"The Empire's New Clothes"

New from Oxford University Press: The Empire's New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth by Philip Murphy.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the wake of Brexit, the Commonwealth has been identified as an important body for future British trade and diplomacy, but few know what it actually does. How is it organized and what has held it together for so long? How important is the Queen's role as Head of the Commonwealth? Most importantly, why has it had such a troubled recent past, and is it realistic to imagine that its fortunes might be reversed. In The Empire's New Clothes, Murphy strips away the gilded self-image of the Commonwealth to reveal an irrelevant institution afflicted by imperial amnesia. He offers a personal perspective on this complex and poorly understood institution, and asks if it can ever escape from the shadow of the British Empire to become an organization based on shared values, rather than a shared history.

Philip Murphy is Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and Professor of British and Commonwealth History at the University of London. He has published extensively on the history of British decolonization and, recently, on the Commonwealth-wide role of the British monarchy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Coming of Democracy"

New from the Johns Hopkins University Press: The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson by Mark R. Cheathem.

About the book, from the publisher:

After the "corrupt bargain" that awarded John Quincy Adams the presidency in 1825, American politics underwent a fundamental shift from deference to participation. This changing tide eventually propelled Andrew Jackson into the White House—twice. But the presidential race that best demonstrated the extent of the changes was that of Martin Van Buren and war hero William Henry Harrison in 1840. Harrison’s campaign was famously marked by sloganeering and spirited rallies.

In The Coming of Democracy, Mark R. Cheathem examines the evolution of presidential campaigning from 1824 to 1840. Addressing the roots of early republic cultural politics—from campaign biographies to songs, political cartoons, and public correspondence between candidates and voters—Cheathem asks the reader to consider why such informal political expressions increased so dramatically during the Jacksonian period. What sounded and looked like mere entertainment, he argues, held important political meaning. The extraordinary voter participation rate—over 80 percent—in the 1840 presidential election indicated that both substantive issues and cultural politics drew Americans into the presidential selection process.

Drawing on period newspapers, diaries, memoirs, and public and private correspondence, The Coming of Democracy is the first book-length treatment to reveal how presidents and presidential candidates used both old and new forms of cultural politics to woo voters and win elections in the Jacksonian era. This book will appeal to anyone interested in US politics, the Jacksonian/antebellum era, or the presidency.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Immigrants Under Threat"

New from NYU Press: Immigrants Under Threat: Risk and Resistance in Deportation Nation by Greg Prieto.

About the book, from the publisher:

A portrait of two Mexican immigrant communities confronting threats of deportation, detention, and dispossession

Everyday life as an immigrant in a deportation nation is fraught with risk, but everywhere immigrants confront repression and dispossession, they also manifest resistance in ways big and small. Immigrants Under Threat shifts the conversation from what has been done to Mexican immigrants to what they do in response.

From private strategies of avoidance, to public displays of protest, immigrant resistance is animated by the massive demographic shifts that started in 1965 and an immigration enforcement regime whose unprecedented scope and intensity has made daily life increasingly perilous. Immigrants Under Threat focuses on the way the material needs of everyday life both enable and constrain participation in immigrant resistance movements.

Using ethnographic research from two Mexican immigrant communities on California’s Central Coast, Greg Prieto argues that immigrant communities turn inward to insulate themselves from the perceived risks of authorities and a hostile public. These barriers are overcome through the face-to-face work of social-movement organizing that transforms individual grievances into collective demands.

The social movements that emerge are shaped by the local political climates in which they unfold and remain tethered to their material inspiration. Immigrants Under Threat explains that Mexican immigrants seek not to transcend, but to burrow into American institutions of law and family so that they might attain a measure of economic stability and social mobility that they have sought all along.

Visit Greg Prieto's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"After Eunuchs"

New from Columbia University Press: After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China by Howard Chiang.

About the book, from the publisher:

For much of Chinese history, the eunuch stood out as an exceptional figure at the margins of gender categories. Amid the disintegration of the Qing Empire, men and women in China began to understand their differences in the language of modern science. In After Eunuchs, Howard Chiang traces the genealogy of sexual knowledge from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality, showing the centrality of new epistemic structures to the formation of Chinese modernity.

From anticastration discourses in the late Qing era to sex-reassignment surgeries in Taiwan in the 1950s and queer movements in the 1980s and 1990s, After Eunuchs explores the ways the introduction of Western biomedical sciences transformed normative meanings of gender, sexuality, and the body in China. Chiang investigates how competing definitions of sex circulated in science, medicine, vernacular culture, and the periodical press, bringing to light a rich and vibrant discourse of sex change in the first half of the twentieth century. He focuses on the stories of gender and sexual minorities as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, philosophers, educators, reformers, journalists, and tabloid writers, as they debated the questions of political sovereignty, national belonging, cultural authenticity, scientific modernity, human difference, and the power and authority of truths about sex. Theoretically sophisticated and far-reaching, After Eunuchs is an innovative contribution to the history and philosophy of science and queer and Sinophone studies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Extralegal Groups in Post-Conflict Liberia"

New from Oxford University Press: Extralegal Groups in Post-Conflict Liberia: How Trade Makes the State by Christine Cheng.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the aftermath of the Liberian civil war, groups of ex-combatants seized control of natural resource enclaves in the rubber, diamond, and timber sectors. With some of them threatening a return to war, these groups were widely viewed as the most significant threats to Liberia's hard-won peace. Building on fieldwork and socio-historical analysis, this book shows how extralegal groups are driven to provide basic governance goods in their bid to create a stable commercial environment. This is a story about how their livelihood strategies merged with the opportunities of Liberia's post-war political economy. But it is also a context-specific story that is rooted in the country's geography, its history of state-making, and its social and political practices. This volume demonstrates that extralegal groups do not emerge in a vacuum.

In areas of limited statehood, where the state is weak and political authority is contested, where rule of law is corrupted and government distrust runs deep, extralegal groups can provide order and dispute resolution, forming the basic kernel of the state. This logic counters the prevailing 'spoiler' narrative, forcing us to reimagine non-state actors and recast their roles as incidental statebuilders in the evolutionary process of state-making. This leads to a broader argument: it is trade, rather than war, that drives contemporary statebuilding. Along the way, this book poses some uncomfortable questions about what it means to be legitimately governed, whether our trust in states is ultimately misplaced, whether entrenched corruption is the most likely post-conflict outcome, and whether our expectations of international peacebuilding and statebuilding are ultimately self-defeating.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Child Labor in America"

New from the University Press of Kansas: Child Labor in America: The Epic Legal Struggle to Protect Children by John A. Fliter.

About the book, from the publisher:

Child labor law strikes most Americans as a fixture of the country’s legal landscape, involving issues settled in the distant past. But these laws, however self-evidently sensible they might seem, were the product of deeply divisive legal debates stretching over the past century—and even now are subject to constitutional challenges. Child Labor in America tells the story of that historic legal struggle. The book offers the first full account of child labor law in America—from the earliest state regulations to the most recent important Supreme Court decisions and the latest contemporary attacks on existing laws.

Children had worked in America from the time the first settlers arrived on its shores, but public attitudes about working children underwent dramatic changes along with the nation’s economy and culture. A close look at the origins of oppressive child labor clarifies these changing attitudes, providing context for the hard-won legal reforms that followed. Author John A. Fliter describes early attempts to regulate working children, beginning with haphazard and flawed state-level efforts in the 1840s and continuing in limited and ineffective ways as a consensus about the evils of child labor started to build. In the Progressive Era, the issue finally became a matter of national concern, resulting in several laws, four major Supreme Court decisions, an unsuccessful Child Labor Amendment, and the landmark Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Fliter offers a detailed overview of these events, introducing key figures, interest groups, and government officials on both sides of the debates and incorporating the latest legal and political science research on child labor reform. Unprecedented in its scope and depth, his work provides critical insight into the role child labor has played in the nation’s social, political, and legal development.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Security Entrepreneurs"

New from Oxford University Press: Security Entrepreneurs: Performing Protection in Post-Cold War Europe by Alexandra Gheciu.

About the book, from the publisher:

Focusing on four East European polities-Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania--this book examines the dynamics and implications of processes of commercialization of security that have occurred following the collapse of communist regimes. These processes have been central to post-communist liberalization, and have profoundly shaped those states and their integration into European institutional structures and global economic and political circuits. They have also affected -- and been shaped by-- the behaviour and power of regional and global actors (e.g. European institutions, regional, and global corporations) in Eastern Europe. By virtue of the fact that they combine in complex ways local, national, regional, and global dynamics and actors, processes of security commercialization in the former Eastern bloc can be seen as instances of 'glocalization'. Several aspects of security commercialization are particularly important. To begin with, private actors --specifically private security companies (PSCs)-- have been reconstituted as partial agents of public power. As such, they have come to be systematically involved in performing security practices traditionally associated with the state. In addition, a potent commercial logic has come to permeate public security institutions. This has led to redefinition of the relationship between the state and its population in ways that defy conventional wisdom about the role of the state, and pose difficult normative challenges. More broadly, processes of security commercialization in Eastern Europe, which involve important performative dimensions, have led to the emergence of complex, hybrid networks of security providers that transcend domestic/international, public/private boundaries and behave, in many ways, as entrepreneurs.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Trans Generation"

New from NYU Press: The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution by Ann Travers.

About the book, from the publisher:

A groundbreaking look at the lives of transgender children and their families

Some “boys” will only wear dresses; some “girls” refuse to wear dresses; in both cases, as Ann Travers shows in this fascinating account of the lives of transgender kids, these are often more than just wardrobe choices. Travers shows that from very early ages, some at two and three years old, these kids find themselves to be different from the sex category that was assigned to them at birth. How they make their voices heard—to their parents and friends, in schools, in public spaces, and through the courts—is the focus of this remarkable and groundbreaking book.

Based on interviews with transgender kids, ranging in age from 4 to 20, and their parents, and over five years of research in the US and Canada, The Trans Generation offers a rare look into what it is like to grow up as a trans child. From daycare to birthday parties and from the playground to the school bathroom, Travers takes the reader inside the day-to-day realities of trans kids who regularly experience crisis as a result of the restrictive ways in which sex categories regulate their lives and put pressure on them to deny their internal sense of who they are in gendered terms.

As a transgender activist and as an advocate for trans kids, Travers is able to document from first-hand experience the difficulties of growing up trans and the challenges that parents can face. The book shows the incredible time, energy, and love that these parents give to their children, even in the face of, at times, unsupportive communities, schools, courts, health systems, and government laws. Keeping in mind that all trans kids are among the most vulnerable to bullying, violent attacks, self-harm, and suicide, and that those who struggle with poverty, racism, lack of parental support, learning differences, etc, are extremely at risk, Travers offers ways to support all trans kids through policy recommendations and activist interventions. Ultimately, the book is meant to open up options for kids’ own gender self-determination, to question the need for the sex binary, and to highlight ways that cultural and material resources can be redistributed more equitably. The Trans Generation offers an essential and important new understanding of childhood.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Journalism Without Profit"

New from Oxford University Press: Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails by Magda Konieczna.

About the book, from the publisher:

The last decade has witnessed a dramatic decline in the presence and influence of legacy news organizations. This decline has led to tremendous growth in news startups, which have attempted to fill the gap left by their legacy counterparts by producing the quality public service journalism upon which the health of U.S. democracy depends. If legacy news organizations, with their existing infrastructure, are failing, can these startups do any better? This question lies at the heart of Journalism Without Profit.

Magda Konieczna explores three prominent news nonprofits: the Center for Public Integrity, one of the oldest and largest of its kind; the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, a university-based watchdog news organization that relies on others to publish its work; and MinnPost, an online news website. Through in-depth study of the practices of each newsroom, Konieczna isolates one common behavior that will contribute to their success: the way these organizations collaborate and share stories. Though this emergent behavior differentiates news nonprofits from the mainstream journalism from which they arose, it also ties the two forms of journalism together, as news nonprofits attempt to share stories with mainstream publications. In other words, the very behavior that may enable these organizations to do better than their mainstream counterparts also limits their ability to evolve much beyond them.

In one of the first major books to focus on nonprofit journalism, Konieczna investigates the major questions that will open the field up to further study. Where did nonprofit news come from, and where is it going? Who funds it, and why? Ultimately, Konieczna offers a new way to think about the seismic changes in journalism that are defining the 21st-century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"K-pop Live"

New from Stanford University Press: K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance by Suk-Young Kim.

About the book, from the publisher:

1990s South Korea saw the transition from a military dictatorship to a civilian government, from a manufacturing economy to a postindustrial hub, and from a cloistered society to a more dynamic transnational juncture. These seismic shifts had a profound impact on the media industry and the rise of K-pop. In K-pop Live, Suk-Young Kim investigates the meteoric ascent of Korean popular music in relation to the rise of personal technology and social media, situating a feverish cross-media partnership within the Korean historical context and broader questions about what it means to be "live" and "alive."

Based on in-depth interviews with K-pop industry personnel, media experts, critics, and fans, as well as archival research, K-pop Live explores how the industry has managed the tough sell of live music in a marketplace in which virtually everything is available online. Teasing out digital media's courtship of "liveness" in the production and consumption of K-pop, Kim investigates the nuances of the affective mode in which human subjects interact with one another in the digital age. Observing performances online, in concert, and even through the use of holographic performers, Kim offers readers a step-by-step guide through the K-pop industry's variegated efforts to diversify media platforms as a way of reaching a wider global network of music consumers. In an era when digital technology inserts itself into nearly all social relationships, Kim reveals how "what is live" becomes a question of how we exist as increasingly mediated subjects, fragmented and isolated by technological wonders while also longing for a sense of belonging and being alive through an interactive mode of exchange we often call "live."

--Marshal Zeringue