aimiller's Reviews (689)

This book is a really incredible intervention in food studies that takes consumption (literally, as in eating) as a mode of racial production, and intervening into Foucault's notion of biopower as being a localized process, rather than something that is located in a larger European state. It's also an incredibly beautifully written book--Tompkins' writing really aligns with her argument, and although it is theoretically dense, it's in no way impenetrable. My favorite chapters were chapter three and chapter five, looking at Uncle Tom's Cabin and at trade cards from the author's collection.

A really moving and important look at haunting as methodology, and for exploring haunting as a mode of identifying how systems of power and sociality coexist in the current day. I'll note that I read "A Glossary of Haunting" by Eve Tuck and C. Ree before I read this book, so my reading was pretty heavily colored by that essay (which I strongly recommend to everyone ever all the time.) I particularly enjoyed chapters three and four, as I thought they lent themselves most strongly to what I do as a historian, so obviously ymmv on that point. Her weird obsession with haunting being fixed by justice, and as a means towards a solution (or a signpost towards that solution) was very odd to me given what "Glossary" has to say, and I'm still teasing out how I feel about that (can we give ghosts justice? Will ghosts just go away?)

The book is very beautifully written, though, and I will no doubt mine it heavily for quotations in the future! I'd definitely recommend this to anyone thinking about haunting as a theoretical concept for their work.

A really incredible look into four different food-related movements across the 20th century, and the ways that they reveal more about the cultural values held by those in charge of the movements than they do about food practices themselves.

I really really enjoyed this book- it was easy to read (I got through it in less than a day) and though it wasn't necessarily groundbreaking to me, the way things were explained was very simple and accessible. The chapter on "obesity" really was what knocked it out of the park for me, and her very deliberate and careful pulling back of layers to reveal how class in particular shapes understandings around food (especially shoring up the boundaries of the middle class) are something I want every single person in my life to read. (But really, it's a bummer this isn't through a popular press because I want everyone to read it.)

A really solid examination and troubling of biopolitics and racialization. It can be rough to get into at first, but once you get going, it gets easier and easier to read, and by the end you're really invested. The last chapter in particular is really good in terms of thinking about what it might mean to consider a futurity outside of the western Man. I really loved chapter 5 ("Law") as well, for its examination of how documented "wounding" may be necessary for full personhood. It may really help you to have reader Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter before you read this, but it's not necessary by any stretch. A really good book overall,and one I'm glad to have read.

This book is really a great look at the different dimensions of the political use of music for American Indian folks, and is an incredible look at the ways that Native folks have navigated federal attempts at assimilation by using music as a political tool to assert sovereignty where they could. I really enjoyed especially the last chapter about specific artists, though the chapter about music education is a great addition to literature about boarding schools. It can occasionally feel like a slog, or maybe that's because I tried to read it in like 10-page bursts before bed when I thought I was awake enough to handle it (hence why it took almost six months for me to finish it...) but otherwise I really enjoyed this book.

A good solid read, though some of it feels repetitive if you've read other pieces of queer history (I literally just finished portions of Jack Halberstam's In a Queer Time and Place which makes the argument about the urban-centric focus on queer communities really not look as fresh as it might have otherwise.) The best chapters in my opinion were the chapter on "hard women" (chapter six) and the chapter about community policing or non-policing (chapter four.) Those were the chapters were Johnson's point about pushing queer historiography were really most obvious and challenging. Otherwise it was... fine? I enjoyed the chapter about the CCC in the same way I love all stories about drag shows in male homosocial spaces, but I didn't find it particularly groundbreaking. But I did leave it grateful that I had read it, so I think that is worth something (hence the four stars.)

Such a good, important book. Norrgard does an incredible job of weaving Ojibwe meanings of labor with the way that labor functioned as an exercise of sovereignty, and it really hammers home the point in an incredible way. The way she navigates labor history is so deft and incredible, and her careful commitment to the stories she tells is just so admirable. This is an incredible book and I strongly recommend it for anyone who wants to see an incredible example of Native labor history.

I really enjoyed this! Sharpless's use of a variety of voices and stories really lend weight to her story, and was a really great, refreshing look at the work that Black women were doing as domestic workers. The number of historical actors she highlights may get a little dizzying at times, as she moves thematically rather than chronologically, but it really worked well for me, and I think her explicit disavowal of the "Mammy" stereotype is very effective.

Bowes's book makes an important case for the localization of removal, rather than seeing Cherokee removal as the be-all, end-all of removal policy and how it operated. In many ways, Bowes's book takes that localization and makes it dizzyingly accurate--the chapters whip across location and time in their focus on each nation, and it can be difficult to keep all the actors in each chapter straight. The use of settler colonialism as a theoretical framework is also pretty underused--but the importance of his intervention is nonetheless made clear as the specificity with which he deals with each nation reveals the ways individuals in those nations navigated the options they were presented. The chapter on the Ojibwe and Odawa peoples in Michigan in particular were a very revealing look into the logics of removal and the way that Native people could negotiate various policies to try to maintain connection to their homelands.

A solid, quick read--lots of examples to illustrate Turner's points, and I deeply appreciated her inclusion of gender as an analytical touchstone throughout the book, rather than touching on it as a special category in a segregated chapter. This book is super undertheorizied--the complexity of her analysis is maybe not what someone familiar with working class studies, for example, would hope. I would definitely recommend this for folks looking for an easy read into an understanding of how people outside the middle and upper classes ate.