New Books in World Affairs

Michael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the disciplinary framework of world literature levels the differences between different types of literature. He uses colonial Egypt as a geographic focus of inquiry and demonstrates how literary traditions changed the act of reading: his examples include the Rosetta Stone and translations of the Qur’an. He thus demonstrates that literary reading (to be distinguished from how reading was conceptualized in Egypt before the colonial period) requires different ethical capacities and sensibilities and how they were gradually institutionalized by different genres of texts. 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

Carla Pestana’s new book The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a rousing look at a transformative moment in Caribbean history. Pestana details the various political, economic, and religious factors that inspired England’s government, led by its new Protector Oliver Cromwell, to attempt an invasion of Spanish-held territory in the West Indies. She narrates the failed effort to take the island of Hispaniola, and the subsequent victory in conquering Jamaica. Yet, Pestana shows how incomplete that conquest was for the early years of English rule, and the various hardships that Jamaican settlers faced when trying to build the colonial economy. Along the way, she makes bold assertions about the conquest’s place in the broader history of English imperialism, as well as the role of piracy in Jamaican history.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

We are accustomed to the thought that individuals facing dire circumstances may rightfully take use of others’ property in order to save their own lives. For example, one thinks it obvious that in order to avoid freezing to death, a lost mountain hiker may rightfully break into and make use of a heated cabin that is not his property. But what justifies this idea? And what are its implications for a world where millions are subjected to sustained and systematic depravation? In The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) Alejandra Mancilla defends the idea that under the current global order, those who are subject to such systematic depravation have a right to take, use, seize, and occupy what is needed in order to satisfy requirements for basic subsistence. 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 Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s (Peter Lang Publishing, 2016), Jatinder Mann, an assistant professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University, offers a comparative look at the policies and politics of multiculturalism in Canada and Australia. He explores how the two countries navigated the transition from Britishness as the defining idea of community to multiculturalism as the defining idea of the nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

America’s national experience and collective history have always been subject to transnational forces and affected by global events and conditions. In recognition of this reality, the textbook Global Americans: A History of the United States (Cengage, 2017) presents a history of North America and then the United States in which world events and processes are central rather than colorful sidelights. In doing so, the text reflects the diverse experiences of the students it speaks to, as well as their families. Readers will be immersed in an accessible and inclusive American history in which a variety of social, cultural, economic, and geographic dynamics play key roles. The authors want you to see yourselves in the narrative, primary source documents, images, and other media they have assembled. Global Americans reveals the long history of global events that have shaped — and been shaped by — the peoples who have come to constitute the United States. In this podcast Maria Montoya discusses the story behind the creation and necessity of this textbook, what it hopes to accomplish in classrooms, and the opportunities and challenges of collaborative writing. Maria E. Montoya earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1993 and her BA from Yale in 1986. She is an Associate Professor of History New York University, as well as the Dean of Arts and Science at New York University, Shanghai. She is the author of numerous articles as well as the book Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840-1900. She has also worked on the AP U.S. History Development Committee and consulted to the College Board. Lori A. Flores is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale, 2016). She is based in Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017) Bruce O’Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest, Romania, where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism, O’Neill shows how the city’s homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work, a home to make, or money to spend, the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O’Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps, black labor markets and transit stations, detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation, from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how boredom correlates with the downward mobility of Bucharest’s homeless, O’Neill theorizes boredom as an enduring affect of globalization in order to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement. Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree for Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Kief Hillsbery‘s Empire Made: My Search for an Outlaw Uncle Who Vanished in British India (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) follows the career of Nigel Halleck, an English tax assessor in employ of the British East India Company and his travels on the Indian frontier from 1841 to 1878. Hillsbery reconstructs his ancestor’s life through his own travels to the region in the late 1970s. Believed by his family to be a gentleman gone rogue, gem smuggler, or possibly eaten by a tiger, Hillsbery unravels a fascinating tale of a man who choked under the stifling conditions of Victorian cultural norms and set out to reinvent himself at the court of Nepal during its years of self-imposed isolation. A man with limited horizons for economic and social advancement in Victorian England, Halleck was obliged to seek employment with the Company. Seeking a life of adventure and self-expression on the other side of the world, Halleck instead found a life of shallow colonial routine in Calcutta. Halleck chaffed under the rules and regulations Company bureaucracy. He became increasingly alienated by his surroundings and began to question the racist assumptions of the British imperial project. Inspired by the career of Henry Lawrence, Halleck left the shadow of Company in search of his own autonomy in Nepal, a distant locale outside the reach of British rule. A linguist and explorer, Hallack became one of the first Europeans to visit the country. Under the Rana court, Halleck found his place as advisor and companion to Jang Bhadur Rana during a period of political reform. Empire Made is an imperial history constructed from fragments of family letters, archival research, and the author’s own extensive travel in the frontier regions of India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Afghanistan. Hillsbery reconstructs the life of his ancestor while finding many parallels with his own experiences on the Indian frontier as a young man. In search of his uncle’s grave, Hillsbery uncovers the mysteries of Nigel Hallack, a nonconformist who transgressed the boundaries of colonizer and colonized as well as European attitudes towards homosexuality in the Age of Empire. James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at espositojamesj@gmail.com and on Twitter @james_esposito_ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

There are as many New Deals as there are books on the subject. Yet only recently have historians begun to dig into the international dimensions of the New Deal. Kiran Klaus Patel is one of those historians, and his book, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2016), is an impressive crack at showing the transnational intertwinements and comparisons that made up the New Deal’s moment. Patel locates the United States in a vast network of modernizing states who experienced a shared crisis in the years after 1929, developed national policies to address the crisis, and looked to other states in search of inspiration or out of fear. As late as 1938, for instance, Roosevelt was requesting Nazi labor statistics to help refine his own administrations planning. Patel shows how the New Deal shaped the world and, more importantly, was shaped by the world. The book provides fresh contributions to a range of different topics, such as the global Great Depression, the Good Neighbor Policy, the development of the welfare state, interwar international relations, and American post-WWII globalism. Kiran Klaus Patel, Professor of European and Global History at Maastricht University, achieves this with a knowledge of secondary literature in a variety of languages and rich archival evidence. The result of Patel’s work is a New Deal that looks a lot less exceptional, yet no less important to global history. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Dance & Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries (Manchester University Press, 2017) by Dana Mills, considers dance as a political expression from a number of perspectives, situating the analysis within a framework of contemporary political theory. Mills notes that dance has always been with us, as humans, but that we do not usually think about it as part of our political discourse in the same way that other performative or artistic expressions are integrated into political discussions and political life. Mills’ book argues that dance, as a language or means of communication, should be considered from the dancers’ perspective but also from the audience or the receivers’ experience and understanding, as well as the choreographers’ point of view, and the interactions of the other dancers involved. Mills digs into the overarching question of how can we expand our notion of what is political so that dance is included, trying to also understand why it has often been excluded from the notion of the political. The book elaborates on how and why dance is political, how dance can give voice to subversive discourse, how it can articulate feminist perspectives, and how it can provide opportunity and outlet for those marginalized within society and politics. The scope of the book is global–integrating not only the groundbreaking work of Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham as the building blocks for thinking about dance and politics–but exploring the Gumboots dance and development in South Africa; the One Billion Rising concept and diffusion to western countries, and non-western appropriation of the movement; and the integration of dance into human rights advocacy in Israel and in Palestine. The book concludes with another example of the role of dance within yet another community, the Native American communities in North America. Throughout the book, Mills teases apart the issues of the body as a political entity, while also exploring the conceptual notion of political space where dance is performed, and how the body is part of an understanding of political space. These questions are vital to consider in context of contemporary political theory and what we understand to be political discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Simone Muller’s Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (Columbia University Press, 2016) is a superb account of the laying of submarine telegraph cables in the nineteenth century and the battles over them in the subsequent decades. Her book shows how expanding telegraph networks were instrumental in processes of capitalism, nation-building, and globalization. To track these grand developments, however, Muller reconstructs the network of people who built, managed, and fought over telegraph networks. She calls this eclectic collection of financiers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and politicians “actors of globalization.” Muller’s book is an historical kaleidoscope that shows the multi-faceted meaning of telegraphy. Her actors imbued telegraphy with hopes of world peace, of Weltcommunication (a predecessor of the global village idea), of a global electric union, and of bolstering the civilizing mission. Even if submarine telegraphy never achieved these aspirations, her book demonstrates just how culturally and socially significant this technology and these networks were to the pre-WWI world. Her book should be of interest to historians of capitalism, technology, international relations, Europe and the United States, along with anyone curious about the longer duree of globalization. Simone Muller is a principal investigator at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs