New Books in Communications

In the first of four episodes in the MITP Open Access series, Travis Rich, PubPub co-founder and project lead, speaks with Edward Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. They discuss Frankenbook—an open access digital version of the print edition of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece Frankenstein published by the MIT Press in 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Palestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford UP, 2022) enters these distinct environments for political expression and action of Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and considers how Palestinians are differently impacted by dispossession, settler colonialism, and militarism.Amahl Bishara looks to sites of political practice—journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the road—to analyze how Palestinians create collectivities in these varied circumstances. She draws on firsthand research, personal interviews, and public media to examine how people shape and reshape meanings in circumstances of constraint. In considering these different environments for political expression and action, Bishara illuminates how expression is always grounded in place—and how a people can struggle together for liberation even when they cannot join together in protest.Amahl A. Bishara is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford, 2013).Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban anthropology, futurity, care, and migration. Her work has been featured in Environment and Planning D, Current Anthropology, City & Society, and Radical Housing Journal, among other journals and public-facing platforms. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Nishant Kumar's Religious Offense and Censorship of Publications: An Enquiry Through the Prism of Indian Laws and the Judiciary (Routledge, 2022) analyzes the role of laws and the judiciary in the process of censorship in India. It examines the rationales and observations produced by the judiciary when demands for censorship are directed against publications that allegedly offend religious sentiments. Focusing on a micro-level analysis of censorship of publications, it presents a hard case to understand the limitations of freedom of expression and the role played by the judiciary in defining its boundaries. The volume traces the evolution of laws governing freedom of expression since the colonial period and the context in which these laws were amended after Independence. It also explicates how the legal process – the structural and functional aspects of working of judiciary – affects the fate of freedom of expression in India. Employing comparative legal analysis, it tries to understand and situate the Indian case within the larger discourse of censorship and freedom of expression around the world, thereby marking its similarities and differences. In unravelling the politics of censorship, the author also examines the interaction among different stakeholders like government, non-state actors and the judiciary.A tract for our times, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of law, especially constitutional law and fundamental rights, politics, especially political theory and Indian politics, modern India and South Asian studies.Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on Indigenous Religion and Christianity at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Nostalgia for the 1980s is in the air. From Stranger Things to the relaunch of 80s franchises like Top Gun, the American entertainment industry casts the period as an age of simpler things, clearer dichotomies, and less technology. Yet not all was simple. The 1980s were the heyday of the Cold War. They were the decade of rapid social change, of deregulation and selfish consumption, of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They were also the decade when a new technology swept the world, setting the stage for our all-too-digital present.A lot has been written about the rise of video in the United States, the format wars, the impact it had on the entertainment industry, on personal entertainment consumption habits, and new business models. But the rise of video was not a uniquely American phenomenon, nor was the American experience normative. In fact, wherever the new technology arrived, from the US, to the Middle East, to Eastern Europe, it reshaped social and business practices, as well as government responses to it, in ways that reflected the political, social, and economic arrangements of each space.Johnny Walker’s Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1972-1992 (Edinburgh UP, 2022) tells the story of Britain’s vide boom in the 1980s by focusing on the first video distributors who took chances on a wide range of films, from documentaries, to horror, to kids entertainment, in order to attract consumer interest. The new video shops that mushroomed across Britain turned video rental into a common practice among the public. Soon, despite a crushing recession, more and more industry players started to invest into what media at the time was dismissing as a mere ‘plaything.’ Rewind, Replay chronicles the idiosyncratic ways in which British distributors and store owners navigated various local political and economic pressures including piracy, the infamous video nasties moral panic and the government crackdown on the industry, as well as the corporate expansion of the industry which, by the end of the decade, eliminated independent distributors, and turned the pre-recorded videocassette from morally questionable enterprise into a staple of high street retail.Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy is Teaching Professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her book, Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination, came out in 2022. Twitter: @OanaGodyKenw. Oana’s webpage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Patrick Bixby's book Nietzsche and Irish Modernism (Manchester UP, 2022) demonstrates how the ideas of the controversial German philosopher played a crucial role in the emergence and evolution of a distinctly Irish brand of modernist culture. Making an essential new contribution to the history of modernism, the book traces the circulation of these ideas through the writings of George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as through minor works of literature, magazine articles, newspaper debates, public lectures, and private correspondence. These materials reveal a response to Nietzsche that created abiding tensions between Irish cultural production and reigning religious and nationalist orthodoxies, during an anxious period of Home Rule agitation, world war, revolution, civil war, and state building. With its wealth of detail, the book greatly enriches our understanding of modernist culture as a site of convergence between art and politics, indigenous concerns and foreign perspectives.Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on mass media, popular culture and avant-garde art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Cosplay, a portmanteau of “costume” and “play,” emerged from geeky Japanese subcultures to become a popular hobby, and even profession, around the world. Frenchy Lunning dives into the reasons why people cosplay through interviews, pictures, and her own firsthand experience of cosplay events in America and Japan. She distills the essence of cosplay to performance and the negotiation of identity, a pair of concepts that she interrogates in part by contrasting cosplay practices in America and Japan.Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (U Minnesota Press, 2022) is livened with extensive photographs and fascinating tidbits about key figures in cosplay, such as Mari Kotani. Cosplayers are allowed to speak for themselves, describing what cosplay means to them and how they use it to negotiate their social roles and identities in fascinating detail. Lunning layers individuals’ testimony on a history of cosplay that highlights the changing settings, technologies, and communities supporting cosplay over the decades to leave readers debating what role cosplay will play in the construction of future identities.Frenchy Lunning is Professor Emeritus of Liberal Arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and has written two books: Subcultural Fashion: Fetish Style (2013), and Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (2022). She is working on a third book, Revolutionary Girl: Shōjo. The director of the US- and Japan-based academic conferences Mechademia Conference on Asian Popular Cultures, she is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the new biannual Mechademia: Second Arc journal.Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University. Her book, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, is forthcoming in July 2023 from the University of Hawai’i Press. It examines the contemporary media environment through Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Vivian Berghahn joins to discuss what is broken with the peer review system in general, how it impacts book publishing, and some creative solutions for how it can be rectified. Also, hear the surprising reason why small, independent publishers tend to have more robust quality review processes than big corporate publishers.Avi Staiman is the founder and CEO of Academic Language Experts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

JoAnne Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita and Professor of Managerial Communication and Work and Organization Studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, talks about her classic and award-winning 1989 book, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Johns Hopkins University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Control Through Communication tells the fascinating story of how corporations came to adopt modern communications systems, including typewriters, filing cabinets, card catalogs, memos, and reports. Over the past twenty years, the book has been hugely influential in history, communications, and media studies. Yates and Vinsel also talk about how Yates came to move from literature to business history and organization studies, what it was like working as a woman in a business school in the 1980s, how she managed to have a dual writing career in history and business school journals, and much more.Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction: Amazing Antiquity (Liverpool UP, 2022) by Dr. Ross Clare introduces and analyses the reception of classical antiquity in contemporary science fiction. By using up-to-date methods from classical reception theory, science-fiction analysis and fictional-world studies, the book will help furnish the reader's understanding of the ways in which the literature, culture, history and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome are appropriated and represented across multiple media platforms in the science-fiction genre today. The book will therefore serve as an entry point into several areas of study: the reception of classics in popular culture, antiquity in modern media, the uses of the ancient world in science-fiction, and broader science-fiction criticism. The chapters, structured by medium, principally offer a roughly chronological overview of that medium and its treatment of ancient history, mythology, literature, and culture. An abundance of case studies from literature, film, television, and videogames—including Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Bill and  Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Fallout: New Vegas—show how classical antiquity is reused, encountered, and re-encountered by creators and consumers of the present. Clare shows how we bounce off images of this history, and it bounces off us, a reciprocation that creates new visions of Greece and of Rome.In addition to this book, Ross Clare is the author of Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames, with Bloomsbury Academic Press, as well as having written some short stories, and video game scripts. He used to teach at the University of Liverpool.Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

NFT, BTC, DAO, ETH, WAGMI, HODL. It would have been hard to avoid these acronyms only a year ago. The hype around cryptocurrencies and blockchain art was almost as annoying as the glee with which crypto sceptics welcomed the sudden onset of the crypto winter.But for all the popularity of Bored Apes and Ponzi scheme stories, there seems to have been little serious engagement with the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the blockchain. The academy appears to have dismissed the crypto world out of hand, citing its financial unviability and the deeply ‘problematic’ philosophical foundations of its technology.Rhea Myers is a crypto artist, writer, and hacker who searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. Her engagement in the technical history and debates in blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied its ascendancy.Remodelling the tropes of conceptual art and net art to explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value, culture and currency, Myers’s work has become required viewing for anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and collectivity.Rhea Myers speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about art’s role in mapping and shaping the emergent properties of blockchain technologies, the crypto-libertarian, anarchy-capitalist nexus, and the enduring legacy of the conceptual art movement.Proof of Work brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks with essays, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous. PostScript Viruses, 1993 Portrait of V.I. Lenin with Cap, in the Style of Jackson Pollock III by Art & Language Futherfield Gallery, London Is Art, 2014/15, Art Is, 2014/17 Pierre's essay on the speculative deficit and NFT art Certificate of Inauthenticity, 2020 Rhea Myers is an artist, writer, and blockchain developer and activist. Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers focussed on blockchain tech in 2011, becoming one of the first artists to enter into creative, speculative, and conceptual engagement with ‘the new internet’.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications