New Books in American Studies

Travel to virtually any African country and you are likely to find a Coca-Cola, often a cold one at that. Bottled asks how this carbonated drink became ubiquitous across the continent, and what this reveals about the realities of globalisation, development and capitalism.Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sara Byala is the first assessment of the social, commercial and environmental impact of one of the planet's biggest brands and largest corporations, in Africa. Dr. Byala charts the company's century-long involvement in everything from recycling and education to the anti-apartheid struggle, showing that Africans have harnessed Coca-Cola in varied expressions of modernity and self-determination: this is not a story of American capitalism running amok, but rather of a company becoming African, bending to consumer power in ways big and small.In late capitalism, everyone's fates are bound together. A beverage in Atlanta and a beverage in Johannesburg pull us all towards the same end narrative. This story matters for more than just the local reasons, enhancing our understanding of our globalised, integrated world. Drawing on fieldwork and research in company archives, Dr. Byala asks a question for our time: does Coca-Cola's generative work offset the human and planetary costs associated with its growth in the twenty-first century?This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Chhaya Kolavalli's book Well-Intentioned Whiteness: Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City (U Georgia Press, 2023) documents how whiteness can take up space in U.S. cities and policies through well-intentioned progressive policy agendas that support green urbanism. Through in-depth ethnographic research in Kansas City, Kolavalli explores how urban food projects--central to the city's approach to green urbanism--are conceived and implemented and how they are perceived by residents of "food deserts," those intended to benefit from these projects.Through her analysis, Kolavalli examines the narratives and histories that mostly white local food advocates are guided by and offers an alternative urban history of Kansas City--one that centers the contributions of Black and brown residents to urban prosperity. She also highlights how displacement of communities of color, through green development, has historically been a key urban development strategy in the city.Well-Intentioned Whiteness shows how a myopic focus on green urbanism, as a solution to myriad urban "problems," ends up reinforcing racial inequity and uplifting structural whiteness. In this context, fine-grained analysis of how whiteness takes up space in our cities--even through progressive policy agendas--is more important. Kolavalli examines this process intimately and, in so doing, fleshes out our understanding of how racial inequities can be (re)created by everyday urban actors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Daniel Herbert's book Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film (U California Press, 2023) tells the improbable story of New Line Cinema, a company that cut a remarkable path through the American film industry and movie culture. Founded in 1967 as an art film distributor, New Line made a small fortune running John Waters’s Pink Flamingos at midnight screenings in the 1970s and found reliable returns with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in the 1980s. By 2001, the company competed with the major Hollywood studios and reached global box office success with the Lord of the Rings franchise. Blurring boundaries between high and low culture, between independent film and Hollywood, and between the margins and the mainstream, New Line Cinema epitomizes Hollywood's shift in focus from the mass audience fostered by the classic studios to the multitude of niche audiences sought today.A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Daniel Herbert is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan and author of Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store. Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the violence, familial separation, and dehumanisation that they faced. In response, proslavery southerners attempted to counter these messages either through idealisation or outright erasure of enslaved life.In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture (University of Arkansas Press, 2023), Dr. Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives.Dr. Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of the ways that slavery was visually idealised and defended in antebellum art. She then explores the tyranny—especially that depicted in art—enacted by supporters of enslavement, introduces a range of ways that artwork depicting slavery was tangibly concealed, considers photographs of enslaved female caretakers with the white children they reared, and investigates a printmaker’s confidential work in support of the Confederacy. Finally, she delves into an especially pernicious group of proslavery artists in Richmond, Virginia. Reading visual culture as a key element of the antebellum battle over slavery, Hidden in Plain Sight complicates the existing narratives of American art and history.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In my talk with Barry Gewen on his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (W. W. Norton, 2020), we explore the disparate influences that shaped Kissinger as both an intellectual and as a practitioner of power. Our conversation touches on Kissinger’s upbringing in a German-Jewish community in Bavaria at the time of Hitler’s rise to power and pivots to an understanding of Kissinger’s Realism as his pessimistic yet unwavering approach to foreign affairs and exigencies like the balance of power. In his committed opposition to the Wilsonian creed—the missionary idea of America’s role in the world—Kissinger was decidedly in the camp of the political scientist Hans Morgenthau, a fellow German-Jewish immigrant and mentor of sorts. Barry Gewen, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, deserves to be heard, and his book deserves to be read, for his judicious, textured appraisal of Kissinger. His Kissinger is neither a war criminal nor a diplomatic magician but one guided by the stern maxim that order is prior to justice in the affairs of an ever-perilous world. Our talk closes with Gewen’s assessment of Kissinger’s thinking on the present-day foreign-policy challenges for the U.S. of China and the Russia-Ukraine war.Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

An incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacy.For more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of security that routinely make them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability (Princeton UP, 2023) probes this paradox by examining American attachments to the terror of the sublime, the fear of uncertainty, and the anxieties produced by unending racial threat. Challenging conventional approaches that leave questions of security to policy experts, Russ Castronovo turns to literature, philosophy, and political theory to show how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. His incisive critique ranges from frontier violence and white racial anxiety to insurgent Black print culture and other forms of early American terror, uncovering the hidden logic of insecurity that structures modern approaches to national defense, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. Drawing on examples from fiction, journalism, tracts, and pamphlets, Castronovo uncovers the deep affective attachments that Americans have had since the founding to the sources of fear and insecurity that make them feel unsafe. Timely and urgent, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability sheds critical light on how and why the fundamental political desire for security promotes unease alongside assurance and fixates on risk and danger while clamoring for safety.Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Salim Yaqub's Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945 (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores how Americans from all walks of life – political leaders, businesspeople, public intellectuals, workers, students, activists, migrants, and others – struggled to define the nation's political, economic, geopolitical, demographic, and social character. It chronicles the nation's ceaseless ferment, from the rocky conversion to peacetime in the early aftermath of World War II; to the frightening emergence of the Cold War and repeated US military adventures abroad; to the struggles of African Americans and other minorities to claim a share of the American Dream; to the striking transformations in social attitudes catalyzed by the women's movement and struggles for gay and lesbian liberation; to the dynamic force of political, economic, and social conservatism. Carrying the story to the spring of 2022, Winds of Hope also shows how dizzying technological changes at times threatened to upend the nation's civic and political life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Think about the last time that you saw or interacted with an unhoused person. What did you do? What did you say? Did you offer money or a smile, or did you avert your gaze?Kevin F. Adler and Donald W. Burnes's book When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America (North Atlantic Books, 2023) takes an urgent look at homelessness in America, showing us what we lose--in ourselves and as a society--when we choose to walk past and ignore our neighbors in shelters, insecure housing, or on the streets. And it brilliantly shows what we stand to gain when we embrace our humanity and move toward evidence-based people-first, community-driven solutions, offering social analysis, economic and political histories, and the real stories of unhoused people.Authors Kevin F. Adler and Donald W. Burnes, with Amanda Banh and Andrijana Bilbija, recast chronic homelessness in the U.S. as a byproduct of twin crises: our social services systems are failing, and so is our humanity. Readers will learn: Why our brains have been trained to overlook our unhoused neighbors The social, economic, and political forces that shape myths like "all homeless people are addicts" and "they'd have a house if they got a job" What conservative economics gets wrong about housing insecurity What relational poverty is, and how to shift away from "us versus them" thinking That for many Americans, housing insecurity is just one missed paycheck away Who "the homeless" really are--and why that might surprise you What you can do to help, starting today A necessary, deeply humanizing read that goes beyond theory and policy analysis to offer engaged solutions with compassion and heart, When We Walk By is a must-read for anyone who cares about homelessness, housing solutions, and their own humanity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics (Cornell UP, 2023) examines the conditions under which the United States is willing and able to pressure its allies to assume more responsibility for their own defense. The United States has a mixed track record of encouraging allied burden-sharing—while it has succeeded or failed in some cases, it has declined to do so at all in others. This variation, Brian D. Blankenship argues, is because the United States tailors its burden-sharing pressure in accordance with two competing priorities: conserving its own resources and preserving influence in its alliances. Although burden-sharing enables great power patrons like the United States to lower alliance costs, it also empowers allies to resist patron influence.Blankenship identifies three factors that determine the severity of this burden-sharing dilemma and how it is managed: the latent military power of allies, the shared external threat environment, and the level of a patron's resource constraints. Through case studies of US alliances formed during the Cold War, he shows that a patron can mitigate the dilemma by combining assurances of protection with threats of abandonment and by exercising discretion in its burden-sharing pressure.Blankenship's findings dismantle assumptions that burden-sharing is always desirable but difficult to obtain. Patrons, as the book reveals, can in fact be reluctant to seek burden-sharing, and attempts to pass defense costs to allies can often be successful. At a time when skepticism of alliance benefits remains high and global power shifts threaten longstanding pacts, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma recalls and reconceives the value of burden-sharing and alliances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

On this episode, J. Daniel takes readers back more than forty years, telling a story that is part baseball history, part urban history, and part U.S. cultural history, with a narrative weaving together the develop­ment of the Midwestern cities of St. Louis and Milwaukee through their engagement with beer and baseball. In Suds Series: Baseball, Beer Wars, and the Summer of ’82 (University of Missouri Press, 2023), Daniel provides much more than a simple play-by-play of the season that was, highlighting the impact of the 1981 strike on free agency and player movement, offering an engaging snapshot of early ’80s pop culture and “hop culture,” and covering both the famous players and personalities—Rickey Henderson’s stolen bases, Reggie Jackson’s home run brigade, and the birth of Cal Ripken Jr.’s iron man streak—and tragic teams alike. Although the small-ball Cardinals would prevail over the “Wallbanging” Brewers in October of 1982 after seven thrilling games and a season of attrition, these two teams remain iconic in their home cities, and Daniel joined the New Books Network to discuss the intrigue and impact of 1982 as well as its enduring relevance to the current era, as baseball seeks a winning formula to recapture modern-day audiences.Jonathan “J.” Daniel has spent twenty years working in sports, both in front of and behind the camera. He produced five seasons of Rays Magazine, a weekly television show about the Tampa Bay Rays, and worked as a sports producer at Fox affiliates in Tampa and Chicago. He is the author of Phinally!: The Phillies, the Royals, and the 1980 Baseball Season That Almost Wasn’t (McFarland & Co., 2018) and blogs at https://www.80sbaseball.com.Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) is a professor of New Testament and typically hosts Biblical Studies conversations for the New Books Network, but occasionally covers topics of his normal beat as a hobbyist. In this case, he stepped up to the plate for New Books in Sports as a lifelong baseball fan, native St. Louisan, and one-time wannabe sportscaster. For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies