Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast

In Charros: How Mexican Cowboys Are Remapping Race and American Identity (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Laura R. Barraclough tells a surprising story about the urban American West. Barraclough, the Sarai Ribicoff Associate Professor in American Studies at Yale University, writes the history of elite Mexican and Mexican-American cowboys – charros – and how charro culture served as a site of contested national identity in the mid twentieth century United States. In Western cities such as Los Angeles, Denver, and San Antonio, Chicano men and women used charro organizations and events as places where one could assert both Mexican and American, as well as middle- and upper-class, identities. Rather than the archetypical image of a white, dusty, cowboy riding alone across a desolate mesa, Charros portrays a Western ranching culture that is more urban, more flamboyant, more crowded, and less white than many Americans may assume.

Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

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What is “Chinese dance,” how did it take shape in during China’s socialist period, and how has this socialist form continued to influence Post-Mao expressive cultures in the People’s Republic of China? These are the questions that Emily Wilcox, Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, takes up in Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy (University of California Press, 2018). Revolutionary Bodies is the first English-language primary source-based history of dance in the People’s Republic of China. Combining over a decade of ethnographic and archival research, Dr Wilcox analyzes major dance works by Chinese choreographers staged over an eighty-year period from 1935 to 2015. Using previously unexamined film footage, photographic documentation, performance programs, and other historical and contemporary sources, Wilcox challenges the commonly accepted view that Soviet-inspired revolutionary ballets are the primary legacy of the socialist era in China’s dance field.

Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet.

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What does anti-imperialism look like from the vantage point of North America? In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad(University of California Press, 2019), Manu Karuka (Barnard College) answers this question by reinterpreting the significance of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples—in particular the Paiute, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Karuka proposes three new concepts—counter-sovereignty, continental imperialism, and modes of relationship— for our understanding of this history. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Empire’s Tracks engages with writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Frederick Jackson Turner to Ella Deloria, and draws also from legal, legislative, military, and business records. Ultimately, Karuka gives the lie to exceptionalist narratives of the United States by showing how its transportation infrastructure, like those around the world, emerged violently at the nexus of war and finance.

Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan.

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In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world's greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or "Rich Hill" and the Imperial Villa of Potosí instant legends, famous from Istanbul to Beijing. The Cerro Rico alone provided over half of the world's silver for a century, and even in decline, it remained the single richest source on earth. Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World(University of California Press, 2019), is the first interpretive history of the fabled mining city’s rise and fall. It tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation from Potosí’s startling emergence in the 16th century to its collapse in the 19th. Kris Lane, France V. Scholes Chair in Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University, provides an invigorating narrative and rare details of this thriving city as well as its promise of prosperity. A new world of native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents who lived alongside the elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials, emerge in lively, riveting stories from the original sources. An engrossing depiction of excess and devastation, Potosí reveals the relentless human tradition in boom times and bust.

Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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In her newest book, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds (University of California Press, 2019), Dr. Houri Berberian uses a transnational or transimperial approach to examine the interconnectedness of 1905 Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution and the Young Turk Revolution and the role that Armenian revolutionaries played in each. Dr. Berberian’s unique approach allows readers to see the linkages between these events that are often viewed as separate and encapsulated and see how the Armenians who lived at the epicenter of these events participated. She examines how Armenian revolutionary intellectuals were able to utilize another revolution, the technological revolution, to facilitate the spread of information, revolutionary literature, people and arms between these three empires and the widespread Armenian diaspora using steam ship, telegraphs and increased access to printing technology. She also examines how the revolutionaries indigenized and interpreted the various liberal and socialist ideas they now had greater access to in a way that fit the Armenian context: split between three empires and facing increased persecution and ethnic conflict. Listen in as we discuss the successes and failures of this understudied revolutionary movement and the lives and struggles of individual Armenian revolutionaries navigating the complex realties of living at the confluence of three empires in the throes of collapse and revolution.

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The consumption of food and drink is much more than what we put in our mouth. Food and drink have been a focal point of modern social theory since the inception of agrarian capitalism and the industrial revolution. The origins of food and drink are rather complex. The construction of food and drink as authentic to a specific region is even more complex. Join us for a discussion with Alex Colas, Jason Edwards, Jane Levi, and Sami Zubaida about their book Food, Politics, and Society Social Theory and the Modern Food System(University of California Press, 2018). Together we will learn more about the history and sociology of how various ideas and practices shape human understanding and organization of the production, processing, preparation, serving, and consumption of food and drink in modern society. The authors divide this book into twelve chapters and draw on a wide range of historical and empirical illustrations to provide a concise, informed, and accessible survey of the interaction between social theory as well as food and drink. They provide a perfect interview for a wide range of discipline as long been a focal point of modern social theory.

Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the placemaking associated with the development of farmers’ market.

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Thanks to the efforts of activists concerned that the problem of “battered women” was being ignored -- and treated as a private, family matter rather than a broader social problem -- since the 1980s interpersonal/domestic violence has been treated as a criminal act enforced by the institutions of American criminal justice. But too seldom have we asked if this approach has actually worked. In her powerful and provocative new book, Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (University of California Press, 2018), Leigh Goodmark asks us to evaluate the effects of criminalizing domestic violence and to consider what might be gained by thinking about interpersonal violence as a problem of economics, public health, community, and human rights.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (University of California Press, 2018) by Brannon D. Ingram is a timely study of the Deoband movement from its inception in India to its transnational contemporary context in South Africa. Through careful analysis of historical textual discourses, Ingram carefully guides his readers through important polemics that manifested amongst the Deoband ‘ulama and its implications for Muslim publics and their performance of a “traditional” Islam. The study, then, goes onto highlight why and how the Deoband movement’s relationship to Sufism has been miscategorized and crucially situates the Deoband ‘ulama’s own complex relationship with Sufism, especially Sufi ethics and comportment. Overall, Ingram challenges his readers to think more carefully about Sufism in the 21st century. This book is a must read for those interested in Sufism, South Asian Islam, and global transnational Islam.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion 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 [email protected]

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In his groundbreaking new book, Alef is for Allah: Childhood, Emotion, and Visual Culture in Islamic Societies (University of California Press, 2018), Jamal Elias takes his readers on a riveting intellectual tour thematically centered on the interaction of childhood, visual culture, and affect in contemporary Muslim majority societies, and in Muslim intellectual thought more broadly. Drawing on while also significantly extending and reworking recent theoretical explorations in the field of affect theory, Elias interrogates, with lucidity as well as with dazzling insight, the promises, aspirations, and tensions invested in childhood and the figure of the child in Muslim visual culture. Elias convincingly shows that not only is childhood itself a concept and construct fraught with ambiguity, but also that the mobilization of the ideal child through material and visual culture can take remarkably malleable forms and purposes. Alef is for Allah moves seamlessly between such varied contexts as Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan to illumine the depth and diversity of the intersection of piety, nationalism, and visual culture in Islam and Muslim societies. This lyrically written book also includes incredible and excellently presented images making it particularly well suited for undergraduate and graduate seminars on material Islam, Muslim visual culture, affect studies, and childhood studies.

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 academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Peyote occupies a curious place in the United States and Mexico: though prohibited by law, its use remains permissible in both countries for ceremonial practices in certain religions. As Alexander S. Dawson reveals in The Peyote Effect: From the Inquisition to the War on Drugs (University of California Press, 2018), this anomalous position is nothing new, as it existed as far back as the prohibitions on the use of peyote by non-Indians imposed by the Inquisition in Mexico during the colonial period. Though this ban ended with Mexico’s independence, it was not until chemists in Germany and the United States began investigating peyote’s properties in the late 19th century that its usage spread outside of Native American communities. Fears of the drug’s psychoactive effects led to a succession of state-level U.S. bans in the early 20th century, yet these were usually fragmentary in their scope, allowing for its continued usage by Native American communities outside their jurisdictions. The broader use of peyote as a hallucinogen in the 1950s led to more general efforts to outlaw it, yet the exemptions granted for its use by Native Americans in religious practices creates a distinction between them and the larger population akin to the one that existed during the colonial era hundreds of years ago.

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