Musician James Brown is famous for his civil rights slogan, “Say it loud; I’m Black and I’m proud,” illustrating the argument that Kevin Quashie makes in his new book The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2012)–that public expressiveness has become the dominant trope for thinking through and even theorizing blackness. As a result, public expressivity (think powerful oratory at mass demonstrations or spirited polemics, such as David Walker’s Appeal) is linked to resistance. In fact, contemporary activist-scholars, such as Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, have called on others, particularly whites, to engage in this kind of public expressiveness associated with blacks. One of Jones’ 6 Rules for Allies, encourages others “to be loud and crazy so black folk don’t have to” (see http://vimeo.com/78945479). Jones is asking for allegiances that allow black folk time and space for quiet. Although what Jones advocates it still a necessity, Quashie presents a history and present of black folk engaging quiet, both with and without allies. In his provocative new study, Quashie expands and even challenges what it means to be loud and re-examines long held notions about double consciousness, the role of surrender vis a vis resistance, oratory as the most effective means of resistance, and the need to develop retrospection and cultivate interiority. No doubt his remarks during this interview will be of as much interest as the book.

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Ellen D. Wu‘s The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2014) charts the complex emergence of the model minority myth in fashioning Asian American stereotypes throughout the twentieth century. Wu investigates how inclusion of Asian Americans rather than exclusion can still reproduce racist attitudes against Asian Americans as well as other communities of color. In doing so, professor Wu considers the model minority myth’s multiple points of emergence from the U.S. state, countries in Asia, and Asian American communities themselves.

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Matthew Cecil brought many questions into his latest historical work, Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image (University Press of Kansas, 2014). Questions included, “Why were some members of the press so willing to serve as J. Edgar Hoover’s pawns, even when it was clear they were being used?” And, “How did Hoover’s interactions with the press resemble his leadership at the FBI?” Cecil, director of Wichita State’s Elliott School of Communication, said he has long had research interests into Hoover’s FBI. This is a book that will draw interest far beyond the Academy. Those interested in politics, media, criminal justice and one of America’s most storied and divisive figures, Hoover, would do well to pick up this book.

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John Ahlquist and Margaret Levi are the authors of In the Interest of Others: Organizations and Social Activism (Princeton University Press, 2013). Ahlquist is associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin; Levi is professor of political science at the University of Washington.

Ahlquist and Levi confront the paradox of how certain unions mobilize members to political action. Why would a union member support political acts outside of the scope of contract and wages? They build a theoretical model in order to answer that question. They argue that factors related to union leadership and the founding moments of each organization relate strongly to the success in convincing members to think about a “community of fate”. Unions use information and education to transform member beliefs about the wisdom of collective interest. Using cases from multiple countries, the book contributes to scholarship on labor movements, political mobilization, and studies of interest groups.

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David Biespiel‘s Charming Gardeners (University of Washington Press, 2013) is unlike any book I’ve read in a long time. Filled with epistolary poems, his book – despite being populated by the poet’s friends and family – is actually a work of great loneliness. In many ways, Biespiel’s journey is America’s, where the road is both a symbol of arrivals, but also departures, and in between is solitude. On the surface, Biespiel’s poems seem like the private meditations of one man. However, his poems encompass each of us, socially and politically, by illuminating our nation’s contradictory character: a longing for enchantment in a disenchanted world. The poems in Charming Gardeners live between the wilderness and the civilized and the poet, finding himself in this zone of uncertainty, does what any of us would do: call out to those we love. In our conversation we discuss his years in Boston and D.C., the Attic Institute in Portland, the poetry wars, and so much more. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

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Neoplatonists, including the 11th century Jewish philosopher-poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol, are often saddled with a cosmology considered either as outdated science or a kind of “invisible floating Kansas” in which spatiotemporal talk isn’t really about space or time. Sarah Pessin, Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, is committed to upending these traditional readings. In Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire: Matter and Method in Jewish Medieval Neoplatonism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Pessin begins her reappraisal from the ground up, interpreting neoplatonist cosmo-ontology as a response to the Paradox of Divine Unity: of how God can be both complete yet also give way to that which is other than Himself. Pessin argues that Ibn Gabirol saw being and beings as emanating from God via a process of divine desire – a kind of pre-cognitive, essential yearning to share His goodness forward. This desire infuses the initial Grounding Element, a positive conception of matter that (contrary to standard views) is prior to and superior to soul and intellect and utterly distinct from Aristotle’s notion of Prime Matter. Pessin’s provocative book is full of surprising insights that reveal the richness of the ideas of a “completely mischaracterized” figure and period.

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[Re-posted with permission from Wild About Math]

I’ve admitted before that Physics and I have never gotten along. But, science fiction is something I enjoy. So, when Princeton University Press sent me a copy of Physics Professor Chuck Adler‘s new book Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2014), I was intrigued enough that I wanted to interview the author. This interview rambled, but in a good way. Chuck is a great guest, he’s passionate about physics and math as well as fantasy and science fiction. We flowed through a number of subjects and had a grand time.

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Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World (Ashgate, 2013), a new book by Constance DeVereaux (Colorado State University) and Martin Griffin (University of Tennessee) sets out to challenge assumptions about policy making and culture in the contemporary world. The book has, at its centre, an understanding of narrative as both a practice that is central to what it means to be human and an analytical tool for understanding policy and culture. The book uses a wide range of case studies to illustrate the importance of this dual understanding of narrative to account for debates and differences between understandings of global culture as potentially threatening, in the form of globalization, or liberating, in the form of transnationalism. The case studies range from film and media studies, historical examples of Berlin and the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts, as well as questions over cultural heritage, through to readings of fictional case studies using the same narrative methods. The book will be essential reading for all scholars working in cultural policy and cultural studies, but also represents a challenge to the mainstream approaches of political science thinking about public policy.

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In her previous book, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (Yale University Press, 2006), Deborah Cohen took us into the homes of Britons and examined their relation to their habitat and its artifacts from 1830 onwards. In her new book, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013), Cohen focuses on the family cupboard of skeletons. As she airs its content, she asks what families tried to conceal in the past and why. Her journey begins in the eighteenth century, in the vast imperial lands of India where men attempted to hide their local wives and children from relatives back in Britain. Cohen then travels to mid-nineteenth century Britain and enters the Divorce Court where she traces how dissolving unhappy marriages came at the price of publicly exposing domestic failure. The heart of the book beats most ardently in three chapters that consider how families dealt with disability, adoption and homosexuality from the Victorian period till the 1970s. Cohen brings to life the hushed voices of heartbroken mothers, adoptive parents and children who didn’t live up to society’s standards. Cohen ends the book with an examination of the rise of the modern confessional culture from the 1930s through the 1970s.

The book situates secrets as a category in flux. It traces the role of families in the transformation of social norms from the Victorian era to the present day. Families are portrayed as active historical agents whose struggles to conceal and live with shameful details often softened social stigma such as that attached to illegitimacy, adultery or homosexuality. Cohen records how secrecy was transformed from a pervasive practice to its rejection as harmful. Cohen demonstrates insightfully how while secrecy was derided, privacy became entangled with personal freedom and public confession is championed as an avenue to greater happiness.

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Thomas Mann referred to Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) as a “criminal philosopher,” a “Pan-Germanist,” “an irrationalist,” a “Tarzan philosopher,” “a cultural pessimist… the voice of the world’s downfall.” Yet, Walter Benjamin urged his friend Gershom Scholem to read Klage’s latest book in 1930, at a time when Klages was increasingly bending his anti-Semitic philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) in a political direction. It was, Benjamin wrote, “without a doubt, a great philosophical work, regardless of the context in which the author may be and remain suspect.”

Nitzan Lebovic, historian at Lehigh University, has set himself the task of unfolding the ways in which Klages’s philosophy became both an inspiration for Nazi cultural politics and a subterranean source in the history of critical philosophy from Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben. In this podcast, we discuss his book The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History, 2013).

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