Racquel J. Gates’ new book, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2018), interrogates understandings of African-American representations on screen.  This book is an important analysis of the concepts of negative and positive representations, especially in regard to the narrow space that these binary classifications create. Gates takes on not only the concept of representation, but also the texts where the images are presented, leading the reader through a variety of popular culture venues. Double Negative presents a careful typology of negativity, with extensive and diverse examples of each distinct variation. This analysis also integrates texts that are often dismissed or undermined. Instead, Gates provides valuable and nuanced interpretations of genres, reclaiming popular culture artifacts that are often excluded from scholarly or critical analysis. Gates explores many of the less respectable images and presentations of African-Americans, considering not only the images themselves and the narratives in which they are presented, but also the historical context in which the popular culture artifacts are engaged and consumed. Double Negative also takes up a metanalysis of celebrity in context of representation, especially in the entwining of race and gender. This is a fascinating book, examining important political questions and understandings through popular culture texts.

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Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr., in his new book, Reading Politics with Machiavelli(Oxford University Press, 2018), puts himself and the reader into conversation with Machiavelli, exploring Machiavelli’s thinking and how Machiavelli explains his theories. As Schmidt notes, Machiavelli put himself into non-temporal conversations with ancient and classical thinkers, with religious texts and understandings, and with a raft of historical and contemporary political examples and experiences. These encounters provide the opportunity to reconsider democratic institutions and, more importantly for Schmidt’s analysis, an expansion of the democratic imagination. Part of the critique of our current political imagination is that it is circumscribed by a neoliberal narrowness. In order to think through solutions to political problems, Schmidt engages Machiavelli’s many works, finding within those works two things: potential solutions to contemporary political problems, but perhaps more importantly, new ways to think about the problems themselves and the possible solutions. This is the more profound interpretation within Reading Politics with Machiavelli, that Niccolo Machiavelli, in the intimate mode of his writing, and in the engaging way he structures and integrates his examples and what we should learn from those examples and analyses, is providing contemporary readers with innovative and imaginative approaches to think about politics.

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Candis Watts Smith and Christina Greer are the editors of Black Politics in Transition: Immigration, Suburbanization, and Gentrification (Routledge, 2019). Smith is assistant professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina; Greer is associate professor of political science and American Studies at Fordham University.

Black Politics in Transition examines the role of three themes—immigration, suburbanization, and gentrification—in Black politics today. Immigration has resulted in demographic changes in Black populations throughout the US. In addition, the movement of Black populations out of the cities to which they migrated a generation ago—a reverse migration to the American South or a movement from cities to suburbs shifts the locus of Black politics. At the same time, middle class and white populations are returning to cities, displacing low income Blacks and immigrants alike in a process of gentrification.

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Transnational feminist theory and practice is faced with a dilemma: how should we contest and resist gender-based oppression, while at the same time respecting cultural difference? In her book, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic(Oxford University Press, 2018), Serene J. Khader argues for a way out of this universalism/relativist impasse. She proposes a “nonideal universalism,” arguing that while feminism requires a universalist opposition to sexist oppression, it need not require universal adoption of Western values and strategies. Nonideal universalism answers the dilemma by rejecting the view that there is a single cultural form compatible with feminism, and by focusing on justice enhancement rather than justice achievement. Ultimately, Khader argues that transnational feminist solidarity requires empirical, contextual consideration of the harms of sexist oppression against the harms of imperialist intervention.

Emily K. Crandall is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

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Many have read and debated “How Political Science became Irrelevant” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author of that piece is Michael C. Desch and much it comes from his recent book Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton University Press, 2019). Desch is the Packey J. Dee Professor of International Relations at University of Notre Dame.

In Cult of the Irrelevant, Desch traces the history of the relationship between the Washington and the academy across the 20th century. He shows that social science research became most oriented toward national security problem-solving during times of war and that scholars shifted to other topics during peacetime. This pattern has caused tension between national security planners and university-based researchers over independence, resources, and rewards.

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In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.

You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor have written Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements, and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor in the Department of Politics and a senior fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Tichenor is the Philip H. Knight Chair of Political Science and director of the Program on Democratic Engagement and Governance of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon.

Rivalry and Reform explores the historical relationships between presidents and social movements. Through several cases, including Lincoln and abolitionism, Johnson and the civil rights movement, and Ronald Reagan and the New Christian Right, Milkis and Tichenor show that major political change happens through compromise between movement leaders and presidents negotiated over decades. The book concludes by focusing on Barack Obama’s approach to social movements such as Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, and Marriage Equality.

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Politicians love to woo entertainment corporations to their states and cities through subsidies and tax cities. But Pat Garofalo argues that such incentives waste taxpayer money in The Billionaire Boondoggle: How Our Politicians Let Corporations and Bigwigs Steal Our Money and Jobs (Thomas Dunne Books, 2019). Garofalo details how filmmakers, gambling companies, sports teams and other companies play governments off one another, making them bid against each other to win the privilege of luring companies to their areas, without providing any benefits in economic development. Garofalo sees hopes in recent grassroots backlashes, such as with Boston’s rejection of the Olympics and New York City’s resistance to Amazon. But he cautions that without a coordinated effort among governors and mayors, companies will continue to be able to manipulate the process.

Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006.

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Martha S. Jones, in her excellent new book Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America(Cambridge University Press, 2018), weaves together the legal and constitutional dimensions of citizenship—from the Founding documents and law cases with which  many scholars and students are familiar—with the daily civic engagement of African-Americans as they took part in public life and the rights of citizens. This political, historical, and legal analysis focuses particularly on the antebellum experiences of black Americans in Baltimore, Maryland, just miles from the U.S. Capital, but also vital as the largest free black community in the U.S. in one of the largest cities in the United States before the Civil War. Birthright Citizens takes the question of what defines and makes an individual a citizen, legally, and how that is performed and engaged in a granular or daily way, and delves into the historical record of black Americans in Baltimore, exploring how individuals took on the qualities and actions of citizens before the 14th Amendment. Jones’ deeply researched work is, as she notes, “a history, told through a series of disruptive vignettes, that suggests how people without rights still exercised them.” This is a fascinating marrying together of the structural and legal parameters of citizen rights and denials of those rights for many black Americans, both free and enslaved, and the ideas and actions pursued and taken by African-Americans in an effort to act like and thus be citizens. As we continue to consider the idea of citizenship, which remains less fixed and clear as a concept or legal construct, this analysis lays out the fluid and evolving understanding of the idea and daily functioning of citizenship in the early years of the republic and, particularly, in context of free, formerly enslaved, and enslaved black Americans in the United States.

 

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Reece Peck's Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Cambridge University Press, 2019) offers a unique argument of why the Fox News Channel has been both a commercial successful and wielded enormous political influence. Peck focuses on the importance of the tabloid sensibilities and populist style of Fox News. He traces the history of Fox's counter-elite brand from Murdoch to O’Reilly to Hannity. Using the network's coverage of the economic recession as a case study, Peck shows how producers and hosts how use style to frame news events and create a coalition of working-class and business-class people.

Peck is assistant professor of media culture at College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

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