A new analysis of the origins of the Haitian Revolution, revealing the consciousness, solidarity, and resistance that helped it succeed.

This is a study of the history and consequences of the revolutionary campaign to transform culture and ritual in northern Vietnam. Based on official documents and several years of field research, it provides a detailed account of the nature of revolutionary cultural reform in Vietnam.

A fresh account of early American religious history that argues for a new understanding of ritual. In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America’s Revolution. Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.

Published by the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College in association with Getty Publications This richly illustrated exhibition catalogue features photographs by three Mexican women, each representing a different generation, who have explored and stretched notions of Mexican identity in works that range from the documentary to the poetic. Revolution and Ritual looks first at the images of Sara Castrejón (1888–1962), the woman photographer who most thoroughly captured the Mexican Revolution. The work of photographic luminary Graciela Iturbide (born 1942) sheds light on Mexico’s indigenous cultures. Finally, the self-portraits of Tatiana Parcero (born 1967) splice images of her body with cosmological maps and Aztec codices, echoing Mexico’s layered and contested history. By bringing their work into conversation, Revolution and Ritual invites readers to consider how Mexican photography has been transformed over the past century.

Although many books have explored Mao's posthumous legacy, none has scrutinized the massive worship that was fostered around him during the Cultural Revolution. This book is the first to do so. By analyzing secret archival documents, Daniel Leese traces the history of the cult within the Communist Party and at the grassroots level. The party leadership's original intention was to develop a prominent brand symbol, which would compete with the nationalists' elevation of Chiang Kai-shek. However, they did not anticipate that Mao would use this symbolic power to mobilize Chinese youth to rebel against party bureaucracy itself. The result was anarchy and when the army was called in it relied on mandatory rituals of worship such as daily reading of the Little Red Book to restore order. Such fascinating detail sheds light not only on the personality cult of Mao, but also on hero-worship in other traditions.

The Nobel Prize–winning author’s classic novel of civil war in nineteenth-century Brazil: “A modern tragedy on the grand scale . . . As dark as spilled blood” (Salman Rushdie, The New Republic). Deep within the remote backlands of Brazil lies Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth: prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and every kind of outcast. It is a place where history and civilization have been wiped away. There is no money, no taxation, no marriage, no census. Canudos is a cauldron for the revolutionary spirit in its purest form, a state with all the potential for a true, libertarian paradise—and one the Brazilian government is determined to crush at any cost. In perhaps his most ambitious and tragic novel, Mario Vargas Llosa offers his fictionalized vision of the story of Canudos, inhabiting characters on both sides of the massive, cataclysmic battle between the society and government troops. The resulting novel is a fable of Latin American revolutionary history, an unforgettable story of passion, violence, and the devastation that follows from fanaticism.

Examines the history and purpose of political rituals, discusses examples from Aztec cannibal rites to presidential inauguration, and argues that the use of ritual determines the success of political groups.