New Books in World Affairs

Coll Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entanglement, with each chapter following a particular set of travelers to explore a particular way that urban and Indigenous histories are linked: knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, memory. Interspersed with these chapters are free-verse poetical interludes that weave archival fragments and Thrush’s own writerly voice together in stories of particular objects that mark the book’s journey: a mirror, a debtors’ petition, a pair of statues, a lost museum, a hat factory, a notebook. It is a thoughtful, compelling account that will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in indigenous studies, urban history, early modern history, and London itself. An appendix on Self-Guided Encounters with Indigenous London helps readers use the book as a kind of travel guide to help activate the history of Indigenous London into shaping explorations of the city today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

James Alexander Dun is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. His book Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) provides a detailed examination of how the Haitian Revolution shaped Americans view of their own revolution, their relations with both England and France, and left an imprint on the domestic ideological battles between Federalists and Republicans. Philadelphia, a center for antislavery activity and a stage for revolutionary ideas, was actively engaged in trade with the French colony of Saint Domingue. Newspapers, letters, and eyewitness accounts from merchant ships provide a window into how the Haitian Revolution influenced domestic politics. People and ideas from Saint Domingue flooded the city dividing citizens over the meaning of rebellion, revolution, freedom and slavery. Dun has deciphered complex events and shown how Haiti became a symbol of all that was right and wrong in the revolutionary Atlantic. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Why does the UN intervene in some cases of mass violence and not others? Why and how have public attitudes toward humanitarian intervention changed over the past decades? And how do the stories we tell each other about cases of violence and civil war impact our decisions about when intervention is appropriate? Carrie Booth Walling’s recent book, All Necessary Measures: The United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) sets out to answer these questions. She looks at a series of international crises in the 1990s in the 1990s and early 2000s, beginning with Iraq in 1991-2 and concluding with the recent conflict in Syria. In each case, she examines how member-states in the UN characterize the conflict and how that characterization shapes their preferred responses. The conclusion is simple: narratives matter. They determine how people describe the conflict. They determine the kind of responses countries are willing to consider. And they determine, at least in part, whether the UN chooses to intervene in conflicts, and if so, how and to what end. Walling’s research is careful and her conclusions measured and well-supported. She joins an increasing emphasis in genocide studies on the importance of narratives of all kind. Readers will come away with an increased understanding of why the international community sometimes seems to care about mass violence and sometimes does not. This podcast is the last in our summer/fall series on research about genocide prevention. If you find this interview interesting, I encourage you to listen to previous interviews in the series as well. The series includes interviews with Scott Straus, Bridget Conley-Zilkic and James Waller. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity. Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience. In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor. In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. Additionally he serves as a Human Rights Commissioner for the City of Seattle and teaches Jewish literature to middle and high school students in an after school program. You can find out more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@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

Widely known for his pioneering work in the field of settler colonial studies, Patrick Wolfe advanced the theory that settler colonialism was, “a structure, not an event.” In early 2016, Wolfe deepened this analysis through his most recent book, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (Verso Books, 2016) which takes a comparative approach to five cases in: Australia, Brazil, Europe, North America, and Palestine/Israel. Just as settler colonialism grew through institutionalized structures of Indigenous elimination, categorical notions of race grew through purpose-driven (and context-specific) exploitation, classification and separation. In Traces of History, the machinery and genealogy of race are as present in land relations as they are in legal precedents. Wolfe ties together a transnational pattern of labor substitution and slavery, Indigenous land dispossession, and the inception of racial categories which continue to normalize these historical processes into the present. While the Indigenous/settler relationship is binary across societies, Wolfe posits, the seemingly fixed concepts of race it produces are, actually, widely varied. Bearing strong threads of influence by Said, DuBois, Marx, and countless Indigenous and Aboriginal scholars, Wolfe lays down a model for drawing connections across these cases, while simultaneously acknowledging that as with any ongoing process, there remain pathways for optimism and change. Patrick Wolfe passed away in February 2016 shortly after the publication of Traces of History. The following interview is with Dr. Lynette Russell and Dr. Aziz Rana, two of Wolfe’s many colleagues and thought partners both impacted by and familiar with his work. Prompted by the release of Traces of History and Wolfe’s untimely passing soon after, the interview recorded here engages the book as a platform for broader discussion about the substance of Wolfe’s intellectual pursuits, integrity, commitments and the creativity and challenges borne of them. Patrick Wolfe was a writer and historian who lived and worked in Wurundjeri country near Healesville, Australia. His interdisciplinary work as a historian, political and social theorist focused on intersections of race, colonialism, imperialism, anthropological history and Aboriginal history. Wolfe’s books include Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. He worked at universities in Australia and the United States, including La Trobe University. Lynette Russell is Director of the Monash Indigenous Centre at Monash University. Russell specializes in anthropological and Indigenous history. Her current research concerns the development of racial thought in Australia. She is the author/editor of over a dozen books, including Roving Mariners, and Appropriated Pasts. Aziz Rana is a Professor of Law at Cornell University Law School. Rana’s research and teaching center on the U.S. experience within the global history of colonialism, focusing on notions of race, citizenship, and empire in U.S. legal development and political identity. He is the author of The Two Faces of American Freedom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Quantification is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when hearing or reading about the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (OHCHR). Yet in the 21st century, a wide range of policy and advocacy agendas begin with numbers. Those numbers become indicators, composites, standards, and measurement tools, which then get adopted in advocacy rhetoric or policy practice. In The Seduction of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Sally Engle Merry combines ethnography, human rights, and science and technology studies to explore how people living in vulnerable situations across the globe are represented by the numbers designed to both name and support them. While numbers do not have agency, and cannot help or hurt on their own, Merry dedicates most of the book to untangling the politics and practice of developing standards and indicators, and interpreting the realities that come with “governance by numbers.” The genealogy of these indicators and standards are given as much space as their application, as Merry describes their highly political origins and a process of their subtle acceptance as normalover time. With roots in colonial authority and population management, indicators have been developed and used for a range of purposes in governance: to manage people, resources, planning, dissent, and reputations among others. Merry explores indicators and indices from legal, anthropological, historical, and genealogical perspectives, describing a range of unexpected stewards from short-term United Nations consultants to U.S. State Department officials to computer algorithms. While the book focuses on the globalization of definitions, measurements, and management techniques, it simultaneously explores the widely varied phenomena of gender violence, human rights, and human trafficking. On a set of topics that have been broadly fetishized, the overlay of quantified assessments and accompanying responses to them raises many questions about voice, politics, and international policy-making among many other topics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

This podcast explores the role of epidemics in colonial and postcolonial Asia, challenging old assumptions and highlighting the interrelationships between disease and human society. It examines the contradictory effects of Western technologies, the development of technologies of control and surveillance, and the connection between disease and citizenship. The speaker also shares personal fears of diseases and discusses future projects on disease surveillance and communication technology.

What is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, assembles a new collection of essays to explore this question. The book develops the concept of a “sea narrative,” thinking through the connection between this and a variety of forms of cultural production. The essays are eclectic, but unified, reflecting the emerging interest in both the subject and the approach the book uses. The book travels across the globe as well as across the centuries since 1600, taking in French accounts of the Atlantic crossing; prisoners of war; newspaper articles; Soviet technology and propaganda; Irishness and Ireland’s sense of itself; Du Maurier’s understanding of the coast; A S Byatt’s work; the idea of the Anthropocene; and “coastal exceptionalism.” Each essay is fascinating in its own right, but the collection builds to reorientate the study of the sea for historians and literary scholars, as well as any academic interested in how we narrate and culturally produce the sea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

Jessamyn R. Abel’s new book carefully traces the rise and transformations of an internationalist worldview in modern Japan, from its withdrawal from the League of Nations and admission into the UN, to successive attempts (both failed and successful) to host the Olympics in Tokyo, to important wartime and postwar conferences in Tokyo and Indonesia. The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933-1964 (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) brings these moments together into a cohesive story that tracks change and continuity in the history of international relations and/in Japan over the course of the twentieth century. Abel’s book is a fascinating historical account that also helps us to think about and understand the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games to be held in Tokyo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

The historical convergence of European imperialism and technological innovation in communication and travel made multiple social sites of intersection between the local and global possible. Nile Green, Professor of South Asian and Islamic history at UCLA, examines how these terrains of exchange transformed Islam during the modern period from roughly 1800-1940 in his book, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam (Oxford University Press, 2015). Green sees religion as a tool for social power and explores various religious economies to determine how interpretations of Islam are negotiated and deployed. What he shows is that modern iterations of the tradition are often shaped not only by Muslims, but also Christians and Hindus. In these sites of exchange religious actors and institutions can be analyzed as entrepreneurs and firms, which effectively compete for their clientele. Religious entrepreneurial competition and innovation fostered by Muslim/Christian interactions in imperial contexts contributed to the Muslims’ adaptation of Christian missionary methods for their own proselytization purposes. Overall, Green presents a world history of Islam that disrupts assertions of the unifying power of globalization on Muslims and illustrates the generative process within these terrains of exchange. In our conversation we discussed evangelical orientalism at England’s universities, Bibles and printing in Muslim societies, language-exchange, religious entrepreneurs in Hyderabad, traditions of Hindu-Sufism, and the construction of the first mosques in Detroit and Japan. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs