Weekly Book List, July 6, 2018

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

Walking Raddy: The Baby Dolls of New Orleans edited by Kim Vaz-Deville (University Press of Mississippi; 349 pages; $90 hardcover, $30 paperback). Scholarly and other writings on both the original and revived Baby Doll tradition in New Orleans, which began in the early Jim Crow era with members of a black women’s Mardi Gras club who sang and danced wearing masks and revealing clothing.

AMERICAN STUDIES

Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present by Dixa Ramirez (New York University Press; 336 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Combines literary and historical analysis in a study of Dominican cultural expression since 1844 and the ways in which Dominicans have responded to the misperception and miscategorization of their area of Hispaniola in wider Western discourse.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World by Crystal Biruk (Duke University Press; 288 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Uses an ethnographic study of demographic research on HIV/AIDS in Malawi to examine how health statistics are affected by relationship dynamics, research cultures, and other factors.

Funeral Culture: AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom by Casey Golomski (Indiana University Press; 232 pages; $85 hardcover, $30 paperback). Examines the HIV/AIDS epidemic’s impact on funerary and related practices in Swaziland.

Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology by Florence E. Babb (University of California Press; 277 pages; $85 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). New and previously published writings on the interplay of gender, race, and indigeneity in Peru and other settings.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body by Ari Larissa Heinrich (Duke University Press; 272 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Topics include the cultural afterlife of Frankenstein’s monster in China, the Cadaver Group and “flesh art,” and other provocative representations of corporeality.

Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art by Susette Min (New York University Press; 272 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Develops an alternative approach to Asian-American art that emphasizes, among other things, its potential for the pursuit of racial and social justice; artists discussed include Tehching Hsieh, Byron Kim, Simon Leung, Mary Lum, and Nikki S. Lee.

BIOLOGY

Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson (Basic Books; 283 pages; $27). A natural and cultural history of bees.

COMMUNICATION

Demystifying the Big House: Exploring Prison Experience and Media Representations edited by Katherine A. Foss (Southern Illinois University Press; 368 pages; $38). Combines essays on media depictions of prison life with writings that document the experiences of those actually incarcerated; topics include the television programs Orange Is the New Black and Oz, and the lived experience of women “lifers.”

Homegrown: Identity and Difference in the American War on Terror by Piotr M. Szpunar (New York University Press; 224 pages; $89 hardcover, $28 paperback). Topics include what is termed the “discourse of the Double” in representations of homegrown terrorism.

CULTURAL STUDIES

The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology by Mark A. McCutcheon (University of British Columbia Press; 280 pages; US$32.95). Links Mary Shelley and Marshall McLuhan in a discussion of Frankenstein as a founding “intertext” for technology; draws on the novel’s progeny in popular culture, including in the films of David Cronenberg, Canadian science fiction, and Canadian electronic dance music.

Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century by Suzanne Leonard (New York University Press; 272 pages; $30). Draws on television, film, women’s magazines, and other realms in a study of how today wifely identities are represented and prescribed in popular culture through the framework of professionalism.

DANCE

Pina Bausch’s Dance Theatre: Tracing the Evolution of Tanztheater by Lucy Weir (Edinburgh University Press; 224 pages; $125). A study of the German dancer and choreographer (1940-2009) and the relationship between her Tanztheater and modernist theater practices.

ECONOMICS

High-Skilled Migration to the United States and Its Economic Consequences edited by Gordon H. Hanson, William R. Kerr, and Sarah Turner (University of Chicago Press; 272 pages; $130). Research on the issue that goes beyond questions of high-skilled foreign workers’ impact on wages and employment to consider such topics as innovation and productivity, company behavior, and comparative advantage across countries.

How Growth Really Happens: The Making of Economic Miracles through Production, Governance, and Skills by Michael H. Best (Princeton University Press; 290 pages; $29.95). Defends a production-centric approach to economic growth and considers how government can support its needed infrastructure, rather than subsidizing particular enterprises; combines theory with historical case studies.

FILM STUDIES

Beyond Method: Stella Adler and the Male Actor by Scott Balcerzak (Wayne State University Press; 280 pages; $84.99 hardcover, $27.99 paperback). Describes how Adler’s approach drew on her studies with Stanislavski and challenged Lee Strasberg’s emphasis on the actor’s self in favor of a more socially engaged form of performance; uses roles played by Brando, De Niro, and other of her students to trace her impact on “onscreen maleness.”

Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972 by Peter Stanfield (Rutgers University Press; 236 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $28.95 paperback). Discusses a cycle of more than 40 outlaw motorcycle movies made between 1966 and 1972, beginning with The Wild Angels.

Toward Fewer Images: The Work of Alexander Kluge by Philipp Ekardt (MIT Press; 448 pages; $45). A study of the German filmmaker, television producer, digital entrepreneur, theorist, and public intellectual (b. 1932).

The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium by Paula Albuquerque (Amsterdam University Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press; 250 pages; $115). Combines the author’s perspectives as scholar and experimental filmmaker in a study of webcam streaming footage and its potential uses in cinema.

GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES

Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform by Libby Adler (Duke University Press; 288 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Argues that many important legal issues affecting the LGBT community are given short shrift in activists’ focus on a narrow range of reforms.

HISTORY

Are We Not Foreigners Here? Indigenous Nationalism in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Jeffrey M. Schulze (University of North Carolina Press; 258 pages; $90 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Examines identity and claims to nationhood for three transborder peoples: the Yaqui, the Kickapoo, and the Tohono O’odham.

City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture by Justin T. Clark (University of North Carolina Press; 292 pages; $90 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Focuses on the years 1820 to 1860 in a study of the city’s visionary subcultures, including Transcendentalists, magnetic clairvoyants, Millerites, and Spiritualists.

A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City by Matthew Vitz (Duke University Press; 338 pages; $104.95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). An environmental and political history of Mexico’s capital; documents how disputes over water, housing, sanitation, and other issues shaped its environmental decline and unequal development.

Creating Conversos: The Carvajal-Santa Maria Family in Early Modern Spain by Roger Louis Martinez-Davila (University of Notre Dame Press; 351 pages; $55). Uses a family with origins in Castile to examine how Jews who converted to Catholicism actively shaped their identities from the mid-1300s through the mid-1600s in Spain and Spanish colonial Bolivia and Mexico.

Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance by Stephanie Nohelani Teves (University of North Carolina Press; 240 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Draws on literature, music, plays, dance, and other realms in a study of the concept and performance of aloha and its significance for Hawaiian identity.

The Defiant: Protest Movements in Post-Liberal America by Dawson Barrett (New York University Press; 224 pages; $24.95). Offers case studies of a range of protest movements from the post-Sixties period, including activism by punk rockers, radical environmentalists, opponents of the war in Iraq, and critics of globalization.

Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration by Shelly Chan (Duke University Press; 288 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Uses a concept of “diaspora moments” to examine how the migration of more than 20 million Chinese overseas shaped the political, economic, and cultural development of modern China.

A Forgotten Front: Florida during the Civil War Era edited by Seth A. Weitz and Jonathan C. Sheppard (University of Alabama Press; 258 pages; $39.95). Essays on such topics as Florida Hispanics as Confederate soldiers, guerrilla fighting against a Union-occupied coast, and women on the Florida home front.

Has the Gay Movement Failed? by Martin Duberman (University of California Press; 240 pages; $27.95). Examines the movement’s history since Stonewall and argues that its radical transformative vision for society at large has been sidelined by an emphasis on normative inclusion.

Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia by Jovana Babovic (University of Pittsburgh Press; 208 pages; $27.95). Topics include how the middle class’s consumption of foreign entertainment marginalized Yugoslav performers and their audiences.

Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930-1985 by Valerie J. Korinek (University of Toronto Press; 528 pages; $95 hardcover, $42.95 paperback). Focuses on the cities of Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton, and Calgary.

The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910--1950 by Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (University of North Carolina Press; 272 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Discusses the work of anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, physicians, psychologists, economists, geologists, and agronomists who were involved in cross-border intellectual exchange, and who influenced policies regarding indigenous peoples and other minorities.

Selling the CIA: Public Relations and the Culture of Secrecy by David Shamus McCarthy (University Press of Kansas; 232 pages; $29.95). Traces decades of a public-relations strategy launched by the intelligence agency to counter critics in the wake of scandals in the mid-1970s.

Stamping American Memory: Collectors, Citizens, and the Post by Sheila A. Brennan (University of Michigan Press; 236 pages; $70). A study of stamp-collecting culture from the 1880s to the 1940s in the context of a civic conversation reflected in commemorative stamps issued.

Waterfront Manhattan: From Henry Hudson to the High Line by Kurt C. Schlichting (Johns Hopkins University Press; 256 pages; $24.95). Traces the history and shifting fortunes of Manhattan Island’s waterfront since colonial times, including a long period in which it was in private rather than New York City control.

HISTORY OF MEDICINE

Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal by Noemi Tousignant (Duke University Press; 209 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Examines the challenges faced by toxicologists in the West African country working to research and counter the public-health threat of heavy metals and other poisons.

HISTORY OF SCIENCE

William Stimpson and the Golden Age of American Natural History by Ronald Scott Vasile (Northern Illinois University Press; 308 pages; $29). A biography of the American naturalist, who apprenticed with Louis Agassiz and later worked with Spencer Baird to create the Smithsonian department of invertebrate zoology.

LAW

A Family Matter: Citizenship, Conjugal Relationships, and Canadian Immigration Policy by Megan Gaucher (University of British Columbia Press; 208 pages; US$89.95). Examines restrictive definitions of family under immigration policies instituted by the Conservative Stephen Harper government.

Making Habeas Work: A Legal History by Eric M. Freedman (New York University Press; 208 pages; $45). Draws on records from the colonial and early national periods in a history of habeas corpus since its beginnings as one of many linked remedies in common law.

LITERATURE

Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry by Dani Spinosa (University of Alberta Press; 296 pages; US$24.95). Uses analyses of texts by 16 poets to develop a view of “postanarchism” as a critical strategy for literary study, and in particular, experimental poetry.

Cormac McCarthy’s Violent Destinies: The Poetics of Determinism and Fatalism edited by Brad Bannon and John Vanderheide (University of Tennessee Press; 349 pages; $60). Essays on such topics as fatal loss in McCarthy’s Tennessee novels.

Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Stacie Cassarino (Ohio State University Press; 236 pages; $69.95). Juxtaposes gastronomic and literary “deviations” in a study that links food movements and the evolution of avant-garde poetry in the 20th-century United States.

Emergency Writing: Irish Literature, Neutrality, and the Second World War by Anna Teekull (Northwestern University Press; 280 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $39.95 paperback). Focuses on Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, Louis MacNeice, Denis Devlin, and Patrick Kavanagh in a study of Irish writers’ grappling with modernism and the country’s neutrality during “the Emergency,” the Irish euphemism given World War II.

Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in American Literature by Sharada Balachandran Orihuela (University of North Carolina Press; 248 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Examines piracy---expansively defined---as depicted in 18th- and 19th-century American literature in relation to issues of property, citizenship, and the state.

Light without Heat: The Observational Mood from Bacon to Milton by David Carroll Simon (Cornell University Press; 312 pages; $45). A study of 17th-century literature and science that explores the affective experience of investigation, with an emphasis on the cognitive advantages of the open-ended and undisciplined in contrast to methodological rigor.

Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text by Hertha D. Sweet Wong (University of North Carolina Press; 288 pages; $32.95). Traces the interplay of writing and visual art in autobiographical works by Art Spiegelman, Faith Ringgold, Leslie Marmon Silko, Peter Najarian, Julie Chen, Theresa Hak Kyung, Carrie Mae Weems, and Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds.

Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics by Heather Milne (University of Iowa Press; 280 pages; $80). Focuses on works published since 2001 by U.S. and Canadian women poets, including such figures as Jennifer Scappettone, Margaret Christakos, Larissa Lai, and Rita Wong.

The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760-1830 by David Francis Taylor (Yale University Press; 320 pages; $50). Links literature and visual culture in a study of satirical caricaturists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and their appropriation of works by Shakespeare, Swift, and other writers.

MUSIC

Ina Boyle (1889-1967): A Composers Life by Ita Beausang and Seamus de Barra (Cork University Press; 192 pages; $35). A biography of the Irish composer.

Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz by Jason Borge (Duke University Press; 266 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Pays particular attention to Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba in a study of responses to jazz by Latin American intellectuals, composers, musicians, audiences, and others in the mid-20th century; topics include anti-jazz rhetoric in Brazil that cast the music as a challenge to samba.

PHILOSOPHY

Adorno’s Poetics of Form by Josh Robinson (State University of New York Press; 288 pages; $90). Links the Frankfurt School theorist’s writings on art and literature to his broader philosophical project.

Althusser, the Infinite Farewell by Emilio de Ipola, translated by Gavin Arnall (Duke University Press; 154 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $23.95 paperback). A study of the French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-90) that juxtaposes For Marx, Reading Capital, and other canonical works against lesser-known texts and finds what is termed a second, subterranean current of thought throughout his writings that especially flowers in his later works.

The Architecture of Law: Rebuilding Law in the Classical Tradition by Brian M. McCall (University of Notre Dame Press; 560 pages; $70). Sets human law in the context of a wider legal cosmology of the classical natural law tradition; draws on such figures as Cicero, Aristotle, Gratian, Augustine, and Aquinas.

Idleness: A Philosophical Essay by Brian O’Connor (Princeton University Press; 216 pages; $24.95). Examines the presumptions behind various philosophers’ arguments against idleness, including those of Kant, Hegel, and Marx; explores an alternative view of the state as true freedom.

Marx’s Dream: From Capitalism to Communism by Tom Rockmore (University of Chicago Press; 304 pages; $45). Draws sharp distinctions between Marx and Marxism, and the latter movement’s view of its philosopher namesake.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Military Cultures in Peace and Stability Operations: Afghanistan and Lebanon by Chiara Ruffa (University of Pennsylvania Press; 204 pages; $65). Examines how the military culture of the sending nation shapes the behavior of forces; draws on fieldwork among French and Italian units in both settings.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce (Polity Press; 224 pages; $64.95 hardcover, $19.95 paperback). Traces the history of the notion of a special bond among the world’s English-speaking peoples and examines its reworking and revival by politicians and others in an era of Brexit.

RELIGION

On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios by St. Maximos the Confessor, translated by Maximos Constas (Catholic University of America Press; 572 pages; $39.95). First complete English translation of a work by the Greek monk and theologian (circa 580-662) in which he interprets 65 difficult passages from the Old and New Testaments.

Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody by Melissa M. Wilcox (New York University Press; 336 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Explores the activism, community work, and “serious parody” of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group that began in 1979 with three gay men donning nuns’ habits in San Francisco’s Castro District and has since expanded to 83 “houses” on four continents.

SOCIOLOGY

Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie by Elisabeth Schimpfossl (Oxford University Press; 248 pages; $39.95). Examines the lives and self-perceptions of Russia’s richest rich; draws on interviews with multimillionaires and billionaires, as well as their spouses and children.

Youth Who Trade Sex in the U.S.: Intersectionality, Agency, and Vulnerability by Carisa R. Showden and Samantha Majic (Temple University Press; 244 pages; $92.50 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Topics include problematic aspects of the prevailing “innocent girl--predatory man” narrative.

URBAN STUDIES

Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Future by Michael Oluf Emerson and Kevin T. Smiley (New York University Press; 256 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Contrasts Houston and Copenhagen in a study of how cities become and manifest qualities as market and people cities, including through aspects of governance, transportation, diversity, land use, and environment.

WOMEN’S STUDIES

Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina by Barbara Sutton (New York University Press; 328 pages; $99 hardcover, $35 paperback). Documents the experiences of women who endured physical, sexual, and emotional violence under Argentina’s dictatorship in the 1970s and early 80s.