Rorotoko

In a nutshell

Hip-Hop Revolution explores the current cultural and political landscape of hip-hop by providing a broad based historical context for the art. Beginning with the emergence of popular culture in the United States and the minstrel show in the antebellum era, I work through the emergence of jazz, rock and roll, blaxploitation movies in the 1970s, to the development of hip-hop in the mid-1970s New York City. The point…

In a nutshell

Newlyweds on Tour is the first historical study to trace the origins and growth of the American honeymoon from 1820 to 1900. Rather than treating the honeymoon as a simple by-product of the privatization of the family, I argue that it was formed at the interstices of and helped articulate a variety of narratives -– patriotic, conjugal, sentimental, and sexual – that were central to modern American national…

In a nutshell

Right populist parties have been gaining electoral clout in Europe since the mid-1990s. Right wing parties are not new to European politics. What is new is that parties that analysts had viewed as extremist and fringe are attracting sufficient numbers of votes to become part of legally constituted governing coalitions.

This is a surprising development. Post-war Europe prided itself on having learned the lessons of fascism and Nazism.…

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Why do we tell stories—or, for that matter, engage in any of the arts? In a world of unsparing biological competition, how could a successful species afford an unflagging appetite for stories we know to be untrue? Why do we expend time and resources on music, dance, design, and stories? The arts, and especially the art of fiction, give us pleasure, of course. But does that pleasure reflect…

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In order for countries to reconcile after terrible wars, must they apologize, pay reparations, and otherwise “come to terms with the past”?

A powerful conventional wisdom, based on the postwar experiences of West Germany and Japan, says yes. West Germany made extensive efforts to atone for wartime crimes—formal apologies, monuments to victims of the Nazis, and candid history textbooks; Bonn successfully reconciled with its wartime enemies. By contrast,…

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The Three Cultures compares the premises, vocabulary, sources of evidence, contributions, and limitations of the research, scholarship, and theories of natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists. The concepts of physicists, chemists, and biologists refer to things with material features, such as particles, molecules, cells, and neurons. Most social scientists and humanists rely on concepts for events, such as behavior, thought, and emotion, that occur at the end of…

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This book is about the cultural connection between love and illness—a connection often referred to in the everyday use as “lovesickness” and all too often automatically assumed. As a specialist in and a long-time devotee of nineteenth-century Russian literature, I encountered time and again, almost in every nineteenth-century Russian novel, a hero or a heroine who falls ill or even dies from unrequited or unfulfilled love. I became…

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Mainland Passage is a historical and cultural study of the Puerto Rican mass migration to New York City in the 1940s and how this migration ultimately created a Puerto Rican cultural borderland. I call this crucial migration the mainland passage because it served to strengthen Puerto Rico’s political relationship with the United States.

The book describes how this passage to the mainland was coordinated with the creation…

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The Conservative Turn is an intellectual history of American anti-communism told through the biographies of two intellectuals, Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers, who met as Columbia undergraduates in the 1920s.

Both of them were communists in their youth, and both would become anti-communists in the 1930s, only to travel in two separate ideological directions, representative men for the purposes of this book. A scholar and a literary critic,…

In a nutshell

9/11 was one of the most photographed events in history, and in the years that followed numerous films investigated, profiled and sought to understand what happened on that day and how such a calamity could occur. As years pass and the events grow more distant in time, film portraits of what happened on 9/11 grow more salient as a form of social memory.

Firestorm examines the influence of…

In a nutshell

As recently as the 1930s there were no creative writing programs, and now there are hundreds. My book The Program Era is a literary history of postwar America that puts this remarkable fact at its center, asking what it means that most serious writers in the U.S. now teach creative writing, and are themselves graduates of writing programs.

This would be an important story if only for the…

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Muhammad Is Not the Father of any of Your Men is about the Islamic assertion that Muhammad was the last in a series of prophets sent by God to mankind in order to facilitate human salvation. This assertion is mentioned once in the Qur’an, in verse 40 of chapter 33 (“The Confederates”). Here, addressing an unidentified audience, the voice that controls the text announces, “Muhammad is not the…

In a nutshell

Camps are unavoidable functions of our contemporary moment, registering local and global forces at their earliest stages and thus signaling trend, crisis, and identity. These malleable spaces conform to our desires but might equally be constrained or manipulated by external forces. Some camp to escape, while others set up camp to approximate return to a home that is inaccessible or does not exist, still others are forced to…