Weekly Book List, April 21, 2017

ANTHROPOLOGY

Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance: Anthropologies of Sound and Movement edited by Evangelos Chyrsagis and Panas Karampampas (Berghahn Books; 272 pages; $120). Essays on such topics as Peruvian huayno music spectacles.

Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan by Mathijs Pelkmans (Cornell University Press; 213 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Draws on fieldwork in the southern mining town of Kokjangak in a study of how a range of secular and religious ideologies have met first embrace, then decline in the former Soviet republic.

Governing Affect: Neoliberalism and Disaster Reconstruction by Roberto E. Barrios (University of Nebraska Press; 324 pages; $65 hardcover, $30 paperback). An ethnographic study of the aftermaths of Hurricane Mitch in southern Honduras, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the Grijalva River landslide in Chiapas, Mexico, and the 2016 Mississippi River flood in southern Illinois.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

All About Process: The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labor by Kim Grant (Penn State University Press; 288 pages; $74.95). Examines the artistic process as an aspect of aesthetic theory.

Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art by Robert W. Cherny (University of Illinois Press; 360 pages; $95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). A biography of a Russian emigre artist who fought with the White Army against the Bolsheviks, became a leftist and rose as a muralist in San Francisco during the New Deal, and taught at Stanford, but eventually returned to the Soviet Union after being hauled before the HUAC committee.

CULTURAL STUDIES

Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity by David Scott (Duke University Press; 185 pages; $29.95). Combines scholarly and personal perspectives in an epistolary meditation on the work of the Jamaican-born scholar (1932-2014), a founder of cultural studies in Britain.

DANCE

Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media by Kiri Miller (Oxford University Press; 237 pages; $99 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Focuses on Just Dance and Dance Central in a study of the design, marketing, experience, and appeal of video games designed to teach dance routines.

Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings edited by Clare Croft (Oxford University Press; 315 pages; $99 hardcover, $35 paperback). Writings on such topics as “coded queerness” in Depression-era American ballet, and queer spaces in modern-dance choreographer Anna Sokolow’s Rooms.

ECONOMICS

Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream by Carol Graham (Princeton University Press; 208 pages; $29.95). Explores the health and other consequences of an optimism gap between rich and poor in the United States, with the least optimistic being impoverished whites.

EDUCATION

Cradle to Kindergarten: A New Plan to Combat Inequality by Ajay Chaudry and others (Russell Sage Foundation; 230 pages; $29.95). A critique of current policies on early care and education in the United States; argues, among other things, for universal, high quality education that begins at age three.

Juarez Girls Rising: Transformative Education in Times of Dystopia by Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon (University of Minnesota Press; 336 pages; $108 hardcover, $27 paperback). An ethnographic study of 10 working-class girls at Preparatoria Altavista, an innovative high school in the Mexican city founded in 1968 on social-justice principles.

FILM STUDIES

Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema by Meheli Sen (University of Texas Press; 264 pages; $85 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Explores gender, film form, modernity, and other topics in a study of the supernatural in Hindi cinema since Mahal (1949).

Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis by David Humbert (Michigan State University Press; 169 pages; $24.95). Examines The Birds, Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Strangers on a Train, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and Psycho from the perspective of Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire.

HISTORY

American Girls and Global Responsibility: A New Relation to the World during the Early Cold War by Jennifer Helgren (Rutgers University Press; 256 pages; $59.95). Traces the rise of a new notion of internationalist girl citizenship in such settings as schools, the Girl Scouts, the YWCA, and Seventeen magazine.

Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship by Monica Mattfeld (Penn State University Press; 288 pages; $99.95). Topics include associations between horsemanship and gentlemanly honor and authority during the period.

Combatants of Muslim Origin in European Armies in the Twentieth Century: Far From Jihad edited by Xavier Bougarel, Raphaelle Branche, and Cloe Drieu (Bloomsbury Academic; 238 pages; $120). Writings on soldiers of Muslim origin in French, Russian, German, and British colonial armies; topics include Muslim askaris in the colonial troops of German East Africa.

John W. Garrett and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad by Kathleen Waters Sander (Johns Hopkins University Press; 416 pages; $49.95). Discusses the railroad tycoon and the effort to build a new line from Baltimore over the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River.

Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March by Deborah Gray White (University of Illinois Press; 255 pages; $95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Examines the appeal of mass marches for turn-of-the-millennium Americans.

The Paradox of Paternalism: Women and the Politics of Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic by Elizabeth S. Manley (University Press of Florida; 319 pages; $89.95). Examines the role of Dominican women in politics, including those who both supported and opposed the dictatorships of Rafael Trujillo and his successor.

Promise and Despair: The First Struggle for a Non-Racial South Africa by Martin Plaut (Ohio University Press; 254 pages; $79.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Discusses an interracial delegation that traveled to London in 1909 to lobby for a non-racialized constitution and the franchise for all, a failed mission that set the stage for the creation of the African National Congress.

Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution by Judith L. Van Buskirk (University of Oklahoma Press; 312 pages; $34.95). Draws on veterans’ pension files and other sources in a study of black soldiers in the Continental Army.

A Tale of Two Bridges: The San Francisco--Oakland Bay Bridges of 1936 and 2013 by Stephen Mikesell (University of Nevada Press; 216 pages; $39.95). Examines two versions of the bay bridge, one acclaimed as an engineering wonder, also coming in on time and under budget, and the replacement fraught with structural, budgetary, and completion problems.

Vietnam’s Lost Revolution: Ngo Dinh Diem’s Failure to Build an Independent Nation, 1955--1963 by Geoffrey C. Stewart (Cambridge University Press; 228 pages; $99.99). Draws on newly available archival material in a study of the rise and fall of the Special Commissariat for Civic Action.

Viking Friendship: The Social Bond in Iceland and Norway, c. 900-1300 by Jon Vidar Sigurdsson (Cornell University Press; 192 pages; $39.95). Draws on sagas and other sources in a study of friendship as a more significant social bond than kin in Viking society.

INFORMATION STUDIES

Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge by Melissa Adler (Fordham University Press; 232 pages; $100 hardcover, $28 paperback). A study of the cataloguing practices of the Library of Congress and what is termed the institution’s inability to account for sexual difference; topics include the secret archive known as the Delta Collection.

LAW

The Unfulfilled Promise of Press Freedom in Canada edited by Lisa Taylor and Cara-Marie O’Hagan (University of Toronto Press; 296 pages; US$75 hardcover, US$29.95 paperback). Writings on press freedom under Canada’s Charter of Rights; topics include how accountability to the public is denied.

LITERATURE

Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Story Collection by Aina the Layman with Ziran the Eccentric Wanderer, edited by Robert E. Hegel (University of Washington Press; 288 pages; $50). Translation and study of a collection written around 1660.

Land! The Case for an Agrarian Economy by John Crowe Ransom, edited by Jason Peters (University of Notre Dame Press; 160 pages; $25). Edition of a previously unpublished work from 1932 that had been thought destroyed by Ransom when the Southern Agrarian poet and critic failed to find a publisher.

Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels by Jean Wyatt (University of Georgia Press; 248 pages; $74.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Draws on psychoanalytic theory in a study of love and stylistic innovations in Morrison’s novels from Beloved through God Help the Child.

Relief after Hardship: The Ottoman Turkish Model for “The Thousand and One Days” by Ulrich Marzolph (Wayne State University Press; 160 pages; $39.99). Discusses the French Orientalist Francois Petis de la Croix’s Thousand and One Days as a translation that had unacknowledged roots in an anonymous 15th-century Ottoman collection, Relief After Hardship, and its anonymous 13th-century Persian precursor.

Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814 by Ingrid Horrocks (Cambridge University Press; 306 pages; $99.99). Explores representations of women’s wanderers, with a focus on works by such female authors as Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

PHILOSOPHY

Confucianism and American Philosophy by Mathew A. Foust (State University of New York Press; 180 pages; $80). Links Confucian thinkers to American Transcendentalists and pragmatist philosophers Emerson, Thoreau, Peirce, James, and Royce.

Understanding Ranciere, Understanding Modernism edited by Patrick M. Bray (Bloomsbury Academic; 295 pages; $120). Writings on the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, with particular attention to the topics of modernist art and literature.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Avoiding War With China: Two Nations, One World by Amitai Etzioni (University of Virginia Press; 216 pages; $24.95). Suggests strategies for lessening tensions between the two powers.

Militarizing the Nation: The Army, Business, and Revolution in Egypt by Zeinab Abul-Magd (Columbia University Press; 336 pages; $60). A study of the Egyptian military’s efforts to dominate the country’s politics, economy, and society since 1952.

North Korea and Nuclear Weapons: Entering the New Era of Deterrence edited by Sung Chull Kim and Michael D. Cohen (Georgetown University Press; 224 pages; $64.95 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Essays on how to deter a nuclear North Korea, the dictatorship’s likely strategies, and the trade-offs facing the United States, South Korea, and China.

US Presidential Elections and Foreign Policy: Candidates, Campaigns, and Global Politics From FDR to Bill Clinton edited by Andrew Johnstone and Andrew Priest (University Press of Kentucky; 363 pages; $60). Writings that document the importance, sometimes decisiveness, of foreign policy issues to electoral politics; covers presidential elections from 1940 to 1992.

POPULAR CULTURE

The British Super Hero by Chris Murray (University Press of Mississippi; 304 pages; $65). Traces the history of super heroes in British comics, some of which have used parody and satire in critiques of their American counterparts.

RELIGION

The Social Gospel in American Religion: A History by Christopher H. Evans (New York University Press; 304 pages; $89 hardcover, $28 paperback). Traces the history and legacy of the movement in and beyond Protestantism; figures discussed include Washington Gladden, Emil Hirsch, Frances Willard, and Walter Rauschenbusch.

Theravada Traditions: Buddhist Ritual Cultures in Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka by John Clifford Holt (University of Hawai’i Press; 391 pages; $68). Compares Buddhist cultures in Laos, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, and Cambodia in a study of how religious rituals reflect political and social change.

RHETORIC

Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics by Ronald C. Arnett (Southern Illinois University Press; 334 pages; $40). Applies the French philosopher’s theories to communication ethics.

SPORTS STUDIES

San Francisco Bay Area Sports: Golden Gate Athletics, Recreation, and Community edited by Rita Liberti and Maureen M. Smith (University of Arkansas Press; 352 pages; $24.95). Writings on topics from the city’s professional sports to the origins of the Gay Games.