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Uncovering the intricate cultural threads that inform our dietary practices

Paranatures in Culinary Culture embarks on a gastronomic odyssey, redefining foods we thought we knew and revealing the extraordinary stories of ordinary ingredients and the cultural forces shaping our diets. The book begins with a simple premise: to eat is to assimilate the outer world into the inner body, both physically and mentally. But what happens when this assimilation process goes awry? Thomas R. Parker reveals how culinary staples are not only elements of identity formation but also instruments of cultural disruption when their true nature emerges and challenges our preconceptions.

Parker explores how certain foods—bread, oysters, pigs, cheese, and wine—can both create and destabilize narratives, unsettle assimilation, and decenter Western culinary traditions. Taking inspiration from architectural historian David Gissen’s concept of “subnature” and Michel Serres’s idea of the “parasite,” Parker develops the concept of paranatures: flavors, foods, and practices considered unpalatable by different societies at different times. He reveals how certain ordinary foods live parallel paranatural lives, addressing larger issues of colonial and postcolonial food theory and challenging long-held notions that cuisine was meant to uphold.

Serving up a rich blend of history, culture, and gastronomy, Parker leads readers to perceive food as an adventure, inviting them to taste the untamed side of nature. He offers a thought-provoking invitation to reconceptualize the roles and narratives we assign to the natural world and its produce, allowing us to see food, nature, and ourselves in new ways.

In order to understand National Socialism one must recognize its religious nature. Many Germans were attracted to the party by its pledge to re-establish a true community of the people, a goal that was celebrated as “holy”.
     Not only did Hitler promise to solve political, social, and economic problems, he also responded to a widely felt need for salvation. The prospect of salvation elevated politics into the realm of religion and lent meaning to the lives of those who embraced it.
      In this work Klaus Vondung explores the various forms in which the elevation of politics into the sphere of religion was expressed in the Third Reich: in the faith of committed National Socialists, in the party’s cult events which celebrated the “community  of the people” as a “community of faith” and the Fuhrer as “savior”, and in the persecution of the Jews that was ‘justified’ in religious terms by demonizing Jews as the “evil enemies of humanity” responsible for the world’s ills. This apocalyptic worldview was the extreme manifestation of the religious nature of National Socialism and, in the final analysis, the only plausible explanation for the intention of exterminating the Jews that led to the holocaust.

For pious converts to Christianity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England, all reality was shaped by religious devotion and biblical text. It is therefore not surprising that earnest believers who found themselves marginalized by their race or sex relied on their faith to reconcile the tension between the spiritual experience of rebirth and the social ordeal of exclusion and injustice.

In Piety and Dissent, Eileen Razzari Elrod examines the religious autobiographies of six early Americans who represented various sorts of marginality: John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and Jarena Lee, all of African or African American heritage; Samson Occom (Mohegan) and William Apess (Pequot); and Abigail Abbott Bailey, a white woman who was subjected to extreme domestic violence. Through close readings of these personal narratives, Elrod uncovers the complex rhetorical strategies employed by pious outsiders to challenge the particular kinds of oppression each experienced. She identifies recurrent ideals and images drawn from Scripture and Protestant tradition—parables of liberation, rage, justice, and opposition to authority—that allowed them to see resistance as a religious act and, more than that, imbued them with a sense of agency. 

What the life stories of these six individuals reveal, according to Elrod, is that conventional Christianity in early America was not the hegemonic force that church leaders at the time imagined, and that many people since have believed it to be. Nor was there a clear distinction between personal piety and religious, social, and political resistance. To understand fully the role of religion in the early period of American letters, we must rethink some of our most fundamental assumptions about the function of Christian faith in the context of individual lives.

Reasserts the centrality of Jewish culture to contemporary discussions of diaspora

Diaspora: the scattering of a people, often described as a condition of helplessness and a pathology to be overcome. It can also be, as Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin assert in this provocative work, a unique source of power and strength. Focusing on Jewish experience, Powers of Diaspora forcefully argues that diasporic communities exercise a distinct form of cultural power in order to maintain themselves.

A social history of alcohol, identity, secularism, and modernization from the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras to the present day.

Prohibition in Turkey investigates the history of alcohol, its consumption, and its proscription as a means to better understand events and agendas of the late Ottoman and early Turkish republican eras. Through a comprehensive examination of archival, literary, popular culture, media, and other sources, it unveils a traditionally overlooked—and even excluded—aspect of human history in a region that many do not associate with intoxicants, inebriation, addiction, and vigorous wet-dry debates.

Historian Emine Ö. Evered’s account uniquely chronicles how the Turko-Islamic Ottoman Empire developed strategies for managing its heterogeneous communities and their varied rights to produce, market, and consume alcohol, or to simply abstain. The first author to reveal this experience’s connections with American Prohibition, she demonstrates how—amid modernization, sectarianism, and imperial decline—drinking practices reflected, shifted, and even prompted many of the changes that were underway and that hastened the empire’s collapse. Ultimately, Evered’s book reveals how Turkey’s alcohol question never went away but repeatedly returns in the present, in matters of popular memory, public space, and political contestation.