New Books in World Affairs

I was joined by Pasquale Tridico, Professor of Political Economy at Roma Tre University in Italy. His latest book, Inequality in Financial Capitalism, was published by Routledge in 2017. The issue of inequality has regained attention in the economic and political debate. This is due to both an increase in income inequality, in particular among rich countries but not only, and an increasing interest in this topic by researchers, policy makers and political movements. In this book, the author presents figures and insights on several possible causes of inequality but focuses on the role of financial capitalism, characterised by the strong dependency of economies on the financial sector, by the intensification of international trade and capital mobility, and by the flexibilisation of labour markets, the reduction of wage shares and a declining welfare redistribution. A conversation on such a complex topic was also the opportunity to briefly mention collateral issues such as the financial crisis, the failure of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and Brexit. 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 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

Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is the most recent work from distinguished historian Jack Greene. Using a treasure trove of records from the middle of the eighteenth century, Greene paints in incredible detail a societal picture of Britain’s wealthiest Caribbean colony. Greene finds much more social and economic diversity in Jamaica than traditional accounts suggest. He is also able to trace the specific contours of slavery, landed wealth, and plantation characteristics in each of the island’s regions. For scholars of the eighteenth-century Caribbean, the book is an invaluable study of a key moment in one of the principal locations of the West Indies. 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, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press 2016), Lawrence R. Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College examines the trial of John Demjanjuk. The Right Wrong Man examines Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey that began in 1975. Over the course of the next several decades Demjanjuk was tried twice, first in Israel where he was thought to be “Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka” only to be exonerated, owing to a case of mistaken identity. He was then tried in Munich for his actual crimes as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. The Right Wrong Man is a fascinating look at the law’s effort to bring closure to the horrific events of the Holocaust. 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 searing book Ants among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), Sujatha Gidla traces her family’s history over four generations in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. From their conversion into Christianity by Canadian missionaries and her grandfather’s stint in the British army; her uncle Satyamurthy’s rise as a revolutionary poet, labor organizer and eventual founder of the Maoist People’s War Group (PWG) and her mother Manjula’s struggles raising three children in the face of everyday caste discrimination, to her own involvement with the PWG’s radical student wing that ended with brief imprisonment, it is the impossibility of transcending caste even in “modern” India that she circles back to. She writes, “Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.” Her book has been reviewed to critical acclaim in the New York Times, BBC, and Slate among others. Gidla lives in New York City and works as a subway conductor for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation, titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier,” explores processes of statemaking in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of work can be found here. 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, Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), Jayne Persian, a Lecturer in History at the University of Southern Queensland, explores the history of mass migration of 170,000 Displaced Persons from postwar Eastern Europe to Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Utilizing archives and interviews with these migrants, Persian tells the story of a people looking for a new life after the horrors of World War II, and the challenges and opportunities they found in Cold War Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Just after World War II, West Indians began moving to London in large numbers. The artists, writers, and musicians among them found a place to create, and they found ways to express their complex notions of belonging to both the Caribbean and to the British Empire. Amanda Bidnall‘s The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945-1965 (Liverpool University Press, 2017) traces their paths and their fortunes, their successes and their troubles. Bidnall writes against a prevailing interpretation of immigrant London as torn apart with racial divisions. While this generation may have encountered degrees of racial animosity, they were at also intent on participating in and contributing to a burgeoning scene that welcomed them as newcomers.   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, Youth Encounter Programs in Israel: Pedagogy, Identity and Social Change (Syracuse University Press, 2017), Karen Ross conducts an in-depth analysis of Jewish-Palestinian youth encounter peace-building programs in Israel. She adopts a narrative approach and carefully considers how these youth programs impacted their young participants in long-term, positive and profound ways. Of particular interest is her insights about how to research and evaluate the “impact” of education programs in a non-linear, non-causal and broadly conceived approach. Her work has rich and multi-layered practical implications for the continuous peace-building efforts both within and out of the Israeli/Palestinian context. Karen Ross is an assistant professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are youth culture, identity formation, qualitative research methods, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.   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 spoke to Gregory Mann about his book From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Non-Governmentality (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Gregory Mann investigates how the effectiveness of government institutions declined in the years following the independence of nation-states of the West African Sahel and gave way to a state of non-governmentality. Rather than presenting a linear explanation of this decline, Mann describes instances in which one can see its multiple roots and intricate evolution. These stories describe the activities of anticolonial leaders and intellectuals during the waning years of the colonial empire and its immediate aftermath, debates over the status of migrants and immigration within the Sahel and to France, the arrival of NGOs in light of governments inability to address the drought and famine that afflicted the Sahel between 1973 and 1974 and, finally, the role human rights organizations in the handling of Saharan prisons. By telling these stories Mann illustrates how current understandings of government decline as the result of either neocolonial or neoliberal interventions are both misguided and insufficient and sets the stage for a more nuanced debate about the role of the state in Africa that goes beyond its brief post-colonial past. Gregory Mann is Professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes on the history of French West Africa. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor in 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

Fashion is often dismissed as trivial, but Reina Lewis‘s Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Duke University Press, 2015) takes both it and what Muslims specifically wear and devotes and 300+ eye-opening pages to it. Defining it as, not a history, but “a history of several lived presents.” Largely focusing on Turkey, Western Europe, and North America, Lewis walks us through the landscape of Muslim fashion, incorporating marketing, global trends, social media, and the perspectives of those who wear the clothes themselves, Muslim women. We see how religion and identity shape what people wear, how they don’t necessarily have to even fit within the set of decisions that one makes when picking ones clothes, and how functionality is also key. Ultimately, Muslim Fashion is about the role of personal choice in how Muslim women express themselves through dress and will go far in challenging assumptions about Muslims and specifically, young Muslim women. NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Somalis have lived in Kenya for generations, in many cases since long before the founding of the country. Yet, Kenyan officials and citizens often perceive them as a dangerous and alien presence, with attendant civil and human rights abuses. In examining the historical precedents, Keren Weitzberg‘s We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya (Ohio University Press, 2017) challenges many of the most analytical categories that have traditionally shaped African historiography, thus forging unique inroads into debates over globalization, African sovereignty, the resurgence of religion, and the multiple meanings of being African. Utilizing an exhaustive range of documentary and oral sources, Weitzberg breaks through the narrative of belonging, to include the gray areas of identity as they evolve and change over generations of Somalis living in Kenya. Erin Freas-Smith, Ph.D can be reached at efreassmith@gmail.com.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs