History Faculty Publish Five Books in Fall 2010
The Department of History has had a busy year for book publications! Five history faculty members have published books in fall 2010, all of which are available here in the GSU Library:
Isa Blumi, Chaos in Yemen: Societal Collapse and the New Authoritarianism (Routledge). Prof. Blumi challenges recent interpretations of the social, political, and economic transformations in Yemen since unification in 1990, explaining why the ‘Abdullah ‘Ali Salih regime has become the principal beneficiary of these conflicts. Blumi resists linking Yemen to the “global struggle against Islamists,” offering a perspective on Yemen domestic affairs that challenges contemporary over-emphasis on the tribe and sectarianism. More broadly, Blumi’s work offers an alternative set of approaches to studying societies facing new forms of state authoritiarianism. (From publisher’s description).
Allen Fromherz, The Almohads: Rise of an Islamic Empire (I. B. Tauris) and, published in spring 2010, Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh University Press). See our recent blog entry here describing these two books, both drawing on original Arabic sources.
Jacob Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London (Ashgate) Prof. Selwood focuses on how inhabitants of early modern London understood the increasingly diverse nature of their city. Emphasizing day-to-day practice, Selwood draws on petitions, government records, guild minute books and taxation disputes along with plays and printed texts to show how the people of London defined belonging and exclusion in the course of their daily actions–the making and selling of goods, the collection of taxes and the give and take of guild politics. An empirical examination of civic economics, taxation and occupational politics that asks broader questions about multiculturalism and Englishness, this study speaks not just to the history of immigration in London itself, but to the wider debate about evolving notions of national identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (From publisher’s description).
Christine Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise: U. S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i (University of Pennsylvania Press). In The Purposes of Paradise, Prof. Skwiot uses discourses of travel, tourism, desire and diplomacy to untangle the histories of Cuba and Hawai’i in the context of U.S. imperialism and global power. Drawing on a broad range of primary sources, from government resources and tourist industry records to promotional materials and travel narratives, Skwiot explores how travel and tourism shaped U.S. imperialist policy and attitudes towards Cuba and Hawai’i; more broadly, her book highlights both continuity and change in U.S. imperial thought and practice, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. (From publisher’s description).
and
Charles Steffen, Mutilating Khalid: The Symbolic Politics of Female Genital Cutting (Red Sea Press). In Mutilating Khalid, Prof. Steffen examines a recent case of female genital mutilation prosecuted in a U.S. court, beginning with a suburban Atlanta jury’s 2006 conviction of Khalid Misri Adem, a thirty-one-year-old Ethiopian immigrant, of two counts of aggravated assault and cruelty to children for allegedly circumcising his daughter when she was two years old, resulting in Adem being sentenced to ten years in a Georgia state penitentiary. The precedent-setting Adem case drew national and international media coverage and energized women’s rights and human rights activists from Atlanta to Nairobi, and prompted the Georgia state legislature to pass a law criminalizing female genital mutilation. Steffen explores the symbolic politics that surrounded the precedent-setting Adem case, showing how prosecutors, judges, reporters, politicians, and activists set out to mold the public’s image of Khalid and to appropriate his symbolic value for their own particular purpose, and addressing the forms of symbolic politics that have arisen as transnational immigration alters the human landscape of American cities. (From publisher’s description)