Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast

The rights of pregnant workers as well as (the lack of) paid maternity leave have increasingly become topics of a major policy debate in the United States. Yet, few discussions have focused on the U.S. military, where many of the latest policy changes focus on these very issues. Despite the armed forces' increases to maternity-related benefits, servicewomen continue to be stigmatized for being pregnant and taking advantage of maternity policies. In Militarized Maternity: Experiencing Pregnancy in the U.S. Armed Forces (U California Press, 2021) , Megan McFarlane analyzes military documents and conducts interviews with enlisted servicewomen and female officers. She finds a policy/culture disparity within the military that pregnant servicewomen themselves often co-construct, making the policy changes significantly less effective. McFarlane ends by offering suggestions for how these policy changes can have more impact and how they could potentially serve as an example for the broader societal debate.

Dr. Megan McFarlane is an Assistant Professor at Marymount University. Her most recent research centers on women’s reproductive health care policies, with a particular focus on maternity (pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, and postpartum). 

Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at SUNY Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee

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During the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes and exchanges that underlay these translations. Using as a case study the 1597 Persian rendition of the Yoga-Vasistha—an influential Sanskrit philosophical tale whose popularity stretched across the subcontinent—Shankar Nair illustrates how these early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars drew upon their respective religious, philosophical, and literary traditions to forge a common vocabulary through which to understand one another. These scholars thus achieved, Nair argues, a nuanced cultural exchange and interreligious and cross-philosophical dialogue significant not only to South Asia’s past but also its present.

This interview is one of 3 interviews related to an upcoming American Academy of Religion "New Books in Hindu Studies" academic panel. The panel discusses Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2020) in tandem with Patton Burchett's A Genealogy of Devotion. Patton's interview can be accessed here.

Translating Wisdom is available open access here. 

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Today on New Books in History, Rod Phillips, Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, talks about his book, French Wine: A History, out in 2016 with the University of California Press, and published in paperback in 2020.

For centuries, wine has been associated with France more than with any other country. France remains one of the world’s leading wine producers by volume and enjoys unrivaled cultural recognition for its wine. If any wine regions are global household names, they are French regions such as Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy. Within the wine world, products from French regions are still benchmarks for many wines.

French Wine is the first synthetic history of wine in France: from Etruscan, Greek, and Roman imports and the adoption of wine by beer-drinking Gauls to its present status within the global marketplace. Rod Phillips places the history of grape growing and winemaking in each of the country’s major regions within broad historical and cultural contexts.

Examining a range of influences on the wine industry, wine trade, and wine itself, the book explores religion, economics, politics, revolution, and war, as well as climate and vine diseases. French Wine is the essential reference on French wine for collectors, consumers, sommeliers, and industry professionals.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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The vision for America’s cross-cultural future lies beyond the multicultural myth of the "great melting pot." That idea of diversity often imagined ethnically distinct urban districts—the Little Italys, Koreatowns, and Jewish quarters of American cities—built up over generations and occupying spaces that excluded one another. But the neighborhood of Boyle Heights shows us something altogether different: a dynamic, multiracial community that has forged solidarity through a history of social and political upheaval.

Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy (University of California Press, 2021) is an in-depth history of the Los Angeles neighborhood, showcasing the potent experiences of its residents, from early contact between Spanish colonizers and native Californians to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the hunt for hidden Communists among the Jewish population, negotiating citizenship and belonging among Latino migrants and Mexican American residents, and beyond. Through each period and every struggle, the residents of Boyle Heights have maintained remarkable solidarity across racial and ethnic lines, acting as a unified polyglot community even as their tribulations have become more explicitly racial in nature. Boyle Heights is immigrant America embodied, and it can serve as the true beacon on a hill toward which the country can strive in a time when racial solidarity and civic resistance have never been in greater need.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.

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If China’s Mao era is seen by many as a time of great upheaval and chaos, there are also people and places for whom things appear quite different. Writing from one such place in A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (U California Press, 2020), Emily Ng foregrounds the perspective of a rural population in Henan province whose cosmological visions frame the Mao period as a time of relative calm, when a powerful sovereign brought order to both human and sprit realms.

Throughout this book, cosmological disturbance, ghosts and psychiatric disorder become lenses through which to understand the upheaval of capital flows, cross-country migrations and intergenerational strife which have coloured social, economic and political relationships in China since Mao. Ng’s extensive fieldwork with spirit mediums themselves, ordinary villagers who consult them and patients in a local hospital is complemented by cosmically ambitious insights into society and history which make this beautifully written book an invaluable resource for understanding China’s past and present, and eras of historical disturbance more generally, through a highly compelling new lens.

Ed Pulford is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

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California is often used as a synecdoche for the United States itself - America in microcosm. Yet, California was, is, and will always be, Native space. This fact is forcefully argued by Damon Akins and William J. Bauer, Jr. in We Are the Land: A History of Native California (University of California Press, 2021). Akins, an associate professor history at Guilford College, and Bauer, a professor of history at UNLV, track the long history of the Pacific Coast, from ocean to mountain, with an emphasis on Native spaces, Native power, and Native resiliency. California historically contained (and indeed, still does contain) a dizzying array of Native nations, tribes, and societies, and We Are the Land does the work of attempting to cover, in some small amount, as many as possible over several centuries worth of history. It is a crisply written survey that doesn't shy away from the horrors of the past, but also dwells on moments of power and activism - this is no simple story of decline and tragedy. California, Akins and Bauer maintain, cannot be understood apart from its Native context - indeed the land and its people are in many ways one and the same.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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With thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On the island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social justice. 

Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2021) sheds light on the emergence of social solidarity initiatives and networks forged between citizens and noncitizens who work together to improve local livelihoods and mobilize for radical political change. Basing her argument on years of ethnographic fieldwork with frontline communities in Sicily, anthropologist Megan Carney asserts that such mobilizations hold significance not only for the rights of migrants, but for the material and affective well-being of society at large. 

Megan A. Carney is Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona. Her writing has appeared in The Hill, The Conversation, and Civil Eats. She is the author of the award-winning book The Unending Hunger.

Fulya Pinar is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on the refugee women's commoning practices to build sustainable futures in Turkey.

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Political Theorist Robert Bartlett spoke with the New Books in Political Science podcast about two of his recent publications, which take on translating the work of two distinct classical thinkers, Aristotle and Aristophanes. In discussing these thinkers, we talked about two of Aristophanes’ earliest extant plays, The Acharnians and The Knights. We also discussed Aristotle’s text, The Art of Rhetoric. All three of these works focus on the interaction of the words spoken by a public individual, and how those words are also received and considered by an audience, especially the citizens of the state. This conversation took us to ancient Athens and some of the earliest western thinking about the interrelationship between political rhetoric and emotions, and how these connections can be both useful and dangerous, especially for democracies.

Bartlett explains that Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is an important component of Aristotle’s thinking about politics, and one of his later works. The Art of Rhetoric explores the idea and art of persuasion, and Aristotle provides a defense of rhetoric for the polis. Bartlett also examines the way that Aristotle’s Rhetoric, while attacked by Thomas Hobbes in his writing, as he does with so many of Aristotle’s works, actually provides the basis for Hobbes’ understanding of the passions, and thus the basis for Hobbes’ own political theory. In an effort to examine the way that rhetoric and persuasion work, especially within politics, Aristotle delineates a clear account of the passions in Book II of The Rhetoric, and this, combined with the three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, logos), are key to considering how rhetoric can be used, for good or ill. It is inevitable that political rhetoric will come forward in societies, however large or small, simple or complex. Thus, Aristotle’s work explains not only how to best make use of rhetoric, it also explains the ways in which rhetoric can be misused, abused, and how it can threaten the society when used corruptly, especially by demagogues. Bartlett’s translation of Aristotle’s text guides the reader with clarity and accessibility, and his interpretative essay explores these important dimensions of understanding how rhetoric works, how it accesses our emotions, and how it can be used corruptly. This is particularly important to consider in our current political climates, in the United States and elsewhere, as we have seen the rise of demagogues and the inflaming of passions within the political sphere. 

Against Demagogues: What Aristophanes Can Teach Us about the Perils of Populism and the Fate of Democracy (University of California Press, 2020) examines many of the same themes as Aristotle explores in The Rhetoric, but in Aristophanes’ work, Bartlett notes, the use of comedy and narrative skewer the demagogue and his abuse of rhetoric. Once again Bartlett has translated the ancient Greek work, in this case, the two plays, The Acharnians and The Knights, and has provided an interpretative essay of each play. Against Demagogues also provides the contemporary reader with considerations of Aristophanes’ relevance, especially in his attack on demagogues. As Bartlett notes, the term “demagogue” itself only become negative in its valence when Aristophanes uses it this way in The Knights.

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). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

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In Deviant Opera: Sex, Power, and Perversion on Stage (University of California Press, 2020), Axel Englund examines an increasingly common trope in opera direction: the use of imagery associated with the kink and BDSM communities. This imagery underscores the themes of sexuality and domination that run through the opera repertory, and it also calls attention to the essential artificiality of operatic performance: opera, after all, is another form of role play. Some stagings have also used BDSM imagery to subvert problematic gender portrayals in classic opera, or even to call out the power imbalances offstage in the world of contemporary opera, which has recently been rocked by revelations of abuse at the highest level. Englund's book will be interesting to opera fans, kinksters, and anyone interested in contemporary efforts to breathe life into classic works of theatre.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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How rural areas have become uneven proving grounds for the American Dream. Small-town economies that have traditionally been based on logging, mining, farming, and ranching now increasingly rely on tourism, second-home ownership, and retirement migration. In Dividing Paradise: Rural Inequality and the Diminishing American Dream (University of California Press, 2021), Jennifer Sherman tells the story of Paradise Valley, Washington, a rural community where amenity-driven economic growth has resulted in a new social landscape of inequality and privilege, with deep fault lines between old-timers and newcomers. In this complicated cultural reality, "class blindness" allows privileged newcomers to ignore or justify their impact on these towns, papering over the sentiments of anger, loss, and disempowerment of longtime locals. Based on in-depth interviews with individuals on both sides of the divide, this book explores the causes and repercussions of the stark inequity that has become commonplace across the United States. It exposes the mechanisms by which inequality flourishes and by which Americans have come to believe that disparity is acceptable and deserved.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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