years later, single-mother families are still five times more likely to be poor. How can this be given the vast increases in education and employment achieved by American women over this period?

In Thanks for Nothing, Nicholas H. Wolfinger and Matthew McKeever explore the contradictions that lie at the heart of single motherhood. Drawing on forty years of data from two large national surveys, they find that the mystery of single mothers' economic stagnation can be explained by changes in the kind of women most likely to become single mothers. In 1980, most single mothers were divorced women; forty years later, the majority are mothers who gave birth out of wedlock. On paper, divorced women look a lot like their married contemporaries, but with one income instead of two. Never-married mothers are a completely different population--they have less education, work less, and receive lower economic returns on their educational credentials when they do work. They're also far more likely to have grown up in underprivileged families. Ultimately, Wolfinger and McKeever find that some single mothers are doing better even as others have fallen through the cracks.

Providing an in-depth look into the economics of single motherhood, Thanks for Nothing offers the most detailed statistical portrait of single mothers to date and, importantly, provides concrete suggestions for how policymakers should respond to persisting inequalities among mothers.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Burying Mussolini"

New from Cornell University Press: Burying Mussolini: Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism by Paolo Heywood.

About the book, from the publisher:

Burying Mussolini addresses the global resurgence in authoritarian and nationalist populism and its connection with valorizations of ordinary life. Predappio is the birthplace and burial site of Benito Mussolini and Italy's premier neo-fascist tourist site with hundreds of thousands of fascist sympathizers descending on the town annually. But, Paolo Heywood asks, what of the people who actually live there? What does 'ordinary life' look like in the shadow of Mussolini's grave?

As politicians, commentators, and social scientists seek to understand what lies behind new forms of political authoritarianism, and whether and how they resemble movements once thought consigned to the past, Burying Mussolini narrates how people in Predappio cope with the dark heritage of their home by carefully crafting a sense of 'ordinariness' that is itself inflected by ghosts of their fascist past.

Paolo Heywood is Associate Professor of anthropology at Durham University. He is the author of After Difference, editor of New Anthropologies of Italy, and the co-editor of Beyond Description.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Indicators of Democracy"

New from Stanford University Press: Indicators of Democracy: The Politics and Promise of Evaluation Expertise in Mexico by Diana Graizbord.

About the book, from the publisher:

The spread of democracy across the Global South has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country's citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the policies they put forth? In Indicators of Democracy Diana Graizbord exposes the complex, often-hidden world of the institutions that are meant to ensure democratic accountability and transparency. Taking the case of Mexico's National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), Graizbord provides a deep theory of what happens when democratic aspirations intersect with technocratic ambitions. Analyzing what it takes to establish and sustain monitoring and evaluation as a form of official state expertise, Graizbord is able to put forward the contours of technodemocracy―a democratic political project that hinges on the power of experts to shape politics in unexpected but profound ways.

Visit Diana Graizbord's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Supply Chain Justice"

New from Princeton University Press: Supply Chain Justice: The Logistics of British Border Control by Mary Bosworth.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the UK’s immigration detention and deportation system turns people into monetized, measurable units on a supply chain

In the UK’s fully outsourced “immigration detainee escorting system,” private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign national citizens. Run and organized like a supply chain, this system dehumanises those who are detained and deported, treating them as if they were packages to be moved from place to place and relying on poorly paid, minimally trained staff to do so. In Supply Chain Justice, Mary Bosworth offers the first empirically grounded, scholarly analysis of the British detention and deportation system. Drawing on four years of extensive ethnographic research, Bosworth examines what keeps the system in place and whether it might be effectively challenged.

Told by a senior manager that “this is a logistics business,” Bosworth documents how the public and private sectors have built a supply chain in which people’s humanity is transformed both symbolically and tangibly through administrative processes and bureaucracy into monetized, measurable units. Like all logistics, the system has failure built into it. The contract does not seek to eradicate risk but rather to manage it, determining responsibility and apportioning a financial value to such “failures” as delay, escape, aborted flight or death in custody. Front-line workers and managers depoliticise and normalise their efforts by casting their duties in familiar bureaucratic terms, with targets, “service level agreements” and “key performance indicators.” Focusing on first-hand accounts from workers and lengthy observation and document analysis, Bosworth explores the impact of border logistics in order to ask what it would take to build inclusive infrastructures rather than those designed to exclude.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Multicultural Britain"

New from Oxford University Press: Multicultural Britain: A People's History by Kieran Connell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Between the end of the Second World War and the early twenty-first century, Britain became multicultural. This vivid book tells that remarkable story. Kieran Connell, an historian of Irish and German heritage who grew up in Balsall Heath, inner-city Bir-mingham, takes readers into multicultural communities across Britain at key moments in their development.

Journeying far beyond London, Multicultural Britain ex-plores the messy contradictions of the country's transition into today's diverse society. It reveals the ordinary people who have forged Britain's multiculturalism; skewers public leaders, from Enoch Powell to Harold Wilson to Margaret Thatcher, who have too often weaponized race for their own political ends; and shines a light on the shifting nature of British racism, revealing its enduring day-to-day impact on ethnic-minority groups.

Between postcolonial reckonings and immigration anxieties, how people live together in Brexit Britain remains an urgent question for our time. Connell's fresh, thought-provoking book unveils British multiculturalism not as a problematic idea, but as a rich and complex lived reality.

Visit Kieran Connell's website.

The Page 99 Test: Black Handsworth.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Democracy in Power"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States by Sandeep Vaheesan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of America’s energy industry.

Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America.

Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Visit Sandeep Vaheesan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Out of Sight, Into Mind"

New from Columbia University Press: Out of Sight, Into Mind: The History and Philosophy of Yogic Perception by Jed Forman.

About the book, from the publisher:

Most Indian and Tibetan religious traditions have some theory of yogic perception―a profound type of sentience afforded by meditative practice. And most consider it the bedrock of their religious authority, the primary means by which one gains spiritual insight. Disagreements about what yogis perceive abound, however, spanning many philosophical topics, including epistemology, ontology, phenomenology, and language.

Out of Sight, Into Mind is a groundbreaking exploration of debates over yogic perception, revealing their contemporary relevance as a catalyst for comparative philosophy. Jed Forman examines intellectual and philosophical developments over a millennium in India and Tibet, offering rich analyses of many previously untranslated texts. He traces divergences and confluences between thinkers within and across traditions, demonstrating that accounts of yogic perception shifted from theories based on vision to ones based on the mind. Drawing on this investigation, Forman calls for broadening philosophical discourse, arguing that subjects like yogic perception have often been deemed “religious” and thus neglected. He contends that these Indian and Tibetan debates hold important lessons for present-day topics such as hermeneutics and exegesis, the relationship between conception and perception, representationalism versus phenomenalism, and the limits of language. Shedding new light on the intellectual history of yogic perception, this book models how a comparative approach can yield novel philosophical insights.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Arbitrating Empire"

New from Oxford University Press: Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law by Allison Powers.

About the book, from the publisher:

Arbitrating Empire offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power-one shaped as much by attempts to insulate the US government from international legal scrutiny as it was by efforts to project influence across the globe. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Mexico, Panama, and the United Kingdom, the book traces how thousands of dispossessed residents of US-annexed territories petitioned international Claims Commissions between the 1870s and the 1930s to charge the United States with violating international legal protections for life and property.

Through attention to the consequences of their unexpected claims, Allison Powers demonstrates how colonized subjects, refugees from slavery, and migrant workers transformed a series of tribunals designed to establish the legality of US imperial interventions into sites through which to challenge the legitimacy of US colonial governance. One of the first social histories of international law, the book argues that contests over meanings of sovereignty and state responsibility that would reshape the mid-twentieth-century international order were waged not only at diplomatic conferences, but also in Arizona copper mines, Texas cotton fields, Samoan port cities, Cuban sugar plantations, and the locks and stops of the Panama Canal.

Arbitrating Empire uncovers how ordinary people used international law to hold the United States accountable for state-sanctioned violence during the decades when the nation was first becoming a global empire-and demonstrates why State Department attempts to erase their claims transformed international law in ways that continue to shield the US government from liability to this day.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The War on Rescue"

New from Cornell University Press: The War on Rescue: The Obstruction of Humanitarian Assistance in the European Migration Crisis by William Plowright.

About the book, from the publisher:

The War on Rescue documents how governments block assistance to people in times of crisis. Focusing on the European Migration Crisis of 2015–2022 to address the reasons why governments do this, William Plowright discusses the strategies employed that prevent suffering people from receiving help.

The European Migration Crisis motivated people around the world to offer assistance to needy refugees and migrants across Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa. Both large and small organizations rushed to bring food, medical care, and rescue to those stranded at sea. However, many European governments sought to prevent humanitarian assistance and deny safe haven to the desperate. Boats filled with those rescued were blocked from harbors, activists were arrested, and staff were threatened; some faced violence. The War on Rescue adds to social science understanding of and explanations for humanitarian assistance and the reasons why governments obstruct rescue efforts.

Visit William Plowright's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Our Money"

New from Princeton University Press: Our Money: Monetary Policy as if Democracy Matters by Leah Rose Ely Downey.

About the book, from the publisher:

How the creation of money and monetary policy can be more democratic

The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, nonelected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials. In Our Money, Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters.

Downey applies and develops democratic theory through an exploration of monetary policy. In so doing, she develops a novel theory of independent agencies in the context of democratic government, arguing that states can employ expertise without being ruled by experts. Downey argues that it is through iterative governance, the legislature knowing and regularly showing its power over policy, that the people can retain their democratic power to guide policy in the modern state. As for contemporary macroeconomic arguments in defense of central bank independence, Downey suggests that the purported economic benefits do not outweigh the democratic costs.

Visit Leah Rose Ely Downey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Normalization of the Radical Right"

New from Oxford University Press: The Normalization of the Radical Right: A Norms Theory of Political Supply and Demand by Vicente Valentim.

About the book, from the publisher:

Radical-right behavior is increasing across Western democracies, often very quickly. Previous research has shown, however, that political attitudes and preferences do not change as quickly. Vicente Valentim argues that the role of social norms as drivers of political behavior is crucial for understanding these patterns. Building on a norms-based theory of political supply and demand, he argues that growing radical-right behavior is driven by individuals who already had radical-right views, but who did not act on those views because they thought that they were socially unacceptable. If these voters do not express their preferences, politicians can underestimate how much latent support there is for radical-right policy. This leaves the radical right with less skilled leaders, who are unable to mobilize even radical-right voters to support them. However, if politicians realize that there is more private support for radical-right policy than is typically observable, they have an incentive to run for politics with a radical-right platform and to mobilize silent radical-right views. Their electoral success, in turn, leads to radical-right individuals becoming more comfortable in displaying their views, and impels more politicians to join the radical right. The book's argument makes us rethink how political preferences translate into behavior, shows how social norms affect the interaction of political supply and demand, and highlights how a political culture that promotes inclusion can be eroded.

Visit Vicente Valentim's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Emergency"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Emergency: COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life by Claire Laurier Decoteau.

About the book, from the publisher:

A forceful critique of how and why states failed to protect marginalized communities in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications of ignoring the existing emergencies that exacerbated the pandemic’s devastating effects.

The COVID-19 pandemic inaugurated a state of emergency unprecedented for most Americans. Some could observe this emergency from the relative safety of their homes, but those in marginalized communities, without access to the same privileges, were forced to risk their health and well-being.

In Emergency, sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau documents and theorizes the emergencies of COVID-19 by looking at the experiences of Chicagoans and the policies that shaped their lives. She describes the uneven racial impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx Chicagoans as a crisis within a crisis, caused by a convergence of emergencies: a state of emergency that protected white supremacy and wealth, the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced for decades due to the long-term gutting of care infrastructure and deindustrialization, and the sacrifice “essential workers” were asked to make to protect the United States economy. As Decoteau shows, the city’s “racial equity” project used data to determine which communities would be given scarce resources, but once positivity or death rates declined, resources were retracted and redistributed elsewhere. City officials thus attempted to manage these converging emergencies by manipulating epidemiological data and orchestrating systems for interpreting that data. Decoteau makes clear that the emergencies precipitated by COVID-19 long predated the pandemic, and that we will continue to live with their compounding crises if we do not tackle their structural underpinnings.

Visit Claire Laurier Decoteau's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity"

New from NYU Press: Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity by Bethany Hughes.

About the book, from the publisher:

Considers the character of the “Stage Indian” in American theater and its racial and political impact

Redface unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, Bethany Hughes contends that it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as “Indian.” By chronicling how performances and definitions of redface rely upon legibility and delineations of race that are culturally constructed and routinely shifting, this book offers an understanding of how redface works to naturalize a very particular version of history and, in doing so, mask its own performativity.

Tracing the “Stage Indian” from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms and turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy, Redface uses case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. Hughes connects extensive scholarship on the “Indian” in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface’s high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Revealing the persistence of redface and the challenges of fixing it, Redface closes by offering readers an embodied rehearsal of what it would mean to read not for the “Indian” but for Indigenous theater and performance as it has always existed in the US.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rights and Right-Holding"

New from Oxford University Press: Rights and Right-Holding: A Philosophical Investigation by Matthew H. Kramer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Building on many years of scholarship, Matthew H. Kramer sets out his definitive philosophical investigation of rights and rights-holding with this monograph, as he sometimes revisits and modifies his previous positions. Beginning with the analytical schema propounded by the American legal theorist Wesley Hohfeld, the book provides a defence of the proposition that every claim-right with a certain content is correlative to at least one duty with the same content and that every duty with a certain content is correlative to at least one claim-right with the same content. The volume then addresses the longstanding debates over the nature of right-holding, with a sustained defense of the Interest Theory and with some innovative critiques of the Will Theory. Finally, it considers the ethical and analytical questions involved in determining who can hold claim-rights at all. It argues that the beings capable of holding claim-rights include not only human adults of sound mind but also all other living human beings, many dead people, and all future generations of people, along with most non-human animals.

Addressing some major topics within moral, legal, and political philosophy, Rights and Right-Holding: A Philosophical Investigation will be a key work for philosophers and academic lawyers alike.

Matthew H. Kramer is Professor of Legal & Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is the Director of the Cambridge Forum for Legal & Political Philosophy, and he has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2014. His work covers numerous areas of political, moral, and legal philosophy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France"

New from Cornell University Press: Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France by Andrea Mansker.

About the book, from the publisher:

Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France uncovers the unexplored history of matrimonial agents, their novel marketing tactics, and the rise of personal advertisements to track the commercialization of marriage in nineteenth-century France. Brokers transformed courtship and marriage into forms of commercial exchange, linking them to the burgeoning urban values of abundance, pleasure, and social mobility.

By studying agents' and readers' media fictions on love alongside court cases, legislation, and literature surrounding the industry, Andrea Mansker reveals the intimate and socioeconomic pressures of finding a spouse. At the same time, she demonstrates how contemporaries used the business of matrimony to reimagine their public identities, relationships, and courtship rituals following unprecedented historical change due to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The matchmaking business both responded to and helped shape national anxieties over fluctuating nuptial rates and changing laws on marriage and divorce. As a result, marriage itself was reconceived as a commercial contract inseparable from the atomistic and corrupt marketplace.

The debates and pressures Mansker describes in Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France are still relevant today. As contemporary online daters likely understand, the possibility of finding a mate in an expanded pool of candidates beyond one's family, locality, and nation offered individuals the liberating opportunity to explore new personas just as it produced a novel sense of danger about these impersonal transactions in the anonymous marketplace.

Visit Andrea Mansker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Soldier's Reward"

New from Princeton University Press: The Soldier's Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon by Jennifer Ngaire Heuer.

About the book, from the publisher:

A sweeping history of intimacy and family life in France during the age of revolution

The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars devastated Europe for nearly a quarter of a century. The Soldier’s Reward recovers the stories of soldiers and their relationships to family and domestic life during this period, revealing how prolonged warfare transformed family and gender dynamics and gave rise to new kinds of citizenship.

In this groundbreaking work combining social, cultural, gender, and military history, Jennifer Ngaire Heuer vividly describes how men fought for years with only fleeting moments of peace. Combatants were promised promotion, financial gain, and patriotic glory. They were also rewarded for their service by being allowed to return home to waiting families and love interests, and with marriages that were arranged and financially supported by the state. Heuer explores competing ideas of masculinity in France, as well as the experiences of the men and women who participated in such marriages. She argues that we cannot fully understand the changing nature of war and peace in this period without considering the important roles played by family, gender, and romantic entanglements.

Casting new light on a turbulent era of mass mobilization and seemingly endless conflict, The Soldier’s Reward shows how, from the Revolution through the Restoration, war, intimacy, and citizenship intersected in France in new and unexpected ways.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Inquiry Under Bounds"

New from Oxford University Press: Inquiry Under Bounds by David Thorstad.

About the book, from the publisher:

Herbert Simon held that the fundamental turn in the study of bounded rationality is the turn from substantive to procedural rationality. Theories of substantive rationality begin with normative questions about attitudes: what should we prefer, intend, or believe? By contrast, theories of procedural rationality begin with normative questions about processes of inquiry: how should we determine what to prefer, intend, or believe? If Simon was right, then the central task for theories of bounded rationality is to develop an account of rational inquiry for bounded agents. We need, that is, a theory of inquiry under bounds.

Inquiry Under Bounds takes as its starting point a five-point bounded rationality program inspired by recent work in cognitive science. To elaborate on and defend that program, Thorstad argues we need an account of rational inquiry for bounded agents. Inquiry under bounds develops an account of rational inquiry for bounded agents: the reason-responsiveness consequentialist view. I use this account to clarify and defend key insights from the bounded tradition as well as to shed light on recent controversies in the epistemology of inquiry.

Visit David Thorstad's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Carceral Apartheid"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons by Brittany Friedman.

About the book, from the publisher:

It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Brittany Friedman terms carceral apartheid. Prisons are a microcosm of how carceral apartheid operates as a larger governing strategy to decimate political targets and foster deceit, disinformation, and division in society.

Among many shocking discoveries, Friedman shows that, beginning in the 1950s, California prison officials declared war on imprisoned Black people and sought to identify Black militants as a key problem, creating a strategy for the management, segregation, and elimination of these individuals from the prison population that continues into the present day. Carceral Apartheid delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques―including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists―to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

Visit Brittany Friedman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Living Off the Government?"

New from New York University Press: Living Off the Government?: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfare by Anne M. Whitesell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores the ways welfare recipients lack adequate political representation

Who deserves public assistance from the government? This age-old question has been revived by policymakers, pundits, and activists following the massive economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anne Whitesell takes up this timely debate, showing us how our welfare system, in its current state, fails the people it is designed to serve. From debates over stimulus check eligibility to the uncertain future of unemployment benefits, Living Off the Government? tackles it all.

Examining welfare rules across eight different states, as well as 19,000 state and local interest groups, Whitesell shows how we determine who is―and who isn't―deserving of government assistance. She explores racial and gender stereotypes surrounding welfare recipients, particularly Black women and mothers; how different groups take advantage of these harmful stereotypes to push their own political agendas; and how the interests and needs of welfare recipients are inadequately represented as a result.

Living Off the Government? highlights how harmful stereotypes about the race, gender, and class of welfare recipients filter into our highly polarized political arena to shape public policy. Whitesell calls out a system that she believes serves special interests and not the interests of low-income Americans.

Visit Anne M. Whitesell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unmentionables"

New from Stanford University Press: Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class by Stacy Fahrenthold.

About the book, from the publisher:

As weavers, garment workers, and peddlers, Syrian immigrants in the Americas fed the early twentieth-century transnational textile trade. These migrants and the commodities they produced—silk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothing—moved along steamship routes from Beirut through Marseille and Madeira to New York City, New England, and Veracruz. As migrants and merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of work, Syrian textile manufacturing expanded across the hemisphere. Unmentionables offers a history of the global textile industry and the Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it. Stacy Fahrenthold examines how Arab workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation. She writes women workers—the majority of Syrian garment workers—back into US labor history. She also situates the rise of Syrian American industrial elites, who exerted supply chain power to combat labor uprisings, resist unionization, and stake claim to the global textile industry. Critiquing the hegemony of the Syrian peddler in histories of this diaspora, Unmentionables introduces alternative narrators: union activists who led street demonstrations, women garment workers who shut down kimono factories, child laborers who threw snowballs at police, and the diasporic merchant capitalists who contended with all of them.

Visit Stacy Fahrenthold's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Chile Underground"

New from Yale University Press: Chile Underground: The Santiago Metro and the Struggle for a Rational City by Andra B. Chastain.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fascinating historical examination of the Santiago Metro system as a microcosm of Chilean national identity during the twentieth century

The Santiago Metro, the largest urban infrastructure project in Chile’s history, was designed in the 1960s in response to rapid urban growth. Despite the upheavals of Salvador Allende’s democratic socialism (1970–1973) and Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990), the project survived and is now the largest metro system in South America. What explains its success? How did its meaning shift under democracy and dictatorship? What does its history reveal about struggles for a more just city?

Drawing on Chilean and French archives, Andra B. Chastain demonstrates that Chilean-French relations and French financing were crucial to the project’s survival during the Cold War. The Metro’s history also illuminates the contested process of implementing neoliberalism and the unexpected continuities of state planning and visions for a rational city that persisted despite free-market reforms. Most important, this story shows that the Metro came to symbolize the nation and became a critical site where planners, workers, and urban residents contested Chile’s path to modernity.

Andra B. Chastain is assistant professor of history at Washington State University Vancouver. She is the co-editor, with Timothy W. Lorek, of Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America’s Long Cold War.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Authoritarian Absorption"

New from Oxford University Press: Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China by Yan Long.

About the book, from the publisher:

Authoritarian Absorption portrays the rebuilding of China's pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state's inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational organizations, the Chinese government, and grassroots movements, which turned epidemics into a battleground for enhancing the state's domestic control and international status. Foreign interveners effectively mobilized China's AIDS movement and oriented activists towards knowledge-focused epistemic activities to propel the insertion of Western rules, knowledge, and practices into the socialist systems. Yet, Chinese bureaucrats played this game to their advantage by absorbing some AIDS activist subgroups―notably those of urban HIV-negative gay men―along with their foreign-trained expertise and technical proficiency into the state apparatus. This move allowed them to expand bodily surveillance while projecting a liberal façade for the international audience.

Drawing on longitudinal-ethnographic research, Long argues against a binary view of Western liberal interventions as either success or failure, highlighting instead the paradoxical outcomes of such efforts. On one hand, they can bolster public health institutions in an authoritarian context, a development pivotal to China's subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of specific groups, such as urban gay men. On the other hand, these interventions may reinforce authoritarian control and further marginalize certain populations―such as rural people living with HIV/AIDS and female sex workers―within public health systems.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Race Traffic"

New from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press: Race Traffic: Antislavery and the Origins of White Victimhood, 1619-1819 by Gunther Peck.

About the book, from the publisher:

Fantasies of white slavery and the narratives of victimhood they spawn form the foundation of racist ideology. They also obscure the lived experience of trafficked servants and sailors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gunther Peck moves deftly between the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds to discover where and when people with light skin color came to see themselves as white. Separating fact from fiction, and paying close attention to the ideological work each performs, Peck shows how laboring women and men leveraged their newfound whiteness to secure economic opportunity and political power.

Peck argues that whiteness emerged not as a claim of racial superiority but as a byproduct of wide-ranging and rancorous public debate over trafficking and enslavement. Even as whiteness became a legal category that signaled privilege, trafficking and race remained tightly interwoven. Those advocating for the value of whiteness invoked emotionally freighted victimhood, claiming that so-called white slavery was a crime whose costs far exceeded those associated with the enslavement of African peoples across the Americas. Peck helps us understand the chilling history that produced the racist ideology that still poisons our politics in the present day.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought"

New from Edinburgh University Press: Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought by Caroline Ashcroft.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores a Cold War concept of technology as a catastrophic influence on modern politics

• Explores the intellectual history of a ‘catastrophic’ concept of technology in the work of some of the twentieth century’s most important political thinkers
• Reveals the centrality of this narrative in the work of what is otherwise generally considered to be an ideologically and philosophically diverse group of theorists
• Contextualises this concept of technology in the Cold War period to reveal the fundamentally political character of the critique as a rejection of liberalism
• Studies both ‘technology’ as an overarching concept as well as particular realisations of technology in these theorists’ work: technologies of war, production, media and biotechnology
• Reveals the way in which this concept of technology produces a specific critique of the relationship between humans, world and nature in modernity, which brings the critics of technology into discourse with early environmentalism

In the mid-twentieth century, a certain idea of technology emerged in the work of many influential political theorists: a critical, catastrophic concept of technology, entangled with the apocalyptic fears fuelled by two all-consuming world wars and the looming nuclear threat. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger and Herbert Marcuse, Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought explores the critical idea of technology as both a response to a dramatically changing world, and a radical political critique of Cold War liberalism.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Anatomy of Justice"

New from Oxford University Press: The Anatomy of Justice: On the Shape, Substance, and Power of Liberal Egalitarianism by Regina Schouten.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Anatomy of Justice argues for a reorientation in liberal egalitarian theorizing about justice. Gina Schouten argues that the orientation she proposes supports compelling resolutions to longstanding disputes and difficulties internal to egalitarianism, as well as compelling defenses of liberalism against feminist and egalitarian critics.

On the orthodox approach, a theory of liberal egalitarian justice comprises a set of normative principles to guide the design and workings of social institutions. Schouten argues that we should instead think of theory's most important product as evaluative discernment. Theorizing should aim to discern with as much precision as possible the achievements, or values, by realization of which a society can be more rather than less just. Schouten offers a weighted specification of the values of justice, which she calls “the anatomy of justice,” and she makes the case for the anatomy by letting it flex its muscles.

First, the anatomy of justice resolves difficulties internal to liberal egalitarianism, in part by deflating longstanding debates, like the debate about whether equality is fundamentally a distributive or a relational value.

Second, the anatomy provides systematic and plausible guidance for addressing injustice. By precisifying the values of justice, the anatomy supports a unified liberal egalitarianism that could be developed to describe the ideally just society, but that also, and more importantly, provides guidance for improving an unjust society. That's because the very same values that are optimally realized in a just society also provide guidance in circumstances of profound injustice, even if the normative principles those values underpin differ across circumstances. Because the anatomy offers a modular framework for theorizing justice across (just and) unjust circumstances, it is more broadly and concretely helpful than normative theory is often thought to be.

Finally, the anatomy underpins compelling defences against criticisms of liberalism from the left. The book aims to demonstrate that feminist liberal egalitarianism is viable and valuable for progressive politics. To make the case, Schouten shows that the anatomy of justice serves as a possibility proof for what liberal egalitarianism can do. she assembles the fundamental, definitive commitments of liberal egalitarianism in a novel way to reveal liberalism's radical potential.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages"

New from Princeton University Press: The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages by Shane Bobrycki.

About the book, from the publisher:

The importance of collective behavior in early medieval Europe

By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as Shane Bobrycki argues, the influence and importance of the crowd did not disappear in early medieval Europe. In The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, Bobrycki shows that although demographic change may have dispersed the urban multitudes of Greco-Roman civilization, collective behavior retained its social importance even when crowds were scarce.

Most historians have seen early medieval Europe as a world without crowds. In fact, Bobrycki argues, early medieval European sources are full of crowds—although perhaps not the sort historians have trained themselves to look for. Harvests, markets, festivals, religious rites, and political assemblies were among the gatherings used to regulate resources and demonstrate legitimacy. Indeed, the refusal to assemble and other forms of “slantwise” assembly became a weapon of the powerless. Bobrycki investigates what happened when demographic realities shifted, but culture, religion, and politics remained bound by the past. The history of crowds during the five hundred years between the age of circuses and the age of crusades, Bobrycki shows, tells an important story—one of systemic and scalar change in economic and social life and of reorganization in the world of ideas and norms.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Morality: From Error to Fiction"

New from Oxford University Press: Morality: From Error to Fiction by Richard Joyce.

About the book, from the publisher:

We make moral judgments about all sorts of things, both mundane and momentous. But are any of these moral judgments actually true? The moral error theorist argues that they are not. According to this view, when people make moral judgments (e.g.,"Stealing is morally wrong") although they purport to say true things about the world, in fact the world does not contain any of the properties or relations that would be necessary to render such judgments true. Nothing is morally right; nothing is morally wrong. The first part of this book argues in favor of this version of moral skepticism. Moral properties, it is claimed, have features that cannot be accommodated within the naturalistic worldview. Some of these problematic features pertain to the “reason-giving” nature of moral properties; some pertain to puzzles surrounding the notion of moral responsibility. Suppose, then, that we decided that this radical skepticism about morality is correct-what, then, should we do with our faulty moral discourse? The abolitionist presents the most obvious answer: that we should just do away with morality (in the way that in the past we eliminated talk of bodily humors, say). The fictionalist presents a less obvious answer: that we should retain moral discourse even though we know (at some level) that it is false. The second part of this book advocates an ambitious version of moral fictionalism. This book is a sequel to the author's 2001 work The Myth of Morality.

Visit Richard Joyce's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Color of Family"

New from the University of Chicago Press: The Color of Family: History, Race, and the Politics of Ancestry by Michael O'Malley.

About the book, from the publisher:

A uniquely blended personal family history and history of the changing definitions of race in America.

A zealous eugenicist ran Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in the first half of the twentieth century, misusing his position to reclassify people he suspected of hiding their “true” race. But in addition to being blinded by his prejudices, he and his predecessors were operating more by instinct than by science. Their whole dubious enterprise was subject not just to changing concepts of race but outright error, propagated across generations.

This is how Michael O’Malley, a descendant of a Philadelphia Irish American family, came to have “colored” ancestors in Virginia. In The Color of Family, O’Malley teases out the various changes made to citizens’ names and relationships over the years, and how they affected families as they navigated what it meant to be “white,” “colored,” “mixed race,” and more. In the process, he delves into the interplay of genealogy and history, exploring how the documents that establish identity came about, and how private companies like Ancestry.com increasingly supplant state and federal authorities—and not for the better.

Combining the history of O’Malley’s own family with the broader history of racial classification, The Color of Family is an accessible and lively look at the ever-shifting and often poisoned racial dynamics of the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Filipino American Sporting Cultures"

New from NYU Press: Filipino American Sporting Cultures: The Racial Politics of Play by Constancio R. Arnaldo Jr.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examines the significance of sports in the lives of diasporic Filipino Americans

Organized sports have occupied a central place in Filipino American life since US colonialism began in the Philippines in 1898. For Filipino diasporas in the United States, sports are important cultural sites through which men and women cultivate a sense of ethnic community and belonging to the American national fabric.

Sports studies focused on Asian America have tended to focus on East Asians, largely ignoring Filipinos. Thus, we know very little about how sports work as critical arenas to understand larger questions about Filipino identity formations, racialization, gender dynamics, diasporic contours, and post-colonial sporting cultures. This book offers an in-depth ethnographic examination of the significance of sports to the lives of Filipino Americans under the shadow of US empire and neocolonial inequities. Through a close examination of Filipino American sporting cultures―from boxing and the Manny “Pac-Man” Pacquiao phenomenon to men’s basketball leagues to women’s flag football―this book shows how engagements with sports reveal the shifting nature of Filipino Americanness and Filipino American subjectivity.

Drawing on over four years of data collected in Southern California, Las Vegas, Urbana-Champaign, and Arlington, Constancio R. Arnaldo, Jr. documents the intimate connections among Filipino American sports, transnationalism, and diasporic belonging. Filipino American Sporting Cultures adds an important voice to the body of work using sports as a lens to look at US culture and communities of color.

--Marshal Zeringue