New Books Network

Just east of the Norwich-New London Turnpike in Uncasville, Connecticut, stands the Mohegan Congregational Church. By most accounts, it’s little different than the thousands of white-steepled structures dotting the New England landscape: the same high-backed wooden chairs, high ceilings, images of lordly white men. To the careful observer, there is one notable distinction. Just above a traditional cross near the front entrance hangs a single, perfect eagle feather. The juxtaposition might be startling for some. But as Brown historian Linford D. Fisher beautifully illuminates in The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2012), Native cultures in New England – and, indeed, most everywhere – are highly incorporative, blending elements of Christian religious practice with their own. This was never more the case than during the eighteenth century evangelical revival known to scholars as the First Great Awakening. A significant turning point in American spiritual life, Native peoples of New England are often left out of the narrative. When they’re included, it’s as passive targets of conversion. Fisher tells a dramatically different story. (Many thanks to New Books in American Studies host Benjamin Smith for composing our new intro music!)

While reading about genocide and mass violence should always be be disturbing, a certain numbness sets in over time.  Every once in a while, however, a book breaks through that numbness to remind the reader of the horror inherent in the subject. The new book Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide, edited by John Roth and Carol Rittner (Paragon House, 2012) is one of these books.  While individuals have always committed or fell victim to sexual violence during conflicts, only recently have armies and states begun to use large-scale rape as a tactic to help them achieve their broader war aims.  Rittner and Roth set out to explore why and how this is happening and to identify possible solutions to the problem.  Some of the essays are academic, some personal, but they all contain horrifying reminders of the intensely personal experience of rape and sexual violence.  Aimed at students as well as professionals, the book offers a broad survey of the state of research rather than overarching conclusions.  In doing so, it sears its way into your consciousness. John and Carol have the kind of easy familiarity that comes from having worked together for decades.  The result is more a conversation than an interview.  I threw in some guiding questions, but mostly sat back and enjoyed the chance to hear two experts talk with each other about a subject of pressing importance.  I hope you’ll appreciate the chance to do the same.  

Gene Cooper’s new book is a multi-sited ethnographic study of market and temple fairs in the region of Jinhua, a city on the east coast of China and the home of Hengdian, “China’s Hollywood.” The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China: Red Fire (Routledge, 2013) weaves together historical and ethnographic methodologies in a spirited account of the genealogies and contemporary practices of a variety of forms of performance at these local gatherings. After providing an extended background of the region, its religious institutions and perspectives, and on the history of temple fairs in general in Part 1 of the book, Part 2 moves into the economic, cultural, religious, and political dimensions that contribute to the “red fire” of temple fairs in Jinhua today. Cooper shows how the local fair can serve both as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque atmosphere (replete with elements of freak show and circus) and a site of everyday forms of resistance. The book also features a wonderfully detailed account of the arts of popular performance at the fairs, from small-cymbal narrative (xiaoluo shuo) to opera (wuju) competitions, and looks closely at the religious dimension of secular temple gatherings. Cooper’s lively voice infuses every page of the book and each moment of the interview.

You were amused to find you too could fear “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.” The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of the many media through which people explored the ramifications of Einstein’s ideas about the cosmos in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Masterfully incorporating a contextual sensibility of the historian of science with a sensitivity to textual texture of the literary scholar, Katy Price guides us through the ways that readers and writers of newspapers, popular fiction, poems, magazines, and essays translated and incorporated Einsteinian relativity. Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe (University of Chicago Press, 2012) situates this popular engagement with the physical sciences within the political transformations of early twentieth-century Britain, looking at how the scientific and publishing communities attempted (with different levels of success) to use media coverage of relativity to rally the support of a wider reading public. It is a rich study that has much to offer to those interested in the history of science, of literature, and of popular culture, while helpfully complicating all of those categories. “Fly with me then to all’s and the world’s end And plumb for safety down the gaps of stars Let the last gulf or topless cliff befriend, What tyrant there our variance debars?” *Both quotes above are from William Empson’s poems, and can be found on pages 167 and 162 of Price’s book.

I first learned about Felix Gilman‘s work from the influential academic blog Crooked Timber. I proceeded to read Thunderer, Gears of the City, and Half-Made World and found myself impressed by Gilman’s distinctive settings, themes, and voice. It should surprise no one, in my view, that Thunderer received a nomination for the 2009 Locus Award for Best First Novel and that it also garnered Gilman a nomination for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award in both 2009 and 2010. Thus, when I agreed to host New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy I immediately contacted him about a podcast on The Rise of Ransom City (Tor, 2012). As a political scientist who works on state formation and international change I found The Rise of Ransom City as masterful account of the coming of modernity–as refracted through a fantastic setting. As Lev AC Rosen writes of it: “The Rise of Ransom City continues Felix Gilman’s brilliant deconstruction of the mythology of the American West, putting it back together with magic and mechanics, and creating something so imaginative it seems to punch you in the chest. Narrator Professor Harry Ransom is a compelling voice; a teller of tall tales and showman, but whereas the snake-oil salesmen of the American West sold piss and ink, Ransom has a genuine miracle to sell. He is both liar and totally honest in ways that are sly and funny and sometimes tragic. This is a fantastic story of a war and a life told with incredible humanity and pizzazz, by a narrator who, like the world he inhabits, is bold and colorful and a wholly new sort of magic.” Interested listeners might also read Johann Thorsson’s interview with Gilman. A warning: the audio quality of this podcast is on the poor side. I hope that listeners will stick with it nonetheless, as Gilman has fascinating things to say about the themes and ideas at work in The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City.

This past October, David Stern announced that he would step down as commissioner of the National Basketball Association in February 2014.  In Stern’s three decades at the helm, the NBA has seen its domestic fortunes rise and ebb.  Television ratings for regular-season and playoff games have declined steadily since their peak in the late 1990s.  In the present season, ten teams in the league are filling less than 80 per cent of seats in their home arenas, and average attendance in the league overall has dropped below that of the National Hockey League and Major League Soccer. But Stern has been successful in meeting one of his stated aims: expanding the international profile of the NBA.  Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kobe Bryant have been global celebrities in a way that no American football or baseball player can imagine.  Meanwhile, some 20 per cent of players on current NBA rosters are foreign-born.  The league’s games are broadcast in 40 countries by various partner networks, and overseas sales of caps and jerseys account for more than a third of the league’s merchandising revenue.  Stern has even spoken of a European division of the league beginning play in the next decade. The NBA’s international success is all the more striking when one considers that it the youngest of the major American sports leagues, and that it took some two decades to gain stable fan support and financial health.  Founded in 1946 as the Basketball Association of America, the league competed in cities of the Northeast and Midwest.  From the start, the BBA had rivals:  the celebrated barnstorming team of African American players, known as the Harlem Globetrotters, and a second professional circuit, the National Basketball League, which played in smaller cities like Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Waterloo, Iowa.  As David Surdam shows in his history of the NBA’s first 15 years, these were humble origins.  Professional basketball’s early years were marked by cheap owners, empty arenas, and plenty of red ink.  When the BAA and NBL merged in 1949, the combined league featured 17 teams.  Ten years later, there were only eight. Dave’s book, The Rise of the National Basketball Association (University of Illinois Press, 2012), focuses on the economic history of the league’s early years.  Told from this perspective, the NBA’s rise is a story of survival—and somewhat bewildering tenacity.  But the league’s eventual stability can also be attributed to the innovations of its early leaders.  The widened free-throw lane, the 24-second shot clock, and other rule changes were aimed at bringing fans to the arenas.  The ultimate effect was to transform professional basketball from a game of defensive stalling and two-handed set shots to the fast-paced, high-scoring entertainment of today.

Religious conviction enjoys a privileged status in our society.  This is perhaps most apparent in legal contexts, where religious conviction is often given special consideration.  To be more precise, religious conscience is recognized as a legitimate basis for exemption from standing laws, whereas claims of conscience deriving from non-religious commitments generally are not.  Why is this?  Is there something special about religiously-based claims of conscience?  Is there something special about religion such that it gives rise to claims of conscience that deserve special consideration?  If so, what? In his new book, Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, 2013) Brian Leiter offers subtle analyses of toleration, conscience, and respect.  He argues that religion is indeed to be tolerated, because liberty of conscience is a central moral and political ideal.  However, he holds that there’s nothing special about religion that gives special moral or legal weight to the demands it places on the consciences of believers.  Contending that all claims of conscience—religious and non-religious—deserve toleration, Leiter argues that legal exemption may be granted on the basis of a claim of conscience—religious or otherwise—only when doing so does not place additional burdens on the non-exempt.

In December 1958, US Senator Hubert H. Humphery recalled that at some point during an eight hour meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier “tore off on a whole long lecture” that the Senator wished he could remember because it was “the best speech I could ever make in my life on antiracialism. Boy, he really gave me a talking to.” Thus beings Meredith Roman‘s fascinating book Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of US Racism, 1928-1937 (Nebraska UP, 2012). At first read, the image of animated Khrushchev haranguing a US Senator with “the best speech” the latter ever heard on the topic of race seems out of place, odd, and to some extent even comical. After all, what could Khrushchev really have known about race in America to impress an American? Khrushchev’s fluency in “speaking antiracism” was no mere preformative dig at the United States. In fact, many African American travelers and expatriates to the Soviet Union in the 1930s were astonished how much its citizens knew and were concerned about American race relations. In Opposing Jim Crow, Roman shows that antiracism was a genuine vernacular constructed through show trials, antiracist campaigns, media, and representations of racial oppression in the United States. It was through American racism that the USSR was crafted into a morally superior, raceless society. Nothing reinforced this idea more than the adoption of Soviet antiracist discourse by American Americans visitors, expatriates, and sympathizers themselves. But more importantly, it was via these multiple intersections that speaking antiracism became an important, and until now ignored, component in the effort to create new Soviet people in the 1930s.

Building upon The Origins of Meaning (see previous interview), James R. Hurford‘s  The Origins of Grammar (Language in the Light of Evolution, Vol. 2) (Oxford University Press, 2012) second volume sets out to explain how the unique complexity of human syntax might have evolved. In doing so, it addresses the long-running argument between (to generalise) linguists and non-linguists as to how big a deal this is: linguists tend to claim that the relevant capacities are unique to humans, while researchers in other disciplines argue for parallels with other animal behaviours. James Hurford sides with the linguists here, but not without giving careful consideration to the status of birdsong, whalesong, and similar systems. Meanwhile, at the other end of the evolutionary process (so far), interest is growing in accounts of human syntax that are incidentally much more gradualist in nature and which invite potential explanation in evolutionary terms. Moreover, the idea of quantitative limits on human processing are being appealed to, in conflict with the tradition view of ‘infinite’ generative capacity. In the second part of the book, Hurford charts a course through this field in order to characterise the ‘target’ of the evolutionary story. Finally, he turns to the process itself, positing a role for the ‘symbolic niche’ in the rapid co-evolution of culture and individual capacities throughout the span of humans’ existence, and considering how grammaticalisation might be responsible for the earliest, as well as the most recent, innovations in human language. In this interview, we touch on many of these topics, and try to situate this work within the history of linguistics. We consider the implications of new trends in linguistic theory and research practice, and look at how evolutionary claims might be validated – or at least shown to be plausible, in the face of residual scepticism. And we discuss whether and when genome research will inform linguistic analysis.