"Shrill Hurrahs"

New from the University of South Carolina Press: Shrill Hurrahs: Women, Gender, and Racial Violence in South Carolina, 1865--1900 by Kate Côté Gillin.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Shrill Hurrahs, Kate Côté Gillin presents a new perspective on gender roles and racial violence in South Carolina during Reconstruction and the decades after the 1876 election of Wade Hampton as governor. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Southerners struggled to either adapt or resist changes to their way of life. Gillin accurately perceives racial violence as an attempt by white Southern men to reassert their masculinity, weakened by the war and emancipation, and as an attempt by white Southern women to preserve their antebellum privileges.

As she reevaluates relationships between genders, Gillin also explores relations within the female gender. She has demonstrated that white women often exacerbated racial and gender violence alongside men, even when other white women were victims of that violence. Through the nineteenth century, few bridges of sisterhood were built between black and white women. Black women asserted their rights as mothers, wives, and independent, free women in the postwar years, while white women often opposed these assertions of black female autonomy. Ironically even black women participated in acts of intimidation and racial violence in an attempt to safeguard their rights. In the turmoil of an era that extinguished slavery and redefined black citizenship, race, not gender, often determined the relationships that black and white women displayed in the defeated South.

By canvassing and documenting numerous incidents of racial violence, from lynching of black men to assaults on white women, Gillin proposes a new view of postwar South Carolina. Tensions grew over the struggle for land and labor, black politicization, the creation of the Ku Klux Klan, the election of 1876, and the rise of lynching. Gillin addresses these issues and more as she focuses on black women's asserted independence and white women's role in racial violence. Despite the white women's reactionary activism, the powerful presence of black women and their bravery in the face of white violence reshaped Southern gender roles forever.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sectarian Politics in the Gulf"

New from Columbia University Press: Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings by Frederic M. Wehrey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Beginning with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and concluding with the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings, Frederic M. Wehrey investigates the roots of the Shiʿa-Sunni divide now dominating the Persian Gulf’s political landscape. Focusing on three Gulf states affected most by sectarian tensions—Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait—Wehrey identifies the factors that have exacerbated or tempered sectarianism, including domestic political institutions, the media, clerical establishments, and the contagion effect of external regional events, such as the Iraq war, the 2006 Lebanon conflict, the Arab uprisings, and Syria’s civil war.

In addition to his analysis, Wehrey builds a historical narrative of Shiʿa activism in the Arab Gulf since 2003, linking regional events to the development of local Shiʿa strategies and attitudes toward citizenship, political reform, and transnational identity. He finds that, while the Gulf Shiʿa were inspired by their coreligionists in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, they ultimately pursued greater rights through a nonsectarian, nationalist approach. He also discovers that sectarianism in the region has largely been the product of the institutional weaknesses of Gulf states, leading to excessive alarm by entrenched Sunni elites and calculated attempts by regimes to discredit Shiʿa political actors as proxies for Iran, Iraq, or Lebanese Hizballah. Wehrey conducts interviews with nearly every major Shiʿa leader, opinion shaper, and activist in the Gulf Arab states, as well as prominent Sunni voices, and consults diverse Arabic-language sources.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Muslims and Jews in France"

New from Princeton University Press: Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict by Maud S. Mandel.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. Maud Mandel shows how the conflict in fact emerged from processes internal to French society itself even as it was shaped by affairs elsewhere, particularly in North Africa during the era of decolonization.

Mandel examines moments in which conflicts between Muslims and Jews became a matter of concern to French police, the media, and an array of self-appointed spokesmen from both communities: Israel's War of Independence in 1948, France's decolonization of North Africa, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 student riots, and François Mitterrand's experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s. She takes an in-depth, on-the-ground look at interethnic relations in Marseille, which is home to the country's largest Muslim and Jewish populations outside of Paris. She reveals how Muslims and Jews in France have related to each other in diverse ways throughout this history--as former residents of French North Africa, as immigrants competing for limited resources, as employers and employees, as victims of racist aggression, as religious minorities in a secularizing state, and as French citizens.

In Muslims and Jews in France, Mandel traces the way these multiple, complex interactions have been overshadowed and obscured by a reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Good Science"

New from The MIT Press: Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research by Charis Thompson.

About the book, from the publisher:

After a decade and a half, human pluripotent stem cell research has been normalized. There may be no consensus on the status of the embryo—only a tacit agreement to disagree—but the debate now takes place in a context in which human stem cell research and related technologies already exist. In this book, Charis Thompson investigates the evolution of the controversy over human pluripotent stem cell research in the United States and proposes a new ethical approach for “good science." Thompson traces political, ethical, and scientific developments that came together in what she characterizes as a “procurial" framing of innovation, based on concern with procurement of pluripotent cells and cell lines, a pro-cures mandate, and a proliferation of bio-curatorial practices.

Thompson describes what she calls the “ethical choreography" that allowed research to go on as the controversy continued. The intense ethical attention led to some important discoveries as scientists attempted to “invent around" ethical roadblocks. Some ethical concerns were highly legible; but others were hard to raise in the dominant procurial framing that allowed government funding for the practice of stem cell research to proceed despite controversy. Thompson broadens the debate to include such related topics as animal and human research subjecthood and altruism. Looking at fifteen years of stem cell debate and discoveries, Thompson argues that good science and good ethics are mutually reinforcing, rather than antithetical, in contemporary biomedicine.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Between Birth and Death"

New from Stanford University Press: Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China by Michelle King.

About the book, from the publisher:

Female infanticide is a social practice often closely associated with Chinese culture. Journalists, social scientists, and historians alike emphasize that it is a result of the persistence of son preference, from China's ancient past to its modern present. Yet how is it that the killing of newborn daughters has come to be so intimately associated with Chinese culture?

Between Birth and Death locates a significant historical shift in the representation of female infanticide during the nineteenth century. It was during these years that the practice transformed from a moral and deeply local issue affecting communities into an emblematic cultural marker of a backwards Chinese civilization, requiring the scientific, religious, and political attention of the West. Using a wide array of Chinese, French and English primary sources, the book takes readers on an unusual historical journey, presenting the varied perspectives of those concerned with the fate of an unwanted Chinese daughter: a late imperial Chinese mother in the immediate moments following birth, a male Chinese philanthropist dedicated to rectifying moral behavior in his community, Western Sinological experts preoccupied with determining the comparative prevalence of the practice, Catholic missionaries and schoolchildren intent on saving the souls of heathen Chinese children, and turn-of-the-century reformers grappling with the problem as a challenge for an emerging nation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Objects of Thought"

New from Oxford University Press: The Objects of Thought by Tim Crane.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Objects of Thought addresses the ancient question of how it is possible to think about what does not exist. Tim Crane argues that the representation of the non-existent is a pervasive feature of our thought about the world, and that we will not adequately understand thought's representational power ("intentionality") unless we have understood the representation of the non-existent. Intentionality is conceived by Crane in terms of the direction of the mind upon an object of thought, or an intentional object. Intentional objects are what we think about. Some intentional objects exist and some do not. Non-existence poses a problem because there seem to be truths about non-existent intentional objects, but truths are answerable to reality, and reality contains only what exists. The proposed solution is to accept that there are some genuine truths about non-existent intentional objects, but to hold that they must be reductively explained in terms of truths about what does exist. The Objects of Thought offers both an original account of the nature of intentionality and a solution to the problem of thought about the non-existent.

--Marshal Zeringue

"How We Hope: A Moral Psychology"

New from Princeton University Press: How We Hope: A Moral Psychology by Adrienne Martin.

About the book, from the publisher:

What exactly is hope and how does it influence our decisions? In How We Hope, Adrienne Martin presents a novel account of hope, the motivational resources it presupposes, and its function in our practical lives. She contends that hoping for an outcome means treating certain feelings, plans, and imaginings as justified, and that hope thereby involves sophisticated reflective and conceptual capacities.

Martin develops this original perspective on hope--what she calls the "incorporation analysis"--in contrast to the two dominant philosophical conceptions of hope: the orthodox definition, where hoping for an outcome is simply desiring it while thinking it possible, and agent-centered views, where hoping for an outcome is setting oneself to pursue it. In exploring how hope influences our decisions, she establishes that it is not always a positive motivational force and can render us complacent. She also examines the relationship between hope and faith, both religious and secular, and identifies a previously unnoted form of hope: normative or interpersonal hope. When we place normative hope in people, we relate to them as responsible agents and aspire for them to overcome challenges arising from situation or character.

Demonstrating that hope merits rigorous philosophical investigation, both in its own right and in virtue of what it reveals about the nature of human emotion and motivation, How We Hope offers an original, sustained look at a largely neglected topic in philosophy.

Visit Adrienne Martin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Conflict and Conversion"

New from Oxford University Press: Conflict and Conversion: Catholicism in Southeast Asia, 1500-1700 by Tara Alberts.

About the book, from the publisher:

Conflict and Conversion explores how Catholic missionaries, merchants, and adventurers brought their faith to the strategically and commercially crucial region of Southeast Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This region conjured visions of the exotic in the minds of early modern Europeans, and became an important testing ground for ideas about the nature of conversion and the relationship between religious belief and practice. Some Southeast Asians adopted Christianity--and even died for their new faith--while others resisted all incentives, menaces, and cajolement to reject their original spiritual beliefs and practices. In this volume, Tara Alberts explores how Catholicism itself was converted in this encounter, as Southeast Asian neophytes adapted the faith to their own needs. Conflict and Conversion> makes the first detailed exploration of Catholic missions to the diverse kingdoms of Southeast Asia and provides a new connective history of the spread of global Christianity to this crossroads of the world.

This volume focuses on three areas which represent the main cultural and religious divisions of the broader region of Southeast Asia: modern-day Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia. In each of these areas, missionaries had to engage with a variety of political and economic systems, social norms, and religious beliefs and practices. They were obliged to consider what adaptations could be made to Catholic ritual and devotions in order to satisfy local needs, and how best to counter local customs deemed inimical to the faith, which obliged them to engage with fundamental questions about what it meant to be Christian. Alberts seeks to uncover the conflicts over these issues, and the development of the concept of conversion in the early modern period.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Children of Rus’"

New from Cornell University Press: Children of Rus': Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation by Faith Hillis.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Children of Rus’, Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River—which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine—was one of the Russian empire’s last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century, this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs, the southwest’s Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthodox residents of the borderlands and to diminish the influence of their non-Orthodox minorities.

Right-bank Ukraine would seem unlikely terrain to nourish a Russian nationalist imagination. It was among the empire’s most diverse corners, with few of its residents speaking Russian as their native language or identifying with the culture of the Great Russian interior. Nevertheless, as Hillis shows, by the late nineteenth century, Russian nationalists had established a strong foothold in the southwest’s culture and educated society; in the first decade of the twentieth, they secured a leading role in local mass politics. By 1910, with help from sympathetic officials in St. Petersburg, right-bank activists expanded their sights beyond the borderlands, hoping to spread their nationalizing agenda across the empire.

Exploring why and how the empire’s southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement, Hillis puts forth a bold new interpretation of state-society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.

--Marshal Zeringue

"West Germany and the Global Sixties"

New from Cambridge University Press: West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962-1978 by Timothy Scott Brown.

About the book, from the publisher:

The anti-authoritarian revolt of the 1960s and 1970s was a watershed in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The rebellion of the so-called ‘68ers’ - against cultural conformity and the ideological imperatives of the Cold War; against the American war in Vietnam; in favor of a more open accounting for the crimes of the Nazi era - helped to inspire a dialogue on democratization with profound effects on German society. Timothy Brown examines the unique synthesis of globalizing influences on West Germany to reveal how the presence of Third World students, imported pop culture from America and England and the influence of new political doctrines worldwide all helped to precipitate the revolt. The book explains how the events in West Germany grew out of a new interplay of radical politics and popular culture, even as they drew on principles of direct-democracy, self-organization and self-determination, all still highly relevant in the present day.

--Marshal Zeringue