New Books in the Arts & Sciences

New Books in the Arts & Sciences         —panel discussions celebrating recent work by the Columbia Faculty The Art of Love Poetry By: Erik Gray

Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States–one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror. The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans. Harcourt shows how counterinsurgency’s principles–bulk intelligence collection, ruthless targeting of minorities, pacifying propaganda–have taken hold domestically despite the absence of any radical uprising. This counterrevolution against phantom enemies, he argues, is the tyranny of our age. Seeing it clearly is the first step to resisting it effectively.

Composed of Michel Leiris's daily travel journal detailing the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition in sub-Saharan Africa, this first English translation (by Brent Edwards) of the French Surrealist writer's Phantom Africa bears witness to the full range of social and political forces shaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.

New Books in the Arts & Sciences—panel discussions celebrating recent work by the Columbia Faculty.

From the late 17th through the late 19th century, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it could sometimes be deadly. What Nostalgia Was unearths that history. Thomas Dodman traces the invention of nostalgia as a medical diagnosis in Basel, Switzerland, its spread through the European republic of letters and into Napoleon's armies, its subsequent transformation from a medical term to a more expansive cultural concept, and its shift in meaning in the colonies, where Frenchmen worried about racial and cultural mixing came to view moderate homesickness as salutary. 

New Books in the Arts & Sciences          —panel discussions celebrating recent work by the Columbia Faculty The Beneficiary by Bruce Robbins

New Books in the Arts & Sciences: panel discussions celebrating recent work by the Columbia Faculty. At Home In The World by Maria DiBattista and Deborah Nord & Reading Jane Austen by Jenny Davidson

"Over the Rainbow" exploded into worldwide fame upon its performance by Judy Garland in the MGM film musical The Wizard of Oz (1939). Voted the greatest song of the twentieth century in a 2000 survey, it is a masterful, delicate balance of sophistication and child-like simplicity in which composer Harold Arlen and lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg poignantly captured the hope and anxiety harbored by Dorothy's character.