Front Table Newsletter 8/12

On This Week's Front Table, start off your week with Aztec philosophy, finally translated to English in its entirety; dive into stories of women under appreciated in history from thousands of years ago up through recent decades; finally, whether you prefer comedy or drama, finish off your summer reading with some new fiction about the need for human connection and self-discovery. Find these titles and more at semcoop.com.

Discourses of the Elders
(W. W. Norton, Company)
Sebastian Purcell

Western philosophers have long claimed that God, if such a being exists, is a personal force capable of reason, and that the path to a good human life is also the path to a happy one. But what if these claims prove false, or at least deeply misleading? The Aztecs of central Mexico had a rich philosophical tradition, recorded in Latin script by Spanish clergymen and passed down for centuries in the native Nahuatl language--one of the earliest transcripts being the Huehuetlatolli, or Discourses of the Elders, compiled by Friar Andrés de Olmos circa 1535.

Novel in its form, the Discourses consists of short conversations between elders and young people on how to achieve a meaningful and morally sound life. The Aztecs had a metaphysical tradition but no concept of "being." They considered the mind an embodied force, present not just in the brain but throughout the body. Their core values relied on collective responsibility and group wisdom, not individual thought and action, orienting life around one's actions in this realm rather than an afterlife, distinctly opposed to the Christian beliefs that permeate Europe and America.

Sebastian Purcell's fluency in his grandmother's native Nahuatl brings to light the Aztec ethical landscape in brilliant clarity. Never before translated into English in its entirety, and one of the earliest post-contact texts ever recorded, Discourses of the Elders reflects the wisdom communicated by oral tradition and proves that philosophy can be active, communal, and grounded not in a "pursuit of happiness" but rather the pursuit of a meaningful life.

On Strike Against God
(Feminist Press)
Joanna Russ

A lost feminist masterwork by feminist and speculative fiction icon Joanna Russ about a lesbian's coming-to-consciousness during the social upheaval of the 1970s.

When Esther, an English professor living in 1970s small-town New York, has her first lesbian love affair, the fallout brings her everyday miseries into focus and sends her spiraling. Confronted with the homophobia of straight feminists and the misogyny of gay men, Esther is left to forge a language for her feminism and her burgeoning lesbian desire. A darkly comedic story of feminist love, hope, and reckoning, On Strike Against God's call to readers --"Let's be reasonable. Let's demand the impossible"--rings urgently true today.

Originally published in 1980, On Strike Against God is the only realist novel by feminist science fiction icon Joanna Russ. This new critical edition includes previously unpublished alternate endings to the novel, letters between Joanna Russ and acclaimed poet Marilyn Hacker, and additional essays by Russ. Contemporary authors Jeanne Thornton and Mary Anne Mohanraj discuss Russ's continued impact, and an interview with science fiction luminary Samuel R. Delany reflects on Delany's decades-long friendship with Russ.

The Missing Thread
(Viking)
Daisy Dunn

Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women--whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power--were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it.

In this monumental work, Dunn reconceives our understanding of the ancient world by emphasizing women's roles within it. The Missing Thread never relegates women to the sidelines and is populated with well-known names such as Cleopatra and Agrippina, as well as the likes of Achaemenid consort Atossa and Olympias, a force in Macedon. Spanning three thousand years, the story moves from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, from Lesbos to Asia Minor, from the Persian Empire to the royal court of Macedonia, and concludes with Rome and its growing empire. The women of antiquity are undeniably woven throughout the fabric of history, and in The Missing Thread they finally take center stage.

Liars
(Hogarth Press) 
Sarah Manguso

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I'd always known that. But I'd never suspected how easily I'd fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including--a few years later--all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it's not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John's ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.

As Jane's career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.

The Rage of Replacement
(University of Minnesota Press) 
Michael Feola

The "Great Replacement" narrative, which imagines that historic white majorities are being intentionally replaced through immigration policies crafted by global elites, has effectively mobilized racist, nationalist, and nativist movements in the United States and Europe. The Rage of Replacement tracks how this narrative has shaped the politics and worldview of the far right, binding its various camps into a community of rage obsessed with nostalgia for a white-supremacist past.

Showing how the replacement narrative has found significant purchase in recent mainstream discourse through the rise of Trumpism, right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson, and events such as 2017's "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Michael Feola diagnoses the dangers this racist theory poses as it shapes the far-right imagination, expands through civil society, and deforms political culture.

Identifying the Great Replacement narrative as a central force behind the rise and expansion of far-right extremism, Feola shows how it has motivated a variety of dangerous political projects in pursuit of illiberal, antidemocratic futures. From calls for the creation of segregated white ethnostates to extremist violence, The Rage of Replacement makes clear that replacement theory poses a dire threat to democracy and safety.

The English Experience
(Vintage)
Julie Schumacher

The bestselling author of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement completes her hilarious trilogy of academic mishap by chronicling the beleaguered Professor Fitger as he chaperones Payne University's annual "Experience: Abroad" to London and beyond, with eleven undergrads in tow.

Among his charges are a claustrophobe with a juvenile detention record, a student who erroneously believes he is headed for the Caribbean, a pair of unreconciled lovers, a set of undifferentiated twins, and one young woman who has never been away from her cat before. Through a sea of troubles--personal, institutional, and international--the gimlet-eyed, acid-tongued Fitger strives to navigate safe passage for all concerned, revealing much about the essential need for human connection and the sometimes surprising places in which it is found.

Late Capitalism
(Verso)
Ernest Mandel

Late Capitalism is the first major synthesis to have been produced by the contemporary revival of Marxist economics. It represents, in fact, the only systematic attempt so far ever made to combine the general theory of the "laws of motion" of the capitalist mode of production developed by Marx, with the concrete history of capitalism in the twentieth century.

Mandel's book starts with a challenging discussion of the appropriate methods for studying the capitalist economies, sketches the structure of the world market and the variant types of surplus-profit that have characterized its successive stages, and advance an extremely bold schema of the "long waves" of expansion and contraction in the history of capitalism. It surveys the main economic characteristics of late capitalism as it has emerged in the contemporary period, and argues that the last expansionary long wave started with the victory of fascism on the European continent and the advent of the war economies, and produced the record world boom of 1947-72. Mandel discusses the reasons why the dynamic upswing of growth in this period was bound to reach its limits at the turn of the 1970s, and why a long wave of economic stagnation and intensified class struggle has set in today.

Late Capitalism is a landmark in Marxist economic literature. Specifically designed to explain the international recession of the 1970s, it is a central guide to understanding the nature of the world economic crisis today.