New Books Network

Joan Kee’s new book is a gorgeous and thoughtful introduction to the history of contemporary art in Korea. Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) traces the creation, promotion, reception, and rhetoric of the work produced by a constellation of artists creating large, mostly abstract paintings in neutral colors from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Kee opens up these works for readers by offering close readings of many important paintings and objects. In doing so, she teaches us how to see these works as methods, showing us how to visualize labor and process in an aesthetic product and pointing out ways that tansaekhwa artists were visualizing conceptions of time, space, materiality, and the agency of the viewer. Contemporary Korean Art also considers tansaekhwa in relation to the global circulation and translation of information about the art world beyond Korea, and explores how the postwar Korean art world dealt with the legacies of empire, nationalism, and colonization. It’s a beautiful and fascinating book. You can find a recent exhibition on tansaekhwa here.

Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E. Andrews challenges this view. Through his careful research, skilled use of anecdotes, and compelling narrative. Dr. Andrews shows how it was Native Americans and people of African descent themselves who did much of the heavy lifting when it came to mission work. Moreover, Dr. Andrews not only explores the complex relationship between these diverse groups of people within the Protestant churches he studies (primarily Puritan, Anglican, and Moravian), the meeting of Protestant Christianity and indigenous religious beliefs, and the relationship between culture and religion, he also shows how white, black, and Native American missionaries cooperated (and argued with) each other. This book is a fascinating read and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of the Atlantic World or missions.

In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one another as never before.  However, as Ethan Zuckerman argues in Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (Norton, 2013), just because a connection is possible does not mean disparate voices are being heard.  Instead, things and not ideas have become more connected; we now live in a world where is easier to get a bottle of water from a tropical island halfway around the world than it is to get (let alone comprehend) news from that island. Zuckerman, a media scholar and activist based at MIT, suggests despite our perceived “connectedness,” the wired world is actually becoming more provincial and narrow, as we shift from professionally curated news and information, to search engines and algorithmically selected information based on previous “likes” and those of our homogeneous social circles.  In other words, we are getting more and more of what we already know we want with ever-greater efficiency, but not what we need to be informed participants in a global world. In an expansive analysis that takes on everything from the global response to modern pandemics, to Greek philosophy, to the “Arab Spring,” to musical hybridization across cultures, Zuckerman calls for a world of “digital cosmopolitans,” where those who can bridge between communities are called upon to foster deeper, more nuanced conversations around the globe in ways that fulfill the promise of expanding technological opportunities. At once a thoughtful analysis, an engaging history, and a bold call to arms, Rewire offers readers a deep understanding of how media is evolving to shape and be shaped by global voices.  As such, it has vast implications at both  personal and geopolitical levels for the future of information, technology.

What would a truly ‘social’ social media look like? This is the core question of From Corporate to Social Media: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and Communication Industries (Routledge, 2014),  the new book by Marisol Sandoval. The text is concerned with the emergence of a seemingly open and democratic space, social media, which is in fact subject to corporate dominance and control. The book aims to provide a political economy of the social relations in which media and communications industries are embedded, to reveal the inequalities of both power and control in social media. This point is illustrated through case studies of major corporations. Sandoval takes an important theme- including net neutrality, e-waste, ideologies, and labour conditions- and compares and contrasts CSR statements and positions with the reality of corporate actions on these themes. Case studies include Google, Apple, Disney and AT&T. The book concludes by considering how social media might become more social by thinking about how it might contribute to the idea of the commons, a concept that has been crucial to much critical theory thinking in recent years. By linking ideas of the commons to the political economy of media and communications, From Corporate to Social Media, gives an important new basis for future theoretical discussion. The book is therefore essential reading for all of us participating in the new world of social media, whether as academics, employees or as citizens.

Kathryn Cramer discusses "Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future," a volume of new science fiction short stories written by leading "hard sci-fi" authors in consultation with scientists at Arizona State University.

Academics don’t pay enough attention to class.  And when we do, too often we only magnify the tendency for working class subjects to be defined according to middle class norms; and according to those norms, they, not surprisingly, fail in one way or another, justifying their position beneath the middle class.  There are many unfortunate consequences of this dynamic.  Among them, we seldom see what’s really happening in, say, the performance of a country song. Nadine Hubbs, Professor of Music Theory and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, is an exception to this rule.  In Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (University of California Press, 2014), she discusses subjects that range from a Foo Fighters tour-promotion video, the role of taste in class distinction, and the blinders that members of the middle class seem to wear when they notice working-class culture.  Then she removes the blinders and takes a look at some country, noticing an artistic richness and political agenda that academics and critics seldom see.  Along the way, she investigates a few of the prominent assumptions about country—its bigotry and political conservatism, for example.  She discusses research that undermines these assumptions, noting the work they do to maintain class distinctions and privilege.  And finally she makes the case for paying more attention to class, working-class culture, suggesting the potential for real political collaboration between the working and the middle classes. Here are some of the videos mentioned in the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsrqw0oElHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e5hRLbCaCs http://www.gretchenwilson.com/media/videos/41683/56793

Lawrence Lipking’s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Revolution.  Whereas some accounts suggest that this period involved the rejection of imaginative thinking, Lipking traces it through the works of Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Hooke, and many others, demonstrating that the ability to envision new worlds is as crucial to their critical insights as rational thought.  Each chapter of the book approaches a different discipline, from astronomy to natural history and the life sciences, exploring the intersection between imagination and the emerging ideas surrounding the scientific process.

When he died from AIDS in 1993, Arthur Ashe was universally hailed as a man of principle, grace, and wisdom—a world-class athlete who had transcended his game. But a closer look at Ashe’s life reveals a more complex picture. Certainly, Ashe was an admirable figure. When tennis tournament organizers barred the teenage phenom because of his race, Ashe maintained his dignity. Decades later, when he was teaching a university course on African Americans in sport, Ashe couldn’t find a suitable textbook. So he researched and wrote one himself. At the same time, however, Ashe’s views on civil rights initially were more in line with those of Booker T. Washington than those of other politically active athletes of the 1960s. He did not accept the equality of women in sports. And his position on competing in South Africa under apartheid went through a long evolution. On these issues and others, Arthur Ashe had plenty of critics–something that is often missed today. Surprisingly, despite his pioneering role in the history of tennis and his involvement in a range of pursuits off the court, Ashe has not been the subject of a scholarly biography. Eric Allen Hall’s book, Arthur Ashe: Tennis and Justice in the Civil Rights Era (Johns Hopkins University, 2014) fills this gap. As Eric explains in the interview, Ashe was a unique athlete in that he left his personal papers to a research archive. His biography thus draws not only from press accounts of Ashe’s life and the tennis star’s own memoirs (he wrote four during his lifetime), but also from Ashe’s notes and letters. The result is a portrait of Arthur Ashe that shows the fullness of his character–his broad interests, his impressive talents, and his missteps.

Amrita Pande‘s Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press 2014) is a beautiful and rich ethnography of a surrogacy clinic. The book details the surrogacy process from start to finish, exploring the intersection of production and reproduction, complicating and deepening our understanding of this particular form of labour.

John Morrow and Jeffrey Sammons share their insights on the story of the fabled 369th Infantry Regiment in their book, Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality (University Press of Kansas, 2014).  Our guests reveal a great deal about the state of African Americans in prewar New York civil and political society, while also presenting for the first time a complete narrative of the regiment’s service in the First World War, using American, French, and German archives.  Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War is the most authoritative and compelling history of this famous regiment, and goes far to restore their actual experiences to public notice, while also dispelling many misperceptions and myths that have accrued over the last century.

Denise Cruz‘s Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012) traces representations of Filipinas in literature and popular culture during periods of transitional power in the Philippines, from the transition from Spanish to American colonial power, then to Japanese Imperialism, then to independence and the Cold War, and then to contemporary global capital. Professor Cruz questions how these disruptions in power destabilized the elite classes, and provided moments of possibility for writers to shift ideas of femininity in the Philippines and for Filipinas abroad. Rather than focus solely on gender within the Philippines, Cruz considers how Filipina femininity was made through imperial networks from Spain, Japan, America and across the globe. In doing so, she exposes how the making of the Filipina was neither natural nor national, but was actually a strategic response to shifting colonial powers as well as to the demands of the global capital market. 

In 2005, the Comedy Central Network aired an episode of “South Park” in which one of the characters asked if any “Third World” countries other than Russia had the ability to fly a whale to the moon. During a press conference that took place two years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin lamented that he was the only “pure democrat” left in the world. The United States did not deserve such a title, he explained, in light of its “homeless citizens, detentions without normal court proceedings, and horrible torture.” The willingness of a U.S. cartoon to mock Russia’s pretensions to “great power” status and Putin’s defense of his government’s democratic credentials raise important questions about the general trajectory of U.S.-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union. Angela Stent addresses this important topic in her new book The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twentieth First-Century (Princeton University Press, 2014). Drawing on her experience as professor of history at Georgetown University and work in the U.S. State Department, she explores the question of why U.S.-Russian relations have often become strained despite having some successes cooperating on issues such as arms control. Do geographical, historical, ideological, and cultural differences make such discord inevitable? Just how much do “personal relations” and “domestic issues” shape this relationship? What steps, if any, can Americans take in the coming years to forge a more productive relationship with the Russian Federation? Whatever one thinks of Stent’s arguments and recommendations, she has succeeded in writing a thought provoking work that will help general readers and specialists better understand the vicissitudes of recent U.S.-Russian relations. Whether they like it or not, U.S. and Russian policymakers will have to continue dealing with each when addressing problems as diverse as the future of Ukraine, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and “global terrorism.” Over the long term, the question becomes: Can the leaders of these two nations put the past behind them and work together to create a more humane and peaceful world? Or, as Stent argues, will this relationship remain a “limited partnership” where U.S. and Russian policymakers continue to clash on most issues and only cooperate when their governments’ interests happen to coincide?

As campaign season ends, what can we make of all those ads? Brian Arbour is the author of Candidate-Centered Campaigns: Political Messages, Winning Personalities, and Personal Appeals (Palgrave-MacMillan 2014). Arbour is assistant professor of political science at John Jay College, City University of New York. Why do certain candidates focus on making campaign promises and extolling their legislative record, while others just talk about themselves? Arbour argues that scholars have underplayed the personal narratives that feature so prominently in much campaign advertising. As a result, candidate-centered appeals for votes have been largely ignored or misunderstood. Arbour aims to address this deficit with his new book that examines the way candidates talk about their own background and the background of opponents. He argues that candidate-centered campaigns build trust with voters as one would with neighbors or new co-workers.

One striking feature of humans is that fact that we sometimes act together. We garden, paint, sing, and dance together. Moreover, we intuitively recognize the difference between our simply walking down the street alongside each other and our walking down the street together. The former involves coordinated action and intention; but the latter involves something more—what we might think of as a shared intention.  Once we recognize that shared activity involved share intentions, a range of distinctively philosophical questions emerge: What are shared intentions?  What is their structure?  How do they emerge?  How are they connected to group action? In Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together (Oxford University Press, 2014), Michael E. Bratman addresses such questions.  He argues that the planning theory of individual agency that he has developed in previous work provides sufficient resources for understanding small-scale instances of acting together.  His claim, then, is that modestly social agency can be accounted for without the introduction of new philosophical elements such as “we intentions” and “joint commitment.”   Bratman provides a model of group action and intention that is philosophically sparing but explanatorily powerful.

Marcia Ochoa‘s book Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela (Duke University Press, 2014) is a detailed ethnography of Venezuelan modernity and nationhood that brings two kinds of feminine performances into the same analytical frame. Her focus on transformistas and beauty queens allows her to draw relationships among power, beauty, violence, and space. The book uses different orders of magnitude, moving from the national and transnational through the street and the runway and coming to rest finally on the body to work through arguments about mediation and the production of femininity. Ochoa’s work contributes to scholarship on politics and gender in Venezuela by understanding them as bound together and mutually constitutive. Along the way there are some searing and moving portraits of the people who are her subjects.