Bookshelf

(Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Clark uses what he calls the “dual function” of Socrates’ “What is F-ness?” question to find positive philosophical content in Plato’s dialogues of definition. The publisher’s description of the book says that Clark uses the question as a springboard for two types of investigation — conceptual and causal — noting that the key to understanding any of the dialogues of definition, therefore, is to decipher between them. “Clark offers a way to do just that, at once resolving interpretive issues in Socratic philosophy, providing systematic interpretations of the negative endings, and generating important new readings of the Charmides and Lysis, whilst casting further doubt on the authenticity of the Hippias Major.”

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022).
The publisher notes: “The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition — and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution — were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world. Tracing early modern artisanal practice, Mackenzie Cooley shows how the idea of race and theories of inheritance developed through animal breeding in the shadow of the Spanish Empire. While one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, another limited it by biology, reducing man to beast and prince to stud. ‘Race,’ Cooley explains, first referred to animal stock honed through breeding. To those who invented the concept, race was not inflexible, but the fragile result of reproductive work. As the Spanish empire expanded, the concept of race moved from nonhuman to human animals. Cooley reveals how, as the dangerous idea of controlled reproduction was brought to life again and again, a rich, complex, and ever-shifting language of race and breeding was born.”

(Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2021).

In this book, the author has compiled the important terms, laws, and information on the political life of Guyana. Andaiye, the late Guyanese gender rights activist, wrote in the foreword: “A Political Glossary of Guyana is pioneering work. There has been no previous recorded attempt at compiling a similar glossary in the country, although there have been earlier reference books of different kinds … best of all, it is designed to be of use not only to students and teachers in a range of disciplines including Caribbean studies and political science, but to the very many of us outside academia who do not have the skills to dig up information for ourselves from dust-filled documents and memories.”

(Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2021).

This book is the first to set the poets of Scottish King James IV’s court — William Dunbar, Walter Kennedy, and Gavin Douglas — in an extended dialogue with Latin and vernacular traditions of historiography. As one reviewer noted, “Terrell’s elegant study examines how these Scottish writers marked out a distinct realm of Scottish cultural and poetic achievement, appropriating and subverting English literary models in ways that reveal the interplay between literary and historical authority in the scripting of nationhood.

(Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley Blackwell, 2021)
Part of the Blackwell Guides to Classical Literature series, this book “explores the language of Latin poetry while helping readers understand the socio-cultural context of the remarkable period of Roman literary history in which the poetry was composed. With an innovative approach to this important area of classical scholarship, the authors treat elegy alongside lyric as they cover topics such as the Hellenistic influences on Augustan poetry, the key figures that shaped the elegiac tradition of Rome, the motifs of militia amoris (‘the warfare of love’) and servitium amoris (‘the slavery of love’) in Latin love elegy, and more,” according to the publisher.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2021)
According to the publisher, “While levels of religious belief and observance are declining in much of the Western world, the number of people who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ is on the rise. Practices such as yoga, meditation, and pilgrimage are surging in popularity. ‘Wellness’ regimes offer practitioners a lexicon of spirituality and an array of spiritual experiences. Commentators talk of a new spiritual awakening ‘after religion.’ And global mobility is generating hybrid practices that blur the lines between religion and spirituality.”

The essays collected in this book examine not only individual engagements with spirituality, but also show how seemingly personal facets of spirituality are deeply shaped by religious, cultural, and political contexts.

(Duke University Press, 2021)
Part of the Refiguring American Music series, this book builds on archival research and oral history interviews, conducted in France, Senegal, and the United States, that examine the popularization of African American music in postwar France and the Francophone world where it signaled new forms of power and protest. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, the author demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements.

One reviewer notes, “Celeste Day Moore takes us on a dazzling and deeply researched tour through the soundscapes and multisensory experiences of the Francophone Black world.”

(Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2020)
According to the publisher, this book offers “a new history of what it meant to shoot, edit, and sell news images after World War II” and unravels the mythology surrounding Magnum Photos, a photographers’ cooperative founded in the middle of the 20th century.

“Bair shows that between the 1940s and 1960s, Magnum expanded the human-interest story to global dimensions while bringing the aesthetic of news pictures into new markets” and “made photojournalism integral to postwar visual culture,” the publisher adds. “By unpacking the collaborative nature of photojournalism, [the] book shows how picture editors, sales agents, spouses, and publishers helped Magnum photographers succeed in their assignments and achieve fame.”

The book, the author’s first, was named winner of the Association of American Publishers’ 2021 PROSE Award.

(University of California Press, 2021)
Best known for his experimental film about its own making, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, William Greaves was an influential independent documentary filmmaker who produced, directed, shot, and edited more than 100 films on a variety of social issues and on key African American figures ranging from Muhammad Ali to Ralph Bunche to Ida B. Wells.

MacDonald’s book offers the first comprehensive overview of Greaves’ career, bringing together a mix of essays from critics and scholars, Greaves’ own writings, an extensive meta-interview with Greaves, conversations with his wife and collaborator and his son. Together, they illuminate Greaves’ mission to use filmmaking as a tool for transforming the ways African Americans were perceived by others and the ways they saw themselves.

(New York and London: Routledge, 2021).
This volume focuses on teaching classics in a prison setting and features articles that examine how incarcerated adults read and discuss classical texts and the best pedagogical practices for teaching within a prison.