New Books in Anthropology

In Fearing Together: Ethics for Insecurity (Oxford UP, 2023), Ami Harbin explores how fearing is a central part of how we relate to each other and the unpredictable world. Fearing badly is a key part of many of our moral failures, and fearing better a central part of our moral repair.We might think that fearing is undesirable and should be avoided whenever possible. In fact, Fearing Together shows that the avoidance of fear causes some of our greatest threats. This book brings together philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychoanalysis to help us understand fear as a relational practice so that we can see that our relationships with other fearers shape what we fear, what fear feels like, how we identify and understand our fears, and how we cope with them.Growing as moral agents involves coming to grips with what kinds of fearers we want to be and become, and with what we owe each other when facing what we cannot control. At the heart of this book are the moral quandaries and complexities of relational fearing: the ethics of fearing together.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India (Duke UP, 2022), Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is not only a violation of the body but a language through which a range of issues—including caste and gender hierarchies, control over land and labor, and the shape of justice—are contested. Rather than focus on the laws governing rape, Oza closely examines rape charges to show how the victims and survivors of rape reclaim their autonomy by refusing to see themselves as defined entirely by the act of violation. Oza also shows how rape cases become arenas where bureaucrats, village council members, caste communities, and the police debate women’s sexual subjectivities and how those varied understandings impact the status and reputations of individuals and groups. In this way, rape gains meaning beyond the level of the survivor and victim to create a social category. By tracing the shifting meanings of sexual violence and justice, Oza offers insights into the social significance of rape in India and beyond.Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of media cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out her upcoming books: The Other #MeToos and ReFocus: The Films of Annemarie Jacir. Follow her on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Brian Valente-Quinn is an Associate Professor of Francophone African studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His book, Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa, was published at Northwestern University Press in 2021. Senegalese Stagecraft explores the theatrical stage in Senegal as a site of poetic expression, political activism, and community engagement. In their responses to the country’s colonial heritage, as well as through their innovations on the craft of theater‑making, Senegalese performers have created an array of decolonizing stage spaces that have shaped the country’s theater history. Their work has also addressed a global audience, experimenting with international performance practices while proposing new visions of the role of culture and stagecraft in society.Through a study of the innovative work of Senegalese theater-makers from the 1930s onward, Senegalese Stagecraft explores a wide range of historical contexts and themes, including French colonial education, cultural Pan‑Africanism, West African Sufism, uses of television and mass media, and popular theater and activism. Using a multidisciplinary approach that includes field, archival, and literary methods, Valente‑Quinn offers a fresh look at performance cultures of West Africa and the Global South in a book that will interest students and scholars in African, Francophone, and performance studies.Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, radio, sound studies, and podcasting. Her most recent article on feminist discourses of motherhood in French podcasting is forthcoming in the 2023 special issue, “Podcasting Disruptive Voices,” of CFC Intersections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In her moving, sophisticated, and analytically groundbreaking new book Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford UP, 2023), Shenila Khoja-Moolji recounts and engages critical narratives of displacement and migration to examine the formation of religious communities. A central theme of this book is the idea of an Isma‘ili ethics of care, as Khoja-Moolji documents with meticulous care the powerful manifestations and consequences of everyday life connected with practices ranging from cooking, socio-religious counseling, and story telling. Moving nimbly between different locations including East Africa, South Asia, and North America, as well as varied theoretical registers dealing with categories of sacred space, the sensorium, and embodied sociality, Rebuilding Community is a delightful text that will interest scholars in multiple fields across the Humanities.SherAli Tareen is Associate 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 book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@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/anthropology

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing's aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, and cosmopolitan aspiration. At the heart of these tensions, a question persistently emerges: How does English become more than a language—and whiteness more than a race? Engaging in this inquiry, Ke-Schutte explores twenty-first century Afro-Chinese encounters as translational events that diagram the discursive contours of a changing transnational political order—one that will certainly be shaped by African and Chinese relations.A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

How can scholars employ the practices and techniques of investigative journalism?Susan Hartman provides an answer in her intimate look at refugee experience in the United States. In City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life Into A Dying American Town (Beacon Press 2022), Hartman introduces readers to Utica, a small Rust Belt city located in upstate New York, just 250 miles north of Manhattan. The city provides the backdrop as Hartman examines the lives of three refugees: a Somali Bantu teenager who straddles the expectations of her Somali mother and those of her American peers; an Iraqi interpreter who worked with the American military in Baghdad; and a Bosnian entrepreneur who finally achieves her American dream of opening a café and bakery in March 2020.Across 48 short chapters, Hartman traces how Utica’s economic and cultural renewal is tied to the city’s policy of welcoming refugees from across the globe. But not everyone is happy as locals often seen refugees as foreigners who steal jobs, drain public coffers and overwhelm social services. But, as Hartman ably demonstrates, refugees bring their energy and wit in rebuilding their lives and growing new communities in cities such Utica. In the process, readers learn of the ways in which refugees have invigorated rust belt cities, long characterized by declining industry, decrepit factories and aging populations. The book ends with a caution: America’s closed door refugee policy threatens the well-being of Americans and refugees alike.Susan Thomson is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023), Mauro P. Porto examines the conservative revolt of Brazil's white middle class, which culminated with the 2018 election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro. He identifies the rise of a significant status panic among middle-class publics following the relative economic and social ascension of mostly Black and brown low-income laborers. The book highlights the role of the media in disseminating "mirrors of whiteness," or spheres of representation that allow white Brazilians to legitimate their power while softening or hiding the inequalities and injustices that such power generates. A detailed analysis of representations of domestic workers in the telenovela Cheias de Charme and of news coverage of affirmative action by the magazine Veja demonstrates that they adopted whiteness as an ideological perspective, disseminating resentment among their audiences and fomenting the conservative revolt that took place in Brazil between 2013 and 2018.Mauro P. Porto is Associate Professor of Communication at Tulane University. He is the author of Media Power and Democratization in Brazil: TV Globo and the Dilemmas of Political Accountability and Televisão e Política no Brasil. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Caste, Knowledge, and Power: Ways of Knowing in Twentieth-Century Malabar (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates the transformations of caste practices in twentieth century India and the role of knowledge in this transformation and in the continuing of these oppressive practices. The author situates the domination and subordination in the domain of knowledge production in India not just in the emergence of colonial modernity but in the formation of colonial–Brahminical modernity. It engages less with the marginalization of the oppressed castes in the modern institutions of knowledge production which has already been discussed widely in the scholarship. Rather, the author focuses on how the modern colonial–Brahminical concept of knowledge invalidated many other forms of knowing practices and how historically caste domination transformed from the claims of superiority in acharam (ritual hierarchy) to the claims of superiority in possession of knowledge.K. N. Sunandan is Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. His areas of interest are history of caste, history of knowledge production, colonialism and knowledge, and history and sociology of science.Sanjukta Poddar (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor in Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The social consequences of anti-parasitic urbanism, as efforts to expunge supposedly biological parasites penalize those viewed as social parasites. According to French philosopher Michel Serres, ordered systems are founded on the pathologization of parasites, which can never be fully expelled. In Paris and the Parasite: Noise, Health, and Politics in the Media City (MIT Press, 2021), Macs Smith extends Serres's approach to Paris as a mediatic city, asking what organisms, people, and forms of interference constitute its parasites. Drawing on French poststructuralist theory and philosophy, media theory, the philosophy of science, and an array of literary and cultural sources, he examines Paris and its parasites from the early nineteenth century to today, focusing on the contemporary city. In so doing, he reveals the social consequences of anti-parasitic urbanism.Salvador Lopez Rivera is a PhD candidate in French language and literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

On March 11, 2011, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of northeastern Japan triggering a massive tsunami and shifting the earth on its axis. Nearly 20,000 residents in the Tōhoku region lost their lives, with many hundreds of thousands more injured, displaced, and left with horrific loss. Dr. Pilvi Posio shares her PhD research based on eight months of fieldwork in the town of Yamamoto in Miyagi prefecture, where 635 residents lost their lives. She began her research on long-term community recovery four years after the disaster, when national focus was shifting from recovery and restoration (fukkyū 復旧) to reconstruction (fukkō 復興 ). Learn how large-scale, government-funded initiatives, including the construction of three new compact cities away from the immediate coastal area, had the unintended effect of causing "reconstruction disaster” by aggravating resident anxieties and accelerating depopulation. In presenting her concept of Aspired Communities, Dr. Posio argues that community is best viewed not as a static, territorially-bound identity, but as a dynamic process, one which is continually constituted from a future-oriented outlook of collective aspiration.Pilvi Posio is a senior researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Finland, and is currently working on sustainability issues in Asia. Her dissertation can be found here.Satoko Naito received her PhD in Japanese literature from Columbia University and teaches as a docent at CEAS.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-a... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology