• The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture
• By Talinn Grigor, professor of art history
• Penn State University Press, July 1, 2021

Grigor “argues that while Western imperialism was instrumental in shaping high art as mercantile-bourgeois ethos, it was also a project that destabilized the hegemony of a Eurocentric historiography of taste,” according to the publisher’s description. Reviewer Christina Maranci, author of Medieval Armenian Architecture: Constructions of Race and Nation, says Grigor’s volume “is a finely wrought, insightful and successful contribution to the study of the reception of ancient Iran in the modern world.”

• Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska
• By Jessica Bissett Perea, assistant professor of Native American studies
• Oxford University Press, November 2021

In her first book, Bissett Perea offers radical and relational ways of listening to Inuit performances across a range of genres — from hip-hop to Christian hymnody and traditional drum songs to funk and R&B — to register how Indigenous music can sound out entanglements between structures of Indigeneity and colonialism. Reviewer George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music and Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place, says Sound Relations is “a magnificent achievement, a profoundly path-breaking and persuasive work of decolonial scholarship that enriches Indigenous studies, sound studies and cultural studies by presenting original and generative new concepts, ideas and terms.”

• Africanness in Action: Essentialism and Musical Imaginations of Africa in Brazil
• By Juan Diego Díaz, assistant professor of music
• Oxford University Press, April 23, 2021

Díaz counters misperceptions of African music as primitive, exotic and monolithic, by examining the perspectives of Black musicians in Bahia, Brazil, a site imagined by many as a diasporic epicenter of African survivals and purity. According to the publisher, Díaz argues that the Bahia musicians assert Afro-Brazilian identities, promote social change and critique racial inequality by creatively engaging essentialized tropes about African music and culture. Reviewer Kofi Agawu of The Graduate Center, City University of New York, says: “Combining attention to discourse and rhetoric with detailed musical analysis, the author unveils the multiple truths of influence, invention, self-definition and aspiration.”

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