Weekly Book List, December 14, 2018

ANTHROPOLOGY

African Science: Witchcraft, Vodun, and Healing in Southern Benin by Douglas J. Falen (University of Wisconsin Press; 240 pages; $79.95). Explores local understandings of the nature and power of aze or witchcraft in the West African nation.

Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt: Navigating the Margins of Respectability by L.L. Wynn (University of Texas Press; 248 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Uses ethnographic accounts of love affairs in Cairo to explore anthropological theories of kinship, gift-giving, and honor.

The Middle Class in Mozambique: The State and the Politics of Transformation in Southern Africa by Jason Sumich (Cambridge University Press; 174 pages; $105). Draws on fieldwork in the capital, Maputo, in a study of the complex role of the state, and past and present power relationships, in the formation of Mozambique’s middle class.

ARCHAEOLOGY

Archaeology and Ancient Religion in the American Midcontinent edited by Brad H. Koldehoff and Timothy R. Pauketat (University of Alabama Press; 350 pages; $64.95). Research on the Archaic to Mississippian archaeology of religion in the region, with particular attention to practices in the Cahokia area and surrounding Illinois uplands.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Moved to Tears: Rethinking the Art of the Sentimental in the United States by Rebecca Bedell (Princeton University Press; 219 pages; $45). Challenges prevailing characterizations of the sentimental in the work of American artists and architects, documenting its varied and shifting forms since the 18th century.

COMMUNICATION

Rube Tube: CBS and Rural Comedy in the Sixties by Sara K. Eskridge (University of Missouri Press; 242 pages; $50). Examines strategies and concerns linked to the network’s embrace of rural comedies, including The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Petticoat Junction, during the period.

ECONOMICS

The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust by Kevin Werbach (MIT Press; 344 pages; $27.95). Discusses the blockchain, which underlies the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and other applications, as a “legal technology” and considers how it can be made trustworthy.

The Economics of Poverty Traps edited by Christopher B. Barrett, Michael R. Carter, and Jean-Paul Chavas (University of Chicago Press; 464 pages; $130). Research on financial, environmental, psychological, and other factors that produce a cycle of poverty over generations, with a focus on developing economies.

GENDER STUDIES

Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny by Sarah Banet-Weiser (Duke University Press; 240 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Traces the interplay of popular feminism and popular misogyny in advertising, online culture, and other realms.

HISTORY

Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands by Greg Dvorak (University of Hawai’i Press; 346 pages; $68). Combines historical and ethnographic perspectives to explore tensions between personal narratives and collective mythologies concerning the Pacific atoll, as site of Marshallese culture and community, Japanese colonial outpost, World War II battlefield, and U.S. weapons-testing base.

Gold Rush Manliness: Race and Gender on the Pacific Slope by Christopher Herbert (University of Washington Press; 288 pages; $95 hardcover, $30 paperback). Focuses on the mid-19th-century California and British Columbia gold rushes in a study of white miners’ ideologies of manhood.

Just and Righteous Causes: Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926-1963 by James L. Moses (University of Arkansas Press; 232 pages; $34.95). Traces the life and activism of the rabbi and trained social worker who, beginning in 1926, led Little Rock’s Temple B’nai Israel for nearly 40 years.

Lookout America! The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War by Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman (Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England; 320 pages; $45). Describes the collaboration of scientists, military, and movie professionals in the production of atomic, space-mission, and other documentary, scientific, and technical imagery at the Lookout Mountain Laboratory, in Hollywood, between 1947 and 1969.

Nowhere to Remember: Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland to 1943 edited by Robert Bauman and Robert Franklin (Washington State University Press; 196 pages; $24.95). Traces the history of three agricultural communities in eastern Washington from their late 19th-century origins to their residents’ forced removal by the Manhattan Project.

On the Periphery of Europe, 1762--1825: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite by Andreas Schonle and Andrei Zorin (Northern Illinois University Press; 224 pages; $39). Discusses material culture, social practices, and other aspects of the Europeanization and daily lives of Russia’s elite.

The Struggle Is Eternal: Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation by Joseph R. Fitzgerald (University Press of Kentucky; 360 pages; $50). A biography of a key, but largely forgotten activist who led the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee in Cambridge, Md.; topics include how her views on such topics as blacks’ right to self defense were adopted, often uncredited, by other leaders in the civil-rights and black-power movements.

To Build as Well as Destroy: American Nation Building in South Vietnam by Andrew J. Gawthorpe (Cornell University Press; 300 pages; $45). Documents and analyzes the overall failure of American efforts to build viable non-communist political, economic, and other social institutions in South Vietnam; draws on newly available archives and previously unexamined oral histories by U.S. military officers and government officials.

HISTORY OF MEDICINE

Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond edited by Cynthia Bisbee and others (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 728 pages; US$65). Critical edition of the complete correspondence of the English author and an English expatriate psychiatrist, who together coined the word “psychedelic” and explored subjects from mind-altering drugs to politics.

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

The Spatial Reformation: Euclid Between Man, Cosmos, and God by Michael J. Sauter (University of Pennsylvania Press; 464 pages; $89.95). Focuses on the impact of an ancient mathematical treatise, Euclid’s Elements, on a major transformation in the ways Europeans conceived three-dimensional space, including the relation of the earth and heavens, between 1350 and 1850.

LINGUISTICS

Gesture in Multiparty Interaction by Emily Shaw (Gallaudet University Press; 256 pages; $80). A study of embodied discourse in both American Sign Language and spoken English; draws on an analysis of a filmed gesture-based game played together by deaf and hearing participants.

LITERATURE

Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature by Felice D. Blake (Ohio State University Press; 156 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). A study of representations of intraracial, intimate antagonism in black literature since the 1920s; describes how such images figure in the development of collective consciousness and nurture both communal bonds and communal critique.

Cathay: A Critical Edition by Ezra Pound, edited by Timothy Billings (Fordham University Press; 364 pages; $34.95). Scholarly edition of Pound’s “Chinese poems” and related textual and intertextual materials.

The Plot Thickens: Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to du Maurier by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge (Ohio University Press; 350 pages; $85). Examines the narrative role of illustration in Victorian serial fiction as imagery shaped readers’ experiences through art, for example, invoking flashbacks and flash-forwards.

Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949-1958 edited by Graziano Kratli (University of New Mexico Press; 214 pages; $65). Edition of letters that document the mentoring relationship and friendship between Williams and a young Indian man, trained in civil engineering, who went on to join the canon of postcolonial Anglophone poetry in India with three published collections.

PHILOSOPHY

Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West by Deborah Cook (Verso; 192 pages; $29.95). Defends the complementarity of the two European philosophers’ visions and their contemporary relevance in the critique of politics and society today.

Critique of Forms of Life by Rahel Jaeggi, translated by Ciaran Cronin (Harvard University Press; 416 pages; $45). Offers a third-way approach to moral judgment, here termed “immanent critique,” intended to avoid the pitfalls of universal and internal approaches; draws on Hegelian philosophy and engages such Anglo-American thinkers as John Dewey, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Currency Statecraft: Monetary Rivalry and Geopolitical Ambition by Benjamin J. Cohen (University of Chicago Press; 208 pages; $75 hardcover, $25 paperback). A study of how how geopolitical ambition influences the strategies of countries whose currencies are central to international commerce; covers the postwar period, including the current rivalry between the U.S. dollar and the Chinese renminbi.

Why Alliances Fail: Islamist and Leftist Coalitions in North Africa by Matt Buehler (Syracuse University Press; 336 pages; $39.95). Documents how authoritarian governments use clientelism and the social isolation of rural populations to thwart coalitions between Islamists and leftists.

POPULAR CULTURE

Squee From the Margins: Fandom and Race by Rukmini Pande (University of Iowa Press; 256 pages; $67.50). Explores transnational fan culture as a “postcolonial space” and considers issues of race in that realm; draws on interviews of fans from nine countries.

RELIGION

The Body and Desire: Gregory of Nyssa’s Ascetical Theology by Raphael A. Cadenhead (University of California Press; 267 pages; $95). A study of the fourth-century bishop and theologian that focuses on his evolving ideas on issues of gender and sexuality.

Excessive Saints: Gender, Narrative, and Theological Invention in Thomas of Cantimpre’s Mystical Hagiographies by Rachel J.D. Smith (Columbia University Press; 320 pages; $65). Examines the depiction of the lives and bodies of holy women in the Low Countries in the work of the 13th-century preacher, exorcist, and hagiographer who sought to inspire devotion in new figures.

Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology in India- An Exploration of the Kolam by Vijaya Nagarajan (Oxford University Press; 332 pages; $99). A study of a thousand-year-old daily ritual performed by Tamil women, who before dawn create rice-flour drawings on the thresholds of homes, temples, and temples to honor the goddesses Lakshmi and Budhevi.

RHETORIC

A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture by Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman (Penn State University Press; 224 pages; $79.95). Explores the rhetorical complexity of pessimism in a study of such sentiments communicated in adult animated cartoons, speculative fiction, and other popular media.

Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope by Cheryl Glenn (Southern Illinois University Press; 273 pages; $40). Develops a new alternative theory of rhetorical feminism, drawing distinctions and overlap with the subfield of feminist rhetoric.

SOCIOLOGY

Cahuilla Nation Activism and the Tribal Casino Movement by Theodor P. Gordon (University of Nevada Press; 256 pages; $32.95). Examines strategies of self-reliance and determination among the Cahuilla nations, with a focus on how the Cabazon Band defeated California restrictions on Indian gaming in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Gringolandia: Lifestyle Migration under Late Capitalism by Matthew Hayes (University of Minnesota Press; 288 pages; $104 hardcover, $26 paperback). Uses a study of Americans relocating to Cuenca, Ecuador’s third largest city, to examine “transnational gentrification” and other impacts of largely white, middle-class North-to-South migration.

The Taming of New York’s Washington Square: A Wild Civility by Erich Goode (New York University Press; 336 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Describes an unofficial system of social control that keeps the Greenwich Village public park with little serious or violent crime despite widespread infractions and misdemeanors.

THEATER

Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May ’68 by Kate Bredeson (Northwestern University Press; 224 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Examines political activism through theater in France from 1959 to 1971, with a focus on the uprisings of May 1968.