Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

What binds critical race theory (CRT) and decoloniality? They seem to be polar opposites, as CRT centers racism while decoloniality, being transnational, decenters the nation-state as a unit of analysis. Temporally, CRT rests on presentism, decoloniality on historicism. Despite this spatial and temporal divergence, Meghji (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) fuses both theoretical traditions so that one appears incomplete without the other. He deploys four case studies to construct a dialogue between the two: far-right populism, global capitalism, the climate crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Meghji powerfully demonstrates how Trump's America, Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil, and Brexit Britain were tinged with racism. In discussing the neoliberal workfare state and climate change, he shows the further marginalization of the racialized Others and the emergence of environmental racism. In equal measure, COVID-19 revealed the racial profiling of Asian populations in the US and Europe as a purported source of the viral eruption. Meghji does a splendid job showing how CRT and decoloniality complement each other in explaining the preceding phenomena, in which one observes interflow between national and global spaces and hears the echoes of the past in the present. This volume should be required reading on critical race theory and decoloniality.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

American Swastika is a must-read volume for anyone trying to understand both the history and the rise of white supremacy in the US. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, Simi (Chapman Univ.) and Futrell (Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas) interrogate white supremacy organizations in the contemporary US. Specifically, they take a deep dive into four social movements, broadly defined: the Ku Klux Klan, Christian identity groups, neo-Nazis, and racist skinheads. The authors accomplish this task by considering the history of white supremacy in the US and among these social movements, but they go one step further, elucidating the processes of their formation by focusing on key structures of white supremacy movements, including hate in the home, white power parties, white power music, virtual hate, and white power communities. Drawing heavily on their ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, Simi and Futrell paint a stunning and horrifying picture of white supremacy movements, both at the margins and right under everyone's noses. This critical update to the first edition (CH, Nov'10, 48-1786) is a necessary study for any scholar, student, or citizen seeking to better understand the persistence and pervasiveness of white supremacy in the US.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.