Monday, March 18, 2024

"An Unholy Traffic"

New from Oxford University Press: An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South by Robert K.D. Colby.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery and, after a four-year struggle to become an independent slaveholding republic, died as emancipation dawned. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.

As An Unholy Traffic shows, slave trading helped Southerners survive and fight the Civil War, as well as to build the future for which they fought. They mitigated the crises the war spawned by buying and selling enslaved people, using this commerce to navigate food shortages, unsettled gender roles, the demands of military service, and other hardships on the homefront. Some Rebels speculated wildly in human property, investing in slaves to ward off inflation and to buy shares in the slaveholding nation they hoped to create. Others traded people to counter the advance of emancipation. Given its centrality to their nationhood, Confederates went to great lengths to prolong the slave trade, which, in turn, supported the Confederacy. For those held in slavery, the surviving slave trade dramatically shaped their pursuit of freedom, inserting a retrograde movement into some people's journeys toward liberty while inspiring others to make the risky decision to escape.

Offering an original perspective on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, the Civil War, and emancipation, Robert K.D. Colby illuminates the place of the peculiar institution within the Confederate mind, the ways in which it underpinned the CSA's war effort, and its impact on those attempting to seize their freedom.
--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, March 17, 2024

"People's Diplomacy"

New from Cornell University Press: People's Diplomacy: How Americans and Chinese Transformed US-China Relations during the Cold War by Kazushi Minami.

About the book, from the publisher:
In People's Diplomacy, Kazushi Minami shows how the American and Chinese people rebuilt US-China relations in the 1970s, a pivotal decade bookended by Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China and 1979 normalization of diplomatic relations. Top policymakers in Washington and Beijing drew the blueprint for the new bilateral relationship, but the work of building it was left to a host of Americans and Chinese from all walks of life, who engaged in "people-to-people" exchanges. After two decades of estrangement and hostility caused by the Cold War, these people dramatically changed the nature of US-China relations. Americans reimagined China as a country of opportunities, irresistible because of its prodigious potential, while Chinese reinterpreted the United States as an agent of modernization, capable of enriching their country and rejuvenating their lives. Drawing on extensive research at two dozen archives in the United States and China, People's Diplomacy redefines contemporary US-China relations as a creation of the American and Chinese people.
Kazushi Minami is Associate Professor at the Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, March 16, 2024

"Hidden Wars"

New from Oxford University Press: Hidden Wars: Gendered Political Violence in Asia's Civil Conflicts by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True.

About the book, from the publisher:
Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) has always been a part of warfare. In Asia, testimonies of egregious rape and sexual violence extend back to the Rape of Nanjing, to the experience of the Korean comfort women in World War II, and to forced marriages and sexual slavery during the Cambodian genocide. The past two decades have yielded crucial new insights about SGBV, but scholars and researchers still struggle to explain why and when this violence occurs. A major problem is that incidences of SGBV are vastly underreported; reliable data is especially scarce in Asia, where demographic and health surveys are infrequent and national reporting systems are underdeveloped relative to other parts of the globe. Asia also has some of the most protracted conflicts in the world but the complexity of subnational conflicts in Asia often masks the gendered dimensions of violence.

In Hidden Wars, Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True examine the relationship between reports of SGBV and structural gender inequality in three conflict-affected societies in Asia--Burma, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Based on extensive field research and an original dataset on conflict-related SGBV, Davies and True show how reporting is significantly constrained by a variety of factors, including normalized gendered violence as well as political dynamics affecting local civil society, humanitarian, and international organizations. They address the real-world limitations of data collection and argue that these constraints reinforce a culture of silence and impunity that perpetuates SGBV and permits governments to abrogate their responsibility for this violence. Hidden Wars breaks new methodological ground in showing that what we know about SGBV can be understood fully only if the politicized context of reporting SGBV and data collection is taken into consideration.
--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, March 15, 2024

"The Cybernetic Border"

New from Duke University Press: The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion by Iván Chaar López.

About the book, from the publisher:
In The Cybernetic Border, Iván Chaar López argues that the settler US nation requires the production and targeting of a racialized enemy that threatens the empire. The cybernetic border is organized through practices of data capture, storage, processing, circulation, and communication that police bodies and constitute the nation as a bounded, territorial space. Chaar López historicizes the US government’s use of border enforcement technologies on Mexicans, Arabs, and Muslims from the mid-twentieth century to the present, showing how data systems are presented as solutions to unauthorized border crossing. Contrary to enduring fantasies of the purported neutrality of drones, smart walls, artificial intelligence, and biometric technologies, the cybernetic border represents the consolidation of calculation and automation in the exercise of racialized violence. Chaar López draws on corporate, military, and government records, promotional documents and films, technical reports, news reporting, surveillance footage, and activist and artist practices. These materials reveal how logics of enmity are embedded into information infrastructures that shape border control and modern sovereignty.
Visit Iván Chaar López's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, March 14, 2024

"Disruption"

New from Cornell University Press: Disruption: The Global Economic Shocks of the 1970s and the End of the Cold War by Michael De Groot.

About the book, from the publisher:
In Disruption, Michael De Groot argues that the global economic upheaval of the 1970s was decisive in ending the Cold War. Both the West and the Soviet bloc struggled with the slowdown of economic growth; chaos in the international monetary system; inflation; shocks in the commodities markets; and the emergence of offshore financial markets. The superpowers had previously disseminated resources to their allies to enhance their own national security, but the disappearance of postwar conditions during the 1970s forced Washington and Moscow to choose between promoting their own economic interests and supporting their partners in Europe and Asia.

De Groot shows that new unexpected macroeconomic imbalances in global capitalism sustained the West during the following decade. Rather than a creditor nation and net exporter, as it had been during the postwar period, the United States became a net importer of capital and goods during the 1980s that helped fund public spending, stimulated economic activity, and lubricated the private sector. The United States could now live beyond its means and continue waging the Cold War, and its allies benefited from access to the booming US market and the strengthened US military umbrella. As Disruption demonstrates, a new symbiotic economic architecture powered the West, but the Eastern European regimes increasingly became a burden to the Soviet Union. They were drowning in debt, and the Kremlin no longer had the resources to rescue them.
--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

"A Nation Fermented"

New from Oxford University Press: A Nation Fermented: Beer, Bavaria, and the Making of Modern Germany by Robert Shea Terrell.

About the book, from the publisher:
How did beer become one of the central commodities associated with the German nation? How did a little-known provincial production standard – the Reinheitsgebot, or Beer Purity Law – become a pillar of national consumer sentiments? How did the jovial, beer-drinking German become a fixture in the global imagination?

While the connection between beer and Germany seems self-evident, A Nation Fermented reveals how it was produced through a strange brew of regional commercial and political pressures. Spanning from the late nineteenth century to the last decades of the twentieth, A Nation Fermented argues that the economic, regulatory, and cultural weight of Bavaria shaped the German nation in profound ways. Drawing on sources from over a dozen archives and repositories, Terrell weaves together subjects ranging from tax law to advertising, public health to European integration, and agriculture to global stereotypes.

Offering a history of the Germany that Bavaria made over the twentieth century, A Nation Fermented eschews both sharp temporal divisions and a conventional focus on northern and industrial Germany. In so doing, Terrell offers a fresh take on the importance of provincial influences and the role of commodities and commerce in shaping the nation.
--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

"Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles by Neil Gong.

About the book, from the publisher:
Sociologist Neil Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between.

In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics, sociologist Neil Gong traces the divide between the haves and have-nots in the psychiatric treatment systems that shape the life trajectories of people living with serious mental illness. In the decades since the United States closed its mental hospitals in favor of non-institutional treatment, two drastically different forms of community psychiatric services have developed: public safety-net clinics focused on keeping patients housed and out of jail, and elite private care trying to push clients toward respectable futures.

In Downtown Los Angeles, many people in psychiatric crisis only receive help after experiencing homelessness or arrests. Public providers engage in guerrilla social work to secure them housing and safety, but these programs are rarely able to deliver true rehabilitation for psychological distress and addiction. Patients are free to refuse treatment or use illegal drugs—so long as they do so away from public view.

Across town in West LA or Malibu, wealthy people diagnosed with serious mental illness attend luxurious treatment centers. Programs may offer yoga and organic meals alongside personalized therapeutic treatments, but patients can feel trapped, as their families pay exorbitantly to surveil and “fix” them. Meanwhile, middle-class families—stymied by private insurers, unable to afford elite providers, and yet not poor enough to qualify for social services—struggle to find care at all.

Gong’s findings raise uncomfortable questions about urban policy, family dynamics, and what it means to respect individual freedom. His comparative approach reminds us that every “sidewalk psychotic” is also a beloved relative and that the kinds of policies we support likely depend on whether we see those with mental illness as a public social problem or as somebody’s kin. At a time when many voters merely want streets cleared of “problem people,” Gong’s book helps us imagine a fundamentally different psychiatric system—one that will meet the needs of patients, families, and society at large.
Visit Neil Gong's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 11, 2024

"Before the Badge"

New from NYU Press: Before the Badge: How Academy Training Shapes Police Violence by Samantha J. Simon.

About the book, from the publisher:
An inside look at how police officers are trained to perpetuate state violence

Michael Brown. Philando Castile. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. As the names of those killed by the police became cemented into public memory, the American public took to the streets in unprecedented numbers to mourn, organize, and demand changes to the current system of policing. In response, police departments across the country committed themselves to change, pledging to hire more women and people of color, incorporate diversity training, and instruct officers to verbally de-escalate interactions with the public.

These reform efforts tend to rely on a “bad apple” argument, focusing the nature and scope of the problem on the behavior of specific individuals and rarely considering the broader organizational process that determines who is allowed to patrol the public and how they learn to do their jobs. In Before the Badge, Samantha J. Simon provides a firsthand look into how police officers are selected and trained, describing every stage of the process, including recruitment, classroom instruction, and tactical training.

Simon spent a year at police academies participating in the training alongside cadets, giving her a visceral, hands-on understanding of how police training operates. Using rich and detailed examples, she reveals that the process does more than test a cadet’s physical or intellectual abilities. Instead, it socializes cadets into a system of state violence. As training progresses, cadets are expected to see themselves as warriors and to view Black and Latino/a members of the public as their enemies. Cadets who cannot or will not uphold this approach end up washing out. In Before the Badge, Simon explains how this training creates a context in which patterns of police violence persist and implores readers to re-envision the future of policing in the United States.
Visit Samantha J. Simon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, March 10, 2024

"The Dispersion of Power"

New from Oxford University Press: The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy by Samuel Ely Bagg.

About the book, from the publisher:
The Dispersion of Power is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, it explains why elections do not and cannot realize the classic ideal of popular rule, and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Instead, Bagg argues, we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture-an alternative vision that is at once more realistic and more inspiring.

Despite their many shortcomings, real-world elections do prevent the most extreme forms of tyranny, and are therefore indispensable. In dealing with the vast inequalities that remain, however, we cannot rely on standard solutions such as electoral reform, direct democracy, deliberation, and participatory governance. Instead, Bagg shows, protecting and enriching democracy requires addressing underlying inequalities of power directly. In part, this entails substantive policies attacking the advantages of wealthy elites. Even more crucially, deepening democracy requires the organization of oppositional, countervailing power among ordinary people. Neither task is easy, but historical precedents exist in both cases-and if democracy is to survive contemporary crises, leaders and citizens alike must find ways to revive and reinvent these essential democratic practices for the 21st century.
Visit Samuel Bagg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, March 9, 2024

"Write like a Man"

New from Princeton University Press: Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals by Ronnie Grinberg.

About the book, from the publisher:
How virility and Jewishness became hallmarks of postwar New York’s combative intellectual scene

In the years following World War II, the New York intellectuals became some of the most renowned critics and writers in the country. Although mostly male and Jewish, this prominent group also included women and non-Jews. Yet all of its members embraced a secular Jewish machismo that became a defining characteristic of the contemporary experience. Write like a Man examines how the New York intellectuals shared a uniquely American conception of Jewish masculinity that prized verbal confrontation, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation.

Ronnie Grinberg paints illuminating portraits of figures such as Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Irving Howe. She describes how their construction of Jewish masculinity helped to propel the American Jew from outsider to insider even as they clashed over its meaning in a deeply anxious project of self-definition. Along the way, Grinberg sheds light on their fraught encounters with the most contentious issues and ideas of the day, from student radicalism and the civil rights movement to feminism, Freudianism, and neoconservatism.

A spellbinding chronicle of mid-century America, Write like a Man shows how a combative and intellectually grounded vision of Jewish manhood contributed to the masculinization of intellectual life and shaped some of the most important political and cultural debates of the postwar era.
--Marshal Zeringue