2018 in Book Awards and Distinctions

As we look back on 2018, we will be sharing our proudest moments here at the University of Texas Press. As a testament to the high-quality scholarship our authors have produced and the heroic efforts by our editorial staff, we are pleased to highlight the books, below, that have earned awards or distinctions in 2018.

More info

Archaeology

Tom Dillehay’s Where the Land Meets the Sea: Fourteen Millennia of Human History at Huaca Prieta, Peru

2018 Society for American Archaeology's Book Award 

"This volume is a foundational landmark, and can be used to teach students both at undergraduate and graduate levels to provide guidance for how to conduct and publish future archaeological research."

—Antiquity

American Studies

More info

Stacy I. Morgan's Frankie and Johnny: Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s America

2018 Wayland D. Hand Prize (co-winner) 

“I am extremely impressed by this book. I think it will be a valuable addition to African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, and popular culture studies.”

—James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst, author of The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance

More info

Music

Holly Gleason’s Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives

2018 Belmont Award for the Best Book on Country Music 

“Woman Walk the Line radiates heartfelt sincerity, revealing how women in country music—world-famous and little-known, black and white, vintage and contemporary—helped shape the lives of many different kinds of women. It’s concrete evidence that country should and does belong just as much to women as to men.”

More info

—Ann Powers, author of Good Booty

Photography

Dawoud Bey's Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply

Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist 

"Photographs from all of Bey’s major projects are presented in chronological sequence, allowing viewers to see how the collective body of portraits and recent landscapes create an unparalleled historical representation of various communities in the United States."

—Photo-eye Blog

More info

Classics and Ancient World

Jeffrey M. Hunt, R. Alden Smith, and Fabio Stok’s Classics from Papyrus to the Internet: An Introduction to Transmission and Reception

2018 AAP Prose Awards, Classics Category

"Hunt, Smith, and Stok have produced a valuable and useful book…Especially as Classics continues to be a source of interest and even contention in the public eye, the history of the field should remain of vital interest to students…The present volume offers a rich and engaging starting point."

—New England Classical Journal

Middle Eastern Studies

More info

Ahmed Naji’s Using LifeIllustrations by Ayman Al Zorkany, translated by Benjamin Koerber

2018 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards Shortlist 

“Using Life is a riotous novel about a failing state, a corrupt city, a hypocritical authority, but it is also about tequila shots and getting laid and smoking weed with your infuriating girlfriend and debating whether rock music died in the seventies and if Quentin Tarantino is a genius or a fraud. It’s a young man’s book. A young man whose youth is colliding with a dark moment in history.”

—Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books

More info

Camila Pastor's The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate

2018 Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies 

“A groundbreaking work that presents the social configuration of Arabic-speaking migrants and their descendants in a new and revelatory light. This study stands to be an excellent example of a global, connected colonial approach to migration and nationalism. It reconfigures Latin American and Middle Eastern studies in a sound and compelling way, highlighting the ways in which Mexico and the Levant participate in, and interact with, the same structures of power.”

—Christina Civantos, University of Miami, author of Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity

More info

Film, Media & Popular Culture

Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant’s Hysterical! Women in American Comedy

2018 Susan Koppleman Award for Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in Feminist Studies, Popular and American Culture Associations (PACA) 

"Here to meet all your funny female deep-read needs . . . a juicy read for those who love the many ways female comics use their art to question the patriarchy."

—BUST

More info

Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis’s Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics

2018 Best Academic/Scholarly work, Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards Shortlist 

“Picturing Childhood is a much needed and long-awaited interdisciplinary project that looks at representations of children throughout the history of comics.”
—Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature

More info

Jennifer Fronc's Monitoring the Movies: The Fight over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America

2017 Richard Wall Memorial Award finalist (Theatre Library Association)

“Not unlike Facebook, the nascent movie industry resisted regulation; it fought back with self-imposed guidelines aided by the rhetoric of civil libertarians. . . . Fronc has written an engaging and balanced account of questions whose debating points remain relevant today.”

—Shepherd Express 

Latin American Studies

More info

Gary Urton’s Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources

2018 AAP Prose Awards, Biological Anthropology, Ancient History & Archaeology category 
2018 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize
2017 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Honorable Mention

“This volume goes a long way toward explaining and interpreting Inca khipus as encoded political, social, ritual, and economic structures, and as such, is essential reading not only for all Peruvianists and students of ancient civilizations but also, because of the book's code-breaking arguments related to binary coding, hierarchy, and markedness, for scholars in those areas as well.”

—Choice

More info

Harper Montgomery’s The Mobility of Modernism: Art and Criticism in 1920s Latin America

2018 Annual Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation Margaret Arvey Book Award 

“Deeply researched and passionately argued, this book is a model for effective transnational scholarship. Much like her protagonists, Montgomery is a visionary.”

—Tatiana Flores, Rutgers University, author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30!

More info

Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico

2018 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award 

“A rich history of how race was conceptualized and materially inscribed in colonial Mexico—and a pleasure to read. The book’s contributions are manifold, and it will be in conversation with other books in the field, while expanding the discussions with which the colonial period can engage.”

—Ivonne del Valle, University of California, Berkeley

More info

Amy Sara Carroll’s REMEX: Toward and Art History of the NAFTA Era 

2018 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award, Honorable Mention
2017 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Honorable Mention

“Incredibly smart, well-articulated, and very much needed. REMEX is not only an important contribution to the fields of Mexican and border visual cultural and performance studies, but it is the book that will move the conversations in the fields in new and provocative ways. It is the book many of us have been waiting for.”

—Laura G. Gutiérrez, University of Texas at Austin, author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage

More info

John Lear’s Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico 1908–1940

2018 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Award, Honorable Mention

“This superb study intertwines a history of artistic representations of Mexican workers on public walls and in labor publications with that of the artists who produced them. I know of no other work that attempts such an endeavor and, though it is an ambitious project, it is most successful. The wide swath cut by Lear makes the book important for a broad audience: those interested in the history of Mexico, the history of Mexican labor, and the history of Mexican art. The scholarship is impeccable.”

—John Mraz, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, author of Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons

More info

Mariana Mora’s Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities

2018 LASA Mexico Social Science Book Award, Honorable Mention

“Kuxlejal Politics is a most eloquent testimony to the dynamic Zapatista struggle and to what an engaged academy can do when it genuinely walks along the paths of subaltern groups intent on defending their worlds. By theorizing and embodying a farsighted vision of decolonized and decolonizing research, Mora renews our commitment to the idea that another academy is possible and practicable. This work is a gift to us all by one of the most inventive exponents of Mexican anthropology at present, in the best tradition of Latin American critical thought.”

—Arturo Escobar, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

More info

Robert W. Wilcox’s Cattle in the Backlands: Mato Grosso and the Evolution of Ranching in the Brazilian Tropics

2018 Henry A. Wallace Award, The Agricultural History Society 

“This book fills a large hole in historical scholarship. English-language treatments of ranching history anywhere in Brazil are few and far between. It also makes a strong case for the importance of linking agro-pastoral studies to environmental specificity and to careful consideration of labor practices.”

—Thomas D. Rogers, Emory University, author of the award-winning book The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil

More info

Isabel M. Córdova’s Pushing in Silence: Modernizing Puerto Rico and the Medicalization of Childbirth

2018 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize 

“A brilliantly written, accessible, and comprehensive analysis of the multifaceted social, cultural, and historical conditions that led to the medicalization of birthing in Puerto Rico, which enabled doctors to replace midwives. This history has not been written before. The research is original and unique and is a contribution to the fields of sociology, anthropology, history, and biomedicine.”

—Iris O. Lopez, City College of New York, author of Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women’s Struggle for Reproductive Freedom

More info

Patricia Acerbi’s Street Occupations: Urban Vending in Rio de Janeiro, 1850–1925

2017 Warren Dean Memorial Prize in Brazilian Studies, Conference on Latin American History 

“This book makes a huge contribution to our understanding of street life and commerce in Rio de Janeiro and to the transition from flexible slavery to radically unequal freedom. Acerbi’s research is extensive and groundbreaking.”

—Bryan McCann, Georgetown University, author of Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro

www.utexaspress.com

Banned Books Week: On Translating a Controversial Work

Banned Books Week (Sept. 24-30) is the book world’s annual celebration of our right to choose and have access to the books that we want to read. Run by the American Library Association, libraries, bookstores, and the online book community will use this week to host events, highlight banned books, and spotlight the conversation about the real and pressing issue of book censorship in communities around the world. 

Censorship in modern day Egypt has severely restricted the freedoms of artists and writers. In the fall of 2014, a young writer named Ahmed Naji's novel Istikhdam al-haya was published in Arabic to acclaim in Egypt and the wider Arab world. But in 2016, Naji was sentenced to two years in prison after a reader complained that an excerpt published in a literary journal harmed public morality. His imprisonment marks the first time in modern Egypt that an author has been jailed for a work of literature. Writers like Zadie Smith and literary organizations around the world rallied to support Naji; he won the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award after his imprisonment. Naji was released in December 2016, but his original conviction was overturned in May 2017. At this time, he is awaiting retrial and banned from leaving Egypt.

