Fordham University Press Research Articles

The work of repair: Capacity after colonialism in the timber plantations of South Africa By ThomasCousins, New York: Fordham University Press. 2023. 320 pp.

The work of repair: Capacity after colonialism in the timber plantations of South Africa By ThomasCousins, New York: Fordham University Press. 2023. 320 pp.

The mother, the politician, and the guerrilla: Women's political imagination in the Kurdish movement By Nazan Üstündağ. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 272 pp.

The mother, the politician, and the guerrilla: Women's political imagination in the Kurdish movement By Nazan Üstündağ. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 272 pp.

Terror trials: Life and law in Delhi's courts By Mayur R. Suresh. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 272 pp.

Terror trials: Life and law in Delhi's courts By Mayur R. Suresh. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 272 pp.

The drinking curriculum: A cultural history of childhood and alcohol By Elizabeth A.Marshall, New York: Fordham University Press. 2024. pp. 135. $25.00 (paperback)

The drinking curriculum: A cultural history of childhood and alcohol By Elizabeth A.Marshall, New York: Fordham University Press. 2024. pp. 135. $25.00 (paperback)

The humanism of the other in sociolinguistic ethnography

Abstract This article describes the social and ethical responsibility researchers experience in undertaking ethnographic research under conditions of neoliberalism. It acknowledges the hierarchical nature of working in large ethnographic teams in which a mixture of employment contracts and statuses exist. Drawing on relational ethics (Levinas 2003. Humanism of the Other. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.), and its attention to the humanizing potential of difference, the paper describes researchers’ propensity for relationality in the face of competitive neoliberalism. It presents a case study of a large research team and investigates the use of research vignettes to represent and relate in difference. Subjectivity is theorized not in terms of identity but rather through alterity and opacity arguing this direction opens up social and political alliances (Butler 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.). Specifically, the paper suggests the research vignette is a genre well suited to documenting the way humans live in difference, illustrating how the researcher yields to the face of the Other in field work encounters. As a form the research vignette is said to bridge the aesthetic and the scientific, demanding of its reader an engagement with a variety of interpretations. Further, the vignette is considered for its methodological potential in creating a dialogic relational space for research teams within the neoliberal university.

Colonial Sense and Religious Sensibility: Understanding Injury and the Body of Nation in Censored Literature in South Asia

ABSTRACT This essay critically examines Angarey, a collection of nine short stories and one play by Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmuduzzafar, first published in December 1932. Considered a foundational work in Urdu literature which supported the Progressive Writer’s Association in South Asia during the pre-partition era and hailed as an act of literary resistance – especially in the context of the nationalist movements for freedom in India – the stories offer a succinct critique of social and religious practices. Because they exposed the oppression against Muslim women and promoted resistance against the colonial state, the text was banned in March 1933 by the British government. The historical account of its censorship characterizes the British colonial state as the rational and neutral arbiter of its presumed emotionally excitable colonial subjects. In observance of the relationship between affective politics of colonial empire and religion in late colonial India, I critically examine not just the text but also the contextual background of its censorship to explore the link between the colonial ideas about Muslim sensibilities and colonial regulations. In this respect, relying on Asad Ali Ahmed’s critique of the colonial genesis of censorship [“Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, The Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament.” In Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, edited by Raminder Kaur, and William Mazzarella, 172–205. Bloomington, 2009], Talal Asad’s insights on the complicated relation between injury and the discourse of blasphemy [Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, and Ann Laura Stoler’s argument about the Enlightenment’s relationship to empire “Reason Aside: Reflections on Enlightenment and Empire.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford University Press, 2013], this study attempts to understand how the embodied representation of the Muslim self figures in Angarey as an affective attachment, following the context of literary censorship in late colonial South Asia.

Book Review – The Political Logic of Experience: Expression in Phenomenology by Neal DeRoo

Review of Neal DeRoo’s book, The Political Logic of Experience: Expression in Phenomenology (Fordham University Press, 2022).

Reapprendre à voir: Images, Symptoms and the Media of Appearance

Emmanuel Alloa interviewed by Benediktas Vachninas Emmanuel Alloa, Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Fribourg, is one of the most active contemporary thinkers in the field of new visual studies. His areas of research include aesthetics, phenomenology, theories of image, theories of media, and the French philosophy. Professor Alloa has authored and (co)edited numerous books, of which, the most important ones are Looking through Images. A Phenomenology of Visual Media (Columbia University Press, 2021), Dynamis of the Image. Moving Images in a Global World (De Gruyter, 2020), Partages de la perspective (Fayard, 2020), Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty (Fordham University Press, 2017). He is the recipient of the Latsis Prize 2016 and the Aby Warburg Prize 2019 and currently serves as President of the German Society of Aesthetics.In 2021, Professor Alloa gave an online cycle of lectures titled Orbis Pictus. A Media Phenomenology in an Image World at Vilnius University. This year, I had the pleasure to hold an online conversation with Professor Alloa as he kindly agreed to discuss the topic of images and his project of symptomatology. The interview encompassed questions about the relation of an image with the image theories, the differences between the symptomatological approach to images and the visual semiotics, Derrida’s contribution to the problem of mediality, and the role of images in the philosophy today.This interview was taken on the 20th of June, 2023

In Conversation with Brahim El Guabli

A Black and Amazigh Indigenous scholar from Morocco, Brahim El Guabli is an associate professor of Arabic studies and comparative literature at Williams College. His first book is entitled Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham University Press, 2023). He’s currently completing a second book entitled Desert Imaginations: Saharanism and Its Discontents (University of California Press, forthcoming). His journal articles have appeared in LA Review of Books, PMLA, Interventions, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Arab Studies Journal, History in Africa, META, and the Journal of North African Studies, among others. He is coeditor of the two volumes of Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco During the “Years of Lead” (1966–1988) (Liverpool University Press, 2022) and Refiguring Loss: Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Cultural Production (Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming).

Spectacles and spectres: A performative theory of political trials. By Basak Ertür. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. 228 pp. $30.00 paperback

Law & Society ReviewEarly View BOOK REVIEW Spectacles and spectres: A performative theory of political trials. By Basak Ertür. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. 228 pp. $30.00 paperback Reviewed by Keally McBride, Corresponding Author Reviewed by Keally McBride [email protected] Department of Politics, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USASearch for more papers by this author Reviewed by Keally McBride, Corresponding Author Reviewed by Keally McBride [email protected] Department of Politics, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12661Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis

Reviewed by: Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later ed. by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis Robert D. Bland (bio) Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) Freedoms Gained and Lost enters a rich and robust public conversation over the current meaning of the Reconstruction era. Edited by Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis, the collection of essays emerged from the 2018 Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World conference that commemorated the 150th anniversary of South Carolina’s 1868 constitution—a powerful document that expressed a deep faith in the promise of multiracial democracy in the United States. Covering a wide geographical and chronological terrain, the essays in Freedoms Gained and Lost, read together, offer a shift away from the “splendid failure” narrative that has largely defined the field of Reconstruction studies for the last three decades. Far from a story of incremental progress or heroic struggle, Freedoms Gained and Lost highlights the “limits to [the] radical experiment” (2), as well as the “uniquely baleful influences” that doomed the effort (5). In the book’s introduction, Domby and Lewis see the uneven and harrowing nature of the road to freedom as the unifying theme of the Reconstruction era. “Focusing solely on the serial expansion of freedom obscures the way freedoms have been gained and lost repeatedly in American history—and the complex struggles [End Page 271] to maintain them,” they lament. The essays in this volume were written in the shadow of the 2015 Charleston Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting and the violent 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and a well-earned weariness permeates the collection and informs the skepticism toward the previous generation’s more hopeful historiographical synthesis. Speaking to both historiographical debates and Reconstruction’s place in U.S. public history, Bruce E. Baker’s thoughtful “Whom Is Reconstruction For?” seeks to tackle the longer history of Reconstruction’s usable past. “The emergence of a ‘Third Reconstruction’ can be seen as an abandonment of the hopes of the ‘Second Reconstruction,’” Baker argues, “but it is equally a hopeful marker of the beginning of something” (22). Reflecting on the polyphonic nature of Reconstruction’s memory and the varying interpretations in family lore, local communities, textbooks, digital history projects, and the elite press, the essay turns to the critical question: did any of these usable pasts have a stable center? Drawing from the work of southern labor historians, Baker suggests that Reconstruction’s usable past—especially in its “Second Reconstruction” and “Third Reconstruction” iterations—calls upon working-class people to work across barriers of race and age to build a better world. Most of the essays in the collection diverge from Baker’s hopeful synthesis and, when read in total, present the Reconstruction era as a moment of mixed promise and Pyrrhic victory. Hilary N. Green’s essay on Alabama’s postbellum education system dampens the usual optimism around the rise of Black schools in the South by highlighting the distance between imagined policy and the difficult work of implementation. Michael W. Fitzgerald’s essay on Black militias in Alabama’s western Black Belt finds a culture of Black armed resistance that bolstered local chapters of the Republican Party against recalcitrant Ku Klux Klan violence—albeit in a larger political landscape wherein the statewide Republican Party lost control of the statehouse. Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.’s essay on northern-born soldiers serving in the United States Colored Troops demonstrates that, for many veterans, the homecoming experience was fraught with lingering trauma, discriminatory labor markets, and difficulty securing federal pensions at the same rates as their white peers. Examining postbellum infanticide cases in the North and the South, Felicity Turner finds a discriminatory and racist legal system, which demonstrated that the much-heralded new civil rights protections “proved messy and complicated for Black women across the nation” (137). In addition to shifting away from stories that champion the push for civil rights and the imaginative and flexible nature of grassroots democracy, [End Page 272] Freedoms Gained and Lost points to...

To Risk, One's Life

To Risk, One's Life Bryan Counter (bio) IN PRAISE OF RISK BY ANNE DUFOURMANTELLE; TRANSLATED BY STEVEN MILLER Fordham University Press, 2019. IN PRAISE OF RISK BY ANNE DUFOURMANTELLE; TRANSLATED BY STEVEN MILLER Fordham University Press, 2019. Composed of short chapters and written in a poetic style, Anne Dufourmantelle's In Praise of Risk (Éloge du risque) makes a number of careful interventions related to the notion of risk, intercut with narratives of her own sessions as an analyst. Because of the inclusion of these narratives, as well as the text's overall intimate tone, one could understand it as a series of letters addressed to risk. Each section is granted a particular thematic heading—"To Risk One's Life," "Desire, Body, Writing," and "Life—Mine, Yours," to name the main sections that I will discuss here—all uniquely related to the problematic of risk and its place in contemporary life. But Dufourmantelle does not simply piece together an oblique thesis from disparate fragments that happen to fall under a general idea. Rather, the very form of the book indicates an ethical position with regard to risk. It is through a close, sustained, and nuanced engagement with risk that Dufourmantelle gives voice to a stance that is unpopular, untimely, and risky in itself—namely, that risk is not only something to take seriously but may also be something to be celebrated. Its unorthodox structure notwithstanding, In Praise of Risk is first and foremost a psychoanalytic text. At its core, it is motivated by an understanding of the logic of the unconscious and its ability to disrupt a more traditional philosophical idea of causality, as seen in the descriptions of various analytical sessions. In particular, Dufourmantelle is concerned with highlighting risk as being already inscribed in [End Page 212] our lives before any idea of fate is mobilized, usually after the fact through our own narration. The inclusion of her analytical accounts is crucial in that they provide concrete examples of her patients' self-narration of their own lives, which in turn serve as the backdrop against which Dufourmantelle's discussion of risk takes place. In Praise of Risk begins with a simple but provocative statement: "Life is a heedless risk taken by us, the living."1 As Dufourmantelle suggests by characterizing it as "heedless," risk is installed before any intervention on the part of those who live (and before any calculation of outcome) before the very question of outcome is raised. From the text's beginning, life is established as a risk, indeed as risk itself, something reckless and resistant to calculation. If the living necessarily take part in the heedless risk of life, then living—life itself—is already permeated by risk. Dufourmantelle touches on this apparent paradox just a few lines down, in a passage that includes an important pair of clarifying questions: "To risk one's life" is among the most beautiful expressions in our language. Does it necessarily mean to confront death—and to survive? Or rather, is there, in life itself, a secret mechanism, a music that is uniquely capable of displacing existence onto the front line we call desire? For risk—its object still indeterminate for now—opens an unknown space. (1) The beauty of the expression in question, and of risking one's life, is presented here as already given. But this is also a rhetorical move that lays the groundwork for a unique understanding of risk: we do not necessarily have a solid understanding of it since risk is always in contact with its counterpart, precaution, which secures risk's status as "an unquestioned value" (1)—that is, unquestioned but also uninterrogated. Clearly, this pertains only to a common understanding of the term. So what exactly is risk? If it is not so straightforward as to entail simply putting everything on the line, confronting one's own demise, what can it be? As Dufourmantelle posits here, risk is something within life that subjects the living to desire. If, like desire, risk has an indeterminate object and unpredictable effects, then it is always at work for the living and in life, taking on a double valence: risk is, at once, an act...

Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia by TatianaChudakova. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. pp. 344.

Medical Anthropology QuarterlyEarly View BOOK REVIEW Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia by Tatiana Chudakova. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. pp. 344. Barbara Gerke, Corresponding Author Barbara Gerke [email protected] University of Vienna Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Barbara Gerke, Corresponding Author Barbara Gerke [email protected] University of Vienna Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 24 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12770Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Review of “Medicine at the Margins: EMS Workers in Urban America”

Journal Article Review of “Medicine at the Margins: EMS Workers in Urban America” Get access By Christopher Prener Fordham University Press, 2022, 304 pages. https://www.fordhampress.com/9781531501082/medicine-at-the-margins/ Hyeyoung Oh Nelson Hyeyoung Oh Nelson University of Colorado Denver Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, soad058, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soad058 Published: 03 May 2023 Article history Received: 31 March 2023 Accepted: 11 April 2023 Published: 03 May 2023

Breaking point: The ironic evolution of psychiatry in World War II, RebeccaSchwartz Greene, (Foreword by NoahTsika.: Fordham University Press. 2023. 368 pp. $30 (paper). ISBN: 9781531500269.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral SciencesEarly View BOOK REVIEW Breaking point: The ironic evolution of psychiatry in World War II, Rebecca Schwartz Greene, (Foreword by Noah Tsika.: Fordham University Press. 2023. 368 pp. $30 (paper). ISBN: 9781531500269. Roderick D. Buchanan, Roderick D. Buchanan [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-9139-9656 University of MelbourneSearch for more papers by this author Roderick D. Buchanan, Roderick D. Buchanan [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-9139-9656 University of MelbourneSearch for more papers by this author First published: 19 April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22256Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

COMMODIFIED COMMUNION: EUCHARIST, CONSUMER CULTURE, AND THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE. By Antonio EduardoAlonso. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. . Pp. 188. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $25.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 49, Issue 1 p. 86-86 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: The Americas: USA COMMODIFIED COMMUNION: EUCHARIST, CONSUMER CULTURE, AND THE PRACTICE OF EVERYDAY LIFE. By Antonio Eduardo Alonso. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. . Pp. 188. Cloth, $90.00; paper, $25.00. First published: 24 April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.16273Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume49, Issue1Special Issue: Unique Approaches to Christianity in Africa and BeyondMarch 2023Pages 86-86 RelatedInformation

A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art by Wendy Jean Katz

Reviewed by: A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art by Wendy Jean Katz Kara M. French (bio) William Walcutt, Art, Early American art, Nativism A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art. By Wendy Jean Katz. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022, Pp. 226.) Questions of who gets to call themselves a "real" American and whose histories should be centered have saturated the political arena in recent years. In the atmosphere of these heated debates, Wendy Jean Katz's analysis of nativism's ties to nineteenth-century art and artists appears very relevant. Examining the career of popular nineteenth-century artist William Walcutt—a man Katz accurately describes as "nativist adjacent" if not a card-carrying Know-Nothing—and his circle allows for a deeper understanding of how pervasive nativist ideals and symbols were in the illustrations, engravings, banners, and sculptures in the visual vernacular of the 1840s and 50s (xii). A True American goes beyond the more familiar and obvious tropes of nativist ideology—exaggerated caricatures of Irish and German immigrants or scheming Jesuits locking women in convents—to show how even seemingly innocuous displays of the eagle or Thanksgiving celebrations were part of a larger nativist symbology. Katz argues that "the most patriotic art of the nineteenth century, the art that spoke most strongly about American democracy, was often the art most colored by exclusionary ideas about citizenship" (xiii). It was an art that centered the heroism of white Anglo–Saxon Protestant men while relegating women, the enslaved, and people of color to supporting roles, often ushering them out of the frame entirely. William Walcutt and his fellow working artists are likely not as familiar to scholars of the early republic as their fine art contemporaries in the Hudson River School or notable historical painters like John Trumbull or Daniel Huntington. Katz, however, makes a strong case that these men (and they were almost entirely men) represent a kind of "norm" in antebellum art, a norm that was increasingly becoming suffused with nativist ideas of "true Americanism" (xiii). Though Walcutt did gain some fame as a sculptor and illustrator in his own time, he and his circle were more aligned [End Page 187] with what today would be described as commercial art. To be clear, A True American is not a strict biography of Walcutt per se, but a larger study of a circle of artists whose sympathies were more aligned to those of their fellow working-class artisans than fine artists supported by elite patrons. Walcutt was born in Ohio, the descendant of frontiersmen and Revolutionary-era veterans. After working in the Midwest alongside his two brothers who were also artists, Walcutt arrived in New York City in 1847, an environment flush with artistic patronage as well as one in flux from both immigration and the disruptions of the market revolution. One of the most notable contributions of A True American is Katz's detailed analysis of the overlapping circles of working artists like Walcutt, fraternal orders, and nativist organizations. While the rise of fraternal organizations as well as the new cultural industries of the early republic have been well documented, Katz's work allows us to re-envision artistic societies like Walcutt's New York Sketch Club as fraternal organizations rather than just as gatherings of creatives. In doing so, the first two chapters of A True American help expand notions of who counts as a working-class artisan—beyond the usual shoemakers and tailors displaced by industrialization, one must include artists themselves. Not only did this circle of artists often contribute illustrations to nativist publications like America's Own and paint banners for Odd Fellows' lodges, they also provided mutual aid and shared a sense of their own artistic "brotherhood" standing against both capitalist and foreign tyranny. This was particularly acute for American-born artists like Walcutt who believed that American art should be native-grown and commissions reserved for native-born Americans, rather than more well-known European artists who had trained in academies abroad. Walcutt's circle was opposed to the creation of academies of fine arts within the United States, believing them to be hierarchical and anti...

The Myth of the Jew: Negating the Negation

The Myth of the Jew:Negating the Negation Nitzan Lebovic (bio) Keywords Myth, Jewish thought, Paul Hanebrink, Elad Lapidot, Ole Jakob Løland Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Elad Lapidot, Jews out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. Ole Jakob Løland, Pauline Ugliness: Jacob Taubes and the Turn to Paul. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. To what degree is jewish studies still engaging with the myth of the Jew? A popular view identifies Jewish monotheism with a consistent opposition to mythological cyclicality and a pantheistic view of nature. In contrast, academic research demonstrated how limited this view is, and how important mythological themes have been to Jewish scripture and commentary.1 Take, for example, the impact of mythological images of nefilim—fallen beings, but also angels or giants—most clearly visible at times of crisis and "political judgments against royal power."2 Three recent books—in political history, critical thought, and political theology—exemplify how vibrant but problematic myth-making still is for our understanding of Jewish culture. Before turning to these recent books, however, it is worth briefly revisiting the history of the problematic relationship between Jews and their myths. If in premodern times Jews were represented in popular imagery as angels and giants, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the mythic [End Page 327] representation of Jews turned antisemitic and hypernationalist. As a result, after 1945 philosophers and historians in the West adopted a skeptical view of myths and prophetic tropes. The German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the Polish-born Israeli historian Jacob Talmon admired myth as a literary and artistic form, but detested its role in modern politics; myth, they felt, had been at the core of the new language of violence and antisemitism that arose with radical nationalism and racism. "Perhaps the most important and the most alarming feature in this development of modern political thought," Cassirer, then a refugee in the United States, wrote in 1946, "is the appearance of a new power: the power of mythical thought."3 Anchored in the ancient language of death and revival, its political form "is nothing but the dark shadow cast by language on the world of human thought."4 A decade later, Talmon identified a "collective state of permanent excitement" that had turned nineteenth-century national mythic language into twentieth-century "political messianism" and "totalitarian democracy" (1956). For Talmon, as for the political thinker Hannah Arendt, whose Origins of Totalitarianism. (1951, 1954) came out shortly before Talmon's first book, capitalism and fascism had certain characteristics in common, such as the popularity of myth among masters of mass media.5 In the following decades, Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Hans Blumenberg, among others, analyzed myth both as a form and as an agent of historical change. Considering it as a multivalent phenomenon was necessary to capture its power as a cultural force and a strange political beast. Instead of biblical catastrophes or Homer's creatures and heroes, the modern nation gave birth to a cult of self-aggrandizing "authoritarian personalities" and an unparalleled play of propaganda that fueled new myths. The post-1945 analysis of myth focused on the relationship between politics and language. Historians and theoreticians showed that the new evocation of power relied on a process of "emptying out" of meaning. For example, Viktor Klemperer's Lingua tertii imperii (Language of the Third Reich, 1947), unpacked the Nazi "emptying out of language" and the injection into it of mythic and collective "excitement." In contrast to Cassirer's historical overview, Klemperer's linguistic analysis focused on recent examples such as Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century or Josef Goebbels's articles in the Nazi dailies. The emptying out of language was [End Page 328] needed in order to dehumanize the Jew and shape the image of the Hitlerian Übermensch. A decade after Klemperer, Cassirer, and Talmon, Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957) interpreted myth from the perspective of semiology—the study of symbols and signs—which he contrasted to the power of poetics. While avoiding a direct confrontation with the fascist use of myth...

Trad nationalist a/effects

Trad nationalist a/effects

Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age ed. by David Prior

Reviewed by: Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age ed. by David Prior Brian Matthew Jordan Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age. Edited by David Prior. Reconstructing America. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 348. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-9865-5; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-9864-8.) Scholars have often regarded Reconstruction and empire building as discrete phenomena. Seeking to remedy this peril of traditional periodization, [End Page 158] David Prior has collected eleven penetrating essays that reveal how “developments stemming from Union victory and abolition anticipated, shaded into, and intersected with the geopolitical rise of the United States” (p. 13). Building connections between historiographies, deftly tracing intellectual lineages, and extending a growing body of scholarship that has situated Reconstruction in a global context, this welcome volume demonstrates how domestic politics and foreign policies were entwined in postbellum America—all while casting into sharp relief the U.S. Civil War’s consequences. “Union victory and abolition,” Prior contends in his thoughtful introduction, “contoured the rise of the United States as a regional hegemon with an overseas empire” (pp. 9–10). The essays—many of which use biography to develop their claims—are uniformly well written and tightly argued. However, several stand out for their interpretive punch. For instance, the first chapter, written by Andre M. Fleche, recalls Cuba’s struggle to achieve independence from Spain in the Ten Years’ War. By studying the participation of two U.S. Civil War veterans in the conflict (one Union veteran and one former Confederate), Fleche not only reveals how “Reconstruction-era debates over race relations, slavery, and citizenship transcended U.S. borders,” but also clarifies “how much the Civil War reoriented American policy toward abolition in the hemisphere” (pp. 47, 29). Gregg French demonstrates how the “threat of racial, political, and sectional instability in the United States” charged the pitched debates over President Ulysses S. Grant’s attempt to annex the Dominican Republic (p. 94). Lawrence B. Glickman convincingly argues that James Redpath’s “emerging anti-imperialism” is a key to making sense of the radical abolitionist’s postbellum sympathy for Jefferson Davis. Redpath’s work in Ireland both “undermined his commitment to Black freedom” and informed his “critique of Reconstruction” (p. 155). Recent scholars have inventoried how the Civil War continued to annex the lives of its participants. Centering the postwar lives of Oliver O. Howard, Julia Ward Howe, Lyman Abbott, and Clara Barton, Mark Elliott’s brilliant essay demonstrates still another way the Civil War generation toiled in the conflict’s shadow. Because many white northerners interpreted Union victory “as a moral triumph” over slavery and secession, the war promoted a unique sense of national mission that animated interventions abroad (p. 15). This “humanitarian nationalism” at once affirmed American exceptionalism and justified military occupation (p. 161). While Julia F. Irwin and other historians have dated this “nationalist construct” to the Great War, Elliott suggests that “it was already influential in the 1890s, and its foundations were laid in the 1860s” (p. 163). Elliott’s conclusions are important, for they invite us to rethink the “humanitarian rationales of the early twentieth century” as something more than “disingenuous covers for colonial ambitions” (p. 183). In a chapter that harmonizes nicely with Elliott’s piece, David V. Holtby finds that the Grand Army of the Republic, the largest fraternal order for U.S. Civil War veterans, “rallied to imperialism largely because its members equated martial valor with national greatness” (p. 191). Precisely because empire entailed military occupation, many white southerners—still recalling Reconstruction as “bayonet misrule”—subscribed to anti-imperialism. Yet as DJ Polite’s essay reminds, “Southern white anti-imperialism was often conditional” (p. 216). Many white southerners were willing to erect an empire, but [End Page 159] they demanded it “extend from a firm white supremacist political foundation at home” (p. 216). A short review can capture neither the full range of topics nor the many questions provoked by these essays. The book has very much to say about Cuba and the Caribbean, though comparatively little to say about...