New Books Network

In this timely and bold book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World (U Chicago Press, 2025), Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that consistently appears as a moral good actually ends up creating harm for so many. Claims to innocence protect migrant children, but often at the expense of their parents; claims to the innocence of the fetus work to punish women. Ticktin shows how innocence structures political relationships, focusing on individual victims and saviors, while foreclosing forms of collective responsibility. Ultimately, she wants to understand how the discourse around innocence functions, what gives it such power, and why we are so compelled by it, while showing that alternative political forms already exist. She examines this process across various domains, from migration, science, and environmentalism to racial and reproductive justice.
Throughout the book, Ticktin shows how the concept of innocence intimately shapes why, how, and for whom we should care and whose lives matter—and how this can have devastating consequences when only an exceptional few can qualify as innocent. A politics grounded on innocence justifies a world built on inequality, designating most people—especially the racialized poor—as unworthy, undeserving, and less than human. As an alternative, she explores the aesthetics and politics of “commoning”—a collective regime of living that refuses a liberal politics of individual identity and victimhood.

Miriam Ticktin is professor of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is the author of Casualties of Care and the coeditor of In the Name of Humanity.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Her book, Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. 

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Hindu sacred geographies are shaped by interwoven webs of myth, ritual, and pilgrimage. Routes, Patterns, Ideologies: Navigating Sacred Sites in India (HASP, 2025) brings together essays that offer in-depth explorations of Hindu sacred spaces, focusing on the relationships between sites as a crucial dimension of their theological and social significance. Drawing on textual analysis, visual studies, and ethnographic insights, the contributors to this volume illuminate the patterns and mechanisms that link sacred sites into dynamic networks, demonstrating how sacrality is continually negotiated through evolving cultural, political, and theological landscapes.

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What happens when theories of racial hierarchies interact with reality? How are they contested, refuted and changed in light of that encounter? What role do experts, most notably social scientists, play here? And, what can these historical encounters tell us about how we should think of race and migration today? These are the questions which animate Sunmin Kim’s The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate (U Chicago Press, 2026). Taking as his focus the Dillingham Commission, a US government investigation into migrant groups established in 1907, Kim shows how theories of racial essentialism, which increasing were moving across the, at the time blurry, boundary between biology and society were used and contested in a moment when prominent political figures were eager to separate out the valued, long-established migrants from Western and Central Europe from those coming from Eastern and Southern Europe who all, on the face of it, were ‘white’. In doing so ideas such as ethnicity and the possibility of assimilation come to be mobilised. In turn Japanese migrants on the Pacific coast were placed beyond the pale of this possibility of assimilation and continued to be excluded. As Kim shows, not only did the commission report introduce some new vocabulary for thinking of race, but also played a key role in the development of US immigration quotas and a form of racial liberalism. This perspective, while accepting the possibility of a diverse body politic, rested on an assumption of a ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ element, including the possibility that some of the latter simply could never be ‘American’.

In our discussion we discuss the formation and activity of the Dillingham Commission. This includes discussing a number of key figures, such as Franz Boas who measures skulls for the commission and in so doing uses the same tools of the eugenicists and positivists to undercut their racist claims and Yamato Ichihashi who, while vociferously making the case that Japanese migrants such as himself are the ideal ‘Americans’ ends up being an example of the ‘insurmountable difference’ placed in front of such groups. We end by discussing how Zora Neale Hurston, once Boas’s student, provides a different way of conceiving of race and its place in immigration debates.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts.

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Medieval Brittany, with all its contradictions and complexities, comes alive in Meg Wahlberg’s Chivalry in the Shadows (Parkwood Manor Press, 2024). The author has studied and taught medieval literature, and it shows in her richly imagined descriptions of a world long lost, ruled by assumptions and obligations very different from our own.

But however evocative of the time and place in which it is set, Chivalry in the Shadows (Parkwood Manor Press, 2024) goes far beyond standard descriptions of the Middle Ages. Its heroine, Rowen, and her twin brother, Roland, would have to have been born in each other’s bodies to fit neatly into their society. Rowen will gladly fight for the woman she loves, whereas Roland would rather abandon chivalry altogether for music—to the great disgust of their father, determined to see both his children honor the traditions that have defined his life.

How the twins negotiate the gap between their individual strengths and the expectations placed upon them, you will have to read the novel to find out.

Meg Wahlberg specializes in medieval literature, which she teaches at Rowan University. Excavating the lives of marginalized and forgotten individuals, she writes fiction that reconstructs the stories that history has underrepresented. Chivalry in the Shadows is her debut novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including The Merchant’s Tale, co-written with P. K. Adams. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in the summer of 2026.

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Place-Based Solutions (JHU Press, 2026) offers a bold and practical response, charting a path toward what Charles G. Curtin calls "prosilience"—the capacity not just to endure crises, but to leap forward through them. With over thirty years of collaborative, on-the-ground experience in conservation and climate adaptation. This book emphasizes the power of small and mid-sized organizations to catalyze meaningful change, using real-world examples to illustrate how lasting impact depends on aligning ethics, equity, institutional design, and the ability to learn over time. Curtin encourages readers to shift their focus from the pre-crisis status quo to preparing for—and thriving in—novel futures.

This is the third of a series of books that Charles has authored to explore and test frameworks for addressing social and ecological change. His previous two books, The Science of Open Spaces and Complex Ecology: Foundational perspectives on Dynamic Approaches to Ecology and Conservation.

Charles has a Master's in Land Management and a doctorate in Zoology. And he completed a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in Climate Change Adaptation.

His current work develops carbon-negative, place-based conservation strategies addressing fire and drought in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, with companion projects focused on sustaining intact Panamanian cloud forests.

He now lives near Taos, New Mexico.

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On Sep. 6, 2018, India’s Supreme Court ruled that Section 377, a law that criminalized consensual homosexual activity, was unconstitutional, reversing an earlier decision from 2013. Both news headlines and LGBT activists hailed the decision as a major step forward for same-sex rights in India.

But in Mahesh Rao’s new novel Half Light (Penguin Random House India, 2025), the court’s deliberations sit in the background behind the budding relationship between Pavan, a hotel worker in Darjeeling, and Neville, a young, confident student. They meet first in Pavan’s hotel in Darjeeling in 2014; after a tragic incident, they meet again four years later, in Mumbai in 2018.

We’re joined again by Prarthana Prakash as a guest host.

Mahesh Rao grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. He has worked as a lawyer, academic researcher and bookseller in the UK. His debut novel The Smoke is Rising won the Tata First Book Award for fiction. His short fiction has been shortlisted for numerous awards. One Point Two Billion, his collection of short stories set across 13 Indian states, and Polite Society, a Delhi-set reimagining of Jane Austen's Emma, have both been published to critical acclaim. Mahesh has written for the New York Times, The Baffler, Prospect and Elle.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Half Light. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Marc Chagall is widely recognized as the preeminent Jewish artist of the 20th century, but little is known of his work to preserve Jewish culture. In this program, his granddaughter Bella Meyer interweaves images of Chagall’s artwork and personal letters to reflect on his life, passion for Yiddish and dedication to perpetuating Jewish heritage and culture.

This program originally took place on February 17, 2016.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Christine Estima about her novel, Letters to Kafka (House of Anansi, 2025). 

A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská’s torrid love affair with Franz Kafka. In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story “The Stoker” from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence. Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.

CHRISTINE ESTIMA is an Arab woman of mixed ethnicity (Lebanese, Syrian, and Portuguese) and the author of the short story collection The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society. She has written for the New York Times, The Walrus, VICE, the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Maisonneuve, the Toronto Star, and the CBC. Her story “Your Hands Are Blessed” was included in Best Canadian Stories 2023. She was shortlisted for the 2018 Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism and a finalist for the 2023 Lee Smith Novel Prize. Christine has a master’s degree from York University and lives in Toronto.

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The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet (U Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Lisa Nakamura challenges the widespread myth that the internet was born from the labor of a handful of white male entrepreneurs, recovering the uncredited and unpaid contributions of women of color. Focusing on three key inflection points in computing—the microchip era of the 1960s and ’70s, the rise of social media in the 2000s, and A.I.-fueled virtual reality in the 2020s—Dr. Nakamura illuminates these women’s instrumental roles in building new technologies and making them coherent to users.

From the Navajo women who manufactured the first semiconductor circuits in New Mexico to Tila Tequila, the queer Vietnamese American refugee who became the first true internet influencer in the MySpace age, to Black virtual reality creators, Dr. Nakamura highlights how women’s gendered and racialized identities have uniquely positioned them to mediate the development and proliferation of new technologies. She exposes how these women have been structurally excluded from racial capitalism’s benefits while their labor is considered as exploitable and inexhaustible as that of machines. Confronting this injustice, she focuses our attention on their work, which undergirds and makes possible the platforms ingrained in our daily lives.

Arguing for both recognition and material compensation for these women’s labor, The Inattention Economy is a powerful counterhistory of Silicon Valley and a persuasive call to imagine a different kind of internet.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The #MeToo revelations put a twenty-first-century stamp on the age-old story of women’s mistreatment in Hollywood. In Women in Hollywood's Dream Factory: Tales of Inequality, Abuse, and Resistance (U Illinois Press, 2026) Karen McNally edits a collection focused on examining and revising film history in the aftermath of the women’s stories, past and present, that have come to light.
The collection begins with essays on the interplay between reality and imagination in narratives and representations of women’s experiences of unequal treatment. In Part 2, contributors discuss how the gendered attitudes of the media’s stories enable inequality in Hollywood and look at the forces that arise whenever women resist these media assaults. The next section addresses the structures that built the inequalities and mistreatment while Part 4 revisits established narratives to challenge, renew, and expand upon our understanding of film history through women’s stories. Essays in the final section address the combination of inequality and resistance that defines women’s experiences in Hollywood.

Editor of book:

Karen McNally is Professor of American Film, Television and Cultural History at London Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on issues of stardom, gender, race, and American identity as they relate to Hollywood, Amer­ican television, and US history, culture, and politics. She has published widely in volumes and journals including Journal of American Studies and European Journal of American Culture, and she is the author, editor, or co-editor of five books, in­cluding, most recently, The Stardom Film (2020) and American Television during a Television Presidency (2022). Professor McNally was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2023 for the three-year interdisciplinary research project “Lana Turner, a Historical Biography.”

Bio note of host

Dr Priyam Sinha is an Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body. So far, her articles have been published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. She is also a regular podcast host at NewBooksNetwork and has been published in public writing forums like the Economic and Political Weekly, FemAsia, Asian Film Archive, among others. More information on her ongoing projects can be found on her website www.priyamsinha.com and you can follow her on X here

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