New Books in World Affairs

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene(MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global warming.  Lynch and Veland examine how the ostensible state of constant urgency we live in is identified and addressed in political discourse.  With detailed analyses of major climate accords and theories of geo-engineering, they demonstrate how this discourse limits our imagined possibilities for sustainability.  Instead, they propose an ethos of co-existence that is receptive to how different societies and cultures interpret catastrophe.  A pluralistic approach to the Anthropocene, they suggest, may allow us to achieve environmental sustainability while honoring human dignity and justice.Amanda Lynch is Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Brown University and the director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.Siri Veland is Senior Researcher at Nordland Research Institute in Bodø, Norway.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico.  He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In his book Colonial Buganda and the End of Empire: Political Thought and Historical Imagination in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Dr. Jonathon Earle illustrates the rich and diverse intellectual history of Buganda, an East African kingdom that came to be incorporated into the modern state of Uganda.  Earle constructs the intellectual biographies of four important Ganda activists who articulated and debated ideas about kingship, political pluralism, citizenship, and justice. Their views on state and society were drawn from a diverse range of sources such as religious texts, classical political thinkers and local histories. Earle’s book shows that often used distinctions between “sacred” and “secular” or “African” and “European” oversimplify and obscure what was a more pluralistic intellectual milieu.  In writing this book, Earle uses a wide range of primary and secondary sources among which are several private archival collections that had not been previously available to historians. The book is currently a finalist for the 2018 Bethwell A. Ogot Prize presented by the African Studies Association to the author of the best book in East African Studies. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History.  She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Professor Cairns Craig’s new book, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), which has been shortlisted for the Saltire History Book of the Year Award, is a wide-ranging study of the ways in which Scottish culture was defined, exported, transformed, and smuggled through its assimilation in the British State and the British Empire, their rise, their fall, and the more recent fallout. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), and the Chicago School and Thatcher’s distortions of its lessons, is a central theme: A considered analyses of the structure of Smith’s thought, its uses and abuses open and close the argument. Craig develops and applies very original critical concepts to Scotland’s cultural history. These include: ‘Xeniteian migration’ (as opposed to diasporic migration: these are institution-builders, recasting the world in Scotland’s image); ‘Nostophobia’ (revulsion toward the culture of one’s own country, especially where it is seen to be ‘past-oriented’); and ‘Theoxenia’ (hospitality to strangers on the basis that they might be Gods in disguise; this notion is close to the idea of a vast horizon of possible Scotlands that was ignited during the 2014 Independence Referendum). Beginning among the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Craig’s argument casts its net wide, incorporating, for example: the history Scottish Free Masonry; the reception of Walter Scott’s historical novels; the development of so-called ‘race science’; the history of theoretical physics; the intent and impact of pastoral literatures; Associationist aesthetics; film history; modern and contemporary sculpture; contemporary Scottish politics; and a vast array of Scottish literary authors, from Scott to Liz Lochhead. The Wealth of the Nation is vital reading for those interested in the deeper currents of contemporary debates around Scotland’s cultural politics, and for anyone interested in the foundational relationships between what Craig calls ‘Cultural Wealth’ and a more materialist, or dryly economic notion of historical processes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Amidst an atmosphere of hope on the Korean Peninsula over the past year, questions over the wellbeing of North Korea’s population have again come to global attention. But this is far from the first time that such a subject has been in the news, for ever since the catastrophic famine which affected the country from the mid-to-late 1990s, discussions of human rights abuses and malnutrition have been frequent. Sandra Fahy’s Marching through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea (Columbia University Press, 2015) is based on interviews with survivors of that seminal and devastating moment in the DPRK’s recent history. Adding careful framing and contextualisation, and paying close attention to her interlocutors’ linguistic and expressive nuances, Fahy leads us into the lifeworlds of a wide range of North Koreans: parents and children, bureaucrats and farmers, soldiers, miners and students. The book’s account of the consequences of the disaster for community, political and economic life in North Korea is as important as it is chilling, and offers deep insight into a situation which should remain in the mind of anyone seeking to understand a changing Korea today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Jehovah’s Witnesses are one of the most successful “new religious movements” to have emerged from the prophetic ferment within later nineteenth-century Protestantism. Always controversial, often persecuted, and well-known for their proselytising efforts, they have made a substantial contribution in terms of human rights, and they count numerous famous musicians and sports stars among their membership. I caught up with Zoe Knox, Associate Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Leicester, to discuss her new book, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Secular World: From the 1870s to the Present (Palgrave, 2018), to talk about the ways in which this religious community has changed over time, and how it developed its distinctive attitudes towards politics, blood transfusion, and evangelism. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

From Dancing with the Stars to the high-profile airport abandonment of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev by his American adoptive parents in April 2010, popular representations of post-Soviet immigrants in America span the gamut of romantic anti-Communist origin stories to horror stories of transnational adoption of children from Russia. In her latest book, The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States (New York University Press, 2018), Claudia Sadowski-Smith analyzes a plethora of sources from reality tv shows to memoirs and interviews to examine how post-Soviet migrants represent idealized examples of immigrant assimilation and upward mobility in the United States. Sadowski-Smith’s work adds critical analysis to both public and academic American immigration discourses. She evaluates how these migrants have access to a white racial identity often denied to Latino/a and Asian immigrants, how modes of migration impact post-Soviet migrants access to upward mobility, and how these migrants understand anti-immigration legislation aimed at migrants of color. Overall, she examines post-Soviet migrants in the contemporary context of the racialization of immigrants in the United States. Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is a History Instructor at Lee College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Today we are joined by Jenifer Parks, Associate Professor of History at Rocky Mountain College. Parks is the author of The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sport Bureaucracy, and the Cold War: Red Sport, Red Tape (Lexington Books, 2016), which asks how Soviet bureaucrats maneuvered the USSR into the Olympic movement and used the discourses of Olympism to promote athletic democratization, anti-colonialism, and socialism in the context of the Cold War. In The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sport Bureaucracy, and the Cold War, Parks assesses the growth of Soviet Olympism from the Second World War until the 1980 Moscow Games.  Her first chapters highlights the difficulties Soviet sports bureaucrats faced in their efforts to join the international Olympic movement. These bureaucrats needed to convince the IOC of the Soviet Union’s worthiness, in the face of persistent anti-communism from IOC president Avery Brundage. They also needed to win over Soviet politician who feared that any Olympic failure would embarrass the state in front of an international audience. In spite of these early misgivings and misstarts, the Soviet Union largely succeeded in their first Olympics, the 1952 Helsinki Games. The next three decades were an almost uninterrupted era of Soviet athletic dominance. In the 1970s, confident Soviet sports bureaucrats sought to bring the Olympics to Moscow. After losing the 1976 Games to Montreal, Moscow won the right to host the 1980s Olympics. A herculean effort ensued to make Moscow hospitable for the expected tens of thousands of athletes, international journalists, and one million tourists. The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, which set off an international boycott of the Games, marred their extensive achievements which included the biggest Games to date, the largest number of female Olympians, and dozens of new World Records. Through a close reading of the archives of the Soviet Union’s main sporting agencies, including the State Committee for Sports and Physical Education, and an analysis of the key figures in the Soviet sports bureaucracy, Parks also reshapes our understanding of Soviet bureaucracy. The historiography of the USSR emphasizes stagnation in post-Brezhnev Soviet government agencies as a way to explain the state’s inability to deal with the challenges of the 1970s. However, the men of the Sports Committee were not just staid functionaries, but a cadre of professional, effective, pragmatic men driven to use Olympism to promote socialism abroad and at home. The Olympic Games, the Soviet Sport Bureaucracy, and the Cold War will interest scholars broadly concerned with the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and the international Olympic movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Dangerous Nation, Of Paradise and Power, and A Twilight Struggle. He served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988.  His latest book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (Knopf, 2018), is a review of American foreign policy in the twentieth century and an argument regarding how that history should be understood by current policy-makers.  Kagan contends that not only was the twentieth century an “American century” in the sense of American foreign supremacy, but it was an unusual aberration in world history.  Likening international affairs to a jungle, he argues that the U.S. cleared and curated a peaceful garden through its role as a guarantor of economic and military stability, its advocacy for democracy, and its containment of communism.  Accordingly, he contends, any American withdrawal from this role in the 21st century will result in the normal, fearful, power-politics of the jungle growing back, which will have deleterious consequences not only for America but for the entire globe.  Kagan notes that one of the supreme achievements of the United States was not only protecting Western Europe and much of Asia from expansionist communist states, but also the reform and pacification of formers enemies Germany and Japan.  Kagan’s is a challenging and provocative argument and is an important addition to the debate over what was and should be America’s role in world affairs. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.  She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2018), an amazing new book based on her field study in Africa where she investigated the Chinese investments. The book is extremely interesting for its methodology and unconventional findings. Lee’s research project lasted for 7 years during which she has conducted field research in copper mines and construction sites in Zambia. A key question addressed is if Chinese capital is a different type of capital. By the end of the conversation we will know if it is different and if yes, if it is a better or a worse type of capital. Lee has defined Chinese state capital compared with global private capital in terms of business objectives, labour practices, managerial ethos and political engagement with Zambia. She has written a book with huge policy implications. A great contribution to so many fields, sociology of labour first among them. But above all she has written a beautiful book that is a pleasure to read. At times it reads like a novel, particularly the long appendix, called ‘An ethnographer’s odyssey: the mundane and the sublime of searching China in Zambia’. We discussed why China’s presence in Africa is so controversial and what type of Chinese investors are there. Her work focuses on large state-owned companies. Lee’s project in Africa is a continuation of her previous field study of labour in China (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University of California Press, 2007). But this book has another important predecessor, the study of labour in Zambian mines conducted by the great British-American sociologist, Michael Burawoy. She told us about her relationship with him and his work. Lee also discussed whether it is appropriate to use the term “imperialism” to represent Chinese presence in Africa. She argues it is not. The book includes pictures of her field work in mines and construction sites. Definitely a beautiful book, brave piece of field research, nonconformist, original, important, erudite, pleasant to read. Carlo D’Ippoliti is associate professor of economics at Sapienza University of Rome, and is editor of the open access economics journals ‘PSL Quarterly Review’ and ‘Moneta e Credito’. His recent publications include the ‘Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics’ (Routledge, 2017) and ‘Classical Political Economy Today’ (Anthem, 2018), both as co-editor. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs