Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

What happened to the Buddhist scholars who stayed behind in Tibet and China after the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans fled from the People’s Liberation Army in 1959? In Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China (Columbia University Press 2021), Nicole Willock discovers through the stories and writings of the “Three Polymaths” (Tib. mkhas pa mi gsum) of socialist China that contrary to common assumptions, Tibetan Buddhist leaders active in the People’s Republic of China were not mere political “collaborators.” Willocks reveals in the book that the three Buddhist polymaths, Tséten Zhabdrung (1910 – 1985), Mugé Samten (1914 – 1993), and Dungkar Rinpoché (1927 – 1997) alternately safeguarded, taught, adapted, celebrated, and discarded religious epistemes, practices, and institutions in a post-Cultural Revolution PRC. The title of the “Three Polymaths” is often used to refer to Mar Shakyamuni, Yo Géjung, and Tsang Rabsel, who according to Tibetan Buddhist historiography, preserved the Buddhist monastic lineage from the tyrannical king Langdarma (d. 842) one millennium ago. Willock points out that since the early 1980s, the title of the “Three Polymaths” has been passed on to the twentieth-century Buddhist scholars Tséten Zhabdrung, Mugé Samten, and Dungkar Rinpoché, who became not only heroes to many Tibetans in China but also cultural icons symbolizing both the survival and the continuance of Tibetan culture in the post-Mao era. In Lineages of the Literary, Willock explores the Three Polymaths’ writings from a wide range of literary genres, including more traditional ones such as autobiographical life writing (Tib. byung ba brjod pa) and Buddhist poetry, as well as modern innovations such as encyclopedia entries (Tib. tshig mdzod) and academic essays (Tib. dpyad rtsom). Willock argues that the writings of the Three Polymaths highlight the way they adapt and disregard religious epistemes for the purposes of revitalizing Tibetan culture in their own fashion. Interestingly, the Three Polymaths’ writings do not engage explicitly with the social-political contexts of their lives. What is revealed instead, Willock argues, is how these three Tibetan Buddhist leaders acted as moral agents who strategically deployed Buddhist epistemes to impart varying visions of Tibetan culture in the post-Mao era. Taking Saba Mahmood’s idea of “moral agency,” Willock finds that “[T]he culturally specific disciplines and religious epistemes that [the Three Polymaths] accessed in their unique subject positions as male Géluk Buddhist elites allowed them, unlike many other leaders in post-Mao China, to cross state-imposed divides between secular and religious institutions that might otherwise have been impossible to bridge.” Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is a digital humanities project mapping transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.

What happens when the human brain, which evolved over eons, collides with twenty-first-century technology? Machines can now push psychological buttons, stimulating and sometimes exploiting the ways people make friends, gossip with neighbors, and grow intimate with lovers. Sex robots present the humanoid face of this technological revolution―yet although it is easy to gawk at their uncanniness, more familiar technologies based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality are insinuating themselves into human interactions. Digital lovers, virtual friends, and algorithmic matchmakers help us manage our feelings in a world of cognitive overload. Will these machines, fueled by masses of user data and powered by algorithms that learn all the time, transform the quality of human life? Robert Brooks, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers (Columbia UP, 2021) offers an innovative perspective on the possibilities of the present and near future. The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider the interaction of new technologies and fundamental human behaviors. He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs―and are getting better at what they do. Brooks combines an understanding of core human traits from evolutionary biology with analysis of how cultural, economic, and technological contexts shape the ways people express them. Beyond the technology, he asks what the implications of artificial intimacy will be for how we understand ourselves. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ōgimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai for whom she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Machiko assisted Yoshiyasu in his ascent to the rank of chief adjutant to the Tokugawa shogun. She kept him in good graces with the imperial court, enabled him to study poetry with aristocratic teachers and have his compositions read by the retired emperor, and gave birth to two of his sons. Writing after Yoshiyasu’s retirement, she recalled it all—from the glittering formal visits of the shogun and his entourage to the passage of the seasons as seen from her apartments in the Yanagisawa mansion. In the Shelter of the Pine is the most significant work of literature by a woman of Japan’s early modern era. Featuring Machiko’s keen eye for detail, strong narrative voice, and polished prose studded with allusions to Chinese and Japanese classics, this memoir sheds light on everything from the social world of the Tokugawa elite to the role of literature in women’s lives. Machiko modeled her story on The Tale of Genji, illustrating how the eleventh-century classic continued to inspire its female readers and provide them with the means to make sense of their experiences. Elegant, poetic, and revealing, In the Shelter of the Pine is a vivid portrait of a distant world and a vital addition to the canon of Japanese literature available in English. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

Robert Hellyer’s Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups (Columbia UP, 2021) is a tale of American and Japanese teaways, skillfully weaving together stories of Midwesterners drinking green tea (with milk and sugar, to be sure), the recent and complex origins of Japan's love of now-ubiquitous sencha, Ceylon tea merchants exploiting American racism, Chinese tea production expertise, and the author’s own family history in the Japan-America tea trade going back to the nineteenth century. Transnational histories and commodities histories are notoriously delicate dances, but Hellyer has produced a very readable and eye-opening look at the modern history and culture of tea. Green with Milk and Sugar will be of interest to a diverse group of historians—scholars of North America, East Asia, commerce and trade, food, etc.—but also to a general audience who will be pulled in by the author’s personal connections as well as the delightfully jargon-free narrative. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

To call the hundred years that straddle the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries as a radical period of change for China is an understatement, moving from the Imperial period, through the Republican era, and ending in the rise of the PRC. Dr. Elizabeth LaCouture’s Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960, published by Columbia University Pres explores this history by looking at Tianjin: a city divided into nine foreign concessions, and perhaps, at the time, the world’s most cosmopolitan—and colonized—cities. With a focus on family and the home, Dr. Lacouture explores the interplay between these massive political changes and the lives of ordinary people. In this interview, Dr LaCouture.and I talk about Tianjin, changing Chinese politics, and how that affected views of gender, the family, and the home. We also investigate the thorny distinction between modernization and Westernization. Dr. Elizabeth LaCouture is the founding director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Hong Kong, where she is an assistant professor of gender studies and history. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Dwelling in the World. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Race, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, an identifiable present, and an uncertain future. The concept of race has been at the center of both triumphs and tragedies in American history and has had a profound effect on the human experience. Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP, 2018)revisits the origins of commonly held beliefs about the scientific nature of racial differences, examines the roots of the modern idea of race, and explains why race continues to generate controversy as a tool of classification even in our genomic age. Surveying the work of some of the twentieth century's most notable scientists, Race Unmasked reveals how genetics and related biological disciplines formed and preserved ideas of race and, at times, racism. A gripping history of science and scientists, Race Unmasked elucidates the limitations of a racial worldview and throws the contours of our current and evolving understanding of human diversity into sharp relief. About the author: Michael Yudell is a public health ethicist, award-winning historian, and professor and Vice Dean at the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. He is the co-editor of the Columbia University Press Series Race, Inequality, and Health and the author of several books, including Race Unmasked, for which he won the Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association. About the interviewer: Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.

Neoclassical economic theory shows that under the right conditions, prices alone can guide markets to efficient outcomes. But what if it it’s hard to find the right price? In many important markets, a buyer’s willingness to pay for one good (say, the right to use a certain part of the radio spectrum range in San Francisco) will depend on the price of another complementary good (the right to use that same spectrum in Los Angeles). The number of possible combinations can rapidly become incalculably complex. Such complex markets require new collaborations between economists and computer scientists to create designs that are both incentive compatible and computationally tractable. In Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints (Columbia UP, 2017), 2020 Economics Nobel Memorial Prize winner Paul Milgrom discusses some of the new economics theory he has developed to help address these challenging contexts, in which neither unfettered market forces nor top-down planning will work well. In our interview we explore these ideas in the context of the most complex auction ever created, the FCC’s broadcast incentive auction. This auction, designed and planned by a team led by Professor Milgrom with his company Auctionomics, purchased underutilized broadcast spectrum from television stations and sold it onward to telecoms providers. This reallocation helped improve wireless network performance and pave the way for 5G wireless services, while also generating over $7 billion for the US treasury. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

Unnatural Disasters: Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed (Columbia UP, 2021) offers a new perspective on our most pressing environmental and social challenges, revealing the gaps between abstract concepts like sustainability, resilience, and innovation and the real-world experiences of people living at risk. Gonzalo Lizarralde explains how the causes of disasters are not natural but all too human: inequality, segregation, marginalization, colonialism, neoliberalism, racism, and unrestrained capitalism. He tells the stories of Latin American migrants, Haitian earthquake survivors, Canadian climate activists, African slum dwellers, and other people resisting social and environmental injustices around the world. Lizarralde shows that most reconstruction and risk-reduction efforts exacerbate social inequalities. Some responses do produce meaningful changes, but they are rarely the ones powerful leaders have in mind.

How can ideas from sociology help us understand history and economics? In Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought (Columbia UP, 2021), Emily Erikson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale and Academic Director of the Fox International Fellowship, explores the major shift, which occurred during the seventeenth century, in the history and philosophy of economics. The book combines computational methods from sociology with a detailed and close engagement with historical sources and the philosophy of economics. It demonstrates how a key set of merchants proved highly influential in setting the terms of economics, in the context of the specific conditions and institutional settings in England during the period. The book also offers comparative analysis, adding depth to the numerous methods of testing its core hypothesis about what really drove the changes in economics. Clearly written, and deeply engaging, the book is essential reading for scholars in economics and the social sciences, as well as in history and the humanities. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists today. Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Columbia UP, 2021) presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Jessica Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires. Namakkal examines the colonial histories of the Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, arguing that their continued success shows how decolonization paradoxically opened new spaces of settlement, perpetuating imperial power. Challenging conventional markers of the boundaries of the colonial era as well as nationalist narratives, Unsettling Utopia sheds new light on the legacies of colonialism and offers bold thinking on what decolonization might yet mean. Jessica Namakkal is assistant professor of the practice in international comparative studies at Duke University. Samee Siddiqui is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945.

In The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2021), Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application together with reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Hoyt Long is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Katie McDonough is Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute.

Is it just a coincidence that three books by the major Russian writer Maria Stepanova have appeared in English in 2021? Why does Maria Stepanova deploy such a rich variety of voices and forms? What are the challenges of translating her poetry? Who are the pantheon of deceased writers who seem to haunt her every line? In this conversation, the editor of The Voice Over: Poems and Essays (Columbia UP, 2021), Irina Shevelenko talks about Stepanova's poetry and prose with Duncan McCargo. Irina elaborates on her wonderful introduction to the collection and explains how she assembled an outstanding team of translators to help bring this work to an international audience. Both Duncan and Irina read extracts from Stepanova's work. (Maria Stepanova is the author of over ten poetry collections as well as three books of essays and the documentary novel In Memory of Memory.) (US: New Directions, Canada: Book*hug Press, UK: Fitzcarraldo), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker International Prize. Her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals was published by Bloodaxe Books, also in 2021. She is the recipient of several Russian and international literary awards. Irina Shevelenko is professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Translations are by: Alexandra Berlina, Sasha Dugdale, Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Zachary Murphy King, Dmitry Manin, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Andrew Reynolds, and Maria Vassileva. For a video of the May 2021 launch event for The Voice Over, featuring Maria Stepanova and several of the translators, see Book Launch of Maria Stepanova’s The Voice Over: Poems and Essays – A Reading and Conversation – CREECA – UW–Madison (wisc.edu) Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.

Tunisia became one of the largest sources of foreign fighters for the Islamic State—even though the country stands out as a democratic bright spot of the Arab uprisings and despite the fact that it had very little history of terrorist violence within its borders prior to 2011. In Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad (Columbia UP, 2020), Aaron Y. Zelin uncovers the longer history of Tunisian involvement in the jihadi movement and offers an in-depth examination of the reasons why so many Tunisians became drawn to jihadism following the 2011 revolution. Zelin highlights the longer-term causes that affected jihadi recruitment in Tunisia, including the prior history of Tunisians joining jihadi organizations and playing key roles in far-flung parts of the world over the past four decades. He contends that the jihadi group Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia was able to take advantage of the universal prisoner amnesty, increased openness, and the lack of governmental policy toward it after the revolution. In turn, this provided space for greater recruitment and subsequent mobilization to fight abroad once the Tunisian government cracked down on the group in 2013. Zelin marshals cutting-edge empirical findings, extensive primary source research, and on-the-ground fieldwork, including a variety of documents in Arabic going as far back as the 1980s and interviews with Ansar al-Sharia members and Tunisian fighters returning from Syria. The first book on the history of the Tunisian jihadi movement, Your Sons Are at Your Service is a meticulously researched account that challenges simplified views of jihadism’s appeal and success. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner.

Do you trust corporations? Do you trust politicians? Do you trust the science? Does anyone trust anyone anymore? In Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties That Bind Us (Columbia UP, 2021), Professor Ben Ho reveals the surprising importance of trust to how we understand our day-to-day economic lives. Starting with the earliest societies and proceeding through the evolution of the modern economy, he explores its role across an astonishing range of institutions and practices, surveying and synthesizing research across economics, political science, psychology, and other disciplines, and presents his own cutting-edge behavioral economics research on the role of apologies in restoring trust. He argues that we trust far more than we may realize, and that mostly this is a good thing. Check out the New Yorker's review of the book. Ben Ho is an associate professor at Vassar College. Ho applies economic tools like game theory and experimental design to topics like apologies, trust, identity, inequality and climate change. Before Vassar, he taught MBA students at Cornell, served as lead energy economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and worked/consulted for Morgan Stanley and several tech startups. Professor Ho also teaches at Columbia University where he is a faculty affiliate for the Center for Global Energy Policy. His work has been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Ho holds seven degrees from Stanford and MIT in economics, education, political science, math, computer science and electrical engineering. Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

Lynne Huffer, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Womens and Gender Studies at Emory University to speaks widely about the body of her work, including her her new book, Foucault’s Strange Eros, out in 2020 with Columbia University Press. What is the strange eros that haunts Foucault’s writing? In this deeply original consideration of Foucault’s erotic ethics, Lynne Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet. She uncovers eros as a mode of thought that erodes the interiority of the thinking subject. Focusing on the ethical implications of this mode of thought, Huffer shows how Foucault’s poetic archival method offers a way to counter the disciplining of speech. At the heart of this method is a conception of the archive as Sapphic: the past’s remains are, like Sappho’s verses, hole-ridden, scattered, and dissolved by time. Listening for eros across fragmented texts, Huffer stages a series of encounters within an archive of literary and theoretical readings: the eroticization of violence in works by Freud and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the historicity of madness in the Foucault-Derrida debate, the afterlives of Foucault’s antiprison activism, and Monique Wittig’s Sapphic materialism. Through these encounters, Foucault’s Strange Eros conceives of ethics as experiments in living that work poetically to make the present strange. Crafting fragments that dissolve into Sapphic brackets, Huffer performs the ethics she describes in her own practice of experimental writing. Foucault’s Strange Eros hints at the self-hollowing speech of an eros that opens a space for the strange. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Since the end of World War II, Japan has not sought to remilitarize, and its postwar constitution commits to renouncing aggressive warfare. Yet many inside and outside Japan have asked whether the country should or will return to commanding armed forces amid an increasingly challenging regional and global context and as domestic politics have shifted in favor of demonstrations of national strength. Tom Phuong Le offers a novel explanation of Japan’s reluctance to remilitarize that foregrounds the relationship between demographics and security. Japan's Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia UP, 2021) demonstrates how changing perceptions of security across generations have culminated in a culture of antimilitarism that constrains the government’s efforts to pursue a more martial foreign policy. Le challenges a simple opposition between militarism and pacifism, arguing that Japanese security discourse should be understood in terms of “multiple militarisms,” which can legitimate choices such as the mobilization of the Japan Self-Defense Forces for peacekeeping operations and humanitarian relief missions. Le highlights how factors that are not typically linked to security policy, such as aging and declining populations and gender inequality, have played crucial roles. He contends that the case of Japan challenges the presumption in international relations scholarship that states must pursue the use of force or be punished, showing how widespread normative beliefs have restrained Japanese policy makers. Drawing on interviews with policy makers, military personnel, atomic bomb survivors, museum coordinators, grassroots activists, and other stakeholders, as well as analysis of peace museums and social movements, Japan’s Aging Peace provides new insights for scholars of Asian politics, international relations, and Japanese foreign policy. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

What was Harlem before its Renaissance, and how did it come to be? In Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia University Press, 2021), historian Kevin McGruder, Associate Professor at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, explores the life of the remarkable Philip Anthony Payton Jr., a real estate entrepreneur who bought building after building at the turn of the 20th century in the core of Harlem, defined as 125th St. to 135th St. between 5th and 8th Avenues. In doing so, McGruder uncovers much about Black life in New York during the period between the Civil War and the Great Migration and makes an important contribution to the history of housing segregation in the United States. David Hamilton Golland is professor of history, coordinator of humanities, and president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.

Margarita Balmaceda’s Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (Columbia University Press, 2021) is a meticulous exploration of a complex system of energy supplies involving Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union. While originating in Russia, energy supplies, as the author asserts, undergo changes and transformations when being delivered to various destinations. What do these changes inform about the nature of both energy resources and power? Offering an insightful framework in which the two concepts can be understood, Russian Energy Chains complicates the issue of energy supplies that are inextricable from the dynamics of power relations on the interstate level. In addition to acute commentaries on the current role and status of Russia in the energy market, Margarita Balmaceda offers references to various time periods to illustrate how politically and geographically entangled energy systems are. Russian Energy Chains provides a detailed account of the development of the energy power that Russia seems to both offer and usurp; the book guides the reader through the complexity of power relations that include Ukraine and the European Union and helps better understand the current debate about Nord Stream-2. On a larger level, Margarita Balmaceda invites the discussion of the future of the energy market in terms of domestic and international policies. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

Historic preservation is typically regarded as an elitist practice. In this view, designating a neighborhood as historic is a project by and for affluent residents concerned with aesthetics, not affordability. It leads to gentrification and rising property values for wealthy homeowners, while displacement afflicts longer-term, lower-income residents of the neighborhood, often people of color. Through rich case studies of Baltimore and Brooklyn, Aaron Passell complicates this story, exploring how community activists and local governments use historic preservation to accelerate or slow down neighborhood change. He argues that this form of regulation is one of the few remaining urban policy interventions that enable communities to exercise some control over the changing built environments of their neighborhoods. In Baltimore, it is part of a primarily top-down strategy for channeling investment into historic neighborhoods, many of them plagued by vacancy and abandonment. In central Brooklyn, neighborhood groups have discovered the utility of landmark district designation as they seek to mitigate rapid change with whatever legal tools they can. The contrast between Baltimore and Brooklyn reveals that the relationship between historic preservation and neighborhood change varies not only from city to city, but even from neighborhood to neighborhood. In speaking with local activists, Passell finds that historic district designation and enforcement efforts can be a part of neighborhood community building and bottom-up revitalization. Featuring compelling narrative interviews alongside quantitative data, Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn (Columbia UP, 2021) is a nuanced mixed-methods study of an important local-level urban policy and its surprisingly varied consequences. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

We are conscious of only a small fraction of our lives. Because the brain constantly receives an enormous quantity of information, we need to be able to do things without thinking about them—to act in “autopilot” mode. Automatic behaviors—the vast majority of our activities—occur without our conscious awareness, or subconsciously. Yet the physiological basis of subconsciousness remains poorly understood, despite its vast importance for physical and mental health. The neurodegenerative disease expert Yves Agid offers a groundbreaking and accessible account of subconsciousness and its significance. He pinpoints the basal ganglia—the ancient “basement of the brain”—as the main physiological hub of the subconscious. Agid examines its roles in the control and production of automatic behavior, including motor, intellectual, and emotional processes. He highlights the consequences for various brain pathologies, showing how malfunctions of the subconscious have clinical repercussions including not only abnormal involuntary movements, as seen in Parkinson’s disease, but also psychiatric disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorders and depression. Based on this understanding, Agid considers how seeing the basal ganglia as a therapeutic target can aid development of potential new treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders. Shedding new light on the physiological bases of our behavior and mental states, Subconsciousness: Automatic Behavior and the Brain (Columbia UP, 2021) provides an innovative exploration of the complexities of the mind, with implications ranging from clinical applications to philosophy’s thorniest problems. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected].

Ideas about how to study and understand cultural history—particularly literature—are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2021) tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly. Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

Today I talked to Kevin McGruder about his new book Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia UP, 2021) In a moment of hope, even faith, African-Americans inspired by Booker T. Washington believed at the start of the 21st century that prospering financially would lead them to fair and even-standing with their fellow white citizens in America. In that vein, Philip Payton launched the Afro-American Realty Company in 1904 and in doing so took on the big-money crowd. Up against him, for instance, was the Hudson Realty Company that numbered among its backers the Bloomingdale family. To an amazing extent, Payton managed in his short life to engineer real estate deals that made Harlem the home base for many of the African-Americans coming north in the Great Migration of the World War One era. Was it an entirely smooth journey for Payton? No, it wasn’t—as McGruder points out in this episode that brings into account “racial capitalism” and the looming shadow of Woodrow Wilson’s divisive approach to race relations. Kevin McGruder is an associate professor of history at Antioch College. He’s also the author of Race and Real Estate and in the 1990s was the director of real estate development for the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a nonprofit church-based organization in Harlem. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

In a world that purports to know more about the future than any before it, why do we still need speculation? Insubstantial speculations – from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles – often provoke backlash, even when they prove prophetic. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy? Gayle Rogers, author of Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia UP, 2021), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the intellectual history of speculation: from the mirror and the watch tower, the Calvinist reformation, the scientific revolution, through Jane Austen, to the founding of the United States, and the shape of contemporary capitalism – with booms, manias, busts, and bubbles along the way. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future. Gayle Rogers is professor and chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

In 1928 linguist Yuen Ren Chao had reason to celebrate. The Nationalist government had just recognized his system for writing Chinese, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, so he gleefully wrote (using the system) in his diary: "G.R. yii yu jeou yueh 26 ry gong buh le. Hooray!!!" (G.R. was officially announced on September 26. Hooray!!!). He was not the only one excited about the prospect of scraping Chinese characters either. In the global context of phonocentric dominance both the Nationalists and the Communists waged war on Chinese characters, seeking new, scientific, modern, and entirely phonetic writing system. Ultimately, however, Chao's three exclamation marks were somewhat in vain. China's "script revolution" ended, and the Chinese Communist Party opted to simplify Chinese characters instead — a process and history deftly traced by Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958 (Columbia University Press, 2019). In Chinese Grammatology Yurou Zhong explores the history of the script revolution, tracing where it came from, how it changed over time, and how it was finally contained. Sharply written, beautifully constructed and filled with fascinated case studies, this is a real treat for those interested in modern Chinese history and literature, as well as anyone curious about global script reforms in the twentieth century. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at [email protected]

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah’s second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people’s politics and resistance.

Between 1949 and 1997, Hong Kong transformed from a struggling British colonial outpost into a global financial capital. Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2021) delivers a new narrative of this metamorphosis, revealing Hong Kong both as a critical engine in the expansion and remaking of postwar global capitalism and as the linchpin of Sino-U.S. trade since the 1970s. In Made in Hong Kong, Peter E. Hamilton explores the role of an overlooked transnational Chinese elite who fled to Hong Kong amid war and revolution. Despite losing material possessions, these industrialists, bankers, academics, and other professionals retained crucial connections to the United States. They used these relationships to enmesh themselves and Hong Kong with the U.S. through commercial ties and higher education. By the 1960s, Hong Kong had become a manufacturing powerhouse supplying American consumers, and by the 1970s it was the world’s largest sender of foreign students to American colleges and universities. Hong Kong’s reorientation toward U.S. international leadership enabled its transplanted Chinese elites to benefit from expanding American influence in Asia and positioned them to act as shepherds to China’s reengagement with global capitalism. After China’s reforms accelerated under Deng Xiaoping, Hong Kong became a crucial node for China’s export-driven development, connecting Chinese labor with the U.S. market. Peter E. Hamilton is a historian of China and the World. From fall 2021, he will be Assistant Professor in World History at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. His research has been published in Twentieth-Century China, The International History of Review, The Journal of Historical Sociology, and numerous media outlets. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, tentatively titled Banking on the Chinese Frontier: Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

The future of local news and the connection between local news and democracy are two of the hottest topics in philanthropy, education, and media these days. Nikki Usher addresses both head-on in her new book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2021). In the book and in this conversation, Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. She questions longstanding beliefs about the relationship between local news and civic engagement and separates observed behavior from myths about American democracy and the media's role within it. Drawing on more than a decade of field research in newsrooms across the United States, Usher illuminates how news organizations strategize about the future and offers ideas for how they can meet community information needs in an inclusive, equitable way. Nikki Usher is an associate professor in the College of Media at the University of Illinois . Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast.

Notre-Dame of Amiens is one of the great Gothic cathedrals. Its construction began in 1220, and artistic production in the Gothic mode lasted well into the sixteenth century. In Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral (Columbia UP, 2020), Stephen Murray invites readers to see the cathedral as more than just a thing of the past: it is a living document of medieval Christian society that endures in our own time. Murray tells the cathedral’s story from the overlapping perspectives of the social groups connected to it, exploring the ways that the layfolk who visit the cathedral occasionally, the clergy who use it daily, and the artisans who created it have interacted with the building over the centuries. He considers the cycles of human activity around the cathedral and shows how groups of makers and users have been inextricably intertwined in collaboration and, occasionally, conflict. The book travels around and through the spaces of the cathedral, allowing us to re-create similar passages by our medieval predecessors. Murray reveals the many worlds of the cathedral and brings them together in the architectural triumph of its central space. A beautifully illustrated account of a grand, historically and religiously important building from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of time periods, this book offers readers a memorable tour of Notre-Dame of Amiens that celebrates the cathedral’s eight hundredth anniversary. Notre-Dame of Amiens is enhanced by high-resolution images, liturgical music, and animations embedded in an innovative website. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

In an era of rampant Islamophobia, literary representations of Muslims and anti Muslim bigotry tell us a lot about changing concepts of cultural difference. In Islamophobia and the Novel (Columbia University Press, 2018), Peter Morey, Professor at the University of Birmingham, analyzes how recent works of fiction have framed and responded to the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice, showing how their portrayals of Muslims both reflect and refute the ideological preoccupations of media and politicians in the post-9/11 West. Morey discusses novels embodying a range of positions—from the avowedly secular to the religious, and from texts that appear to underwrite Western assumptions of cultural superiority to those that recognize and critique neoimperial impulses. Contemporary literature’s capacity to unveil the conflicted nature of anti-Muslim bigotry expands our range of resources to combat Islamophobia. This, in turn, might contribute to Islamophobia’s eventual dismantling. In our conversation we discussed anti-Muslim prejudice, the tension between narrative and power, literature and its relationship to Islamophobia, the “market for the Muslim,” stereotyping, authenticity and the burden of representation, aesthetic expectations, economic constraints, multiculturalism, securitization, effects of 9/11, the global novel, and Critical Muslim Literary Studies. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected].

In 2014 and 2015, students at dozens of colleges and universities held protests demanding increased representation of Black and Latino students and calling for a campus climate that was less hostile to students of color. Their activism recalled an earlier era: in the 1960s and 1970s, widespread campus protest by Black and Latino students contributed to the development of affirmative action and open admissions policies. Yet in the decades since, affirmative action has become a magnet for conservative backlash and in many cases has been completely dismantled. In To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press, 2019), Amaka Okechukwu offers a historically informed sociological account of the struggles over affirmative action and open admissions in higher education. Through case studies of policy retrenchment at public universities, she documents the protracted―but not always successful―rollback of inclusive policies in the context of shifting race and class politics. To Fulfill These Rights provides a new analysis of the politics of higher education, centering the changing understandings and practices of race and class in the United States. Amaka Okechukwu is an Assistant Professor of sociology at George Mason University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

