Duke University Press Research Articles

Against the Grain: The Poetics of Non-Normative Masculinity in Decadent French Literature. By Mathew Rickard

In this book, Mathew Rickard capably and enthusiastically studies ‘the literary representation of non-normative masculinity at a time when masculinity was perceived to be in crisis’ (p. 18). For Rickard, the fin-de-siècle masculinity crisis ‘ironically allowed greater representation of alternative behaviours and identities precisely due to the questioning of masculinity that was occurring’ (p. 18). Are there places and times when masculinity is not in crisis for someone? How are we to decide if one individual’s masculinity crisis is of wider consequence? Rickard, who situates his writers in the context of the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, concerns about depopulation, struggles for women’s emancipation, and a new sexological interest in ‘perversity’, wonders if masculinity is ‘inherently toxic’ or if ‘queerer, intersectional, even healthier forms of masculinity [can] flourish’ (p. 13). Do all non-normative forms of masculinity array themselves on the side of the queer? Is the queer always a ‘healthier’ or more progressive option? Rickard’s book joins a fascinating body of recent work addressing these difficult questions. Marlon B. Ross’s Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), for instance, is interesting to read in parallel with Rickard’s volume. At one point, Ross tellingly juxtaposes James Baldwin and Truman Capote. Baldwin is Ross’s exemplar of successful insurgency. Capote’s masculinity, for all its non-normative misfittedness, is one some might qualify as counter-insurgent. ‘Sissiness is manifested differently in different racial formations’, Ross suggests (Sissy Insurgencies, p. 29). Racial formations per se do not come up in Rickard’s study, but he mentions, for instance, ‘the intersection of class and masculinity’ (Against the Grain, p. 46). I might tend to surmise that at least one or two of the four figures Rickard studies fall mostly on the Capote side of things (non-normative masculinity being a privilege aligned with other social entitlements) rather than the Baldwin one, but perhaps Rickard would have a different view. Clusters of interrelated social variables specific to different socio-cultural contexts are crucial to the evaluation of any instance of non-normative masculinity. Forms of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ are themselves plural in most historical contexts. When Jean Lorrain and Joris-Karl Huysmans, from their very different social locations, engage with ‘masculinity’, are they engaging with the same thing? Are all people who exhibit non-normative masculinity ‘adversely affected by the laws of the Patriarchy’ (p. 11) to the same degree and in the same way? Rickard begins his demonstration with Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), exploring how ‘non-normative men can appropriate a hegemonic identity through engaging with literature’ (p. 60). He then examines how, in Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas (1901), ‘the representation of witchcraft […] links to the presentation of non-normative masculinity through comparable engagement with marginal practices’ (p. 65). The third chapter studies Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884) and La Tour d’amour (1899), and shows how in Rachilde’s work, a reconfigured masculinity can be found in both ‘passive’ men and some women. In a final chapter, on Octave Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire (1886), Rickard takes up the topic of impotence (literal and figurative, real and fictional) to probe what kind of an achievement textual (as well as real life) ‘masculine author(ity)’ might be (p. 170). Sometimes Rickard writes that things are ‘inherently queer’ (pp. 69, 119; my emphasis): occulture in the Lorrain chapter for instance, or, in Rachilde’s crafty hands, normative masculinity itself. I wonder if the materials Rickard so richly details for his readers might rather encourage us to think relationally, and to come to understand how not all stances that fail to be normative necessarily qualify as queer or insurgent or progressive.

A Note from the New Editors

In August 2022 the editorship of French Historical Studies passed from Kay Edwards and Carol Harrison (University of South Carolina) to a new team, Christine Haynes and Jennifer Ngaire Heuer. As we take the helm of this journal, which has been publishing since 1958, we are humbled by the trust placed in us by the search committee, Jeff Horn, Jean Pedersen, and Roxanne Panchasi, and the Executive Board of the Society for French Historical Studies, especially its president, Bryant (Tip) Ragan. We are deeply conscious of the responsibility we are assuming to serve our community of scholars, by continuing to publish the highest caliber of scholarly work on the history of France, defined in the broadest sense, chronologically, geographically, and thematically.In assuming the editorship of FHS, we are awed by and grateful for the example set by our predecessors, especially Kay and Carol. During their eight-year tenure they not only maintained the long tradition of publishing four stellar issues per year but also undertook a number of important initiatives, including shortening the time involved in the peer review process; making the journal more international, in its reviewers as well as its authors; and undertaking a thorough redesign of the journal, both print and electronic, including the addition of beautiful cover illustrations. We all owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude for their brilliant and enthusiastic guidance of the journal during their tenure.We are also incredibly grateful to the journal's managing editor, Laura Foxworth, who has agreed to stay on. Although many authors and reviewers may not know her role in the editorial process, it is central, and we have already benefited enormously from her smart and sound guidance. We are excited to work with her—and also the production and marketing staff at Duke University Press, still an ideal home for the journal—in the coming years.As an editorial team, we are closer in our scholarly specializations than Carol and Kay. Christine (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) is a dix-neuvièmiste who has written about a wide range of aspects of the cultural, political, economic, and military history of the long nineteenth century (1789–1914), including a book on the post-Napoleonic occupation of France. Jennifer (University of Massachusetts Amherst) also works mostly on the revolutionary era writ large, with special interests in gender, family, war, race, culture, and citizenship. However, we are both eager to get to know a wide variety of scholarship and scholars of all eras of French history. Although we teach at different institutions, we have experience collaborating and are grateful that email, Zoom, and the journal's online system, now transitioning from Editorial Manager to ScholarOne, enable us to work together so easily at a distance.Under our leadership, FHS will, above all, remain committed to publishing outstanding research, including in an annual special issue and regular forums. However, while individually authored articles based on primary research will remain the mainstay of the journal, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected such research, and will continue to do so, likely in ways that we cannot fully anticipate. At the same time, persistent discrimination and violence against people of color in the United States, in France, and elsewhere emphasize the need for our profession and its publications to work harder to include more voices, both of historians today and of historical subjects in the past. Building especially on discussion of this theme at the annual meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies in March 2022 in Charlotte, North Carolina, we intend to continue to make this journal more inclusive, in ways that are complementary to our sister societies, such as the Western Society for French History and the French Colonial History Society, and their publications. As we all recover from and adapt to the events of the last few years and to whatever comes next, we will be open to creative possibilities, such as new sorts of historiographical, pedagogical, collaborative, and hybrid conversations. In feeling our way forward, we will rely even more heavily than our predecessors on you, the journal's readers, authors, and reviewers. Now more than ever, this journal—and our society more generally—depends on you for its existence. Please support our scholarly community by subscribing to the journal, submitting your work, agreeing to review manuscripts, serving on the editorial board, and dropping us notes with comments and suggestions at french.historical.studies@gmail.com.

The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse by Valerie Cassel Oliver

Reviewed by: The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse by Valerie Cassel Oliver Sharon P. Holland The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. By Valerie Cassel Oliver. (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 282. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-934351-19-2.) The Dirty South is the culmination of a decade-long plan at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts “to enhance and broaden the institution’s service to the public, specifically in the areas of African and African American art” (p. viii). While the depth of cultural expression for the African-descended on this side of the Atlantic spans more than four hundred years, the exhibit and its catalog explore the period from 1920 to 2020, arguably some of the most turbulent years in Black expression and experience in the United States. The South of the exhibition’s curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, is indeed dirty, messy even. Its edges need a touch-up, but its roots stretch over that graveyard that begins with the gates through which we all return. The goals of this exhibit are ambitious, as its creators, artists (both visual and sonic), and dreamers aim to reposition our appreciation of the American South and how we frame what Cassel Oliver calls “the overall art historical narrative” (p. xiii). In her signature essay for the exhibition catalog, Cassel Oliver reminds us that the moniker “Dirty South” has been not only about a way of life, but also a way to life. This idea resonates across the spectrum of ideologies of Blackness in social justice and arts movements. In many ways, this collection of essays raises the question: why not use visual culture as a textbook for an understanding of Black history itself? Moreover, it questions what an archive is without its sonic and visual compatriots. Even as the exhibition and its catalog emphasize the materiality of African-descended cultural production, they speak to that place of spirit. Alabama-born artist Jack Whitten, for example, interpreted soul as “dematerialized matter” (p. 18). This is especially true in how the natural world comes forth in “vernacular” cultural production and “land art,” washes over, burrows under their creations. Assembled here in three sections, all of which refer to other artworks across the catalog, the essays yield little gems—like a conversation between Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Jennifer Burris about how Beverly Buchanan’s works both “live in the world” and speak to the world that the exhibition manifests (p. 36). One of the themes that the collection mines and revisits is more subtle, but perhaps it is its most important contribution to the discursive terrain that is the South. This theme is the sense that folks living elsewhere—in the space on the other side of an inverted Mississippi, or living in what is sometimes called the eastern corridor—often discount the contributions of folks who make their living life in this place, while at the same time waxing poetic about their own connection to this place they only visit in a kind of imaginary. As one of the most important scholars of this Dirty South and its music, Regina N. Bradley, reminds us, even within that entity called hip hop, axes of difference, especially in class, abound. As scholar Kirsten Pai Buick proposes, perhaps these contestations and differences can be understood by following the colonial history of this place. She argues that the South is not necessarily an entity that is part of the matrix [End Page 191] of the United States, but an imperial power that has thought of and—as you learn if you if you live here long enough—continues to think of itself in those terms. Shifting our vision once again, the exhibition catalog’s second section traverses this early southern empire. As scholar Anthony B. Pinn notes, the relationality of life and death in modes of Black expression is manifested in the slab, a custom car that becomes “a marker of ideological commitment aesthetically articulated,” where Black expression remakes transportation, turning it from ordinary to extraordinary (p. 84). In this catalog, we not only see constant...

All that was not her By ToddMeyers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 232 pp.

All that was not her By ToddMeyers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 232 pp.

Multisituated: Ethnography as diasporic practice By KaushikSunder Rajan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 272 pp.

Multisituated: Ethnography as diasporic practice By KaushikSunder Rajan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 272 pp.

There's a disco ball between us: A theory of Black gay life By JafariAllen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 440 pp.

There's a disco ball between us: A theory of Black gay life By JafariAllen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 440 pp.

Book Review: Jill Jarvis, Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021)

Jill Jarvis’s book Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony is a promising contribution to the flourishing research being done in the field of Memory Studies, that is challenging the Western and in this case the French politics of testimony from the postcolonial point of view. This book can be read from the larger ethical-political perspective in the field of International Relations, where there is a growing demand for Reconciliation Commissions to address archives beyond the legal framework. The book, as the title suggests, brings together both Postcolonial Studies and Memory studies in the context of Algerian history. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Jarvis’s deconstructive approach to testimony and memory examines how literature archives the two as forms of resilience, as bearers of witness to experiences that surpass both time and space to fill the gaps in official forms of testimony. As more and more nations are demanding compensation from their perpetrators for past violence and crime against humanity on the political front, this book’s relevance is heightened with its demand for justice and reform, and not merely to forgive and forget. The work of deconstruction that Jarvis undertakes to break down familiar language through reflections on the idea of Muslim, justice, witness, and revolt among others, she critiques the age-old practices of testimonial interrogations and censure that destabilises the multifaceted embodiment of Empire. “France remains constitutively haunted by the empire that it has tried both to exorcise and atone for (12)” succinctly covers the period of Algerian colonisation in 1830 to France’s continued endeavour to redeem and absolve itself from its colonial violence that has been and still remains under the shroud of wilful Western amnesia. Jarvis attempts to expose the denial of the paradox of the French Republican values they are so proud of, to demand justice and reform for the most abject.

Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados, by Nicole Charles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.

Suspicion: Vaccines, Hesitancy, and the Affective Politics of Protection in Barbados, by Nicole Charles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.

Economies and Circuits of Repair: On Reparative Justice Within/Beyond the State

Jovan Scott Lewis is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies Black people’s lived experience of racial capitalism and underdevelopment in Jamaica and Tulsa, Oklahoma, through analyses of injury, violence, repair, debt, and reparations. He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press, 2022). In 2021, he was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom to California’s Reparations Task Force, the first state-level reparations commission in the country.

A Black Feminist Study of Religion: Inheriting Victor Anderson’s Black Religious and Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACT In this article, I outline what Kristie Dotson refers to as an “inheritance map” for the epistemological insights and critical moves in Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995). I establish that Beyond Ontological Blackness represents what Stuart Hall calls a significant break – “where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes” 1 1 Hall, “Cultural Studies." – and thusly, a new direction in the study of black 2 2 In my current writing projects (post 2019) I use Black (rather than black) and white for political reasons. Full stop. I deploy a “b” when engaging oppression, however. Still, making distinctions in this essay between what should have a “B” (for example, Black women, church, students, presence, subject, religion, experience, etc.) and what should have a “b” (for example, antiblack, ontological blackness, symbolic blackness, black heroic cultural genius, black crisis, etc.) proved extremely difficult. Most challenging was turning my powerful “B” into a “b” throughout for clarity and consistency. religion and theology 3 3 This is not slippage. I distinguish between black theology and the study of black religion at length in Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). : black religion and culture studies. The latter of which makes room for a black feminist study of religion.

Companion Thinking in Improvised Musicking Practice

ABSTRACT We understand that our thinking and creating is always in company. By musicking with others, we situate ourselves amongst an entangled web of human, nonhuman, and more-than-human co-creators; to recognise these external and internal influences is to become a companion. Our concept of companion thinking stems from companion texts according to Sara Ahmed (2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), which may ‘prompt you to hesitate or to question the direction in which you are going, or they might give you a sense that in going the way you are going, you are not alone’ (16). Companionship implies with: In this paper, we discuss how companions are vital to our improvisatory music practices by considering the co-creative relationships in which we operate. we analyse our artistic research from our perspectives as performers and improvisers and consider the processes of making music with beyond-human entities. Instead of the human-focused concept of collaboration, we posit companionship as an approach to thinking-with and sounding-with the more-than-human, other-than-human, and nonhuman. Our former selves, experiences, environments, and nonhuman critters and objects are always-already part of our musicking practices and communities. Performance is thus ecological, political, and personal; it is through this lens that we analyse the entanglements of our varied communities and explore how this concept can stretch beyond a music practice, to consider what it means to engage in creative practice as migrant-settlers on stolen Aboriginal land. This paper includes an investigation of what it means to be a companion and a discussion of a practice-based case study in which we implement—or practice—companion thinking. As friends, collaborators, and companions to one another, we each present our individual concepts of companionship through our own improvisation practices, addressing themes of situatedness, response-ability, surprise, stumbling, curiosity, and unmastery. We then analyse the entanglements of our work in performance. This process of thinking, making, and doing in-company offers the opportunity to consider an intersection of analysis and performance through an improvisatory musical practice.

Jennifer L. Morgan. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021. 296 pp.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewJennifer L. Morgan. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021. 296 pp.Li Qi PehLi Qi Peh Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 49, Number 2Winter 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722455 Views: 68Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

An Interview with Lee Edelman

Abstract: Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University and a key figure in queer theory. This interview was conducted in December 2022, a month before Edelman's fourth book, Bad Education , was published by Duke University Press. In this discussion, Edelman revisits the "antisocial" debate in queer theory and assesses his understanding of negativity and antisociality in relation to the positions of Leo Bersani and José Esteban Muñoz, among others. Edelman also outlines how his thought in No Future and Bad Education interacts with contemporary politics and strands of Afropessimism, feminism, and family abolition.

:Re-Enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsRe-Enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China, by Mayfair Yang. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. x+374 pp. US$109.95 (cloth), US$29.95 (paper).David A. PalmerDavid A. PalmerUniversity of Hong Kong Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 89January 2023 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722854 Views: 6Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka

Reviewed by: African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka Sheila Petty (bio) African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka. Duke University Press. 2021. 336 pages. $104.95 hardcover; $27.95 paper; also available in e-book. Cajetan Iheka’s outstanding book on environmental issues in African visual culture and screen media paves the way for scholarship in African ecocritical studies. Organized into five chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics shows how, through film, video art, photography, sculpture, and other media, African artists deliver a unique perspective on the socioecological costs of media production, from mineral and oil extraction to the politics of animal conservation. What, for Africa, Iheka asks, is the price of “the ecological footprint of media”?1 He posits that Africans “are disproportionately affected by the distribution of ecological risks” and calls for “empathetic labor” that “is nonexploitative, and is calibrated around the flourishing of various life forms in Africa and beyond.”2 Iheka’s work underscores the significance of African cultural artifacts and their centrality in ecomedia studies and provides a model for twenty-first-century ecological media studies that combine media arts, resource media, and elemental media (e.g., fire, air, water, and earth). The author’s main goal is to expose a grand narrative of global entanglements and to uncover the ecological, social, and human expense to Africa of production and consumption of global media. Iheka’s project probes the implications of resource extraction on the African continent and the ethics of presenting [End Page 204] these images to the world. His methodology constitutes an approach he calls “insightful reading,” which is contextual, located in historical and environmental frames, and allows for consideration of an image’s deep structure through holistic analysis of its cinematic properties.3 In chapter 1, Iheka is concerned with temporal entanglements, which he explores through Wanuri Kahiu’s short science fiction film Pumzi (2009) and Fabrice Monteiro’s series of photographs titled The Prophecy (2015). He argues that both media examples draw on previous African traditions and myths specific to their cultures and blend conventions of artistic genres, African philosophy, and supernatural beliefs. Although Iheka relies somewhat on the Afrofuturism discourse of Mark Dery and Alondra Nelson in this chapter, he is careful to not allow African Indigenous concerns to be overshadowed by the African American frame of Afrofuturism.4 He further asserts that both artists foreground the aesthetics of waste recycling and recuperation. Iheka regrets that Pumzi’s emancipatory thrust is overshadowed by the sacrifice the main character Asha (Kudzani Moswela) must make of her life in order to counter the death of a tree. Monteiro’s photographs foreground their constructed nature by showing extra-human African figures maneuvering through post-apocalyptic backgrounds that include oceans, junkyards, and masses of trash. The figures are clothed in nets, cables, and other objects salvaged from oceans and landfills. Iheka maintains that these artists’ works proffer a culture of hope through recycling and reuse. He further proffers that these works constitute the fruits of a shriving process on the part of the artists as they work through and past complicated traumas of racial, cultural, and global magnitude. Chapter 2 extends Iheka’s discussion of temporal networks by reading spatial interconnections in Pieter Hugo’s series of photographs titled Permanent Error (2011), which depicts recycling of electronic waste in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, and Franck Bieleu’s documentary film The Big Banana (2011), which documents the workings of a transnational banana plantation in Cameroon. The author takes up the issue of labor and its various entangled forms of exploited African unwaged and digital labor that enable planetary communications technology. Chapter 3 extends this theme by probing the ecological and human trauma produced by resource extraction in Nigeria (oil) and Niger (uranium). Michael Watt and Ed Kashi’s Curse of the Black Gold (2008), a collaborative work of fiction, poetry, essays, photographs, interviews, and a letter, “paints the image of a future tainted by oil toxicity” in the Niger Delta, while Idrissou Mora-Kpai’s film Arlit, deuxième Paris (Arlit: The Second Paris, 2005) depicts how extractive uranium strip mining in the town of Arlit...

Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood by Vanessa Díaz

Reviewed by: Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood by Vanessa Díaz Chihab El Khachab Vanessa Díaz, Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 328 pp. Manufacturing Celebrity is an ethnography of the celebrity media industry based in Los Angeles, with an emphasis on the precarious work of paparazzi and celebrity reporters working with magazines such as People and Us weekly. The book contributes to the existing literature on precarious labour in the American media industries as well as the broader field of media anthropology. It is divided into three main parts covering the labour of Latino paparazzi, the labour of white female celebrity reporters, and the content of celebrity magazines. Chapter 1 is an engaging ethnography of the everyday work of Latino paparazzi in Los Angeles, while Chapter 2 delves into the overall political economy of paparazzi images. With a focus on the death of Chris Guerra, a Latino paparazzo, after a police altercation on the job, Chapter 3 reflects on the disposability of racialized bodies in contemporary America. Chapters 4 and 5 provide, respectively, an ethnographic study of red-carpet routines and a strong analysis of the precarity of white celebrity reporters. Finally, Chapter 6 delves into the work of “body teams” in celebrity magazines, which are tasked with covering and manufacturing celebrity bodies on a daily basis, while Chapter 7 explores the power of blended couple names à la “Brangelina.” The book’s core strength lies in its detailed ethnographic attention to the racialized and gendered work of the celebrity media industry, a well-established theme in existing scholarship on American film and television production more broadly. Chapter 1, for instance, details how paparazzi [End Page 197] shifted from being a mostly white male profession before the 2000s to a workforce of mostly Spanish-speaking Latino men, both documented and undocumented, working in precarious circumstances whether through agencies or as freelancers. The author highlights the unspoken skills and professional ethics upheld by paparazzi in the face of widespread condemnation—and in some cases criminalization—of their daily livelihoods. In a similar vein, Chapter 5 narrates the sexualization of female celebrity reporters’ work, which attracted media attention after the #MeToo movement, yet was integral to the industry’s working practices for decades. The chapter shows how reporters are expected to work in numerous informal spaces—classrooms, hospitals, restaurants, houses, nightclubs—in which their physical safety becomes secondary to their ability to elicit information by all means necessary. Another strength of the book is the analysis of the commercial conditions under which celebrity images are made and sold. Chapter 2, in particular, explains the political economy of the boom in paparazzi images after Us weekly, Life and Style, and Star became major competitors to People in the weekly celebrity magazine sector in the early 2000s. This boom not only affected the livelihoods of paparazzi, but also the value attached to certain kinds of images. For instance, whereas “exclusive” shots of celebrities were very valuable in the 2000s, the growing number of “candid” paparazzi images meant that magazines paid less and less to buy their rights, while incentivizing the paparazzi to sell their images multiple times to multiple outlets. The author astutely notes the collusion between celebrities, agents, publicists, and paparazzi in producing the candid images fed to weekly magazines; a collusion hinging all at once on the productive labour of paparazzi and their professional marginalization to avoid legal liabilities on the magazines themselves. While rich in ethnographic detail, the book makes some ambitious claims that are not always supported by ethnography or theoretical elaboration. For instance, the reader is told that Donald Trump’s election to the presidency demonstrates how “the power of celebrity and Hollywood stardom has never held more social, cultural, political, and economic power than it does now” (16). This statement is not supported by a strong historicization of American celebrity culture in the book, whose sources are mostly restricted to the 2000s. This short-term historical focus gives little confidence in the author’s claim that the power of celebrity is unprecedented, since growth in the celebrity media industry’s size cannot [End Page...

A Review of Darren Byler, Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022, 296 pp.

This book explores the situation of the Uyghur population in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region through the prism of the influence of technology. The author uses the concept of terrorcapitalism to show the complexity of the Uyghur’s relations with the authorities and other ethnic groups, as well as with each other in everyday life. To do so, he identifies three processes through which Uyghur men have to go—digital exclusion, ethno-racial devaluation, and material dispossession. The author also suggests three ways of coping with life’s difficulties: friendship, minor politics, and subtraction.

Review of Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium by Mila Zuo (Duke University Press)

In 'Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium,' Mila Zuo examines how female Chinese actors perform "vulgar beauty" as a way of "worlding" to create community and belonging through affective shocks, and specifically, to produce feelings of Chineseness. By using the sense of taste, and specifically the flavors bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour, as a framework, Zuo delves into close readings of television and cinematic case studies to look at the different ways vulgar beauty is deployed by these actors. In its analysis, this book offers a reconceptualization of feminine beauty outside of white western dictates and suggests that (vulgar) beauty can be utilized as a potentially disruptive and transformative force, specifically in destabilizing racial and patriarchal power structures.

Eating in Theory by Annemarie Mol

Reviewed by: Eating in Theory by Annemarie Mol Jessica Hardin Annemarie Mol, Eating in Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 208 pp. Towards the end of the book, Mol offers an example taken from her fieldwork at a food conference for healthcare professionals. In it, a researcher presents a paper that argues that humans, even those in affluent places like Europe, should eat more protein. When asked about the earthly repercussions of such a diet, the researcher responds that this is outside of his domain; that is, the effect of increased protein on the earth and the future of humanity is a political issue (131). As a quick, direct example, this interaction speaks to the heart of this book: how do we live on an earth as it is existentially threatened by human action? This broader frame animates Mol’s feminist critique of human exceptionalism. In the first chapter, Mol situates the reader within philosophical anthropology and empirical philosophy. This chapter would be an excellent addition to anthropological theory seminars because of the ways it denaturalizes the centrality of “the human” (and its particularly hierarchical terms) in Western philosophical and epistemological traditions. The intervention space she carves out is noting that beyond “rising above other creatures,” the human is also situated as rising above the body itself to achieve transcendence (2). Mol asks, what kind of human, in contrast, emerges when we center eating, feeding, nourishment, and sustenance in our theories? By theorizing eating, Mol attends to socio-material conditions by way of rethinking what she calls being (Chapter 2), knowing (Chapter 3), doing (Chapter 4), and relating (Chapter 5). In the final chapter, Mol lays out the political stakes for theorizing eating through “specific [End Page 193] stories about situated people, dependent on each other, on other creatures, and on a forgiving, but frightfully fragile earth” (126). Mol is clear to state that while this is a book of theory, she is not offering a Theory of eating or even the human—as in, she doesn’t offer an “over-arching explanatory scheme” (1). Her approach is to re-consider these through “eating inflected intellectual terms and tools” (6). Each chapter takes aim at canonical philosophical texts that anthropologists engage, most notably Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Each chapter builds from the core recognition that eating is transformative—socially and materially––and that by carefully attending to eating, the fiction of transcendence derived from overcoming the flesh is laid bare. The subtext here is that this hierarchical notion of the human is ultimately a dangerous one, a model that is existentially threatening. There are several cross-cutting themes that thread together Mol’s concerns with rethinking being, knowing, doing, and relating. Here I focus on her ethnographic analyses, the issue of temporality, and the model of care that she develops throughout the text. Based on fieldwork in the Netherlands in diverse places from elderly homes, rehabilitation centers, food conferences and nutritional laboratories, Mol hones in on mundane examples with theoretical explorations that truly match. Examples in the “Being” chapter range from her observations of a speech therapist talking through the process of swallowing with her patient to a dietician diagramming how the body processes sugar as she teaches people living with diabetes how to eat. In both of these examples, Mol’s purpose is draw attention to the absence of eating in philosophical anthropology and demonstrate its significance for what it means to be human. Mol demonstrates that bodies transform through the process of eating making them “externally entangled and internally differentiated” (40). From eating to being, Mol uses instances of situated eating to explore a model of being where “inside depends on the outside, while continuity depends on change” (49). Bridging examples from therapeutic contexts to her own table to a friend’s garden, Mol does what anthropology does best—building ways of thinking about and laboring in the world inspired from “the specificity and situatedness of each and every eater” (25). The second cross-cutting theme that is not articulated as such but runs throughout the book is the issue of temporality. In presenting eating as transformative, Mol encourages the reader to see the ways that...

Domesticating Democracy: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia. SusanEllison. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 281 pp.

Domesticating Democracy: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia. SusanEllison. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 281 pp.