New Books in History

In his new book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), SherAli Tareen, an associate professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College, takes us into the fascinating world of the ‘ulama (theologians) of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century South Asian Islam. Situated historically within the transitional and transformative period of the end of the Mughal era and the beginning of British colonialism, the book focuses on the native discourses, internal debates, and the ensuing logics utilized by Muslim theologians, such as Shah Muhammad Ismail and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi.

The book is divided into three sections and consists of twelve chapters. Throughout the study, Tareen thickly describes the internal debates surrounding issues of political theology (especially divine sovereignty), normativity and law (issues of bid‘a), and ritual practice (particularly of the mawlid (celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday)) as a means to disrupt debates surrounding religious boundary making. Tareen’s close reading of texts in Arabic, Urdu, and Persian unsettles the post-colonial program of the modern secular state, not for the sake of arguing for “native agency” under colonial rule, but rather as a means to amplify how Muslim theologians did not bend to colonial secular norms that they were embedded within. The study models how a focused and nuanced analysis of intra-Muslim debates, such as the one between the Barelvi-Deobandi scholars opens up invigorating possibilities for questions and problem spaces that transcend reductive binaries of law/mysticism, puritan/populist, and reformist/traditionalist. The book is a tremendous contribution to the fields of South Asia and Islamic studies, while its theorizing on the twin forces of religion and secularism also adds greatly to conversations in the study of religion and politics. Tareen also includes a very useful appendix with discussion questions and pedagogical suggestions for how to use sections of the book in various undergraduate and graduate courses.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies 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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Since the 1940s, America’s relations with the rest of the world have been guided by the idea of promoting the free flow of information. It’s an idea that seems benign, perhaps even difficult to argue against—who could possibly oppose the freedom of information? But, as Diana Lemberg shows in her exciting new book, Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media (Columbia University Press, 2019), the idea wasn’t always benign and many fought against its implementation.

In the book, Lemberg, an associate professor at Lingnan University, examines how American businessmen, statesmen, and social scientists sought to tear down barriers to transnational flows of information in the post-WWII era, and, in the process, maximize the spread of American content abroad. Barriers Down is an innovative study that shows just how central information politics were to the US’ vision of the global order. The book deserves a wide audience.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

 

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Professor Ellen Griffith Spears of the University of Alabama, author of Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) discusses the decades long struggle for environmental and civil rights justice in Anniston, Alabama, and broader lessons to be learned from this fight to address one community's exposure to toxic chemicals.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements.

Spears focuses attention on key figures who shaped Anniston--from Monsanto's founders, to white and African American activists, to the ordinary Anniston residents whose lives and health were deeply affected by the town's military-industrial history and the legacy of racism. Situating the personal struggles and triumphs of Anniston residents within a larger national story of regulatory regimes and legal strategies that have affected toxic towns across America, Spears unflinchingly explores the causes and implications of environmental inequalities, showing how civil rights movement activism undergirded Anniston's campaigns for redemption and justice.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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In his new book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), SherAli Tareen, an associate professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College, takes us into the fascinating world of the ‘ulama (theologians) of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century South Asian Islam. Situated historically within the transitional and transformative period of the end of the Mughal era and the beginning of British colonialism, the book focuses on the native discourses, internal debates, and the ensuing logics utilized by Muslim theologians, such as Shah Muhammad Ismail and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi.

The book is divided into three sections and consists of twelve chapters. Throughout the study, Tareen thickly describes the internal debates surrounding issues of political theology (especially divine sovereignty), normativity and law (issues of bid‘a), and ritual practice (particularly of the mawlid (celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday)) as a means to disrupt debates surrounding religious boundary making. Tareen’s close reading of texts in Arabic, Urdu, and Persian unsettles the post-colonial program of the modern secular state, not for the sake of arguing for “native agency” under colonial rule, but rather as a means to amplify how Muslim theologians did not bend to colonial secular norms that they were embedded within. The study models how a focused and nuanced analysis of intra-Muslim debates, such as the one between the Barelvi-Deobandi scholars opens up invigorating possibilities for questions and problem spaces that transcend reductive binaries of law/mysticism, puritan/populist, and reformist/traditionalist. The book is a tremendous contribution to the fields of South Asia and Islamic studies, while its theorizing on the twin forces of religion and secularism also adds greatly to conversations in the study of religion and politics. Tareen also includes a very useful appendix with discussion questions and pedagogical suggestions for how to use sections of the book in various undergraduate and graduate courses.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies 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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Since the 1940s, America’s relations with the rest of the world have been guided by the idea of promoting the free flow of information. It’s an idea that seems benign, perhaps even difficult to argue against—who could possibly oppose the freedom of information? But, as Diana Lemberg shows in her exciting new book, Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media (Columbia University Press, 2019), the idea wasn’t always benign and many fought against its implementation.

In the book, Lemberg, an associate professor at Lingnan University, examines how American businessmen, statesmen, and social scientists sought to tear down barriers to transnational flows of information in the post-WWII era, and, in the process, maximize the spread of American content abroad. Barriers Down is an innovative study that shows just how central information politics were to the US’ vision of the global order. The book deserves a wide audience.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

 

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In her book, Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641-1699 (Cornell University Press, 2018), Sher Banu Khan provides a rare and empirically rich view of queenship in early modern maritime Southeast Asia. Four women ruled the Muslim realm of Aceh in succession during the second half of the seventeenth century. Their reign – with the acquiescence of the religious elite in the kingdom - was remarkable in a society where women were not seen as natural rulers, and where in more recent history, public leadership by women was discouraged. Writing against extant historiography that depicts this era as a period of decline, Khan argues instead that the queens of Aceh enabled diplomatic and trading networks to prosper and asserted Acehnese sovereignty in encounters with European powers.

In our conversation, we discuss the challenges in multi-lingual archival work, how studying queens can help us to reframe the idea of decline, the gendering of authority and leadership as well as the place of female authority in the Muslim world.

Sher Banu Khan is an associate professor of Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore.

Faizah Zakaria is an Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is completing her first monograph on dialectical relationships between landscape and religious conversions in maritime Southeast Asia. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien

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In Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Sarah Abrevaya Stein weaves a narrative tapestry whose threads are drawn from the archives of one Sephardic family, with roots in the city of Salonica, then in the Ottoman Empire, now Thessaloniki in Greece. The story begins with one of the prominent Jewish citizens of that thriving port city, then follows the family in its dispersion through nine countries across three continents during the most tumultuous and violent years of the twentieth century.

This fascinating book is not only a masterful work of archival research but of storytelling. Professor Stein deftly portrays the vivid personalities that comprise the family, even as she teaches valuable lessons about the Sephardic culture in which they were firmly implanted. Professor Stein also ponders important questions about the nature of personal, family, and cultural memories, and the importance of the vanishing art of written correspondence -- and the way history, properly told, can restore and revive buried narratives, and the relationships that gave them life. The result is a masterwork of historical narrative, and a story beautifully told.

David Gottlieb, a member of the teaching faculty at Spertus Institute in Chicago, received his PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2018. He is the author of Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press, 2019).

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The history of women's political involvement has focused heavily on electoral politics, but throughout the twentieth century women engaged in grassroots activism when they found it increasingly challenging to feed their families and balance their household ledgers. Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how working- and middle-class American housewives used their identity as housewives to protest the high cost of food. In doing so, housewives' relationships with the state evolved over the course of the century. Shifting the focus away from the workplace as a site of protest, Emily E. LB. Twarog looks to the homefront as a starting point for protest in the public sphere.

With a focus on food consumption rather than production, Twarog looks closely at the ways food--specifically meat--was used by women as a political tool. Engaging in domestic politics, housewives both challenged and embraced the social and economic order as they sought to craft a unique political voice and build a consumer movement focused on the home.

The book examines key moments when women used consumer actions to embrace their socially ascribed roles as housewives to demand economic stability for their families and communities. These include the Depression-era meat boycott of 1935, the consumer coalitions of the New Deal, and the wave of consumer protests between 1966 and 1973. Twarog introduces numerous labor and consumer activists and their organizations in both urban and suburban areas--Detroit, greater Chicago, Long Island, and Los Angeles.

Emily E. LB. Twarog is an Associate Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations, and Affiliate Faculty in the Gender in Global Perspectives Program and European Union Center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute’s Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

 

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Over the course of three decades Japan built an aircraft industry that by 1941 was qualitatively the equal of any in the world. In Wings for the Rising Sun: A Transnational History of Japanese Aviation (Harvard University Press, 2020), Jürgen Melzer explains the ways in which the Japanese drew upon Western technology and expertise to achieve this goal. In many respects this process was foreshadowed by Japan’s embrace of manned balloons in the late 19th century as a means of flight. As airplanes took to the skies Japan sought to keep pace with these developments by sending men abroad for flight training, purchasing planes for them to fly at home, and developing public enthusiasm for Japan’s airborne achievements though campaigns paralleling those in European countries. Though the French dominated these contacts for the first decade, after the First World War the Japanese turned to the Germans and the British for technology transfers and training. Melzer shows that while businessmen and government officials in the West envisioned Japan as a market for their airplanes, the Japanese used these relationships to develop their own aircraft designs and manufacturing capabilities. Such was their success that were able to adopt rocket and jet engine technology from their German partners in the Second World War with only minimal assistance, although their successes in this area came too late to shape the outcome of the conflict.

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Black New Jersey 1664 to the Present Day (Rutgers University Press, 2018) by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, George Langdon, Jr. Professor of History and Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, is a survey history of African Americans in New Jersey. This is the first published scholarly book-length historical study of African Americans in New Jersey covering the Colonial era to the present in a single volume. Hodges, a prolific scholar, is the author/editor of sixteen books including Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey 1660-1870 (Madison House, 1997) and Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey,1613-1863 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Black New Jersey was awarded the McCormick Prize from the New Jersey Historical Commission in 2019. Hodges’s text is organized around eight neat chapters encompassing Pre-Revolutionary New Jersey to the present. Black New Jersey also includes a useful “Introduction.”

In his text, Hodges emphasizes the history of slavery, religion, the rise of the Black middle class, and the quest for social equality through the Jim Crow era. He also discusses some of the more notable intellectuals in the history of New Jersey such as Paul Robeson and Marion Thompson Wright. Both were active in the long black freedom struggle. Wright’s research became the basis for the first case to challenge segregation in the public-school system Hedgepeth-Williams vs. Trenton, Board of Education (1944) before the historic Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954). Wright, a trained historian, worked on the pivotal Brown case conducting historical research for litigation. These intellectuals were instrumental in advancing the Civil Rights Movement in the Garden State before 1954. This text by Hodges is an important study on the history of northern struggles for equality including the Civil Rights Movement that likely first began in New Jersey.

Hettie V. Williams Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. You can follow Dr. Williams on twitter: @DrHettie2017.

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