Eric Schluessel’s Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt about and responded to attempts to transform them into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Centering on the voices and experiences of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan, Land of Strangers is filled with stories of prostitution, human trafficking, venereal disease, families divided by war, and so much more. Reading across the Turpan archive this book combines records in both Chinese and Chaghatay, laying bare the difficulties revivalists encountered in educating children and showing how interpreters went about 'translating' oral Chaghatay, and throughout it emphasizes how the negotiation of place, difference, and identity was continual and fraught. This beautifully written and meticulously researched book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese history, the history of Central Asia, colonialism, and empire, as well as any historians who might get a particular thrill in seeing the “ragged” sources Eric is dealing with so expertly pieced together. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at [email protected]

Critical philosophy has always challenged the division between theory and practice. At its best, it aims to turn contemplation into emancipation, seeking to transform society in pursuit of equality, autonomy, and human flourishing. Yet today’s critical theory often seems to engage only in critique. These times of crisis demand more. In Critique and Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action (Columbia University Press, 2020), Bernard E. Harcourt challenges us to move beyond decades of philosophical detours and to harness critical thought to the need for action. In a time of increasing awareness of economic and social inequality, Harcourt calls on us to make society more equal and just. Charting a vision for political action and social transformation, Harcourt argues that instead of posing the question, “What is to be done?” we must now turn it back onto ourselves and ask, and answer, “What more am I to do?”. The book advocates for a new path forward that constantly challenges each and every one of us to ask what more we can do to realize a society based on equality and justice. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education.

In this episode, J.J. Mull interviews Gavin Arnall, author of Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (Columbia University Press, 2020). Arnall traces an internal division throughout Fanon’s work between two distinct modes of thinking about change. He contends that there are two Fanons: a dominant Fanon who conceives of change as a dialectical process of becoming and a subterranean Fanon who experiments with an even more explosive underground theory of transformation. In this conversation, Arnall touches on various Fanonian traditions and what they have to tell us about contemporary psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at [email protected].

Justene Hill Edwards is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (Columbia University Press, 2021). Unfree Markets focuses in on an area of slavery’s history that has seldom been explore: the economic lives of enslaved people, and its meaning for them, enslavers, non-enslavers, and the institution of slavery itself. Hill Edwards explores how the complicated history of the slaves’ economy from the colonial period to the Civil War, showing the relationship between it and the development of capitalism in the nation. Through a history of enterprise, cultivation, markets, and people, Hill Edwards shows just how much the tenuous the connection between economic activity and freedom for the enslaved became throughout this time period, and what that meant for everyone involved. Justene Hill Edwards is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia. Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park.

Political Scientist Heath Brown’s new book, Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State (Columbia UP, 2021) is an excellent overview of the homeschooling movement in the United States, but it is much more than an exploration of that movement, since it centers on the way that this movement developed into a parallel political structure within states and localities with substantial capacity to influence policy and politics. Brown notes that initially the homeschool movement was ideologically diverse, but that over the past forty years it has become much more directly connected to conservative politics and the Religious Right. As parents chose to opt out of public education and provide education for their children at home, an entire industry grew up around this undertaking, providing, in the pre-internet days, support, content, approaches, and the means to help parents negotiate this at home. Along the way, as this movement continued to grow and expand, even though it was composed of only a fraction of school-age children, it also became a politically vocal movement, with lobbyists who worked on behalf of homeschoolers to keep government intrusion and regulation at bay. These threads came together and helped to mobilize the members of the homeschool movement. Brown argues that the ideology and the political dimensions of the homeschool movement ultimately migrated over to the Tea Party Movement that takes root in the first decade of the 21st century, since the homeschool ideas are pulling together conservative libertarianism in the anti-government, anti-regulatory vein, and the reintegration of Christian beliefs within academic settings. As we discussed the book, Brown noted that every Republican presidential candidate over the past two decades has paid attention to the homeschool movement, and that President George W. Bush made a point of thanking the homeschool parents and children who had worked so diligently on his campaign and with the GOP Get Out The Vote efforts, since the homeschool students were able to fold these experiences into their curriculum and assignments. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which developed to provide legal support for home school advocates across the states, had initially become a key player in conservative politics, but has now refocused much more narrowly, specifically on homeschool policy. Homeschooling the Right also gets at the complicated position of the homeschool movement within a democracy, since the movement itself is a way of removing the individual or the family from the public sphere. What is ironic, and important to understand, as Brown notes, is that this political movement has a louder, heightened political voice because of the capacity to mobilize many of its adherents, thus it is both actively inside and outside the political sphere. This is a wonderfully written book and so accessible to readers—and it will be of interest to many across a broad spectrum of disciplines. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

How should we understand creative work? In Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries (Columbia UP, 2021), Michael Siciliano, an assistant professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, explores this question through a comparison of a recording studio and a digital content creation company. The book considers the meaning and practice of ‘creative’ labour, considering its ambivalences, the passions and commitments, as well as the compromises and alienations associated with this area of economy and society. It represents a crucial intervention to the literature on cultural production, as well as offering an important understanding of the impact of digital modes of distribution and production on creative industries. A rich and fascinating comparative ethnography, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary culture.

All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Making of New York by Frederick M. Binder, David M. Reimers, and Robert W. Snyder (Columbia University Press, 2019) covers almost 500 years of New York City’s still unfolding story of cultural diversity and political conflict, economic dynamism and unmatched human diversity. This briskly paced volume – which updates a first edition originally published in the mid-1990s – reminds us that today’s hot button debates about immigration, inequality, and globalization have, in various earlier forms, long played roles in the evolution and development of one of the world’s great cities. Bruce Cory is editorial advisor at The Center for New York City Affairs at The New School.

Through discussion of his famous 1970s experiment alongside new research, in Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can (Columbia University Press, 2019), Herbert Terrace argues that, despite the failure of famous attempts to teach primates to speak, from these efforts we can learn something important: the missing link between non-linguistic and linguistic creatures is the ability to use words, not to form sentences. Situating language-learning as a capacity gained through conversation, not primarily representing internal thought, Terrace takes naming as the first step towards language. By drawing on research in developmental psychology, paleoanthropology, and linguistics, Terrace builds a case for understanding human language as grounded in social interaction between mother and child, rather than an inevitable, asocial result of a person’s development. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).

In this episode, I interview Richard Kearney, professor of philosophy at Boston College, about his most recent book, Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense. out through Columbia University Press. The basic premise of Touch is twofold: on the one hand, we have lost touch with our most basic sense, that of touch, the tactile; on the other hand, we must bring touch back to our lives. Kearney weaves together investigations of the centrality of touch that span the history of philosophy with discussions of its role in modern therapies and reflections on cultural tactility. Making the case for the complementarity of touch and technology, this book is a passionate plea to recover a tangible sense of community and the joys of life with others. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

What is the story of race in American fiction? In Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020), Richard Jean So, an assistant professor of English in the Department of English at McGill University, uses computational and quantitative methods, alongside close textual analysis, to demonstrate the institutional whiteness of the US publishing industry. Even as the rise of multiculturalism has been celebrated in American fiction, So shows how publishing houses, reviewers, prize givers, and audiences still focused on a minority of Minority authors, with little evidence of change during the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, although as the struggle for recognition seemed to be won within universities, the literary world continued to exclude authors of colour. In addition, the book engages with, and draws inspiration from, the work and career of Toni Morrison, offering findings that will engage across both the humanities and social sciences. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in race and literature, along with anyone interested in explaining and understanding why race continues to be essential to understanding contemporary culture. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

David Brophy's translation of Muhammad Sadiq Kashghari's In Remembrance of the Saints: The Rise and Fall of an Inner Asian Sufi Dynasty (Columbia University Press, 2021) represents the first comprehensive translation of the text into English. The translation includes a detailed introduction that not only contextualizes the text and its author, but also describes how it reflects the religious and political landscape of the region in the 18th century. Because it sheds light on the Qing conquest of Xinjiang, the role of Naqshbandi Sufis in the region, and the relations between the Muslims of the Tarim Basin and neighboring groups like the Junghars and the Kyrgyz, Brophy's translation will be of great interest to students and scholars of Central Asia, China, and the Islamic world. Nicholas Seay is a PhD student at Ohio State University

In the seventeenth century, Japanese popular prose flourished as waves of newly literate readers gained access to the printed word. Commercial publishers released vast numbers of titles in response to readers’ hunger for books that promised them potent knowledge. However, traditional literary histories of this period position the writings of Ihara Saikaku at center stage, largely neglecting the breadth of popular prose. In Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Columbia UP, 2020), Laura Moretti investigates the vibrant world of vernacular popular literature. She marshals new data on the magnitude of the seventeenth-century publishing business and highlights the diversity and porosity of its publishing genres. Moretti explores how booksellers sparked interest among readers across the spectrum of literacies and demonstrates how they tantalized consumers with vital ethical, religious, societal, and interpersonal knowledge. She recasts books as tools for knowledge making, arguing that popular prose engaged its audience cognitively as well as aesthetically and emotionally to satisfy a burgeoning curiosity about the world. Crucially, Moretti shows, readers experienced entertainment within the didactic, finding pleasure in the profit gained from acquiring knowledge by interacting with transformative literature. Drawing on a rich variety of archival materials to present a vivid portrait of seventeenth-century Japanese publishing, Pleasure in Profit also speaks to broader conversations about the category of the literary by offering a new view of popular prose that celebrates plurality. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

Nineteenth-century Japanese literary discourse and narrative developed a striking preoccupation with ninjō—literally “human emotion,” but often used in reference to amorous feeling and erotic desire. For many writers and critics, fiction’s capacity to foster both licentiousness and didactic values stood out as a crucial source of ambivalence. Simultaneously capable of inspiring exemplary behavior and a dangerous force transgressing social norms, ninjō became a focal point for debates about the role of the novel and a key motor propelling narrative plots. In Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel (Columbia UP, 2019), Daniel Poch investigates the significance of ninjō in defining the literary modernity of nineteenth-century Japan. He explores how cultural anxieties about the power of literature in mediating emotions and desire shaped Japanese narrative from the late Edo through the Meiji period. Poch argues that the Meiji novel, instead of superseding earlier discourses and narrative practices surrounding ninjō, complicated them by integrating them into new cultural and literary concepts. He offers close readings of a broad array of late Edo- and Meiji-period narrative and critical sources, examining how they shed light on the great intensification of the concern surrounding ninjō. In addition to proposing a new theoretical outlook on emotion, Licentious Fictions challenges the divide between early modern and modern Japanese literary studies by conceptualizing the nineteenth century as a continuous literary-historical space.

Scientists have scientific reason and use the scientific method. Humanists have... Emotion? Close reading? Not so, argues Eric Hayot in Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (Columbia UP, 2021). Contrary to popular belief, the humanities involve both reasoning and methods. Humanist reason, Hayot shows, is philosophically and historically grounded and applicable to almost every discipline. Part history of philosophy, part methods handbook, and part manifesto, Humanist Reason will change the way we advocate for the humanities in the twenty-first century. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

This wide-ranging and powerful book argues that Theravāda Buddhism provides ways of thinking about the self that can reinvigorate the humanities and offer broader insights into how to learn and how to act. Steven Collins argues that Buddhist philosophy should be approached in the spirit of its historical teachers and visionaries, who saw themselves not as preservers of an archaic body of rules but as part of a timeless effort to understand what it means to lead a worthy life. He contends that Buddhism should be studied philosophically, literarily, and ethically using its own vocabulary and rhetorical tools. Approached in this manner, Buddhist notions of the self help us rethink contemporary ideas of self-care and the promotion of human flourishing. Collins details the insights of Buddhist texts and practices that promote the ideal of active and engaged learning, offering an expansive and lyrical reflection on Theravāda approaches to meditation, asceticism, and physical training. He explores views of monastic life and contemplative practices as complementing and reinforcing textual learning, and argues that the Buddhist tenet that the study of philosophy and ethics involves both rigorous reading and an ascetic lifestyle has striking resonance with modern and postmodern ideas. A bold reappraisal of the history of Buddhist literature and practice, Wisdom as a Way of Life: Theravāda Buddhism Reimagined (Columbia University Press, 2020) offers students and scholars across the disciplines a nuanced understanding of the significance of Buddhist ways of knowing for the world today.

Xiaomei Chen's Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda (Columbia UP, 2016) examines the changing place of revolutionary propaganda in a changing China. Chen analyzes the "grey areas" in deceptively simple plays and films, showing how a contemporary film about Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping can also be read as an indictment of the corruption and inequality of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." In our discussion we also touch on Xiaomei's family's history as prominent Chinese actors and her own intellectual journey, beginning as a Red Guard and ending as a tenured professor at UC Davis. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

Alzheimer’s disease, a haunting and harrowing ailment, is one of the world’s most common causes of death. Alzheimer’s lingers for years, with patients’ outward appearance unaffected while their cognitive functions fade away. Patients lose the ability to work and live independently, to remember and recognize. There is still no proven way to treat Alzheimer’s because its causes remain unknown. Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer's (Columbia UP, 2021) is a comprehensive and engaging history of Alzheimer’s that demystifies efforts to understand the disease. Beginning with the discovery of “presenile dementia” in the early twentieth century, Han Yu examines over a century of research and controversy. She presents the leading hypotheses for what causes Alzheimer’s; discusses each hypothesis’s tangled origins, merits, and gaps; and details their successes and failures. Yu synthesizes a vast amount of medical literature, historical studies, and media interviews, telling the gripping stories of researchers’ struggles while situating science in its historical, social, and cultural contexts. Her chronicling of the trajectory of Alzheimer’s research deftly balances rich scientific detail with attention to the wider implications. In narrating the attempts to find a treatment, Yu also offers a critical account of research and drug development and a consideration of the philosophy of aging. Wide-ranging and accessible, Mind Thief is an important book for all readers interested in the challenge of Alzheimer’s.

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island in the late eighteenth century and began to gradually abolish slavery. Yet the continued presence of enslaved people in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century has practically vanished from collective memory in both the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. Nira Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of enslaved people in the wake of abolition. She tells the stories of Wayreven, the slave who traveled in the palanquin of his master; Selestina, accused of killing her child; Rawothan, who sought permission for his son to be circumcised; and others, enslaved or emancipated, who challenged their status. Drawing on legal cases, petitions, and other colonial records to recover individual voices and quotidian moments, Wickramasinghe offers a meditation on the archive of slavery. She examines how color-based racial thinking gave way to more nuanced debates about identity, complicating conceptions of blackness and racialization. A deeply interdisciplinary book with a focus on recovering subaltern resistance, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2020) offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean. Nira Wickramasinghe is Chair Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. Her books include Metallic Modern: Everyday Machines in Colonial Sri Lanka (2014) and Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History (second edition, 2015). Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83

In 1935, the writer Baburao Patel writes the following about Bombay’s film industry: “In India, with financing conditions still precarious, the professional film distributor thrives. . . . He comes with a fortune made in share and cotton gambling, advances money to the producer at a killing rate of interest plus a big slice of royalty and recovers his investment by blackmailing the exhibitors into giving heavy and uneconomic minimum guarantees. His only aim in life is to multiply his rupee and in prosecuting this aim he does not worry about the future of the industry or about the existence of the producer or exhibitor.” It’s a hectic time for India’s film industry, as it is for films everywhere, as the silent era becomes the talking era. Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Columbia University Press: 2020) examines this key period of India’s film industry, from finance and casting to screenwriting and production, and brings into view the experiences of the marginalised film workers and forgotten film studios that made up this early period of industry. In this interview, Debashree and I talk about the transition from silent to talking movies in Bombay, along with the historical context and working conditions for those in the city’s historical film industry. Those interested in learning more about the film industry in 1930s Bombay can visit the Wildcat of Bombay Instagram account at @wildcatofbombay (recommended by Debashree!) Debashree Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope and has published in journals such as Film History and Feminist Media Histories. In a previous life Debashree worked in Mumbai’s film and TV industries as an assistant director, writer, and cameraperson. More information can be found on Debashree’s website, and she can be followed on Twitter at @Debashree2017. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bombay Hustle. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

In this episode, I interview Lucy Alford, professor of English Literature at Wake Forest University, about her book Forms of Poetic Attention, recently published by Columbia University Press. Alford argues that, though poetry is ‘made’ of language, its main medium is attention, that poems act fundamentally as instruments for tuning and refining readerly and writerly attention. Following this assertion, Alford, through a wide variety of poetic readings (from al-Khansāʾ to Charles Bukowski, Sappho to Paul Celan—and many in between and around), breaks down the different modalities of attention that emerge in different poems. The overarching dichotomy that Alford identifies differentiates between poetic attention that has an object—transitive—and another, more nebulous form without an object—intransitive. In each of these types, Alford further delineates dynamic coordinates, which are formal-semantic aspects of a poem that lead into various modes of poetic attention: contemplation, desire, recollection, and imagination for transitive; and vigilance, resignation, idleness, and boredom for intransitive. In crafting this lexicon, Alford not only provides a new theory for poetic analysis, but alo expands the theoretical boundaries beyond the confines of the poetic. Instead, she argues, by paying attention to poetry as a subject and object of attention, poetry, through its requirement and production of attention, can train, hone, and refine our capacities for perception and judgment off the page, enabling us to become more attentive beings in a world that increasingly treats attention as a precious commodity. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.