New Books in World Affairs

As Raphael Dalleo demonstrates in his wide-ranging and compelling American Imperialism Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anti-colonialism (University of Virginia Press, 2016), the US occupation of Haiti reverberated throughout the Caribbean, as intellectuals and activists shaped their anti-colonial views in its shadow. Dalleo’s work recovers the important links between the reality of US military and economic power and critiques of imperialism in the work of writers including George Padmore, C.L.R. James, and Amy Jacques Garvey. In highlighting the ways the occupation of Haiti haunted Caribbean literature and politics, this book offers fresh readings of these well-known critical voices. 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 fascinating new book The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Iza Hussin, Lecturer of Politics at University of Cambridge examines the transformation of Islamic law in colonial Malay, Egypt, and India. Combining archival, institutional, and political history, this book charts in staggering detail the centralization of Islamic Law in the shadow of colonial power during and after its attempted marginalization in Muslim societies. Much of this book is focused on explaining this apparent paradox, and a task that it achieves with convincing clarity. By presenting a nuanced and complicated picture of the interaction of colonial power and the colonized elite, Hussin offers a narrative of the making and remaking of Islamic Law in modernity that will delight the intellectual palate of specialists and non-specialists alike. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at stareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Laura Madokoro’s new book is a timely and important study of movement across national borders, migrants, and the refugee label in the global Cold War. Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2016) offers critical historical insight into the problem of defining refugee and the significance of changing notions of the concept, focusing in particular on the modern history of settler colonial contexts and their engagement with Asian migrants. Madokoro looks carefully at the malleable nature of the refugee label in Hong Kong, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond, building on a rich archival and oral history base to weave together the stories of individual migrants, international organizations, humanitarian groups, and others. The end of the book explicitly considers how the account offered in Madokoro’s book might inform how we understand the challenges faced by refugees today, especially in the case of Syria, and indeed Madokoro’s study feels like required reading today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Terry Nichols Clark are the authors of The Third Sector: Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Kallman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Brown University. Clark is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. The social sector varies so greatly across countries that organizations are rarely compared in any comprehensive fashion. Kallman and Clark take on this challenge by studying the nonprofit sector in six countries: China, Taiwan, Japan, France, South Korean, and the United States. They present a theoretical argument that links varied organizations across these countries focused on relationships with state institutions, activism, and independence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Richard Jean So’s new book studies a group of American and Chinese writers in the three decades after WWI to propose a conceptual framework for understanding intellectual and cultural relations between China and America in the twentieth century and beyond. The period that So focuses on was crucial for a number of reasons, including a transformation in US-China relations, transformations in the world economy and international politics, the rise of a new era in media technologies (including the formation of a massive technological infrastructure between the US and East Asia, due in part to radio and telegraph technology and a transpacific transportation system) and the related emergence of a discourse of communications. In Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network (Columbia University Press, 2016), So argues that literary histories of U.S.-China cultural encounter in the twentieth century must also, in part, be histories of media. So recasts the Pacific in the twentieth century as a site of mediation and traces the engagement with concepts of democracy through the work of such writers as Agnes Smedley, Pearl Buck, Paul Robeson, Lin Yutang, Ding Ling, Liu Liangmo, Lao She, and Ida Puitt. It’s a focused, compelling account with resonance for Asian studies, Asian American studies, and broader debates about literature, translation, networks, and media in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

You find a lot of strange things on late medieval and “Age of Discovery” era maps. Of course there are weird beasts of every sort: dragons, griffins, sea monsters, and sundry multi-headed predators. But you also find a lot of bizarre, well, people. These include giant people, tiny people, one-footed people, people with two heads, and people with no heads at all (their eyes, mouths and noses are in their chests). What is one to make of all these different kinds of humanity? And, more important from a historical point of view, what did Renaissance mapmakers think they were doing when they adorned their cartographical products with them? In her wonderful new book Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Surekha Davies offer answers aplenty, and good ones. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

One of the most interesting questions of modern history is this: Why is it that Communist China was able to make a successful transition to economic modernity (and with it prosperity) while the Communist Soviet Union was not? In his excellent book The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR (UNC Press, 2016), Chris Miller offers a convincing explanation for the divergent paths of these two Marxist-Leninist powers. Miller shows that Mikhail Gorbachev knew well about the on-going Chinese experiment, and he modeled much of what he attempted to do on it. Yet, as Miller argues, Gorbachev faced much stiffer political and ideological opposition than the Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, did. In the USSR, the Party was stronger and there were powerful institutional-economic interests standing in his way. In addition, Soviet socialism had “worked” for masses of ordinary citizens in a way that Chinese socialism had not; many “Soviet people” believed in the Soviet system and were very skeptical about the idea of adopting a new economic order. Caught between powerful elites and relatively satisfied regular folks, both of whom were beholden to the old ways, Gorbachev’s reforms didn’t really stand a chance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Last week featured a year-end-round up of books in American politics. This week I looked back to the past year on the podcast in other subfields. I start with an interview I enjoyed with Prerna Singh. Her book examines sub-nationalism in India. Prerna’s book is How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India and was published by Cambridge University Press. Next up is Marc Lynch who came on the podcast to talk about international relations in the Middle East. Here is an excerpt from our interview. Marc’s book is titled The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East and was published by Public Affairs in 2016. In a year with Republicans on the rise in Washington, I enjoyed Bob Lacey’s book of political theory. Bob’s book is Pragmatic Conservatism. Palgrave MacMillan published the book this year. And finally, Deepa Iyer came on the podcast to talk about social movements and South Asian American politics. Deepa’s book, with my favorite cover of the year, is We Too Sing America, published by The New Press. I hope you enjoyed the podcast in 2016 and come back in 2017 for more. Remember to rate the podcast on iTunes and share on social media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Misunderstanding Terrorism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Marc Sageman provides an important reassessment of the global neojihadi threat to the West. He argues that inaccurate evaluations of the threat and overreactions to a limited threat have transformed U.S. society. By constructing a model to explain the turn to political violence, Sageman shows how a misunderstanding of terrorism in the West has dramatically inflated fear of the actual danger posed by neojihadis. This has led to overreaction of the counterterrorist community, which has resulted in threats to fundamental civil liberties. Sageman makes the distinction that the vast majority of political protestors are not violent and he expands on the conditions that may turn some members of an imagined community from talking about violence to engaging in violence. The book brings realistic numbers into the assessment of the threat facing the West and concludes with straightforward policies to end the threat instead of perpetuating it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Since it was published in 2004, Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2014 reprint) has won four major prizes in fields ranging from history of medicine to East Asian history. It is easy to see why. Set in the Chinese treaty port of Tianjin, the book follows Chinese elites over the tumultuous decades that spanned the middle of the nineteenth century to World War Two. Chinese elites in Tianjin engaged British, French, and, importantly, Japanese imperialists and traders in their midst, creating what Rogaski thinks is best called a “hypercolony.” Simultaneously, Chinese elites pressed their own nation-building projects, working to distinguish themselves both from the foreigners and also from the masses they ruled. To do so, they adopted, adapted, and cultivated particular ways of building a modern nation in the final years of the Qing dynasty, which hung, importantly, on practices of hygiene. These ideal ways of being hygienic, thus modern, fundamentally rearranged the urban landscape of Tianjin and the practice of everyday life. Rogaski writes wonderfully and leads the way through tricky historical evidence, pointing out how Chinese elites modernizing projects were apparent in the changed meaning of weisheng. In the early nineteenth century, the term referred to individual ways of guarding health and a century later had come explicitly to refer to government-directed public hygiene measures–“hygienic modernity”–without ever shedding its earlier inflections. The book shows that modernity is not so much a time period, but an aspiration and a process–always incomplete, seemingly right around the washroom corner. Creatively designed and insightfully analyzed, this study defies any simple binaries of colonizer and colonized, or of indigenous and scientific medicine. Rogaski wears her theory lightly and has plenty new to show–not least to historians of medicine who may be most familiar with the stories of colonial medicine from Africa and India. Ruth Rogaski is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and generously agreed to a live faculty-student interview as part of a collaborative final project for Laura Starks course History of Global Health. To learn more about using the New Books Network for classroom projects, see Laura Stark’s essay “Can new media save the book?” in the Fall 2015 issue of Contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs