Earlier Chapters Research Articles

Author's Response: The Asia-Pacific Kaleidoscope Continues to Shift

Author's Response:The Asia-Pacific Kaleidoscope Continues to Shift T.J. Pempel (bio) I want to express my sincere thanks to Asia Policy for providing the venue for this collective assessment of A Region of Regimes: Prosperity and Plunder in the Asia-Pacific. I am especially indebted to the five reviewers for their thoughtful reflections on the book. Nothing is more rewarding to an author who has finished a major book project than to have respected colleagues engage in a thoughtful and appreciative critique of its core arguments. Beyond the usual highlighting of the book's merits and flaws, each reviewer draws attention to different facets of its key contentions. Most go on to suggest valuable extensions of its logic, plus ways in which it points to new research targets and future real-world problems. Although it is tempting to underscore the reviewers' favorable comments, I would prefer to use this limited space to respond to several of the challenges they raise, the extensions they suggest, and the implications for evolving regional uncertainties. Let me begin by addressing two key criticisms. First, though gentle in his wording and appreciative of the "big" picture the book attempts, Thomas Pepinsky questions my provocative grouping of the Philippines with Myanmar and North Korea as rapacious regimes. His data on GDP per capita, tertiary education, and trade certainly suggest more economic differences than similarities among the three regimes. I would raise two counterpoints. First, I focused almost exclusively on the Marcos era (1965–86), when a host of similarities such as official corruption, widespread repression, and anti-industrialization radiated closer resonance. Second, external forces in all three regimes provided powerful underpinnings for rapacious repression while mitigating against industrial development. In North Korea and Myanmar, foreign sanctions, self-chosen isolation, and extensive reliance on foreign profiteering from raw materials and agricultural riches were key elements keeping narrow and repressive elites in power while simultaneously obstructing industrialization. Likewise, the United States was a fulsome supporter of the Marcos dictatorship; moreover, in an ironic twist, U.S. support for land reform and industrial upgrades that had been so critical to industrial development within Japan, [End Page 194] South Korea, and Taiwan gained no traction in the Philippines. Rather, the U.S. government defended entrenched U.S.-run sugar magnates and landed elites in the country, both powerful veto players against land reform and serious industrial improvement. Pepinsky's data also points to something not discussed in his review but that the book treated as pivotal in its distinction between the developmental and the ersatz developmental regimes—tertiary education. It is high and rises continually in the developmental regimes, while it lags demonstrably in the ersatz developmental regimes, creating a long-term obstacle against those regimes capturing a substantial portion of GDP gains. Mary Alice Haddad raises a second criticism worthy of discussion. Although she acknowledges that different mixes of regimes play a powerful role in the dynamics and shaping of the regional order, she rightly notes that my treatment of the Asian region devotes little attention to subnational linkages. As a corrective, she foregrounds the ways in which micro-level multilateral projects often span different regime types and serve as powerful spurs to cross-border cooperation and mutual learning. As such, they add vibrant threads to the regional tapestry. While I accept her point, the argument in the book's concluding chapter analyzes how shifting balances and interactions among the national regimes examined in earlier chapters were critical drivers of the most visible alterations in the regional order. Though one can, of course, debate the significance of state-level vs. local-level webs of cooperation, as Gilbert Rozman found to his disappointment in his 2004 study Northeast Asia's Stunted Regionalism, nationalism, competition for power, and bilateral national government distrust in many instances upended even the most diligent efforts at cross-border cooperation by city mayors or NGOs.1 Several reviews suggest tantalizing ways to extend the logic of the book. Pepinsky sees it as calling for more macro-structural studies of political economy. I share his predisposition. Such macro-structural analyses hold the greatest potential not only to expand our theoretical understanding of East Asia...

Modernism's Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America by Michael Osman (review).

Reviewed by: Modernism's Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America by Michael Osman Anna-Maria Meister (bio) Modernism's Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America By Michael Osman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Pp. 280. This might not be a love story, but it is the tale of a contested relationship. At times abusive, at times symbiotic, architecture and regulation systems not only got together some time ago—here largely during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—but also learned how to support each other. But, as in many romantic stories, the honeymoon period soon shifts as they discover how to push each other's buttons. Michael Osman stresses early on in his multifaceted book that this is not a history of technology; neither, one might add, is it the history of modern architecture told through standardization (which insists on questions of modularity, units, and the logistics to aggregate them). The history Osman tells of regulation practices from late nineteenth century America is one of negotiations: between architecture's insides and outsides, between formal intention and technical necessity, and not least between bodies and the spaces they occupy. He takes systems such as the thermostat or paperwork not merely as narrative for progressivism, but as materialization of architecture's oldest function: to provide shelter in an increasingly self-constructed environment. As such, this could be slotted into a not-quite-expected contribution to the contested category of environmental history in architecture. Expanding histories of hermetic "closed worlds" (Lydia Kallipoliti, The Architecture of Closed Worlds, 2018) or climate and energy measures responding to planetary conditions (Daniel Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate, 2020), Osman understands environment as an interwoven category of porous, uncontrollable, self-made conditions with architectural constructions. Reminiscent of stories where American heroes are expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, here, modern American architecture draws on regulation mechanisms to counter the problems emerging from its own construction. Where industrial production polluted the air, ventilation systems and filters were installed, and where many bodies worked in accord, thermal conditioning became a requirement for ongoing productivity. The first two chapters make this network of bodies, technology, and labor directly apparent. In "The Thermostatic Interior and Household Management," Osman lays out the manifold connections between domestic work and its optimization, a process in constant reciprocity with the attempt to steady the (not only) thermal conditions of mass production. Here, the necessity for clean air oscillated between manual labor—opening and closing windows, for example—and automated filtering systems, when neither inside nor outside was reliable for providing it. In turn, this development [End Page 297] soon entered back into the domestic realm. Discussing "Cold Storage and the Speculative Market of Preserved Assets" in chapter two, Osman untangles the joint strands of economic and microbacterial stabilization through cooling: where food could not rot, prices fluctuated less. Properly outfitted architecture became a key player in this regulation of an ostensibly closed-off interior, one in fact sutured to its environment by metabolist and financial constructs. Warehouses became monumental displays of architectural control, manifesting the modernist aesthetic European architects would soon fawn over. As Osman reminds us, technological systems are only as societally impactful as their representation: what good is control if no one can see it? Where regulation had signaled its virtues through architecture, as Osman explicated in earlier chapters, its practice happened on paper as much as through pipes. In their aesthetic performativity of seemingly objective optimization efforts, the acts of "Representing" or "Imaging" of "Paper-work" in Osman's story are not medial layers distinct from architecture's constructions, but their key. Despite the actors' attempt to enforce dichotomies such as "inside and outside, life and death, profit and loss," what becomes apparent is the inseparability of these categories. While the main themes of this history of modern architecture sound familiar in many places, Osman's insistence on the entanglements between technology and its material representation, and between bodily acts and technified solutions, brings their fuzzy edges into focus. Regulation here is not merely aesthetically motivated nor simply technologically driven, but details a set of material practices in the world, continuously negotiating that which is on paper...

The Mo'olelo Hawai'i of Davida Malo: Hawaiian Text and Translation by Davida Malo

Reviewed by: The Mo'olelo Hawai'i of Davida Malo: Hawaiian Text and Translation by Davida Malo Kahikina de Silva (bio) The Mo'olelo Hawai'i of Davida Malo: Hawaiian Text and Translation, Vol. 2 davida malo; translated and edited by charles langlas and jeffrey lyon, biography contributed by noelani arista University of Hawai'i Press and Bishop Museum Press, 2020 394 pp. At the very start of this volume, we are reminded that its author, Davida Malo (1795–1853), wrote in a language that differs not only from the English on which most contemporary readers rely but also from the Hawaiian commonly spoken today. As the editors note, "His Hawaiian [is] not our Hawaiian" (x). What becomes most clear through this text is that Malo's Hawai'i is a similiarly independent, unfamiliar entity. In a sense, his [End Page 1019] Hawai'i is not our Hawai'i, though its most vital tenets persist in the lives and works of its Indigenous people. In this work, Malo provides detailed descriptions of Hawaiian society and a history of its chiefs, from those who voyaged across the Pacific to the royal genealogies of Hawai'i island. Though many histories of Hawai'i have been written, Malo's is unique in its perspective, penned by an Indigenous scholar and chiefly adviser who witnessed firsthand that of which he writes. His is a simultaneously broad and deep account of not only the famed endeavors of chiefs, but also Hawaiian philosophy, ethics, political structure, and daily life. The Mo'olelo Hawai'i of Davida Malo provides a carefully edited and annotated copy of Malo's original work, with an introduction written by editors Langlas and Lyon and a thoughtful biography of the author contributed by Noelani Arista. The editors' introduction conveys the scope of their work, detailing both the translation of Malo's Hawaiian manuscript into English and the editing of the Hawaiian text to follow contemporary conventions of orthography and punctuation. The discussion of the difficulties faced in both endeavors is of particular use to students working in transcription and translation, as it raises questions relating to consistency, readability, and establishing editorial conventions. Points raised here could provide an effective springboard from which to launch further discussion of choices often made by editors and translators and how those choices affect the information available to the reader. Both the editors' introduction and Arista's biography also do the important work of contextualizing Malo's life and writings for readers of varied familiarity with Hawaiian language and history. Arista attends to the former by offering a broader understanding of Malo, going beyond academia's identification of him as historian and "native informant." She examines Malo in his more influential role as adviser, first to chiefs and later to the entire nation, and it becomes clear that Malo not only penned the story of his people but also was actively involved in its production. Similarly, the editors' notes for reading Malo's Mo'olelo and their analysis of his text as a "bridge," spanning the eras of change Malo witnessed, afford the author agency in both "mov[ing] beyond what he was taught" in the two systems of education that fostered him and in choosing how to blend those teachings in his compositional style (5). As demonstrated in the introduction, this style depends on traditional Hawaiian literary practices [End Page 1020] such as word lists and the partnering of opposites, which are prevalent throughout the Hawaiian text. Though the editors have smoothed out some of these cultural elements, favoring readability in their translation, many remain and may seem cumbersome to English-only readers. The introductory notes prepare readers for such instances and create space for discussion regarding narrative strategies. As a teaching text, this edition of Malo's Mo'olelo will have a significant impact on Hawaiian language learners. Many advanced classes employ Malo's text to help students understand connections between language and worldview. Early chapters list Hawaiian terms that name and organize space—atmospheric strata, bands of terrestrial elevation, political land division, and so on. By mapping these terms on paper or the environment, students learn to visualize these words, their meanings, and how...

Edición y comunismo: Cultura impresa, educación militante y prácticas políticas (México, 1930–1940)

Sebastián Rivera Mir explores the overlap between a Leninist “doctrina del libro”—the belief that spreading Marxist theory led to revolutionary transformation—and Mexico's broader print culture in the 1930s (p. 42). In this carefully researched and elegantly written volume, the world of Communist publishing radiates out from the books themselves to a complex web of editors, printers, vendors, and readers. It was truly transnational, as were parallel editorial traditions throughout Latin America. Europe in general and Moscow in particular were central: for much of the period, the vast majority of Communist books circulating in Mexico were theoretical texts written by Russian (Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov) and European Marxists and published in Spain. Even as production moved to Mexico in the 1930s, decisions in Moscow often determined which books were published. Thus, the early militant posture of the Comintern's Third Period, its shift to an antifascist Popular Front strategy, and subsequent Soviet purges and the short-lived Soviet-Nazi alliance in the late 1930s inevitably shaped editorial efforts in Mexico. The world of Mexican editorials was also peopled by militants from Europe, Latin America, and the United States, some sent by national Communist parties, some seeking political refuge, and some drawn by the cultural effervescence of Cardenista Mexico. And in turn, Mexican publications crossed porous borders and offset the earlier influence of Spain.The author inserts Mexico's “edición comunista” within a national history and print culture that goes back to nineteenth-century liberalism. The central institutional actors are Mexican: the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the Universidad Obrera de México, the Secretaría de Educación Pública, and unions like the Unión de Obreros de Artes Gráficas. So too are his three case studies, the “no tan rojo” Ediciones Frente Cultural, the PCM's own Editorial Popular, and the semimaverick Editorial América (p. 85). Rivera Mir suggests multiple ways that Mexicans made European texts their own: the decisions of Ediciones Frente Cultural to publish books from a variety of socialist traditions; the golden age of quantity and quality of Marxist book production under Lázaro Cárdenas; the interventions of editors and translators in the prologues, footnotes, and texts of European authors; and the eventual decision of the PCM's Editorial Popular to focus on national affairs and texts written by their own leaders.Nowhere is the narrative richer than in the author's re-creation of editorial networks and the people who participated in them, “desde libreros a escritores, pasando por traductores, dibujantes, distribuidores e impresores,” people who often “se transformaron en activistas incansables” (p. 16). We learn how editor Carlos Rojas Juanco worked without pay and often without eating, and how the young Benita Galeana, then barely literate, sold Communist publications in the Mercado Hidalgo and the Carolina textile factory (a rare glimpse of women in a print world dominated by men). One short chapter re-creates an even more understudied world of print, that of conservative militants and their publishers. The parallel worlds of Communist and conservative print were often antithetical: Luis Islas García left the PCM youth organization to become a militant Catholic and author of anti-Communist books. Rivera Mir makes clear that the world of edición comunista contained all the contradictions of global Communist culture in the 1930s, as when a book by Nikolay Bukharin disappeared from the Ediciones Frente Cultural list of titles in newspaper ads after he was purged in the Soviet Union. Particularly interesting is Rivera Mir's profile of militant bookseller Rodrigo García Treviño, who in his brief role as editor of Editorial América insisted on the right to dissent from the flip-flops of PCM policy.This book about books re-creates the world of edición comunista and also hints at its limits. For example, Rivera Mir observes that many of the books that he painstakingly tracked down had uncut pages or margin notes only in early chapters. The Communist ideal of a militant readership was sometimes at odds with a membership, rural and urban, with limited time and literacy to digest dense Marxist texts (consider the unread books on my shelves). These theoretical books seem mostly divorced from the better known and undoubtedly more accessible forms of Mexico's radical print culture, periodicals like El Machete and illustrated pamphlets and posters. Future research might explore the extent to which editors, press operators, and vendors of these distinct forms of Communist publication overlapped. Similarly, to what extent were prints, songs, and stories, often linked to forms of popular culture, able to convey changing Communist doctrine while balancing indoctrination with the urgencies of socialization and the appeal of nationalism? Edición y comunismo provides a pioneering model and new directions for research on radical print culture.

Review: The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome, by Nicola Denzey Lewis

Review: The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome, by Nicola Denzey Lewis

Review: The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland, by Holly Folk

Review| November 01 2021 Review: The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland, by Holly Folk The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland. By Holly Folk. University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 366 pages. $90.00 cloth; $34.95 paper; ebook available and open access through JSTOR eBooks. Rebecca Moore Rebecca Moore Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nova Religio (2021) 25 (2): 145–146. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2021.25.2.145a Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rebecca Moore; Review: The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland, by Holly Folk. Nova Religio 1 November 2021; 25 (2): 145–146. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2021.25.2.145a Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNova Religio Search Holly Folk’s history of the origins and development of chiropractic blends the story of D. D. Palmer (the “discoverer”) and his son B. J. Palmer (the “developer”) of spinal manipulation therapy with in-depth analyses of New Thought, Western Esotericism, Harmonial Religion, and more. Folk deftly places chiropratic within the context of nineteenth-century alternative medicine, which includes magnetic healing, vertebral vitalism, neurocentrism, and other metaphysical approaches to health. Six chapters focus on chiropractic’s beginnings and the (literal) internecine conflicts that ensue over philosophy and treatment. The seventh looks at the current state of chiropractic outside the United States and, somewhat oddly, reintroduces the possibility of Rosicrucian influences on the Palmers, briefly covered in earlier chapters. The book is a veritable compendium of the most influential alternative mental and physical healers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. Most fascinating are the glimpses that Folk provides of the precursors... You do not currently have access to this content.

American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change by Emily Sigalow (review)

Reviewed by: American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change by Emily Sigalow Steven Kaplin Emily Sigalow. American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. 280 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000374 In the first section of her 2019 American JewBu, Emily Sigalow plots a clear historical trajectory of both American Judaism and American Buddhism through the lens of Jews who, in a variety of ways, engage with Buddhism. Eschewing histories that begin with the 1960s counterculture, Sigalow locates the earliest American JewBus in the spirituality movements of the nineteenth century. Her story commences with Charles T. Strauss, born Jewish, who publicly converted to Buddhism in Chicago during the famous World's Parliament of Religions. Sigalow finds in Strauss a Jewish exemplar of Buddhist modernism—empirical, scientific, universal—and the American Buddhist turn away from Asian Buddhist traditions and metaphysics. In chapters 2 and 3, Sigalow traces a JewBu tradition of Buddhist modernization, from Buddhism-interested Felix Adler at the turn of the twentieth century, to Julius Goldwater, an ordained Buddhist priest who took primary care of three Buddhist temples in Los Angeles during the Japanese internment, to more contemporary Jewish Buddhist teachers like Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Ram Dass, who have each been instrumental in spreading Buddhist-inspired meditation to a broad American audience. Thus, Sigalow argues, JewBus played an outsized role in shaping American Buddhism as modern. Sigalow makes this point without losing track of broader historical or theoretical trends; she intersperses her descriptions of well-known JewBus with analyses of colonialism and anti-Asian racism, as well as theoretical assessments of relevant terms like spirituality and syncretism. Sigalow uses these historically compelling early chapters to sidestep the pervasive question in other writings on JewBus (Why are so many American Buddhists Jewish?) in order to ask instead how the Jewishness of JewBus is relevant to their Buddhism. Sigalow conjectures that because modernism and universalism were particularly important to American Jews, American JewBus were especially ready to pick up on these elements in American Buddhism and fashion them into core elements of the American Buddhist tradition. Sigalow does not so much portray JewBus as distinct from other non-Asian Buddhist modernizers but as uniquely qualified agents of the burgeoning movement. In this sense, Sigalow reveals seemingly marginal JewBus to be central figures through which the historical development of Buddhism in America can be delineated. [End Page 492] The second section of American JewBu focuses more on Judaism. In the fourth chapter, Sigalow reveals ways in which the prevalence of JewBus helped create the conditions for the growth of contemplative Judaism in the second half of the twentieth century. For example, Sigalow notes a handful of conferences, including the meeting of a Jewish delegation with the Dalai Lama in India, made famous by Roger Kamenetz's The Jew in the Lotus (HarperCollins, 1994), that brought together Jews and JewBus invested in spiritual seeking. Sigalow finds within these gatherings evidence that Jews in Buddhist circles had significant impact on Jews attempting to fashion a Jewish spirituality. Sigalow more fully fleshes out this relationship in the fifth chapter, in which she recounts her ethnographic fieldwork in the Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn, by arguing that Jewish spirituality utilizes Buddhism's most significant practice—liberalized, universalized meditation—as its own core practice. The Jewish meditation of contemporary Jewish spirituality, then, was made possible precisely by the de-Asianized meditation made popular by JewBus. By taking meditation out of particular Asian contexts and presenting it as universally psychological and spiritual, JewBus helped to create the conditions for a notion of meditation onto which Jewish spiritual seekers could place their particular Jewish traditions (e.g., likening the quiet of Buddhist meditation to the Amidah prayer). The sixth chapter contextualizes the previous two by mapping the concept of Jewish Buddhist spirituality. To some extent, this is in order to contrast the emphases of JewBu spirituality with popular, Protestant-derived understandings of the term. JewBu spirituality is not, Sigalow argues, focused solely on interiority and self-improvement but is necessarily communal and thereby as external as it is internal. However, this chapter reveals that JewBu spirituality likewise functions as a critique of common...

Graham Serjeant, Sickle Cell, Jamaica and Beyond: A Life, Ian Randle Publishers (Kingston and Miami), 2021

Graham Serjeant, Sickle Cell, Jamaica and Beyond: A Life, Ian Randle Publishers (Kingston and Miami), 2021

Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach

Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach

The Musical Language of Rock

The Musical Language of Rock

Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary

Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary

Voices of Guinness: An Oral History of the Park Royal Brewery

Voices of Guinness: An Oral History of the Park Royal Brewery

Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, by Amanda Nettelbeck

Reviewed by: Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire by Amanda Nettelbeck Ryan D. Fong (bio) Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, by Amanda Nettelbeck; pp. vii + 232. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $99.99, $29.99 paper. Although Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire is the first book that Amanda Nettelbeck has published as a sole author, it builds on the extensive work that she has already done—both as editor and coauthor—on colonial law and violence, particularly within the Australasian context. Indeed, the book in many respects marks an important moment of synthesis of this previous work, as well as a broadening of its scope, in the way that it focuses on policies and discourses of “protection” that developed across the expanding British Empire over the course of the nineteenth century. In so doing, Nettelbeck covers a great deal of ground and traces how these new legal structures and norms of colonial management were established and how they were implemented in several key settings, including Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Cape Colony, and Canada. To tell this story, Nettelbeck follows a few predominant threads across the book’s six chapters. First and foremost, she tracks the development of protectorate regimes in a number of colonial locations, using copious archival material to construct a narrative that is striking in both its breadth and level of detail. As she makes clear in her introduction, this is not “a history of indigenous [sic] rights as such” but rather “a history of how a discourse of indigenous rights safeguarded in law . . . became reconciled with coercive practices which worked over time to build indigenous colonial subjecthood” (5). As such, Nettelbeck moves between various colonies and the imperial metropole of London, all while marshaling a vast sweep of information to craft a thorough account of Indigenous protectionism and its eventual replacement by other schemes of colonial management. Interwoven with this primary thread, especially in the early chapters, is a careful unpacking of how these new protectionist programs for Indigenous peoples worked alongside the administration of formerly enslaved people and the increasing number of indentured laborers. In the later chapters, the thread that focuses on developments in the Australian context comes to the fore, but even this more specific discussion is given a complex treatment as Nettelbeck accounts for the differences and tensions between colonial offices across the continent, from Western Australia to New South Wales. What emerges from these interweavings is less a comparative study than a meticulous charting of multiple trajectories of legal and political development. Nettelbeck makes a convincing case that these trajectories worked collectively to establish British imperial power, even if their discursive and rhetorical framing sought to couch these policies in benevolent and humanitarian terms. She further shows that the itineraries of these trajectories were hardly uniform. In fact, one of the key takeaways from the book is just how diverse and even contradictory these policies were, especially when looking across different colonial sites and contexts. For readers new to this history, the details can sometimes be dizzying and difficult to parse, but for those more accustomed to navigating the byzantine workings of colonial bureaucracy, Nettelbeck’s book limns these complexities with both admirable care and impressive economy. As with many works that are situated firmly within settler colonial studies, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood is less interested in providing a robust investigation of [End Page 457] Indigenous responses to these polices than it is in articulating their development and enactment by colonial administrators. Chapter 5 provides a welcome exception to this general rule in developing a framework that attends to the “strategic intimacies of Aboriginal protection,” which provides a glimpse into the affective dimensions and dynamics at work for the Indigenous peoples and communities most affected by these policies (139). In the sections on Aboriginal diplomacy, which focus on Woiwurrung leader Billibellary and Ngaiawang leader Tenberry, and on interracial marriage in Western Australia and New Zealand, Nettelbeck provides her most compelling anecdotes of Indigenous agency and negotiation. These examples contrast the overriding...

Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century

Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century

Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo by C. Cody Barteet

Reviewed by: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo by C. Cody Barteet Sarah J. Constant C. Cody Barteet, Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo. New York: Routledge, 2019. 180 pp. ISBN: 9781138585652 Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo is a tale of two cities—the Xui Maya city of Tihó and the Spanish colony of Mérida—ultimately united through a series of cultural campaigns that sought to exert Spanish authority in colonial Mexico. In this book, Barteet expands upon his previous dissertation research on Early Modern Latin American visual culture as well as past historical studies of the Casa de Montejo that “have mainly considered the façade as a reflection of European aesthetics with limited analysis of its iconography” (11). Lucid descriptions, original photographs, and dozens of archival artifacts evidence colonial anxieties in sixteenth-century Yucatán. Architectural Rhetoric strives to provide a bridge between two cognate disciplines: architectural history and rhetorical studies. Notably, Barteet understands the construction of the Casa de Montejo through Henri Lefebvre’s [End Page 466] “spatial triad” and describes how it may be used to explain the tensions that arose between the center and periphery of Mérida (18). Barteet explains how spatial practices (e.g., architectural styles), representations of space (e.g., the grid-planned city), and spaces of representation (e.g., real and imagined spaces) function as part of a causal loop. In this way, Barteet positions the Casa de Montejo as a social space for reading and understanding conflicts between Indigenous peoples, Spanish colonizers, and the Spanish monarchy. Architectural Rhetoric is divided into two main sections: the first “considers the significance of the building to a Hispanic audience,” and the second considers “how the façade and its urban location resonated among the Xiu Maya of Yucatán” (22). Barteet argues that Spanish conqueror Francisco de Montejo intentionally built the Casa de Montejo on the sacrosanct plaza mayor to symbolically diminish the influence of the Spanish monarchy in the New World and to exert his individual authority as governor over the Indigenous peoples. Barteet illustrates how the construction of the Casa de Montejo may be placed within Lefebvre’s imagination of the spatial triad in order to identify exactly how this building defied Spanish monarchical traditions and initiated a struggle for authority in the Yucatanean province. Barteet extends his analysis of the Casa de Montejo beyond the realm of architectural history and into the field of architectural rhetoric, revealing what different examples of iconography in the Casa de Montejo uncover about colonial tensions within and between Yucatán and the transatlantic world. For example, Barteet argues that Herculean imagery in the Plateresque façade exalts Montejo as the protagonist in the ongoing Yucatanean colonization narrative. Later, Barteet examines both the political and social contexts in which Montejo operated as Yucatán’s adelantado, or governor, through an analysis of “multivocal” iconography in the Plateresque façade (93). Barteet introduces a rhetorical text—the requerimiento—an official policy document concerned with the proper treatment of Indigenous peoples that encouraged the colonizers to “establish alliances through peace accords and gift-giving practices in order to foster a climate capable of hosting a successful colony” (92). Here, connections between the virtuous iconography discussed in earlier chapters and the requerimiento arise, strengthening Barteet’s case for an architectural rhetoric, or a connection between what is written in policy texts and what is therefore “declare[d] in stone” (93). In the second half of Architectural Rhetoric, Barteet examines Maya perceptions of the Plateresque façade and its place in the oft-contested city center. Barteet recalls that Mérida’s identity was “neither solely Spanish nor solely Maya” but existed somewhere in between, occupying a sort of “dual identity” (116). Barteet discusses the social and political importance of mapping practices, which may include the mapping of metaphorical or conceptual spaces such as books, art objects, and geographical locations where “two or more cultures engage one another” (116). In the penultimate chapter, a story of a power struggle often defined by dichotomous...

Review: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age, by Andy Grundberg

Review: <i>How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age</i>, by Andy Grundberg

Another World Is Possible: A Comparative Perspective

Another World Is Possible: A Comparative Perspective

Jewish Mysticism: From Ancient Times through Today

Jewish Mysticism: From Ancient Times through Today

Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary

Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary

Embracing Evolution: How Understanding Science Can Strengthen Your Christian Life

EMBRACING EVOLUTION: How Understanding Science Can Strengthen Your Christian Life by Matthew Nelson Hill. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020. 152 pages. Paperback; $20.00. ISBN: 9780830852833. *This is a short and very readable book whose main purpose is to connect the average churchgoing Christian with a modern and theologically sympathetic understanding of evolution. The general perspective taken by the book is that human understanding of anything (science, art, theology, politics, and so forth) is significantly contextual. The author takes care in the first chapter to explain his perspective on science/faith issues in general, and organizes the book into three parts. *The first part is that of understanding our "biblical lens," namely, exploring the ways in which we are shaped to read scripture, and how this, in turn, influences our beliefs. Do we read the Bible for formation or for information? The two are not mutually incompatible, but neither are they equivalent, and how we balance the two is pertinent to our theological understanding of evolution. This section of the book addresses what are perhaps the two main questions emerging from the early chapters of Genesis: our understanding of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, and the place of predation and death in God's creation. The latter troubles the author much more than the former, and the response presented is not wholly satisfying, even to the author himself. Overall, this section is a good presentation of hermeneutics that focuses on Genesis without bogging down the reader with too much theological weight. *The second part of the book addresses how we understand our "scientific lens." A full chapter is devoted to the basic theory of evolution (its "nuts and bolts") and a subsequent chapter to what is meant by scientific truth and its integration (or not) with faith. The author does a good job of distilling the philosophy of science for the intelligent lay reader without "dumbing it down"--not an easy task. Sometimes, however, the treatment is lacking, particularly concerning the imago Dei in light of evolution. Are we (as appears to be the inference on page 69) special simply because we were evolutionarily lucky to have large brains? *The remainder of the book--its third part--is devoted to how we might integrate an evolutionary understanding of biology with Christian faith. Many books have been written on this subject, and it is difficult for anyone these days to say what has not already been said. The theme running through this section of the book is that an evolutionary perspective can be empowering, primarily because knowledge of fact and truth allows a Christian to better carry out the ministry of Jesus in his/her life and in the world. Knowledge of the roots of our negative genetic urges (for example, the tendency to overeat) can empower us to overcome these urges through a combination of human choice and the grace of God. The final chapter discusses how the Christian church, girded with an appropriate integration of evolutionary knowledge and scriptural foundation, is best positioned to foster the virtues of the kingdom of God through community. *I liked this book, and I think it is definitely one for discussion and use in an adult Sunday school class. It does, however, avoid a number of awkward questions and issues. For example, why does it matter if our negative/positive tendencies are evolutionarily based? Wouldn't we, as Christians, act the same if they had some other origin? There is also an assumption by the author of a transcendent morality--but where does this come from? Are our morals likewise a product of evolution? If so, how does this square with biblical (and other) forms of revelation? And as far as the problem of death is concerned, isn't this a problem of sin in the world? Doesn't it mean that sin is present at the outset of creation? *That said, this is very much a positive contribution to the ongoing evolution/creation issue. Without denying our evolutionary origins, it calls us to transcend them as followers of Jesus. I am sure it will foster interesting discussions in many a church and Sunday school class. *Reviewed by Robert B. Mann, Professor of Physics &amp; Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1.