bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

War on Record is one of the most interest books on the archive that I have read in a long time. Sternhell tells the story of the an archive composed of official records created during the Civil War and collected by the Federal Government in the aftermath.

She wants to know how the archival processes shape what we recognise today as Civil War history. Sternhell claims that she is unearthing the forces that shaped Washington's Civil War archive and learning how the archival records figured in the fraught reality of postbellum era. She reconstructed the process through the records that created tools of war. How Civil War history is shaped by the archive, and the demonstrated extend to which archival labour is rooted in cultural contexts.

There is very little literature on how non-archivists chose to record documents. Scholars have and do contemplate these problems. This particular archive, and others, have never been studied as rigorously as it deserves. She investigates the decision-making process that shaped the compilation: the personal, political, and institutional.

Historians, including Sternhell, agree that archives are deceptive. They are unstable, constructed, and susceptible to influences. Archival records are not static objects. Archives do not simply reflect the past but they shape the present and the future.

Sternhell says "Historians like to think of themselves as the original interpreters of archival records. Yet long before they set foot in the reading room, the records they will be working with had been interpreted in ways they do not understand and cannot escape."

Sternhell conducts her study by 'reading along the grain.' She focuses on the people who managed the records while also studying archival users.

or being a debut book, Parker-Chan did her big one! I read this primarily as a audiobook, when I tried to switch to an e-book it got really confusing to track the characters. It was still confusing to trace the POVs even with the audiobooks.

The novel was so readable; though the military portions caused me to zone out from time to time. They were well written but so dense. I enjoyed the darkness of the book. I supposed most of the characters could be called anti-heroes. They played their parts well.

The f*sting incident was not all that. You guys are just f*cking horny. I did enjoy the romance between Ma and Zhu. I would like to see that grow, and I want to see Ma become a little darker.

I wish Parker-Chan had gone more into depth about the ghosts haunting Zhu and Oyoung. I had a few theories but as the book went along, they kept getting crushed. I felt that Parker-Chan was dragging with non-explantations. Zhu's constant reminder that she was her brother started to get annoying as hell. The pronoun switches was interesting, based on the POV.

She Who Became the Sun reminded my academic of Passing to America by Thomas Abercrombie. The idea of shifting bodies, gender performance, and transgenderism were so prevalent in here. I need an English or Literature major to make this a part of their thesis.

Parker-Chan gets only three stars because because the book dragged, some things were left unexplained (lazy writing), the POVs got confusing, and the military jargon was too much at times.

I enjoyed a Tempest a lot. I would have liked to read it side by side with the original. I have never read anything else by Cèsaire, so far, so this was a treat. I enjoyed the critiques I could find throughout the play. I think it would be fruitful to go back and read an annotated version of it, to see things I perhaps missed.

A classic in history and other academic genres, Michael-Rolph Trouillot stands the test of time. Silencing the Past is about history as knowledge and narrative, though it embraces the ambiguity in the two sides of historicity.

Trouillot has history listed as social process that puts people in three categories: agent, actors, and subjects. Silences enter into the historical processes at four stages: the moment of creation, the moment of fact assembly, the moment of fact retrieval, and the moment of retrospective significance.

The production of history interacts with not just academic work but also with history produced outside of the academy. History both suggests what happened and what was said to have happened. Which in turn places an empahsis on the sociohistorical process and the knowledge of that process respectively.

Vincent Brown looks at how Mortuary Politics shaped the course of history for the contending groups in Jamaica. Brown looks at how death shaped daily life, and how it bleeds over into property, authority, morality, territory, and belonging is the base of the book. Brown is coming from an Atlantic perspective, claiming the history of Jamaica can be seen clearer in the wider web of the connections and comparisons with other parts of the Atlantic basin.

What is mortuary politics? The social meaning from beliefs and practices with death and how they are employed. Brown says the linkage with death makes the dead integral to social and political organization and mobilization, and therefore vital to historical transformation.

Brown uses a plethora of source material: tombstone inscriptions, wills, diaries, parish vestry mins, plantation account papers, court returns, travellers reports, assembly mins, visual images, archaeology of burial sites.

Shared experiences of death and dislocation helped form common assumptions, idioms, and beliefs that would shape meaning in the new world among African persons.

A Master of Djinn draws you in. Clark does a fantastic job building the world of Cairo. I enjoyed learning more about the Djinn. I think the next few books will be excellent. The twist wasn't a huge surprise. Some of the characters were too archetype.

I read The Great Divide as an audiobook. It covers multiple POVs to give a holistic viewpoint of the Panama Canal. My favorite was Ada. I see the historical threads that Henriquez pulled to get her story together. I wished all of them did not have happy endings. I wanted more realism to shine through in the story.

A great novel about the history of Puerto Rico, Hawaii and migration. I loved it. I listened to it on audiobook. It was hard to keep track of the characters in the beginning but once the book got started up it was fantastic.

The Comforts of Home is a history of prostitution in British colonial Africa, and Luise White writes a study of political economy focused on women’s words. Hense White is mainly concerned with sex and money. She investigates the labour processes of prostitution that uncover the ‘two sides of prostitution,’ which focuses on what prostitutes did with their customers and what they did with their earnings.

The book challenges the conventional notions of prostitution as merely a symbol of degradation and instead presents it as a complex interplay of labour, gender, and colonial dynamics. The interactions between class and kin, family and farm, and migrants and housing are laid out by White as concerns that any historian of 20th-century Kenya should be investigating. Her analysis spans the early 20th century to the post-World War II period, revealing how prostitution intertwined in the socio-economic processes in colonial Nairobi.

White challenges the traditional framework of feminist scholarship about prostitution that emphasises hierarchy and deviance. By de-centering the state and men’s domination over women who engaged in prostitution White moves away from showing women as passive subjects. Instead, she shows the active roles and agency of these women.

White shows that prostitution must be looked at on a spectrum. There are different forms of prostitution in the world, and in colonial Kenya there were three forms; ‘watembezi’ (streetwalking), ‘malaya’ (proper prostitutes), and ‘wazi-wazi’ (women who 'entice' men outside their rooms). The book argues there was a complex spectrum of experiences rather than the binary the current literature offers. White challenges romanticised notions of prostitution, showing that the approval of Malaya women by their community is more complex. There were pitfalls and benefits to all of the three forms of prostitution performed in Nairobi.

The rise and fall of pimps in the literature is also discussed, and how the absence of pimps in Keyna allowed prostitutes to retain control over their earnings and form intimate relationships with their customers. She outlines how colonial policies such as the contagious diseases ordinances were designed to control sexually transmitted infections by making prostitutes do regular medical examinations. In turn, these policies granted a degree of legitimacy to the profession as registered prostitutes were seen as less of a public health risk. The regulation allows for records of prostitutes to appear in the archive but imposes a colonial gaze that historians have to navigate through.

The Comfort of Home was a well-researched study that challenged views and prevailing narratives of prostitution at the time of its publication. Through her work, White highlights the agency of women in colonial Nairobi, their strategies for economic survival, and the complex interplay of gender, labour, and colonialism. Her work underscores the importance of incorporating the voices and experiences of marginalized women in historical scholarship, offering a more comprehensive and humanizing portrayal of their lives and labour.

From Africa to The Bahamas looks at the movement, forced or otherwise, from African people to The Bahamas. Lawor uses Colonial Office Roecrds, maps and plans, first-hand narratives, newspapers, and a lot of secondary sources for his book. There are several helpful charts and graphs that allow readers to visualize the numbers and population density. FATTB is a small and quick read. Lawor starts with a look at African history and civilization growth to give background before focusing on The Bahamas. The chapters span looking at African history and civilization, the growth of the Black and Coloured population, the fates of enslaved from slave ships, Liberated Africans to Sierra Leone and Cuba, and Settlements after Emancipation. The demographics of liberated Africans brought to The Bahamas are heart-wrenching, while also informative. 

Lawor;'s work gives good information while also whetting the appetite for more deeper and in-depth works on topics like African cultural practices post-emapnication, and the dynamics between different African ethnic groups, among other things.