New Books in History

In The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival (Penn State University Press, 2018), Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Anyone who tries to understand the history, religion, and especially the “culture” of Southeast Asia, will soon encounter the phenomenon of animism, the belief that landscapes, natural objects, trees and plants, animals, and deceased ancestors, possess spirits that influence the human world. Yet “animism” is a Western analytical category, coined during the colonial period, and used by monotheistic and scientifically-minded Westerners to understand what they openly or secretly regarded as irrational indigenous religion. The relationship between animism and missionaries, colonial officials, and early anthropologists, has generally been antagonistic. The elimination of animist belief and its replacement with Christianity and scientific, rational thinking, was one of the aims of colonial rule. But with the development of a more reflexive anthropology and the rise of cultural relativism in the post-war period, anthropologists have come to a new understanding of animism.

Christopher J. Shepherd's provocative book, Haunted Houses and Ghostly Encounters: Ethnography and Animism in East Timor, 1860–1975 (NIAS Press, 2019), traces the history of how anthropologists have understood animism in East Timor. The book covers the era of colonial ethnography through to the rise of modern professional ethnography. But beyond East Timor and the subject of animism the book is also a critical narrative of the way that colonial anthropology emerged all over the colonized world.

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Departing from the bold and compelling claim that we cannot fully understand the histories of decolonization and the so-called “sexual revolution” apart from one another, Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is a complex analysis of the lasting impact of the Algerian Revolution through the cultural politics of sex, gender, and power in France. Shepard tracks the figure of the “Arab” man from Algerian independence to the Iranian Revolution. Just as the “Arab” man’s pathologized sexuality played a key role in discussions of French defeat in Algeria as a “failure” of French masculinity on the political “Right,” so too did he become a “heroic” figure for the post-decolonization “Left.” From gay liberation to feminism, debates about sexual norms, prostitution, and rape, the “Arab” man appeared again and again in forms that replayed and riffed off of the sexual orientalism of the colonial period.

Drawing attention to the ways the “erotics of Algerian difference” shaped the terrain of what could and couldn’t be thought in terms of sex post-1962, the book highlights the ideas and work of a number of authors from North Africa and elsewhere, voices that have been written out of histories that understand the sexual revolution as a strictly trans-Atlantic phenomenon. The “vanilla” narratives that have resulted have left out sites such as North Africa, failing to see the role of anti-colonialism in the history of the sexual revolution. At the same time, conventional histories have also regularly refused to deal with sex itself, eliding the significance of discussions of sex acts (like sodomy) as sites of politics and power. As Shepard shows, the Arab man and the legacies of the Algerian Revolution were all over the field of “sex talk” in France through the 1960s and 70s. During this period, then, the war did not vanish from view as other histories have suggested. And the end of this era that was linked to the Iranian Revolution brought a shoring up of Western notions of sexual liberation in response to the oppression and violence (of women and homosexuals in particular) deemed inherent to Arab/Muslim societies. A book that brings together an impressive research corpus with killer historical and political analysis, Sex, France, and Arab Men will captivate readers interested in the (global) history of sex, as well as anyone seeking to better understand the cultural and political landscape of post-decolonization France.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).

 

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Anyone who tries to understand the history, religion, and especially the “culture” of Southeast Asia, will soon encounter the phenomenon of animism, the belief that landscapes, natural objects, trees and plants, animals, and deceased ancestors, possess spirits that influence the human world. Yet “animism” is a Western analytical category, coined during the colonial period, and used by monotheistic and scientifically-minded Westerners to understand what they openly or secretly regarded as irrational indigenous religion. The relationship between animism and missionaries, colonial officials, and early anthropologists, has generally been antagonistic. The elimination of animist belief and its replacement with Christianity and scientific, rational thinking, was one of the aims of colonial rule. But with the development of a more reflexive anthropology and the rise of cultural relativism in the post-war period, anthropologists have come to a new understanding of animism.

Christopher J. Shepherd's provocative book, Haunted Houses and Ghostly Encounters: Ethnography and Animism in East Timor, 1860–1975 (NIAS Press, 2019), traces the history of how anthropologists have understood animism in East Timor. The book covers the era of colonial ethnography through to the rise of modern professional ethnography. But beyond East Timor and the subject of animism the book is also a critical narrative of the way that colonial anthropology emerged all over the colonized world.

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Pilar M. Herr’s new book Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile (University of New Mexico Press, 2019) places the independent Mapuche people and pro-Spanish Pincheira bandits at the heart of Chile’s nineteenth century. During the 1820s, while criollo elites struggled openly between themselves to form a stable, constitutional central government and define the meaning of citizenship, they agreed that the southern third of Chile formed an integral part of their newly-imagined nation.

This claim, Herr argues, erased the Mapuche people, who had defended their lands (known to the Spanish as Araucanía) for centuries from the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonial regime. To demonstrate how Mapuche leaders and bandits challenged Chile’s political and territorial claims, and threatened the viability of the young republic, Contested Nation looks at the smoldering war to the death (Guerra a muerte) between Chile and remaining pro-Spanish royalists that spilled over into Araucanía and across the Andes. This focus reveals how Mapuche and Chilean leaders drew on pre-Columbian negotiation rituals, known as parlamentos, alliance-making, and force to resolve the conflict. Herr’s study concludes that Chile’s exclusion of the Mapuche from its evolving definition of “citizen,” and it’s interest in dispossessing the Mapuche of their land to root out bandits and armed opponents, fundamentally altered the meaning of parlamentos and the viability of Mapuche autonomy.

Jesse Zarley is an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where he teaches Latin American, Caribbean, and Global History. His research interests include the Mapuche, borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Río de la Plata. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter.

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In Exile Within Exiles: Herbert Daniel Gay Brazilian Revolutionary (Duke University Press, 2018), James N. Green tells the story of Herbert Daniel, a significant and complex figure in Brazilian leftist revolutionary politics and social activism from the mid-1960s until his death in 1992. As a medical student, Daniel joined a revolutionary guerrilla organization but was forced to conceal his sexual identity from his comrades, a situation he described as internal exile. After a government crackdown, he spent much of the 1970s in Europe, where his political self-education continued. He returned to Brazil in 1981, becoming engaged in electoral politics and social activism to champion gay rights, feminism, and environmental justice, achieving global recognition for fighting discrimination against those with HIV/AIDS.

In Exile within Exiles, James N. Green paints a full and dynamic portrait of Daniel's deep commitment to leftist politics, using Daniel's personal and political experiences to investigate the opposition to Brazil's military dictatorship, the left's construction of a revolutionary masculinity, and the challenge that the transition to democracy posed to radical movements. Green positions Daniel as a vital bridge linking former revolutionaries to the new social movements, engendering productive dialogue between divergent perspectives in his writings and activism.

James N. Green is Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Latin American History at Brown University and the author of several books, including We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States and Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil

Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Memphis. Her forthcoming book uses Carnival as a vehicle to understand social and cultural changes in Mobile, Alabama (USA) in the second half of the 20th century. Her new research project is an investigation of different generations of artists and performers who challenge gender normativity in Monterrey, Nuevo León (Mexico). She also works as an Assistant Producer for the Sexing History podcast.

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Eric Lomazoff has written a kind of detective novel about the national bank controversy during the early years of the new republic. Lomazoff poses, in the introduction, and at the start of each chapter, the general understanding that many scholars and citizens have about the bank controversy itself and the constitutional decision in McCulloch vs. Maryland. And Lomazoff notes that these contours are generally accurate but that they elide significant components of the controversy that is actually spread out over an extended period of time. Given this more extensive time frame, Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2018) does exactly what the title promises, in compiling different aspects of our understanding of the controversy, and integrating key shifts in the political and economic landscape that also changed parts of the actual controversy itself. Lomazoff takes the reader through the general understanding of the National Bank controversy, untangling different threads of the argument and the changing political and economic dynamics in the United States. Because the bank controversy is often collapsed into the debate over either a strict or broad interpretation of the Necessary and Proper clause of the Constitution, many aspects of American political development are generally pushed into the background—these ignored or obscured aspects of the controversy are the focus of Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic, and rightly so, since they trace a deeper and more complex understanding of changing monetary policy, banking regulation, and congressional and executive fiscal power in the new republic. This is an action-packed discussion of the general understanding of the early American Republic, and the real controversy around the establishment of the national bank.

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 author of The Politics of Military Base Closings: Not in My District (Peter Lang Publishers, 2003).

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Departing from the bold and compelling claim that we cannot fully understand the histories of decolonization and the so-called “sexual revolution” apart from one another, Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is a complex analysis of the lasting impact of the Algerian Revolution through the cultural politics of sex, gender, and power in France. Shepard tracks the figure of the “Arab” man from Algerian independence to the Iranian Revolution. Just as the “Arab” man’s pathologized sexuality played a key role in discussions of French defeat in Algeria as a “failure” of French masculinity on the political “Right,” so too did he become a “heroic” figure for the post-decolonization “Left.” From gay liberation to feminism, debates about sexual norms, prostitution, and rape, the “Arab” man appeared again and again in forms that replayed and riffed off of the sexual orientalism of the colonial period.

Drawing attention to the ways the “erotics of Algerian difference” shaped the terrain of what could and couldn’t be thought in terms of sex post-1962, the book highlights the ideas and work of a number of authors from North Africa and elsewhere, voices that have been written out of histories that understand the sexual revolution as a strictly trans-Atlantic phenomenon. The “vanilla” narratives that have resulted have left out sites such as North Africa, failing to see the role of anti-colonialism in the history of the sexual revolution. At the same time, conventional histories have also regularly refused to deal with sex itself, eliding the significance of discussions of sex acts (like sodomy) as sites of politics and power. As Shepard shows, the Arab man and the legacies of the Algerian Revolution were all over the field of “sex talk” in France through the 1960s and 70s. During this period, then, the war did not vanish from view as other histories have suggested. And the end of this era that was linked to the Iranian Revolution brought a shoring up of Western notions of sexual liberation in response to the oppression and violence (of women and homosexuals in particular) deemed inherent to Arab/Muslim societies. A book that brings together an impressive research corpus with killer historical and political analysis, Sex, France, and Arab Men will captivate readers interested in the (global) history of sex, as well as anyone seeking to better understand the cultural and political landscape of post-decolonization France.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).

 

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In The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival (Penn State University Press, 2018), Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Why did early modern people change their religious affiliation? And how did they represent that change in writing? In this outstanding new book, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (Palgrave, 2018), Abigail Shinn, who teaches in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, opens up a broader range of conversion narratives than literary or historical scholars have previously discussed. By expanding the chronological and geographical range of her sources, and so expanding their religious affiliation of her authors and drawing into discussion larger numbers of women, she shows how the representation of conversion changed from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and how disparate narratives relating experiences of Protestant, Catholic and Islamic conversion nevertheless continued to show similar rhetorical characteristics.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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