We are proud to partner with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin to distribute the English translation of Naji's novel Using Life to give the work the international readership it deserves. As Zadie Smith wrote in The New York Review of Books:

“Using Life is a riotous novel about a failing state, a corrupt city, a hypocritical authority, but it is also about tequila shots and getting laid and smoking weed with your infuriating girlfriend and debating whether rock music died in the Seventies and if Quentin Tarantino is a genius or a fraud. It’s a young man’s book. A young man whose youth is colliding with a dark moment in history.”

The original Arabic publication Istikhdam al-haya

Our English translation, available for pre-order now

Set in modern-day Cairo, Using Life follows a young filmmaker, Bassam Bahgat, after a 
secret society hires him to create a series of documentary films about the urban planning and architecture of Cairo. The plot in which Bassam finds himself ensnared unfolds in the novel’s unique mix of text and black-and-white illustrations. The Society of Urbanists, Bassam discovers, is responsible for centuries of world-wide conspiracies that have shaped political regimes, geographical boundaries, reigning ideologies, and religions. It is responsible for today’s Cairo, and for everywhere else, too. Yet its methods are subtle and indirect: it operates primarily through manipulating urban architecture, rather than brute force. As Bassam immerses himself in the Society and its shadowy figures, he finds Cairo on the brink of a planned apocalypse, designed to wipe out the whole city and rebuild anew.

The English translation comes out December 2017. To celebrate, we're excerpting the translator's note by Benjamin Koerber below. You can also read an essay he wrote for The New Inquiry in May of last year: "Using Life: Instructions for Play," and Naji's most "offensive" chapter from Using Life is excerpted on arablit.org. 

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

By Benjamin Koerber

Using Life (Istikhdam al-haya in Arabic) has been the victim of some infamous misinterpretations. In late 2015, its author, Ahmed Naji, was referred to a Cairo criminal court after an earlier version of two chapters appeared in the prestigious Egyptian literary journal Akhbar al-Adab. The charge of “harming public morals” was based, ostensibly, on the testimony of a private citizen who suffered a “drop in blood pressure” after encountering the text’s sexually explicit language. There is, in reality, nothing remarkable about the obscenities in Using Life, and language far more explicit has appeared often in both contemporary and classical Arabic literature. Most observers considered the case absurd, all the more so when the prosecution appeared to have mistaken this work of fiction for a personal confession of acts committed by the author. Nonetheless, after an earlier acquittal, a higher court sentenced Ahmed Naji to the maximum of two years in prison. This marks the first time in modern Egypt that an author has been jailed for a work of fiction. After ten months in prison, and an international campaign of solidarity, Naji was released pending an appeal. The original sentence was finally overturned in May, 2017. At the time of writing, his case is awaiting retrial.

Perhaps ironically, such direct and draconian displays of state power are largely peripheral to the novel’s core critical concerns. Instead, Using Life directs the reader’s gaze at the more subtle mechanisms of repression and constraint at work in contemporary Egypt: the perfidy of friends and lovers, the “kitschification” of culture, and, most importantly, conspiracies wrought in the realm of architecture and urban planning. The book is a response, in the first place, to the utterly unlivable state of today’s Cairo—“a miserable, hideous, filthy, rotten, dark, oppressive, be•sieged, lifeless, enervating, polluted, overcrowded, impoverished, angry, smoke-filled, simmering, humid, trashy, shitty, choleric, anemic mess of a city,” according to the protagonist, Bassam Bahgat. Let the reader be aware that among the city’s current residents, Bassam’s feelings are far from unusual. Cairo’s decades-old crises in housing, electricity, waste management, and traffic (to name a few) have left the city both physically and psychologically scarred, and have remained unresolved amidst the waves of revolution and counterrevolution unleashed since January 25, 2011. The intervention of the security services into urban planning has disfigured the city even further: unbreachable metal sidewalk fences, forcibly depopulated public spaces, and huge con•crete block walls constructed in the middle of major streets are now familiar sights around the capital.

Yet as parts of Cairo have shut down, new aesthetic practices have emerged over the last decade to open new spaces for expression, as well as to repurpose old ones. Graffiti artists have laid claim to the city’s walls and barriers. Comedians and cartoonists have attracted cult followings through YouTube, and bloggers have emerged from the obscurity of their bedrooms to pioneer new literary genres (see, for example, Ghada Abdel Aal’s I Want to Get Married! [2008; trans. Eltahawy, 2010]). In fashion, advertising, and graphic design, independent artists have made spectacular interventions in fields typically dominated by foreign brands.

In Using Life, Naji, together with illustrator Ayman Al Zorkany, has managed to synthesize many elements of this resurgent urban culture into something that is more than just a novel. Its publication in November 2014 was followed by the sale of t-shirts, coffee mugs, and a variety of accessories featuring Al Zorkany’s illustrations, which the artist has also developed into a short film entitled “The Last Dance of the Blue Anus-Fly.” As a book, Using Life follows a number of recent experiments in graphic fiction in Egypt and the wider Arab world, such as Metro (El-Shafee, 2008; trans. Rossetti, 2012) and Fi Shaqqat Bab al-Luq (The apartment in Bab al-Louq) (Maher, Ganzeer, and Nady, 2014); as a literary-graphic hybrid, it resembles most closely Hilal Chouman’s Limbo Beirut (2013; trans. Stanton, 2016). In spite of these affinities, it remains a highly idiosyncratic work, whose style and content can best be understood as the product of its author’s and illustrator’s aesthetic sensibilities and professional backgrounds. Naji, whose former digital avatar “Bisu” was a renowned trickster and collector of oddities in the early years of Egypt’s blogosphere (2004– 2009), has since become known for his assorted creative and critical works, including his novel Rogers (2007), his “history” of Egypt’s blogger subculture (2010), and his contributions as editor of the prestigious literary review Akhbar al-Adab. Ayman Al Zorkany’s background in illustration, costume design, and adver•tising places him outside the jealously guarded borders of Egypt’s literary establishment, and thus pushes Using Life well beyond reigning definitions of the Arabic novel.

Portions of Using Life are indeed “graphic” in both senses of the word, and this presents the reader and the translator with special challenges. While it is hoped that the English reader will approach the depictions of sexuality, drug use, and urban rot with greater forbearance than the Cairene prosecutor, it is inevitable that certain images or expressions may not fit comfortably with everyone’s tastes. In this respect, the reader is urged to bear in mind that certain words in the novel’s vocabulary—e.g., “balls” (bidan), “ass-kissing” (taʿris), and “cocksuckery” (khawlana)— have a different sort of currency, and inhabit a somewhat different web of associations, in the Arabic original. Moreover, while such words are certainly marks of an “attitude,” their transposition into a foreign idiom will make it difficult to draw wholly accurate assumptions about a speaker’s social status, intelligence, or political leanings. These qualifications apply equally to the novel’s illustrations. Sometimes, an image’s local significance will be grasped easily enough: to paraphrase William S. Burroughs, a rat is a rat is a rat is a rat, is a police officer. At other times, one will have to be thoroughly immersed in Egyptian popular culture to know that a scientific description of cockroaches, for example, is a jab at the mercurial public intellectual Mustafa Mahmoud.

. . . 

I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to those many who have assisted in the present translation. Special thanks are due to Wendy Moore, publications editor for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, for her tireless efforts and support at all hours and stages of the project. Dena Afrasiabi, publications editor for CMES, performed extraordinary and brilliant work in guiding the book through the intense final stretch. Series editor Tarek El-Ariss was, long ago, the first to recommend this book to me and recognize the importance of its translation; he has been a constant source of inspiration, insight, magic, and mirth at all levels of its development. I thank Marcia Lynx Qualey (ArabLit.org) for providing many helpful comments and suggestions on the offending Chapter Six, generously promoting Using Life and the work of Ahmed Naji on a truly global scale, and facilitating my public debut in the Arabic translation community. For his brilliant insights into the finer points of Arabic-English translation, many illuminating conversations on the worlds summoned in this novel, and support and sustenance along the way, I offer my utmost gratitude, thanks, and cat memes to Ehab Elshazly. I owe an unpayable debt to the anonymous reviewer who went above and beyond the ordinary duties of that role to offer very helpful and much needed guidance on nearly every aspect of this translation; while any remaining faults are my own, this reviewer’s insights and suggestions have had a significant impact on the final product.

Most of all, I would like to thank Ahmed Naji and Ayman Al Zorkany for welcoming me into the worlds they have created, help•ing me adapt, and not minding when I run off to play on my own.

#FreeNaji

www.utexaspress.com