Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

In his new book, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Andrew Kettler charts the impact that smell had on the making of race and justifications for enslavement in the Atlantic world.Western European defined the African subject as a scented object, appropriated as filthy to create levels of ownership through discourse that marked African peoples as unable to access spaces of Western modernity. So powerful was this process of embodied cultural knowledge and racial othering that the very European biological function of smell altered in the early modern period.While the first half of the book details this dialectical materialism from a European perspective, the second half speaks to the real consciousness and function that the sense of smell had in communities of African descent. Smell became a powerful tool for many enslaved peoples and racialized “others” to assert their agency, individualism, power, and perform everyday acts of resistance.Deeply researched and theorized, The Smell of Slavery offers modern readers a deeper historical understanding of the unconscious development of their senses and the powerful legacy that such embodied cultural knowledge and olfactory racism still has on Atlantic societies.Dr. Andrew Kettler is an Ahmason-Getty Fellow for the University of California, Los Angeles Center for 17th and 18th-Century Studies at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic word.

The Unforgettable Queens of Islam: Succession, Authority and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2020) by Shahla Haeri (Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boston University) is a captivating book on the biographies of Muslim women rulers and political leaders. Drawing from extensive historical archives as well as from ethnographic research, Haeri reflects on the legacy of the hadith that says, “never will succeed a nation as makes a woman their ruler.” The book includes stories of Muslim women leaders in classical period, such as Queen of Sheba and ‘A’isha, and in medieval era, such as Queen Arwa of Yemen and Razia Sultan of India to challenge us to rethink gendered political authority across the Muslim world.In historically situating these biographies and also the contemporary popular legacies of Muslim women who were political and at times religious rulers, Haeri showcases how such political authority did not always rest solely on religious tradition but rather hinged on dynastic power and succession, as well as patriarchal familial support and privilege. Additionally, the biographies of contemporary Muslim women’s leadership through dynastic political succession, such as of Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan and Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia further complicates how religious, legal, and political discourses are used as justifications and/or even weaponized against Muslim women’s authority and power in political and public office by religious and, peculiarly, by secular opposing political figures and movements. The book is a great resource for courses on gender and Islam, but also will be of interest for those who think and write on Islam, gender, politics, sovereignty, and much more.Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier 

In the United States, each election cycle reminds us that younger voters vote at much lower rates than their older counterparts. This discrepancy is often chalked up to apathy or lack of interest in politics among younger voters. In their new book, John B. Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus analyze this conventional explanation along with the political science literature about voting behavior among different age cohorts. What they find is a more complex picture of contemporary young voters, and this complex picture is the focus of their new book, Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Action (Cambridge University Press, 2020).Holbein and Hillygus find that younger citizens (18-29 year old) are quite interested in politics and engaged in various dimensions of politics, but that voting, because of the complex process for registering and voting in the United States, makes it more difficult for younger voters to develop this habit and pursue it. Holbein and Hillygus’ analysis of the data refutes the oft-repeated commentary that younger voters are apathetic. In fact, Making Young Voters demonstrates that today, young voters are more concerned with politics than young voters of the past. But despite this greater interest, youth voting remains low. Making Young Voters argues that the true obstacles to youth voting are lack of experience, and less fully formed noncognitive skills, coupled with the high hurdles of the voting process itself, including the requirements to register to vote, and the differing requirements for actual voting, as well as the many elections that Americans face every year. Thus, some of disconnect between interest and follow through is on the voters themselves, but a sizeable issue, according to wealth and diversity of data that Holbein and Hillygus explore, is the complexity of the voting process in the United States.Holbein and Hillygus explain that younger voters are not accustomed to the act of voting and therefore struggle to follow through on their intention to vote. This can be seen in voter registration. Younger voters either forget to register or they are hesitant to register because they have never done it before, and therefore it is not a habit for them the way it is for older voters. Additionally, Holbein and Hillygus note that previous scholarship on youth voting focused on cognitive skills. Instead, Making Young Voters emphasizes the link between voting and noncognitive skills. Holbein and Hillygus assert that younger voters’ noncognitive skills are less developed. This also contributes to lower turnout among younger voters. Finally, Making Young Voters considers what could be done to increase youth voter turnout. The latter part of the book includes ideas to rethink civics classes and education to highlight how to register and how to vote so as to familiarize younger voters to the process itself. Holbein and Hillygus also suggest creating more pathways to registration such as same-day registration which allows voters to register at their polling place on the day of an election. Making Young Voters brings together approaches from political science, education, and psychology to explain what is standing in the way of more young people actually casting ballots in American elections. And what can be changed to make this process less daunting.Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 

‘THOSE THAT DENY THEIR HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT!’ So Tweeted the 45th President of the United States to his 80 million followers in June, as American streets once again were transformed into spaces of protest. It turns out that the President prefers one particular route between the American past and present, and has vowed to defend both it and its symbols against all comers. The once unifying power of the national narrative is now one of many of points of sharp and often violent division.This is also true of the United Kingdom as it seeks to balance its historical self-image with the realities of its colonizing past. Central to all of this is the question of how we rewrite and debate our constructions of the past, a collective human activity as hardwired into our cultures as music, dance, or art.Daniel Woolf is Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He is the author and editor of many essays and books on history and historical thought in early modern Britain, including the prize-winning The Social Circulation of the Past. Woolf has also served as general editor of the 5 volume Oxford History of Historical Writing, and has published The Global History of History in 2012.All the while, he has held a number of senior administrative posts, most recently serving a ten year term as the 20th Principal and Vice Chancellor of Queen’s University. His A Concise History of History: Global Historiography from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press) provides a cogent and compact survey of historical practice from ancient times to the present. Its point of departure is that those of us in ‘the west’ could do with some consideration of historical traditions from other parts of the globe.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster.

In his new book, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Cambridge University Press) Erik Grimmer-Solem examines the process of German globalization that began in the 1870s, well before Germany acquired a colonial empire or extensive overseas commercial interests.Structured around the figures of five influential economists who shaped the German political landscape, Learning Empire explores how their overseas experiences shaped public perceptions of the world and Germany's place in it.These men helped define a German liberal imperialism that came to influence the 'world policy' (Weltpolitik) of Kaiser Wilhelm, Chancellor Bülow, and Admiral Tirpitz. They devised naval propaganda, reshaped Reichstag politics, were involved in colonial and financial reforms, and helped define the debate over war aims in the First World War.Looking closely at German worldwide entanglements, Learning Empire recasts how we interpret German imperialism, the origins of the First World War, and the rise of Nazism, inviting reflection on the challenges of globalization in the current century. Erik Grimmer-Solem is Professor in the Departments of History and German Studies at Wesleyan University Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. 

The branch of mathematics called game theory – the Prisoners Dilemma is a particularly well-known example of a game – is used by philosophers, social scientists, and others to explore many types of social relations between humans and between nonhuman creatures.In Games in the Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Cailin O’Connor introduces the basics of game theory and its particular branch, evolutionary game theory, and discusses how game theoretic models have helped explain the genesis of the meanings of linguistic and nonlinguistic signals, altruistic behavior, the spread of misinformation, and the origins of fair and unfair distributions of benefits in society.O’Connor, who is associate professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of California–Irvine, also considers some of the drawbacks of game theoretic models. Her short introduction makes a major area of social scientific investigation accessible to readers without mathematical background. 

Category theory is well-known for abstraction—concepts and tools from diverse fields being recognized as specific cases of more foundational structures—though the field has always been driven and shaped by the needs of applications. Moreover, category theory is rarely introduced even to undergraduate math majors, despite its unifying role in theory and its flexibility in application.Postdoctoral Associate Brendan Fong and Research Scientist David I. Spivak, both at MIT, have written a marvelous and timely new textbook that, as its title suggests, invites readers of all backgrounds to explore what it means to take a compositional approach and how it might serve their needs.An Invitation to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionality (Cambridge University Press, 2019) has few mathematical prerequisites and is designed in part as a gateway to a wide range of more specialized fields. It also centers its treatment on applications, motivating several key developments in terms of real-world use cases.In this interview we discussed their views on the promise of category theory inside and outside mathematics, their motivations for writing this book, several of the accessible examples and remarkable payoffs included in its chapters, and their aspirations for the future of the field.Suggested companion works:--Tai-Danae Bradley, Math3ma--Eugenia Cheng, The Catsters--Saunders Mac Lane, Mathematics Form and Function--F. William Lawvere & Stephen H. Schanuel, Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories--Eugenia Cheng, x + y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking GenderCory Brunson (he/him) is a Research Assistant Professor in the Laboratory for Systems Medicine at the University of Florida.

The question of how a state decides what its official language is going to be, or indeed whether it even needs one, is never simple, and this may be particularly true of China which covers a continental landmass encompassing multitude of different language families and groups. Indeed, what is even meant by “Chinese” is unclear when one considers the huge range of related but mutually unintelligible linguistic varieties – from Cantonese to Shanghainese and many other lesser known ones. The story of how the Beijing-derived language today known – at least in English – as “Mandarin” became the standard is thus a highly complex one.In Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Gina Anne Tam takes us through the ways that people in China have navigated the country’s complex linguistic landscape while also negotiating profound questions over the meanings of modern Chinese identity itself.Moving smoothly from the late imperial period up to the Maoist sixties and indeed beyond, this book is a rich source of insight into how states standardize language, and along the way explores the linguistic debates underlying many vital projects, from educating a nation, to writing novels, organizing socialist revolution, performing opera, and indeed dissing foreigners in rap tracks.Gina Anne Tam is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Trinity University, Texas.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

In her new book, After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Hope M. Harrison examines the history and meaning of the Berlin Wall, Drawing on an extensive range of archival sources and interviews, this book profiles key memory activists who have fought to commemorate the history of the Berlin Wall and examines their role in the creation of a new German national narrative. With victims, perpetrators and heroes, the Berlin Wall has joined the Holocaust as an essential part of German collective memory. Key Wall anniversaries have become signposts marking German views of the past, its relevance to the present, and the complicated project of defining German national identity. Considering multiple German approaches to remembering the Wall via memorials, trials, public ceremonies, films, and music, this revelatory work also traces how global memory of the Wall has impacted German memory policy. It depicts the power and fragility of state-backed memory projects, and the potential of such projects to reconcile or divide.For more information on the history of the Berlin Wall check out these video clips with Dr. Harrison: Inside the Chapel of Reconciliation and Outside the Former Death Strip. And listeners might be interested in Harrison's Blog Post about arriving in Berlin a few hours after the Berlin Wall fell.Hope M. Harrison is a Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University.Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo.

As Indonesia nears the 75th anniversary of its proclamation of independence this year, the socio-political debates surrounding her birth as a nation-state take on contemporary salience. In Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kevin W. Fogg analyzes the religious aspirations that motivated many Muslim revolutionaries to fight the return of Dutch after the Second World War and envision a new nation-state. The book tackles this topic on both military and political fronts; paying attention not only to how Islam energized the Indonesian Revolution but also to how revolution refreshes the practice and social organization of Islam. While much of the present historiography on the Indonesian Revolution has centered on the secular nationalist leaders as primary historical actors, this book refocuses attention on how the revolutionary movement drew additional vitality from a diverse group of pious Muslims. Integrating the experiences of relatively obscure military veterans with well-known Muslim politicians, the book is one of the first to provide a coherent survey of the multi-faceted ways Islam became entangled with Indonesia’s revolutionary ideology across different ethnic communities.In this podcast, we discuss the notion of Muslim piety and how stories from veterans of the revolution break down orthodox-heterodox binaries in the practice of Islam, the mutations of religious authority during a tumultuous period, the politics of forming a national bureaucracy to govern Islam and enduring legacies of Indonesia’s Revolution.Kevin W. Fogg is based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is the associate director at the Carolina Asia Center. He is also a research associate at Brasenose College and the Faculty of History, Oxford University. Find him online at www.kevinwfogg.net.Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien