Berkeley Books Blog

A "performative turn" has shaped art practice over the last several decades. This has led to a chiasmus of sorts: post-dramatic theater borrows codes from painting and scupture, and post-studio art has moved itself towards means commonly associated with theater. Though experimental art performances are accesible via multiple media registers, critical discussions of innovation have differed based upon which media the performance is seen to be disrupting. This has had profound effect on the rhetoric surrounding experimental work within both the academic and the broader sociopolitial spheres.

This month's Berkeley Books selection, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, by Assistant Professor of English Donna V. Jones, blends insightful work in critical theory with rigorous analyses of autobiographical writings by major figures in the Négritude movement.

Enacted by state and local legislators between 1876 and 1965, the Jim Crow laws mandated de jure racial segregation under the guise of "separate but equal." Though we live in a different era--one some hopefully or naively label "post-racial"--Jim Crow's legacy continues. This infiltration of the present by Jim Crow's past might not be apparent, however, when one looks to the visuals that emerged from the era. These images, oftentimes blunt in their evocation of separate accommodations, sometimes appear as dated remnants of a distinctly bygone era of American history.

This month's Berkeley Books selection deploys many perspectives to illuminate, frame, and grasp what the New York Times famously dubbed "The Obama Phenomenon."

Herbert Morrison famously opined that British Socialism is, simply put, whatever a Labour Government is doing in the moment. This, of course, does not account for the numerous shifts modern "socialism" has undertaken since its mid 18th century origins. Socialism today is neither the same beast it was in 1880, nor is it the same as it was in 1940. Though they share a name; they share certain principles, and they may often quote from the same key figures, the Mise-en-scène within which these socialisms operate is, at best, comparable.

Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Class, co-edited by Raka Ray and Amita Baviskar, examines who and what defines the Indian middle class.

In this month’s Berkeley Books selection, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England, Associate Professor of English Joanna Picciotto argues that intellectual activity found new expression in the experimentalist sensitivity to perception and its re-imagination of the garden of Eden as the laboratory, Adam as its laborer.

Professor Susanna Elm's book delves into the two universalisms of the fourth century — Christianity and the Roman Empire — and how their debates underscore the role of textual interpretation and rhetorical consensus in shaping cultural and public life.

Historians turn to diplomas, the authoritative documents issued by a ruler, to flesh out the legal and administrative “plot” of the past. In this month’s Berkeley Books selection, Professor of History Geoffrey Koziol points out that diplomas make good sources not only because they have survived but because they were constructed to serve precisely that purpose.

Professor Sophie Volpp's recent book explores how a theatrical mode of spectatorship in Seventeenth-Century China cultivated forms of social and cultural spectatorship.