New Books in World Affairs

Following a 2011 meeting of the annual Mediterranean Workshop at the University of Minnesota, Patricia Lorcin (a co-convener) approached Todd Shepard (one of the workshop participants that year) about editing a volume focused on the Mediterranean in the modern period. From the beginning, these two editors of French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) envisioned a collection that would bring together authors whose work pushes against the boundaries of French and European history (from outside of and within these regional fields). Analyzing the history of the Mediterranean as geographic, social, cultural, political, intellectual, and discursive space from the nineteenth century to the era of decolonization, the book offers a critical history of the region understood in its transnational and imperial complexity. The volume is organized in three parts. Focused on maps and mapping, the first includes essays by Ali Yaycioglu, Ian Coller, Andrew Arsan, and Spencer Segalla. Examining frameworks of migration, the next section features essays by Edhem Eldem, Marc Aymes, Julia Clancy-Smith, and Mary Dewhurst Lewis. In the third part of the collection, authors Sarah Stein, Susan Miller, Ellen Amster, and Emma Kuby interrogate the margins of Mediterranean religious identity, medicine, and the legacies of the Holocaust. Through the analysis of a range of historical actors, events, and the mobilization of different methods and sources, the essays all think carefully through how forms of difference have shaped and divided the region over centuries: nations and borders, language, ethnicity, race, religion, class, and gender. Diverse in their objects of study and approaches, the essays in the volume share a preoccupation with the study of French Mediterraneans plural in their imaginations, populations, and politics throughout the era of modern imperialism. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Hugh Cagle is an exciting analysis of the production of the tropics as an idea and as a dimension of imperialism through the development of the Portuguese empire.  The global connections forged by seafaring empires demanded new ways of conceiving a unified world.  As the Portuguese were first to discover, the ancient canon provided little guidance, and far-flung colonies all seemed unique and defied coherent categorization.  Through efforts to interpret, control, and economize a their outposts in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the Portuguese developed novel and creative methods of producing knowledge within a globalizing world.  Late in the 17th century, some of these efforts would coalesce around the idea of the tropics as physicians attempted to consolidate their authority over the health of the empire.   A space of prodigious nature and profuse disease, the tropics soon became an orienting notion of modern race theory and empires. 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

The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still resonates nearly one-hundred years after it was written. Almost certainly a forgery, the so-called Zinoviev Letter, had no original and has never been traced. Notwithstanding, the Letter still haunts British politics. It was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and it even cropped up in the British media as recently as during the Referendum campaign of 2016 and the 2017 general election. The Letter, addressed to the leadership of the British Communist Party, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervor, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Communist International in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, the Letter’s publication by the Daily Mail on October 25th 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a “Red Scare” in the media. Labour blamed (erroneously) the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been an establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it. The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call “fake news”. Now, former Chief Historian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Dr. Gill Bennett, who headed up an official inquiry into the Zinoviev Affair in the late 1990s, takes another look at this matter in a fascinating book, The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies (Oxford University Press, 2018). Employing research skills honed by forty-years work at the Foreign Office, Dr. Bennett entrances the reader with this still fascinating detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

China’s growing presence in all of our worlds today is felt most keenly by those living directly on the country’s borders. They, together with the Chinese people who also inhabit the borderlands, are parties to a dazzling array of of China-driven transformations unfolding on a vast scale in economics, politics, culture, kinship and other spheres. Consequently, Juan Zhang and Martin Saxer’s edited volume The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders (Amsterdam University Press, 2018) is a timely contribution to our understanding of what is going on at many points of China’s local contact with its 14 neighbouring states. The collected volume sees anthropologists, geographers and historians draw on extensive fieldwork all around the country’s borders with Russia, Laos, Nepal, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Myanmar and Vietnam, seeking in part to answer the question “what does China’s rise mean for its immediate neighbours?” (p. 12). But The Art of Neighbouring is much more than this, for it also offers a theoretical intervention into old debates over China’s past and present approaches to the outside world, and encourages us to look anew at how states and peoples living next-door engage one another more broadly. Here’s an open-access version of the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

According to the Walk Free Foundation, there are currently 46 million slaves in the world. Despite being against international law, slavery is not yet culturally condemned everywhere. Despite being human rights violators, many perpetrators are respected members of their communities. In his new book, What Slaveholders Think: How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize what They Do (Columbia University Press, 2017), Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, from the University of San Diego and the University of Nottingham, explores how slaveholders rationalize what they do and how they deal with the social changes that confront the status quo from which they benefit. Looking from the lenses of social movement theories, Professor Choi-Fitzpatrick, interviews slaveholders on how they feel about being targets of contention and how they react to it. In this way, he provides an original contribution both to social movement and antislavery studies. From a social movement perspective, he emphasizes the behavior of social movement targets and how they interact with challengers. Additionally, he proposes innovative ways to understand and confront slavery. Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

How does postcolonial theory and the work of Freud help us understand trauma? In The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Fordham University Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Yusin, Associate Professor of English and Philosophy at Drexel University, explores both of these approaches for thinking trauma in the the context of a range of historical examples. The book offers a detailed engagement with a host of theorists and theoretical positions from Freud and the theory of psychoanalysis, through postcolonial theories of trauma, to Derrida’s political ideas. The extensive discussion of theory is placed in the context of Rwanda, the memorialisation of genocide, and the partition of India and Pakistan. In the current political context the book offers urgent insights into trauma, and will be of interest across the humanities. More information about the Kigali Genocide Memorial is available here along with the organization that supports widows of the genocide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In her new book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), Dr. Susan Carruthers, professor of American Studies at the University of Warwick, chronicles America’s transition from wartime combatant to post-war occupier in both Germany and Japan. This excellent book examines occupation by exploring the thoughts and feelings of ordinary servicemen and women who participated in the difficult task of rebuilding defeated nations. By examining occupation from the ground up, this book effectively tackles the mythology surrounding America’s occupation and demonstrates that the rebuilding of post-war Europe and Japan was a difficult and by no means straightforward. 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 new book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (Thomas Dunne Books, 2018), Bradley W. Hart, assistant professor at California State University, Fresno, examines Nazi sympathizers, noninterventionists, and others in American who advocated for Nazi Germany in the years before World War II.  Hart looks at a wide array of groups and individuals in his study, from the German-American Bund, the Silver Legion, religious leaders, members of Congress and of course Charles Lindbergh. Hitler’s American Friends ultimately shows that Americans are not immune to the lure of authoritarianism, and just how fragile our democracy is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

If you are tired of reading the same, Washington-based, consensus, ‘realist’ and or ‘neo-conservative’, critiques of American foreign policy, here is something to salivate on: Jeffrey D. Sachs’, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press, 2018). By turns, noted author Jeffrey Sachs’ book is unorthodox, iconoclastic, novel and indeed at times eccentric. A New Foreign Policy provides a road map for a U.S. foreign policy that embraces globalism, cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity—not nationalism and illusory dreams of empty and past glory. You may not agree with him, indeed you may  believe that he is completely wrong and his facts do not add up. Regardless, Sachs’ book is the one that foreign policy experts will be discussing this Fall. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

If you are tired of reading the same, Washington-based, consensus, 'realist' and or 'neo-conservative', critiques of American foreign policy, here is something to salivate on: Jeffrey D. Sachs', A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (Columbia University Press, 2018). By turns, noted author Jeffrey Sachs' book is unorthodox, iconoclastic, novel and indeed at times eccentric. A New Foreign Policy provides a road map for a U.S. foreign policy that embraces globalism, cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity---not nationalism and illusory dreams of empty and past glory. You may not agree with him, indeed you may believe that he is completely wrong and his facts do not add up. Regardless, Sachs' book is the one that foreign policy experts will be discussing this Fall.Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs