"Debt and Refuge"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Being and Becoming Good"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

Visit Anne Jeffrey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Diasporic Connections"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Inner Worlds"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Property Values"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

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

Visit Joshua Specht's website.

The Page 99 Test: Red Meat Republic.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Pakistan's Foreign Policy"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Night Hawk"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Great Communion of Scholars"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Weaponized Policing"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

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

Visit Sebastián Sclofsky's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cancelled Futures"

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

About the book, from the publisher:

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

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

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Interfaith Friends and Ideological Foes"

New from Oxford University Press: Interfaith Friends and Ideological Foes: American Jews, Evangelicals, and Israel, 1963–2018 by Amy Weiss.

About the book, from the publisher:

Interfaith Friends and Ideological Foes examines the evolution of the relationship between American Jews and evangelicals. Amy Weiss argues that Jewish interfaith partnerships with evangelicals developed as a necessary, adaptive strategy to deal with the shifting American political landscape. As evangelicals moved from a subculture to the mainstream, and as their political influence grew, their steadfast defense of Israel made them attractive partners for Jewish communal organizations. Jewish groups acknowledged-and accepted-a certain amount of ideological inconsistency to secure broad political support for Israel.

This book speaks directly to today's challenges regarding polarization and the difficulty of coalition-building. Pundits and the public tend to describe the present as an especially divided time in history. Intensified support for white Christian nationalism, the rise of antisemitism, and debates surrounding Israeli governmental policies have all created a divisive American landscape. Support for Israel, at almost any cost, has shaped the policies of major American Jewish organizations, sometimes leading them to act in profound tension with the views of their constituents and their own longstanding commitments to American democracy and religious pluralism. Th evidence presented in this book upends established claims about Jewish organizations' commitments to promoting religious pluralism. It also helps to explain how support for Israel has become increasingly associated with the American political right.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Landlocked"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Landlocked: Water, Energy, and Planetary Politics in Alberta by Jeremy J. Schmidt.

About the book, from the publisher:

A study of oil-rich Alberta reveals the entwined relationships among geoscience, governance, and power.

The Canadian province of Alberta holds the world’s fourth-largest reserve of fossil fuels, with oil sands famous for bitumen, a viscous form of petroleum. A critical testing ground for international environmental ideas and energy policies, Alberta pioneered state-led efforts to understand, extract, and sell bitumen. Without natural access to ocean ports, Alberta must negotiate pipeline routes with neighboring provinces and nations to reach global markets. But Alberta is also landlocked in another sense: it is caught in an extractive relationship with oil-rich earth.

In Landlocked, Jeremy J. Schmidt focuses on Alberta’s energy industry, particularly its use of water and oil, to argue for a new way of understanding how political authority is forged and maintained through the environment. Schmidt details how water and oil were enrolled in early state-making projects, such as irrigation, and examines the consequences of Alberta’s efforts to extract value from land, including a series of events in 2013 that released 4.2 million barrels of bitumen into underground environments. By uncovering the ways that geosciences supported activities―from land settlement to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples―that produced environmental policies and approaches to management and governance, he shows that they aren’t merely instruments of state power but central to Alberta’s political identity and legitimacy.

Visit Jeremy J. Schmidt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Frontiers of Need"

New from Cornell University Press: Frontiers of Need: American Humanitarianism and the Nigerian Civil War by Brian McNeil.

About the book, from the publisher:

Frontiers of Need argues that the Nigerian Civil War marked a turning point in US foreign policy, bringing humanitarian intervention into the center of debates about US engagement with the world. Emerging at a moment when Americans were already questioning the moral foundations of Cold War foreign policy, Biafra became a mirror reflecting a broader crisis of morality―a sense that the United States had lost its ethical bearings in the world. The mass starvation of Biafran children did not merely present a humanitarian catastrophe but, through a US-led humanitarian intervention, offered a chance to overcome moral paralysis and chart a different role for the United States abroad.

Drawing from governmental archives and organizational records across the United States, Britain, and Nigeria, Brian McNeil analyzes how domestic pressure for humanitarian action forced the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations to intervene in Biafra. Yet both administrations treated humanitarian intervention more as a domestic political problem than as a moral imperative, pursuing relief initiatives that managed American dissent without meaningfully addressing Biafran suffering. Through detailed examination of failed negotiations, bureaucratic conflicts, and competing sovereignty claims, Frontiers of Need reveals how efforts to wed humanitarian intervention with American power ultimately prolonged the conflict while failing to deliver the moral renewal Americans sought, establishing instead a troubling precedent for how humanitarian concern could become entangled with national interest in contemporary international politics.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Socialism Mediated"

New from Oxford University Press: Socialism Mediated: The Making of Soviet Culture in Central Asia by Claire Roosien.

About the book, from the publisher:

When the Bolsheviks took over in Central Asia, they inherited a region that the Russian Empire had colonized less than fifty years before. Tenuously integrated into the Russian Empire and predominantly Muslim, the territories that became the republics of Central Asia were a far cry from the societies where Marxism-Leninism was forged. Despite their narrow foothold, Soviet authorities represented themselves as acting according to the will of Central Asia's people. That representation became increasingly urgent as the state wielded unprecedented violence to enact its policies, such as collectivization, cottonization, religious repression, and women's unveiling. To bridge the gap between Central Asia's masses and the interventionist state agenda many of them perceived as foreign, the Soviet Party-state employed a cohort of Central Asian activists and cultural producers who made common cause with the Bolsheviks. They worked to reorganize social institutions, remake musical form, reshape literary life, and recreate collective imaginaries in conditions of extreme uncertainty and rampant violence.

Socialism Mediated tells the story of these mediators who made Soviet culture in Uzbekistan. From Socialist Realist writers to popular singers, from women's activists to village worker-correspondents, they all worked within Soviet institutions to make Uzbek culture Soviet, and to make Soviet culture Uzbek. Drawing on a wide variety of archival and published sources from collections in three countries, Roosien provides the first study of how Central Asians interpreted, implemented, and resisted the Party-state's utterly novel cultural directives. Through close analysis of cultural production in conversation with social historical methods, she shows how Central Asia's intermediaries formulated a new aesthetics of Socialist Realism as a way to mobilize a legitimizing public for the newfound socialist state, while also often revealing the tensions and inconsistencies in that project. Far from a totalizing takeover, the creation of Soviet culture in Uzbekistan was riven with contradictions and gaps, revealing the unexpected resonances and unresolved tensions in the Soviet project of mass publicity.

Socialism Mediated illuminates hotly debated questions about the legacies of empire and colonialism in the Soviet Union and sheds light on the cultural history of 1930s Central Asia, hitherto unexamined in English.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Shadow Over the World"

Coming soon from Simon & Schuster: A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America's World War II by William I. Hitchcock.

About the book, from the publisher:

From New York Times bestselling author William I. Hitchcock, a riveting, revelatory portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the lead-up to World War II, tracing his—and America’s—awakening to the threat of fascism.

How did FDR and the American public respond to the rise of dictators across Europe and Asia on the eve of World War II? The familiar narrative is that they reacted with indifference and embraced isolationism. Only with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor were Americans reluctantly drawn into the global conflict. But distinguished historian William I. Hitchcock reveals a far more complex and surprising story.

From the time Mussolini came to power in 1922 to America’s entry into the war in 1941, Americans engaged in a fraught national debate over the rising threat—and for some, the lure—of fascism. At the center of this debate was Roosevelt himself. When he took office in 1933, Roosevelt was determined to avoid foreign entanglements that would harm his ambitious domestic agenda of the New Deal. But over the course of his first two terms, a network of journalists, activists, advisers, and diplomats gradually awakened him to the global dangers of fascism.

Roosevelt’s transformation was part of a larger national reckoning with authoritarianism around the world. A Shadow Over the World shines a light on a time when a coalition of courageous humanists gathered around a visionary leader to forge a new purpose for America: to protect democracy, oppose imperialism, support human rights, and lead a global fight for freedom. Their successful struggle against the dark forces of fascism holds powerful lessons for our own perilous times.

The Page 99 Test: The Age of Eisenhower.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Black Farm Boys"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: Black Farm Boys: The Untold Story of the New Farmers of America by Bobby J. Smith II.

About the book, from the publisher:

Founded in 1935, the New Farmers of America (NFA) was the first national organization for Black farm boys studying vocational agriculture at segregated public high schools across the South—and as far north as New Jersey. Sociologist and award-winning author Bobby J. Smith II charts new terrain in Black history by uncovering the hidden story of the organization, which grew to an annual membership of more than 55,000 members and empowered Black boys to challenge racial exclusion in agriculture by becoming farmers and pursuing careers in agriculture. But by 1965, the NFA had vanished—unraveled by a hostile takeover by the predominantly white Future Farmers of America (FFA). The NFA, and the generation of Black agricultural leaders it helped shape, were largely erased from the historical record.

In vivid prose, Smith confronts the haunting paradox of the NFA: an organization that transformed rural Black life yet remains almost entirely absent from American memory. Reconstructing the NFA’s rise, influence, and disappearance, Black Farm Boys reshapes the history of the Black agricultural experience and restores a vital chapter in the story of education, rural life, and racial justice in the United States.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Tempting Fate"

New from Princeton University Press: Tempting Fate: A Philosophical Guide to Risk, Luck, and a Meaningful Life by Duncan Pritchard.

About the book, from the publisher:

A leading philosopher explains how risk-taking can help us live authentic and flourishing lives

We take risks every day—perhaps not the extreme, dangling-off-the-side-of-a-mountain kind of risks, but risks nonetheless, in decisions about careers, marriage, children, moving house, and other matters. Tempting fate is simply what we have to do from time to time in life. But how we should go about tempting fate in a reasonable way? In this illuminating book, philosopher Duncan Pritchard explains why risk-taking, even extreme risk-taking, can sometimes be both reasonable and admirable, and how it can play a crucial role in living an authentic life.

Using Alex Honnold’s famous free solo climb of El Capitan as a paradigm example of admirable risk-taking, Pritchard offers a completely new theory of risk, one that explains it in terms of fragility rather than probability. He shows how fragility can explain why skill and preparation are crucial to sensible risk-taking, even when the activity is unavoidably high risk. Fragility also makes clear that taking risks means riding one’s luck and why both risk and luck are vital to living an authentic and meaningful existence. Pritchard shows that his fragility theory of risk has practical implications for making sense of risk in law, arts, sports, and other domains. Tempting fate, in other words, is not merely thrill-seeking but essential for human flourishing.

Visit Duncan Pritchard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Sceptic Isle"

New from Oxford University Press: The Sceptic Isle: How the British Government Sold the Second World War by Steven Casey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Based on a massive array of overlooked primary sources, The Sceptic Isle presents a fast-paced narrative of the British attempt to sell World War II to its citizens. It weaves together government public relations, media reporting, political manoeuvering, and the public's response to reinterpret some of the most famous moments of British history, from Chamberlain and appeasement to Churchill's great speeches, from the Battle of Britain to the military campaigns in the Mediterranean and Western Europe, from food rationing to the Beveridge Report.

Learn more about The Sceptic Isle at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: When Soldiers Fall.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Europe.

The Page 99 Test: The War Beat, Pacific.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Living Redemption"

New from NYU Press: Living Redemption: Latinas Building Evangelical Futures Under Carceral Control by Melissa Guzman-Garcia.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examines how Latino Evangelical churches promise salvation while reinforcing logics of surveillance and criminalization systems that oppress their congregants

Living Redemption examines how faith-based institutions in Latinx communities enhance the state’s carceral power even as they attempt to empower and redeem their adherents. Drawing on four years of ethnographic research across two Latinx congregations in Fresno and the San Francisco Bay Area, Melissa Guzman-Garcia explores how Mexican, Central American, and Chicana women build their own spiritual services and support systems while recruiting other criminalized people into their church. While these services are meant to offer support, Guzman-Garcia uncovers how they also end up enacting their own spiritual versions of carceral control.

These faith-based organizations tend to socialize people to sanctify state power, either by promoting the idea that collective protests and social movements that challenge capitalism or capitalist exploitation would be unsuccessful, or by putting forward beliefs that the solution to social problems is a matter of “saving your soul,” not working for structural change. Thus, these evangelical settings both perpetuate and disrupt the dominant the racial and gendered social order, sustaining and strengthening state power.

Guzman-Garcia’s analysis urges us to assess the gendered logics and spiritual ideologies that fuel contemporary forms of American carceral governance and consider who exactly benefits from this spiritual and political labor.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Queer Resistance"

New from the University of California Press: Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family, and Inequality in Post-Socialist China by Susanne Yuk-Ping Choi.

About the book, from the publisher:

Queer Resistance examines transformations in intimate lives in post-socialist China through the experiences and resistance of LGBTQ+ people. Drawing on ten years of research conducted between 2015 and 2025, and one of the largest qualitative datasets of its kind, Susanne Y.P. Choi traces the weakening of the state-society-family alliance and its capacity to enforce Confucian and heteronormative ideals, and shows how LGBTQ+ people build communities amid intensified state crackdowns, develop new forms of personhood that subvert collectivist frameworks, and renegotiate intergenerational contracts. They navigate sexual possibilities opened up by marketization and digitalization while confronting hierarchies of desirability structured by class inequality and gender norms. The book demonstrates that younger Chinese people’s efforts to resist traditional obligations and pursue nonnormative life projects are relational, partial, and intersectional, shaped through encounters with changing configurations of power and inequality at the intersection of global forces and local histories.

Visit Susanne Choi's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bodies at Their Limits"

New from Oxford University Press: Bodies at Their Limits: Rethinking Political Violence through Hunger Strikes by Kerry McInerney.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hunger strikes have profoundly shaped the political landscape of the twentieth century, and in the early twenty-first century show no sign of abating. The prevalence of these costly protests provokes questions about the character of contemporary political violence, power, and resistance. This monograph asks how gender and race shape how hunger strikes are performed, enacted, mediated, and remembered. It argues that female hunger strikers push their bodies to their very limits to challenge their liminal positioning at the very limits of the body politic. Without romanticising these violent, desperate acts of last resort, I argue that female hunger strikers use self-directed political violence to produce new gendered identities that contest the gendered and racialised subjectivities that are violently imposed by the state. I focus on two examples of women’s collective hunger strikes in the British context: the hunger strikes undertaken by the British suffragettes of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) between 1909 and 1914, and the 2018 hunger strike by detainees at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre (IRC). Through an analysis of these two cases, I argue that women’s hunger strikes are complexly situated within gendered norms, narratives, and discourses that affect the ability of female hunger strikers’ bodies to ‘speak’ of political injustice. Despite this, female hunger strikers still use their bodies to make political claims on the body politic, enact radical political projects that gesture towards a collective vision of freedom, and even invoke new and different ways of being human.

Visit Kerry McInerney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive"

New from Cornell University Press: Purges: How Dictators Fight to Survive by Edward Goldring.

About the book, from the publisher:

Purges delves into one of the key tactics that autocrats deploy to maintain power: the removal of individuals from within the regime.

From Kim Jong Un's execution of his uncle to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's removal of over a hundred Turkish generals, purges bear significant consequences for the survival and endurance of autocrats. Yet much remains unknown about why dictators use purges and whether they achieve their intended effects.

Drawing on an original global dataset on civilian and military elite purges in dictatorships in addition to case studies spanning North and South Korea as well as Turkey, Edward Goldring examines the logic behind purges and their consequences. He shows that dictators purge to consolidate power, punish disloyalty, and scapegoat elites to alleviate popular threats. But even as purges help dictators consolidate power early in their tenure, purges actually weaken their position when they have been in power for a long time, prompting pushback. In the face of an increasing global shift toward authoritarian norms, Purges offers critical insight into how autocrats maintain―and sometimes lose―power.

Visit Edward Goldring's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Until the Last Ton"

New from Princeton University Press: Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis by Matthew Shutzer.

About the book, from the publisher:

A panoramic historical account of India’s ascent in the global fossil economy

India is today one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of fossil fuels, driving new investments in the global fossil economy and achieving record-breaking levels of coal extraction at home. As the planet burns from climate change, this entrenchment of fossil fuel dependence has left many searching for how we arrived at this point. Until the Last Ton provides a sweeping new appraisal of this planetary dilemma, uncovering how India became part of an emerging fossil capitalism that continues to shape the present.

Matthew Shutzer recasts the origins of the fossil economy by showing how European industrialization unleashed a global search for fossil energy in the colonial world. Placing India at the center of this history, Shutzer traces how the highland forests of eastern India became early frontiers for global coal investment, transforming this landscape into the largest site of imperial overseas coal production across a century of colonial rule. At the heart of these shifts was a legal framework of subterranean property, which redefined local relations of land ownership and social power, while tying the growth of India’s fossil economy to the progressive ecological destruction of the forest frontier.

Following these dynamics into the postcolonial period, Until the Last Ton reveals the enduring impacts of colonial property on independent India’s energy history, shedding new light on postwar struggles for energy development and resource sovereignty, as well as the violent conflicts over mining dispossession that have haunted India’s economic ascent in an age of climate crisis.

Visit Matthew Shutzer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy"

New from Oxford University Press: Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy: Freedom to Choose from Those Worth Choosing by John J. Park.

About the book, from the publisher:

The alarming and recent rise of populist leaders in democracies over the past twenty years―seen in countries such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and the United States―has been accompanied by substantial increases in political corruption. A central question in political philosophy concerns the most morally legitimate form of government. The prevailing view in Western philosophy identifies democracy as that system. Yet a more legitimate model for Western societies emerges when the issue is examined through the lens of East Asian philosophy.

In this book, John J. Park introduces a Confucian-inspired hybrid system for the legislative branch, which fuses meritocracy with democracy. It's called prometheocracy, which is based on Prometheus, the mythological figure who gave fire and knowledge to the people. In this model, all legislators remain democratically elected through one person, one vote, but candidates must first meet specific merit-based requirements―such as passing a criminal background check, demonstrating relevant professional experience, and holding certain educational qualifications. Just as professions like medicine, law, engineering, and academia require specialized credentials, Park posits that the most consequential public offices should demand clear standards of competence. Drawing on philosophical reasoning and empirical research in the social sciences, Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy challenges the dominant democratic paradigm in the West and argues that prometheocracy possesses greater moral legitimacy.

Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy demonstrates that this system holds advantages over other major alternatives, including existing Confucian hybrid proposals and epistocracy. While many philosophers who support Confucian hybrid systems restrict their applicability to select Asian contexts, this work develops a model grounded explicitly in Western values and designed for Western societies. This contribution marks a significant development in comparative philosophy, presenting the book as a bridge between contemporary Confucian political theory and Western political thought.

Ultimately, Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy argues that prometheocracy is the most morally legitimate form of legislative governance for the West.

Visit John J. Park's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Divine Season"

New from Princeton University Press: A Divine Season: Christian Nationalist Activism in Zambia by Naomi Haynes.

About the book, from the publisher:

How Zambian Pentecostal activists worked to transform their country into a self-styled “Christian nation”

In 2015, Zambia began an ambitious program to “actualize” the country’s constitutional declaration that it was a “Christian nation.” For Pentecostal Christian nationalist activists, this was a “divine season,” an opportunity to change their country by submitting it to God’s control. In this book, Naomi Haynes examines these efforts at national transformation, offering a careful ethnographic exploration of Christian nationalist theology, ritual, and policy initiatives. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, Haynes describes how activists promoted Zambia’s Christian identity, whether by writing books and newspaper articles, posting on social media, building new monuments, praying for the nation, or lobbying for constitutional changes.

By tracing Zambian Christian nationalism’s internal contradictions and tensions, Haynes charts its ultimate failure, which she ascribes in part to institutional opposition from the civil service and Catholic and mainline Protestant denominations. She also points to what she terms its fatal theological flaw, going beyond the usual secular analysis in anthropology to engage with theological critiques of Christian nationalism. The example of Zambia offers the most fully realized expression of Christian nationalism outside the West, demonstrating what this movement can look like when given free political rein. With this book, Haynes provides an instructive account of an increasingly influential global movement.

The Page 99 Test: Moving by the Spirit.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Pericles"

New from Reaktion Books: Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric by Paul Cartledge.

About the book, from the publisher:

A nuanced portrait of ancient Athens’s boldest statesman and his enduring cultural legacy.

Pericles, the Athenian statesman, was a towering figure of his era, renowned for promoting Athenian democracy, shaping the Athenian Empire, and championing the arts, notably through the Parthenon’s creation. Born to aristocracy, he was a fervent democrat, a masterful demagogue in the ancient sense, and an eccentric in his personal life. Paul Cartledge explores Pericles’ life, examines Athenian history, and provides an insightful account of Pericles’ political career, his role in Athens’s building program, his intellectual connections, and his love life. Cartledge further considers Pericles’ reputation in the theater and how he has been represented over the centuries from antiquity to the present day. This book is a nuanced, illuminating, and lively portrayal of a remarkable politician.

Paul Cartledge is the A. G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, and Emeritus A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, University of Cambridge. His many books include Democracy: A Life and Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Growth Machines"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Growth Machines: On the Hollow Joys of Consumption in the Desert of Economic Life by Mark Joseph Stelzner.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative look at America’s compulsion to consume and our obsession’s surprising—and strange—origins.

In a capitalist society, people sell their labor to purchase staples like food, shelter, and anxiety medication. That’s the equation of everyday economic life that we’ve always been told is true. Except, is it really that simple anymore? No matter how unmaterialistic you may think you are, odds are that deep within is a drive to consume because it feels good: books you won’t read, clothes you won’t like and might wear even less, a replacement phone whose novelty runs out as quickly as its upgrade hits the market. But what drives this impulse?

In Growth Machines, Mark Joseph Stelzner shows how today’s consumers are now programmed by a US economy intent on infinite growth to work for goods they’ve been convinced they need and conditioned to want. Stelzner establishes the gaps between economic thinking and economic reality, arguing that consumption is no longer just a reflection of needs, but rather, it reflects a need for transaction—in many cases, a treat we seek out because it feels good. We work not only to be able to consume the essentials for living, but also to consume for consumption's sake. Yet such consumption doesn’t make us happier. Stelzner traces this strange nature of consumption to an environmental source: an economy that demands growth. To keep its economy pumping, the US must keep Americans consuming. This makes Stelzner’s book an uncomfortable reflection on how we internalize our economy. To be an American is to consume; to consume is what makes America.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Refugees Together and Citizens Apart"

New from Oxford University Press: Refugees Together and Citizens Apart: Control, Emotions, and Politics at the Palestinian Margins by Silvia Pasquetti.

About the book, from the publisher:

Grounded in long-term ethnography, Refugees Together and Citizens Apart examines how dispossessed Palestinians experience and seek to resist Israeli coercive differentiation through the study of two areas with intertwined histories of forced displacement: the segregated Palestinian districts of Lyd (renamed Lod), and the Jalazone refugee camp in the West Bank. This book brings together the securitized policing that Palestinians experience today in Lyd and the layers of militarism, humanitarianism, and Palestinian Authority rule that Palestinians are forced to negotiate in Jalazone. Melding Palestine Studies and Bourdieusian sociology of settler colonialism, the book connects coercive control, collective emotions, and political life, and argues that how coercive control is exercised, by whom, and against whom matters for how dispossessed Palestinians strive to (re)build affective and political worlds locally and globally.

Refugees Together and Citizens Apart compares the emotional climate of fear, distrust, stigma, and frustration at communal frailty in Lyd's segregated Palestinian districts with the defiant defensive togetherness in Jalazone, examining how these two emotional climates are conducive to different forms of political life. The book supplements the comparative lens with a cross-border perspective attentive not only to the historical but also familial and social ties between the two localities. Crossing Israeli borders of coercive control, this book highlights the role of legal status, place, and class in structures, experiences, and refusals of coercive differentiation. Along the way, it illuminates how the violent dismemberment of the Palestinian body politic is reproduced and the collective struggle for liberation articulated at the Palestinian margins.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Language of Terrorists"

New from Columbia University Press: The Language of Terrorists: Distinguishing Trolls from Violent Extremists by Julia Ebner.

About the book, from the publisher:

If someone posts a death threat or a violent manifesto online, will they cross over from words to deeds? Explicit threats, intimidation campaigns, and incitements to violence are no rarity among white nationalists, incels, and other racist and misogynist extremists. Yet it is often difficult to determine whether they pose genuine risks, since the boundaries between trolling and true violent intent can be blurry. How can we tell the difference between online bluster and terrorist threats?

Julia Ebner―an internationally acclaimed expert on online radicalization―offers a fresh approach, showing how language patterns reveal the potential for political violence. She investigates the psychological underpinnings of texts by terrorists such as Anders Breivik, Dylann Roof, Elliot Rodger, and Brenton Tarrant, offering statistical and qualitative contrasts with nonviolent political writing. Ebner finds striking similarities among their manifestos, including the fusion of personal identity with the group, visceral othering of outgroups, narratives of existential conflict, and the glorification of violence. Following these trails, she demonstrates that perpetrators of extremist violence inadvertently give away their intentions in what they say. Featuring vivid writing and actionable conclusions, The Language of Terrorists presents a new model of violent threat detection that can address pressing challenges faced by the international security and intelligence communities.

Visit Julia Ebner's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fakers"

New from Oxford University Press: Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line by Rory Cormac.

About the book, from the publisher:

Intrigue, espionage, and deception. The truth behind 8,000 once top-secret files, so explosive their authors never dreamed they would be released.

Fakers reveals the rise and fall of the mavericks running Britain's Cold War forgery empire. Their secret mission was audacious: to disrupt and discredit adversaries across the world using phantom groups, fake sources, and counterfeit documents.

The leader was a remarkable character, wrestling with personal and professional dilemmas: Hans Welser. An Austrian refugee and one-time MI5 suspect interned behind barbed wire, Welser was a great survivor who rose to become special operations adviser to the Foreign Office, working hand in glove with MI6. His second in command was an eccentric, hard drinking, and high-flying journalist-turned-propagandist called John Rayner. Brought out of semi-retirement, for one final posting. Their team of bowler-hatted refugees, voluble ex-journalists, trailblazing women, and licentious literary sorts navigated loyalty and betrayal — both professionally and romantically — from the diplomats' attic, in the most sensitive part of the Foreign Office's secret propaganda department.

The newly declassified files expose an array of plots, some comically absurd and others dangerously controversial. The forgery empire impersonated everything from hippies and ghosts to Islamists and ballet composers in their campaign to smear hostile politicians, stir tensions among adversaries, and even stymie the career of a contentious British historian. All took place against a high stakes backdrop — both overseas as states competed beneath the looming threat of nuclear war and in the corridors of power at home where grey-suited bureaucrats circled, keen to shut down the team for good.

With timely insight into how propaganda works and how to respond to disinformation, Fakers is a thrilling journey into a secret world where nothing was as it seemed.

The Page 99 Test: Disrupt and Deny.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In a Land of Strangers"

New from The University of North Carolina Press: In a Land of Strangers: Northern Teachers in the Slave South by Michael T. Bernath.

About the book, from the publisher:

What makes the American South distinctive? Is it the location, the culture, the mindset—or a story Americans learned to tell about themselves? In a Land of Strangers contends that the idea of a “distinctive” South did not crystallize out of the Civil War or politics alone; instead, it took shape decades earlier through the everyday observations of thousands of Northern teachers who lived and worked there from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War. Young, white, educated, and marked as outsiders, these men and women occupied an unusual position of trust within Southern households, classrooms, and plantations, granting them rare, intimate access to the inner workings of slaveholding society.

Michael T. Bernath offers the first full-length study of this vast group of teachers—the most sustained point of contact between North and South in the antebellum era. Bewildered, curious, and constantly translating the South for themselves and audiences back home, these educators described a strange and profoundly different place in their diaries and letters. Collectively, they fixed a shared image of the South in the national imagination. In this book, Bernath reshapes our understanding of sectional identity, American culture, and why the idea of a distinctive South endures.

The Page 99 Test: Confederate Minds.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Joy to the World"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Joy to the World: The Performance of Collective Pleasure by Gary Alan Fine.

About the book, from the publisher:

A celebration and exploration of the idea of pleasure and the unique role it serves in bringing individuals and communities together.

There are innumerable ways to take pleasure in life: a bite of cake in the late afternoon, a walk in the warm springtime air after a long winter, a listen to the opening chords of your favorite song. But each of these pleasures is transformed by the presence of others. In Joy to the World, sociologist Gary Alan Fine takes up one of the major themes of his lifetime of work: pleasure. Fine gives us the conceptual basis for a sociology of pleasure: a joyous view of the world that, at times, inspires us, through expectations of interaction, shared cultures, and routine practices that make life worth living in community.

Fine focuses on the impact of group relations as the platform for satisfaction, emphasizing the power of communities of practice. While pleasures may be enjoyed alone, the pleasure that occurs in social spaces performs a unique function in our personal and social lives; they help us understand ourselves as individuals who are part of a group. What is pleasurably transgressive in one context might seem inappropriate, cruel, or just plain nonsensical in another, and these shades of difference serve to solidify the bonds of the group.

Joy to the World urges us to understand what draws us together as well as to appreciate what drives us apart. Our joys, as well as our challenges, help us to be a part of a caring, conscientious, committed community.

The Page 99 Test: Players and Pawns.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The People’s Justice"

New from Princeton University Press: The People’s Justice: Revolutionary Law and the Founding of the French Republic by Carla Hesse.

About the book, from the publisher:

A major new interpretation of the French Revolution that brings to life the criminal tribunals at the heart of the Republic’s political culture

In The People’s Justice, Carla Hesse offers a sweeping reappraisal of political violence in the French Revolution. From Charles Dickens to Hannah Arendt, the Revolution of 1789–1799 in France has been depicted as the bloodiest of the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions. Through extensive new archival research, Hesse shows that, to the contrary, what set the French Revolution apart was neither the scale nor the intensity of its violence but rather the ubiquity of its political tribunals and the use of novel forms of criminal law and procedure as a means of adjudicating political conflict.

More than 5,000 political trials were prosecuted by the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris alone, and, with an acquittal rate of more than 50 percent, these were neither perfunctory nor foregone in their outcomes. They had a repressive function, to be sure, but more importantly, they played a critical role in founding a republic in France and in shaping its social and political norms. Through jury deliberation, public witnessing, and media coverage, these political trials legitimated a republic and the revolutionary struggle that brought it into being. They were animated less by class warfare, factional hatreds, or utopian ideology than by a patriotic, albeit tragic, effort to hold fellow citizens accountable. Over the course of the last two centuries, France, of course, has successfully established itself as a constitutional regime, but this constitutional tradition is still rooted in and haunted by its revolutionary past. Since 1793, the French Republic has, to some extent or another, kept itself alive by keeping itself perpetually on trial.

--Marshal Zeringue

"He Has the People"

New from Oxford University Press: He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860 by Jonathan Earle.

About the book, from the publisher:

A gripping and granular look at how Abraham Lincoln got elected the 16th president of the United States.

James McPherson calls the election of 1860 "undeniably the most important--and pivotal--in all of American history." The nation was not merely divided over the issue of slavery; the opposing camps were at each other's throats. The moment John Brown and his men attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in the fall of 1859 the compromises that had stitched the country together for decades unraveled. The presidential election was therefore about more than who the next president would be. It was about how soon war would follow his inauguration.

Using the writings and story of Murat Halstead, the nation's first campaign journalist, as well as previously unused documents from Lincoln's campaign manager, Jonathan Earle captures the full drama of the 1860 election. He shows how Lincoln, a one-time Congressman from Illinois, and a dark horse against the more established Stephen Douglas, the Democratic frontrunner, and William Henry Seward, the presumptive Republican nominee, got the people and votes he needed to win in a protracted yet furiously disputed election cycle.

Earle focuses on the chaotic campaigns themselves, as political bosses, candidates, and their self-appointed partisans took politicking in directions that at times resembled paramilitary exercises more than campaign events. In the end, Lincoln and his associates ran a brilliant campaign, leveraging Northern anger, growing antislavery sentiment, and divisions within both the Democratic Party and the nation as a whole. His platform was built on his speeches, which projected a vision for how the nation would persevere in the coming crisis. Behind the commanding rhetoric, however, was sophisticated and very modern political machinery. He Has the People provides an engaging historical narrative and a fresh appraisal of the most consequential of all presidential elections.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Land of Happiness"

New from The MIT Press: The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life by Nozomi Naoi.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fascinating look at how Japanese department stores of the twentieth century influenced modern life, identity, and the concept of a dreamworld—and why they continue to loom so large in our imagination.

The Land of Happiness explores the far-reaching influence of the Japanese department store on modern life and our imaginations. In this gorgeously illustrated volume, Nozomi Naoi explains how Japanese department stores modeled “the new modern Japanese life and identity” through print media and design, physical and imagined space, and the new experiences that these spaces offered. The stores created the notion of a modern subject enjoying a “land of happiness”—and this, in turn, shaped the wider sociological context, including emerging roles for women and perceptions of coloniality.

The book focuses on three areas: the mediascape of proliferating department store posters, advertisements, commercial design, promotional magazines, and merchandise; the physical space, such as the Western-style architecture that characterized many of these early department stores, and the imagined “modern space” created within their walls; and, finally, the production of a novel “dreamworld,” which included dining spaces with children’s menus, elevators, escalators, and more.

While the research on department stores and their role in the quotidian experience is vast, there is nothing like this study, which is uniquely grounded in an art historical approach that draws upon the visual media environment of early twentieth-century Japan and its impact on the everyday.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Profiling"

New from Stanford University Press: Profiling: How Predictive Algorithms Shape Identity and the Social Fabric by Philippe Huneman.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this book, philosopher Philippe Huneman aims to offer an unprecedented and systematic understanding of a simultaneously banal and singular phenomenon of modern life: the digital profile. Diving deeply into the algorithms that produce these profiles, Huneman examines the way in which an individual becomes a predictable subject, both as unwilling producer of their digital profile and unwitting subject of digital marketing's attempts to influence beliefs and behaviors.

As the book demonstrates, today's society of profiling has profound implications for our understanding of self and politics. The book unfolds across three sections. In the first, Huneman explains profiles and profiling as they operate today and describes their contemporary pervasiveness, using examples from a variety of fields and considering the wide range of types of data that can be digitalized―be they traces, search histories, metadata or the like. In the second section, on profiles, Huneman reflects on who is the subject of profiling societies and what kind of consequences profiling has on individuals―from behavior to memory. And, finally, entering into metaphysical questioning, the book shines a spotlight on the feedback loop that develops between algorithmic profiling and reality.

Visit Philippe Huneman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World"

New from Columbia University Press: Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural Capital and Climate Disaster in Belize by Patrick M. Gallagher.

About the book, from the publisher:

Belize is often described as a “pristine” ecotourism destination with a landscape that is “naturally” valuable. Yet for much of the twentieth century, British Honduras―as the country was known under colonial rule―was seen as lacking value, an unprofitable backwater. Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World explores how Belize’s precarious coastal environment has become a site for a new kind of capitalist value production, in which landscapes and ecosystems derive worth from their vulnerability or looming destruction in the era of climate change.

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, Patrick M. Gallagher offers a critical account of market-oriented conservation in the Caribbean that ranges across everyday coastal life, emergent ecological science, and climate policy spaces. He shows how the long material and social histories of racialized colonialism shape the making of technocratic tools for valuing nature. Gallagher traces how new forms of capitalist value emerge from the interaction among colonial pasts, contemporary conservation practices, and vivid scenarios of imminent climate change–driven disaster and loss. He also examines how people and policymakers in Belize imagine and create new ways of life in a changing environment. Ethnographically grounded and rich in theoretical insight, this book illuminates how the Anthropocene environment, newly visible and valuable at the moment of its presumed disappearance, came into being in Belize and around the world.

--Marshal Zeringue