Episodes

  • Christopher Bell, "Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

    Christopher Bell, "Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
    Nov 20 2024
    They call it Spanish Harlem or sometimes just El Barrio. But for over a century, East Harlem has been a melting pot of many ethnic groups, including Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and Mexican immigrants, as well as Italian, Jewish, and African American communities. Though gentrification is rapidly changing the face of this section of upper Manhattan, it is still full of sites that attest to its rich cultural heritage. Now East Harlem native Christopher Bell takes you on a tour of his beloved neighborhood. He takes you on three separate walking tours, each visiting a different part of East Harlem and each full of stories about its theaters, museums, art spaces, schools, community centers, churches, mosques, and synagogues. You'll also learn about the famous people who lived in El Barrio, such as actress Cecily Tyson, opera singer Marian Anderson, portrait artist Alice Neel, incomparable poet Julia De Burgos, and King of Latin Music Tito Puente. Lavishly illustrated with over fifty photos, Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience (Rutgers University Press, 2024) points out not only the many architectural and cultural landmarks in the neighborhood but also the historical buildings that have since been demolished. Whether you are a tourist or a resident, this guide will give you a new appreciation for El Barrio's exciting history, cultural diversity, and continued artistic vibrancy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    38 mins
  • Elia Powers, "Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

    Elia Powers, "Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
    Nov 6 2024
    Elia Powers' book Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality (Rutgers UP, 2024) explores how journalists from historically marginalized groups have long felt pressure to conform when performing for audiences. Many speak with a flat, “neutral” accent, modify their delivery to hide distinctive vocal attributes, dress conventionally to appeal to the “average” viewer, and maintain a consistent appearance to avoid unwanted attention. Their aim is what author Elia Powers refers to as performance neutrality—presentation that is deemed unobjectionable, reveals little about journalists’ social identity, and supposedly does not detract from their message. Increasingly, journalists are challenging restrictive, purportedly neutral forms of self-presentation. This book argues that performance neutrality is a myth that reinforces the status quo, limits on-air diversity, and hinders efforts to make newsrooms more inclusive. Through in-depth interviews with journalists in broadcasting and podcasting, and those who shape their performance, the author suggests ways to make journalism more inclusive and representative of diverse audiences. Cory Barker is a faculty member in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University, where he teaches courses on film, television, and digital culture. Twitter. Newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    59 mins
  • Andrew R. Basso, "Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

    Andrew R. Basso, "Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
    Aug 13 2024
    Perpetrators of mass atrocities have used displacement to transport victims to killing sites or extermination camps to transfer victims to sites of forced labor and attrition, to ethnically homogenize regions by moving victims out of their homes and lands, and to destroy populations by depriving them of vital daily needs. Displacement has been treated as a corollary practice to crimes committed, not a central aspect of their perpetration. Destroy Them Gradually: Displacement as Atrocity (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines four cases that illuminate why perpetrators have destroyed populations using displacement policies: Germany’s genocide of the Herero (1904–1908); Ottoman genocides of Christian minorities (1914–1925); expulsions of Germans from East/Central Europe (1943–1952); and climate violence (twenty-first century). Because displacement has been typically framed as a secondary aspect of mass atrocities, existing scholarship overlooks how perpetrators use it as a means of executing destruction rather than a vehicle for moving people to a specific location to commit atrocities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 13 mins
  • Rachel Z. Feldman, "Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

    Rachel Z. Feldman, "Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
    Jul 9 2024
    Judaism in the twenty-first century has seen the rise of the messianic Third Temple movement, as religious activists based in Israel have worked to realize biblical prophecies, including the restoration of a Jewish theocracy and the construction of the third and final Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Through groundbreaking ethnographic research, Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age: Jews, Noahides, and the Third Temple Imaginary (Rutgers University Press, 2024), Rachel Z. Feldman details how Third Temple visions have gained considerable momentum and political support in Israel and abroad. The role of technology in this movement’s globalization has been critical. Feldman highlights the ways in which the internet and social media have contributed to the movement's growth beyond the streets of Jerusalem into communities of former Christians around the world who now identify as the Children of Noah (Bnei Noah). She documents the intimate effects of political theologies in motion and the birth of a new transnational Judaic faith. Interviewee: Rachel Feldman is an assistant professor of religious studies at Dartmouth College. Host: 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Kim Nelson, "Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

    Kim Nelson, "Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
    Jun 25 2024
    Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film (Rutgers UP, 2024) builds upon decades of scholarship investigating history in visual culture by proposing a methodology of five principles to analyze history in moving images in the digital age. It charts a path to understanding the form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past. The book develops insights across these fields, including philosophical considerations of film and history, to clarify the form and function of history in moving images. It addresses the implications of the historical film on public historical consciousness, presenting criteria to engage and assess the truth status of depictions of the past. Each chapter offers a detailed aspect of this methodology for analyzing history in moving images. Together, they propose five principles to organize past and future scholarship in this vital, interdisciplinary field of study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    27 mins
  • Keja L. Valens, "Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

    Keja L. Valens, "Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
    Jun 22 2024
    Women across the Caribbean have been writing, reading, and exchanging cookbooks since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. These cookbooks are about much more than cooking. Through cookbooks, Caribbean women, and a few men, have shaped, embedded, and contested colonial and domestic orders, delineated the contours of independent national cultures, and transformed tastes for independence into flavours of domestic autonomy. Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence (Rutgers University Press, 2024) by Dr. Keja Valens integrates new documents into the Caribbean archive and presents them in a rare pan-Caribbean perspective. The first book-length consideration of Caribbean cookbooks, Culinary Colonialism joins a growing body of work in Caribbean studies and food studies that considers the intersections of food writing, race, class, gender, and nationality. A selection of recipes, culled from the archive that Culinary Colonialism assembles, allows readers to savour the confluence of culinary traditions and local specifications that connect and distinguish national cuisines in the Caribbean. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Casey James Miller, "Inside the Circle: Queer Culture and Activism in Northwest China" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

    Casey James Miller, "Inside the Circle: Queer Culture and Activism in Northwest China" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
    Jun 11 2024
    After the end of the Maoist era in the People's Republic of China, the rise of queer communities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has generated growing public and academic attention. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in northwest China, Casey James Miller offers a novel, compelling, and intimately personal perspective on Chinese queer culture and activism. In Inside the Circle: Queer Culture and Activism in Northwest China (Rutgers UP, 2023), Miller tells the stories of two courageous and dedicated groups of queer activists in the city of Xi’an: a grassroots gay men’s HIV/AIDS organization called Tong’ai and a lesbian women’s group named UNITE. Taking inspiration from “the circle,” a term used to imagine local, national, and global queer communities, Miller shows how everyday people in northwest China are taking part in queer culture and activism while also striving to lead traditionally moral lives in a rapidly changing society. The queer stories in this book broaden our understandings of gender and sexuality in contemporary China and show how taking global queer diversity seriously requires us to de-center Western cultural values, historical experiences, and theoretical perspectives. Casey James Miller is Assistant Professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He receives his PhD degree in anthropology from Brandeis University. His work focuses on the intersections between queer anthropology, medical anthropology, and the anthropology of Chinese culture and society. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • Jan Baetens, "Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters" (Rutgers UP, 2020)

    Jan Baetens, "Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters" (Rutgers UP, 2020)
    May 26 2024
    Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters (Rutgers UP, 2020) examines The Obscure Cities, one of the few comics series to achieve massive popularity while remaining highly experimental in form and content. Set in a parallel world, full of architecturally distinctive city-states, The Obscure Cities also represents one of the most impressive pieces of world-building in any form of literature. Rebuilding Story Worlds offers the first full-length study of this seminal series, exploring both the artistic traditions from which it emerges and the innovative ways it plays with genre, gender, and urban space. Comics scholar Jan Baetens examines how Schuiten’s work as an architectural designer informs the series’ concerns with the preservation of historic buildings. He also includes an original interview with Peeters, which reveals how poststructuralist critical theory influenced their construction of a rhizomatic fictional world, one which has made space for fan contributions through the Alta Plana website. Synthesizing cutting-edge approaches from both literary and visual studies, Rebuilding Story Worlds will give readers a new appreciation for both the aesthetic ingenuity of The Obscure Cities and its nuanced conception of politics. Jan Baetens is a Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Arts of the KU Leuven. His main research interests and areas of expertise include: contemporary French poetry and popular culture (among many other topics). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    59 mins