From Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Duke, 2020)
Basu offers a genealogical study of right-wing Hindu nationalism, demonstrating how a modernization project subsumed a vast array of polytheistic, pantheistic, and henotheistic cults featuring millions of gods into a singular edifice of faith called Hinduism. The ‘Hindu nation’ calls for the transformation of that religiosity into a jealous ‘political monotheism’.
From Irvin Hunt, Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement (UNC Press, 2022)
What happens when progress is no longer the point? What happens to a movement? In Dreaming the Present, Hunt upends our assumptions about what a movement is, while charting a century of black mutual aid. He argues black co-ops—farms, shops, hospitals, and more—were extraordinary departures from progressive time.
From Justine S. Murison, Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Penn, 2023)
From fears over religious infidelity and disputes over what constitutes a modern marriage to conspiracy theories about abolitionists, Faith in Exposure demonstrates how nineteenth-century controversies—played out in both the political arena and popular novels—helped privacy emerge as a sensibility and a right in modern, secular America.