Weekly Book List, March 30, 2018

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES

Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow edited by Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young (University of Illinois Press; 296 pages; $95 hardcover, $28 paperback). Essays on such topics as postracial imagery in Adam Mansbach’s novel Angry Black White Boy, or The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay; Dave Chappelle’s presidential drag as a black George W. Bush; and sexual orientation and race in ZZ Packer’s short-story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.

AMERICAN STUDIES

Appalachia in Regional Context: Place Matters edited by Dwight B. Billings and Ann E. Kingsolver (University Press of Kentucky; 256 pages; $60). Interdisciplinary writings on the region by scholars in geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, literature, and other fields.

ANTHROPOLOGY

America’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins by Marcia C. Inhorn (Stanford University Press; 232 pages; $85 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Focuses on Lebanese and Iraqis in a study of the experience of Arab refugees resettled in Detroit; pays particular attention to medical concerns.

Domestic Economies: Women, Work, and the American Dream in Los Angeles by Susanna Rosenbaum (Duke University Press; 240 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Explores the intersection of motherhood and paid employment for immigrant Mexican and Central American domestic workers in Los Angeles and their predominantly white, middle-class employers.

Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique by Ramah McKay (Duke University Press; 240 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Contrasts notions of care in a study of the everyday lives of patients and providers linked to two NGO-funded medical projects in the southeast African nation; draws on fieldwork in the capital, Maputo, and in rural Zambezia province.

The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community by Tom Boylston (University of California Press; 181 pages; $34.95). Explores changing practices regarding food, fasting, hospitality, and related matters among Orthodox Christians in the Zege peninsula of northern Ethiopia.

Svay: A Khmer Village in Cambodia by May Mayko Ebihara, edited by Andrew Mertha (Cornell University Press; 216 pages; $69.95 hardcover, $23.95 paperback). Posthumous publication of the dissertation, defended in 1968, of May Mayko Ebihara (1934-2005), described as the first American anthropologist to conduct ethnographic research in Cambodia; documents life in a community where several years later 70 percent of villagers died under the Khmer Rouge.

ARCHAEOLOGY

The Chora of Metaponto 7: The Greek Sanctuary at Pantanello by Joseph Coleman Carter and Keith Swift (University of Texas Press; 1,744 pages; $200). Reports on the full excavation of a Greek sanctuary in southern Italy whose artifacts and well-preserved botanical and faunal “ecofacts” shed light on practices in rural cults in the Magna Graecia from the seventh to the fourth centuries BC.

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor by Susan Merrill Squier (Duke University Press; 280 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Explores the history and visualizations of the “epigenetic landscape,” a scientific model devised in the 1940s; traces the model’s use beyond science into landscape architecture, “bioArt,” and other realms.

Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany by Kathleen James-Chakraborty (University of Minnesota Press; 336 pages; $140 hardcover, $35 paperback). Topics include how churches and other architecture figured in the commemoration of German suffering and the expression of postwar aspirations.

Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s by Rachel Middleman (University of California Press; 265 pages; $65). Focuses on works by Carolee Schneemann, Martha Edelheit, Marjorie Strider, Hannah Wilke, and Anita Steckel.

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises by Leora Maltz-Leca (University of California Press; 416 pages; $49.95). Explores the unorthodox methods and visual vocabulary of the South African artist (b. 1955).

William Strickland and the Creation of an American Architecture by Robert Russell (University of Tennessee Press; 349 pages; $60). A study of the Philadelphia- and later Nashville-based American architect (1788-1854), who was a major proponent of the Greek Revival movement; focuses on his career as book-ended by the Second Bank of the United States, in Philadelphia, and the Tennessee State Capitol.

CLASSICAL STUDIES

Diogenes of Oinoanda/Diogene d’Oenoanda: Epicureanism and Philosophical Debates/Epicurisme et controverses edited by Jurgen Hammerstaedt, Pierre-Marie Morel, and Refik Guremen (Leuven University Press, distributed by Cornell University Press; 368 pages; $125). Bilingual edition of essays on a Greek thinker who lived during the second century AD in what is now southwestern Turkey; examines the philosophical importance of newly discovered inscriptions he carved in a distinctive presentation of Epicurean philosophy.

The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater by Naomi A. Weiss (University of California Press; 275 pages; $95). Explores the dramatic dynamics and relevance of mousike in the Greek dramatist’s later tragedies, with a focus on Electra, Trojan Women, Helen, and Iphigenia in Aulis.

The Odyssey translated by Peter Green (University of California Press; 537 pages; $29.95). Annotated translation of Homer’s epic.

COMMUNICATION

Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media by Shannon Mattern (University of Minnesota Press; 288 pages; $108 hardcover, $27 paperback). A work in “media archaeology” that explores ancient and later antecedents of what today are considered “smart” and mediated urban spaces.

Open TV: Innovation beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television by Aymar Jean Christian (New York University Press; 320 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Documents how the Internet has created innovations and new opportunities for series development, fan support, and sponsorship; sources include interviews with writers, producers, show-runners, and network executives.

The Technological Introject: Friedrich Kittler between Implementation and the Incalculable edited by Jeffrey Champlin and Antje Pfannkuchen (Fordham University Press; 312 pages; $125 hardcover, $35 paperback). Writings on the German media theorist and literary scholar (1943-2011).

CULTURAL STUDIES

Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay by Andrew C. Rajca (Northwestern University Press; 254 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback). Discusses photography exhibitions, audiovisual installations, and other art forms in a study of the contested nature of postdictatorial “memory work,” including the exclusion or marginalization of certain perspectives.

DISABILITY STUDIES

Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness by Melanie Yergeau (Duke University Press; 302 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Draws on queer theory in a study of autism as an identity rather than impairment; includes a critique of early behavioral interventions, finding parallels with gay conversion therapy.

Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance by Robert McRuer (New York University Press; 320 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Discusses transnational queer disability theory and culture as a source of resistance to “austerity politics.”

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

The Myth of “Silent Spring": Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism by Chad Montrie (University of California Press; 185 pages; $85 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Challenges the tendency to cite Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as the catalyst for the American environmentalist movement; offers a revisionist perspective that discusses labor unions and other neglected sources of environmental consciousness and activism back to the 19th century.

The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community by Elizabeth Hoover (University of Minnesota Press; 360 pages; $112 hardcover, $28 paperback). Examines activism on environmental contamination and related health issues in Akwesasne, a Mohawk community that straddles parts of northern New York, Quebec, and Ontario.

FILM STUDIES

Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World by Dahlia Schweitzer (Rutgers University Press; 216 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $27.95 paperback). Discusses film, television, and other media in an analysis of three forms of “outbreak narrative” corresponding to public fears about globalization, terrorism, and the end of civilization.

GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES

Legally Straight: Sexuality, Childhood, and the Cultural Value of Marriage by Joe Rollins (New York University Press; 208 pages; $50). Describes how ideas of children and childhood figured in the legalization of gay marriage in the United States, while assimilating gay men and lesbians to “heterosexual scripts.”

GENDER STUDIES

American Tomboys, 1850--1915 by Renee M. Sentilles (University of Massachusetts Press; 168 pages; $90 hardcover, $26.95 paperback). Documents how the concept of the tomboy developed after the Civil War and contrasts the lived experience of tomboy girlhoods with their depictions in literature.

HISTORY

Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima by Nancy E. van Deusen (Duke University Press; 280 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Topics include how mystics were objectified as conduits of holiness, including the offering of their hair or fingernails as living relics.

Flames of Discontent: The 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike by Gary Kaunonen (University of Minnesota Press; 272 pages; $100 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Uses previously untapped sources to discuss a strike that started on June 2, 1916, with 40 men of the largely immigrant workforce of St. James Mine in Aurora who walked off the job, but went on as an action to idle thousands of miners on Minnesota’s three iron ranges; topics include eventual labor solidarity across the ethnic divide of Finnish, Italian, and South Slavic workers.

From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World by Elidor Mehilli (Cornell University Press; 346 pages; $39.95). Draws on previously unavailable archives in a history of Communist-ruled Albania, which switched allegiance from the Soviet Union to Mao’s China in the 1960s.

Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms by Lucy K. Pick (Cornell University Press; 272 pages; $65). Explores the power exercised by kings’ unmarried daughters and sisters in the kingdoms of Asturias and Leon-Castilla.

Losing Hearts and Minds: American-Iranian Relations and International Education During the Cold War by Matthew K. Shannon (Cornell University Press; 248 pages; $49.95). Discusses an influx of Iranian students to American colleges and universities between 1950 and 1979; describes how the migration, intended in part to provide an educated elite for the Pahlavi regime, worked on some U.S. campuses to promote revolution in Iran.

The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate by Camila Pastor (University of Texas Press; 374 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Combines sources from colonial archives with historical ethnography in a study of migration from French-controlled Syria and Lebanon to Mexico.

The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon by Christy Pichichero (Cornell University Press; 301 pages; $49.95). Documents how officers, medical personnel, and others in the French military advanced progressive theories into practice, including the antecedents of the Geneva Convention.

Pushing in Silence: Modernizing Puerto Rico and the Medicalization of Childbirth by Isabel M. Cordova (University of Texas Press; 234 pages; $90 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Focuses on the transformation of birthing practices in Puerto Rico after 1948, including the near-disappearance of midwife-assisted births after 20 years; topics include a modest revival of midwifery in later decades.

Victor and Evie: British Aristocrats in Wartime Rideau Hall by Dorothy Anne Phillips (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 424 pages; US$39.95). Draws on previously untapped sources in a study of life for Victor Cavendish, ninth Duke of Devonshire, and his wife, Lady Evelyn, after their family arrived in Canada in 1916 to begin the duke’s tenure as Canada’s governor-general, taking residence in Ottawa’s Rideau Hall.

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

The Eighteenth Centuries: Global Networks of Enlightenment edited by David T. Gies and Cynthia Wall (University of Virginia Press; 316 pages; $39.50). Writings by scholars in art, history, music, and other fields on the cultural interconnectedness of the global 18th century; topics include allusions to the American Revolution in operas written by Mozart and the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.

LINGUISTICS

Ideophones and the Evolution of Language by John Haiman (Cambridge University Press; $125). Discusses ideophones in relation to the gestural origins of language.

LITERATURE

Arabian Satire: Poetry from 18th-Century Najd by Hmedan al-Shwe’ir, edited and translated by Marcel Kurpershoek (New York University Press; 208 pages; $35). Translation of works by a poet of the Najd region of the Arabian peninsula who was known for his ribald humor and social criticism.

The Global South Atlantic edited by Kerry Bystrom and Joseph R. Slaughter (Fordham University Press; 336 pages; $125 hardcover, $35 paperback). Writings on literary and other forms of exchange linking Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean from the imperial era to the present; topics include dictator novels of the South Atlantic; Cape Verde and the South Atlantic in Germano Almeida’s Eva; and images of Morocco in a Brazilian telenovela.

Gluttony and Gratitude: Milton’s Philosophy of Eating by Emily E. Stelzer (Penn State University Press; 376 pages; $79.95). Explores the philosophical significance of gluttony, as well as gracious eating, in Paradise Lost.

Herman Melville: Among the Magazines by Graham Thompson (University of Massachusetts Press; 249 pages; $90 hardcover, $32.95 paperback). Focuses on Harper’s and Putnam’s in a study of Melville’s “embeddedness” in the world of magazines, including their material culture, genre conventions, editorial personalities, and paratexts.

In the Presence of Power: Court and Performance in the Pre-Modern Middle East edited by Maurice A. Pomerantz and Evelyn Birge Vitz (New York University Press; 304 pages; $99 hardcover, $40 paperback). Writings on literary and wider culture in the courts of the Middle East from the eighth to the 16th centuries; topics include shadow plays in Mamluk Cairo, food as “table theater” in medieval Cyprus, and Byzantine storytelling.

Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Monica F. Cohen (University of Virginia Press; 312 pages; $45). Links maritime and literary piracy in a study of works of pirate fiction and theater that reveal tensions between emerging ideals of intellectual property and collective and derivative aspects of literary culture; writers discussed include Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, and J. M. Barrie.

A Poetry Precise and Free: Selected Madrigals of Guarini by Nicholas R. Jones (University of Michigan Press; 262 pages; $70). Edition and translation, with commentary, of 150 lyric poems by the Italian Renaissance poet Giovanni Battista Guarini.

Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational History of America’s Most Mutable Book edited by Tracy C. Davis and Stefka Mihaylova (University of Michigan Press; 414 pages; $90). Essays on the significance of Stowe’s novel (including staged and other versions) for a range of international audiences since the 19th century, including Canadian abolitionists, Liberian political elites, French theatergoers; liberal Cuban, Romanian, and Spanish intellectuals and social reformers; Cold War communists; Middle Eastern Muslims; and Brazilian TV viewers.

Whole Faith: The Catholic Ideal of Emilia Pardo Bazan by Denise DuPont (Catholic University of America Press; 242 pages; $80). Explores the sacramental vision of a leading female writer of late 19th-century Spain, who was active in the era of social teaching initiated by Pope Leo XIII.

MEDICINE

Personalized Medicine: Empowered Patients in the 21st Century? by Barbara Prainsack (New York University Press; 288 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Discusses a technologically enabled movement toward greater patient involvement in health care.

PHILOSOPHY

Foucault on Painting by Catherine M. Soussloff (University of Minnesota Press; 136 pages; $100 hardcover, $25 paperback). A study of the French thinker’s engagement with European art history, with particular attention to his writings on Velazquez, Manet, Magritte, Paul Rebeyrolle, and Gerard Fromanger.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire by Brian Drohan (Cornell University Press; 256 pages; $45). Draws on newly available archives in a study of how human-rights activism shaped British military policies in three counterinsurgency campaigns in Cyprus (1955-59), Aden (1963-67), and Northern Ireland (1969-1976).

Latin America Since the Left Turn edited by Tulia G. Falleti and Emilio A. Parrado (University of Pennsylvania Press; 374 pages; $69.95). Topics include economic, social, institutional, and political change in Venezuela, Bolivia, and other countries that experienced a “left turn” in electoral politics in the early 21st century.

The New Political Islam: Human Rights, Democracy, and Justice by Emmanuel Karagiannis (University of Pennsylvania Press; 288 pages; $65). Focuses on variations in the ideas and tactics of Islamism in different settings; topics include Islamist parties in Egypt, Turkey, and Tunisia; activism among European converts to Islam, and militant Shi’a and Sunni groups in Syria and Iraq.

Trump’s First Year by Michael Nelson (University of Virginia Press; 220 pages; $19.95). Offers an assessment of the Trump presidency, beginning beforehand with his election.

Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County edited by Jean C. Oi and Steven M. Goldstein (Stanford University Press; 225 pages; $60). Research on institutional change and adaptability in Zouping, a county in Shandong province; topics include directed improvisation in administrative financing.

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements by Julietta Singh (Duke University Press; 224 pages; $89.95 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Draws on revolutionary and literary texts in a study of problematic aspects of the concept of mastery, including ideas of bodily mastery in the anticolonial thought of Frantz Fanon and Mohandas K. Gandhi; includes analyses of postcolonial literature by J.M. Coetzee, Mahasweta Devi, Indra Sinha, and Jamaica Kincaid.

PSYCHOLOGY

Miller’s Children: Why Giving Teenage Killers a Second Chance Matters for All of Us by James Garbarino (University of California Press; 199 pages; $85 hardcover, $24.95 paperback). Examines the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama, which outlawed mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile murderers; draws on research in adolescent and young-adult development, as well as on 40 re-sentencing cases affected by the 2012 ruling.

PUBLIC POLICY

Policy Drift: Shared Powers and the Making of U.S. Law and Policy by Norma M. Riccucci (New York University Press; 304 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Focuses on surveillance and privacy rights, civil rights, and climate policy in a study of how institutional forces effect change through a process of “policy drift,” without any new policies being written.

RELIGION

Feeling Religion edited by John Corrigan (Duke University Press; 286 pages; $94.95 hardcover, $25.95 paperback). Writings on the interplay of religion and emotions; topics include Jewish ritual music, affect theory as a tool for analyzing documentaries on religion, and religious emotions in Shakta (Hindu) and Shi’a (Muslim) traditions.

Vatican II and Beyond: The Changing Mission and Identity of Canadian Women Religious by Rosa Bruno-Jofre, Heidi MacDonald, and Elizabeth M. Smyth (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 200 pages; US$110 hardcover, US$34.95 paperback). Examines the impact of Vatican II reforms on Catholic female religious, with particular attention to Sister Alice Trudeau, a leader of the Missionary Oblate Sisters, and Sister Mary Alban (Bernadette) Bouchard, a social activist known for her ministry in Haiti.

RHETORIC

Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture by Dana L. Cloud (Ohio State University Press; 226 pages; $84.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback). Defends a theory of “rhetorical realism” as a middle path that challenges relativist claims of no foundational reality independent of subjective perception, while acknowledging ever-present frames of mediation.

SOCIOLOGY

Catch and Release: The Enduring Yet Vulnerable Horseshoe Crab by Lisa Jean Moore (New York University Press; 224 pages; $89 hardcover, $28 paperback). Offers a sociological perspective on the harvesting of horseshoe crabs in a process that upon capture drains the crabs of 40 percent of their medically valuable blood, then releases them back into their habitats.

Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion, and Change edited by Leela Fernandes (New York University Press; 272 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Interdisciplinary writings on inequality by feminist scholars in American and international area studies.

Skateboarding LA: Inside Professional Street Skateboarding by Gregory J. Snyder (New York University Press; 320 pages; $89 hardcover, $30 paperback). Explores the subculture of skateboarders in Los Angeles and their creative uses of urban space.

URBAN STUDIES

Between City and Country: Brookline, Massachusetts, and the Origins of Suburbia by Ronald Dale Karr (University of Massachusetts Press; 304 pages; $32.95). Traces the evolution of the Boston suburb since the start of its suburbanization in the 1840s.