New Books Network

Kelly M. Duke Bryant’s Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940 (U Mass Press, 2026)explores how colonial child protection policies and African children’s responses to them produced new ways of defining, measuring, documenting, and experiencing childhood in the French colony of Senegal from 1848 to 1940. In this groundbreaking book, Bryant takes the scholarship in new directions, offering to a literature dominated by studies of British colonies in the twentieth century a study of childhood in a French colony from the immediate post-emancipation period through the 1930s. This focus allows her to complicate the generally accepted timeline of child protection in colonial Africa and question other assumptions about children’s history on the continent.

The author, Kelly M. Duke Bryant, is an Associate Professor of History at Rowan University and the current President of the French Colonial Historical Society.

The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. She is the author of An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
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In Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival (University
of North Carolina Press, 2026), naturalist, forager, and educator Maria
Pinto uncovers strange and beautiful connections between the natural
and human worlds, mingling reportage, research, memoir, and nature
writing, touching on topics that range from Black farmers’ domestication
of the unforgettable aroma of truffles, to the possibility that
enslaved people wielded mycological poisons against their enslavers.

Pinto
brings a new perspective and a distinctive literary voice to this mix
of environmental and lived history, and every page sings with her
enthusiasm for the networks in which we are embedded: fungal,
ecological, ancestral, and communal. Join us in pursuit of beautiful,
perplexing, delicious, and deadly mushrooms as we explore this
understudied kingdom’s awe-inspiring diversity, discovering how fungi
have been used by people, especially those on the margins, for survival,
pleasure, revelation, and revolution.

When she’s not in the
woods (and sometimes when she is), Maria Pinto is a writer, editor, and
educator. She teaches writing for various literary organizations. She
reads fiction for Peripheries Journal and serves on the board
of Hale, an outdoor education and land conservancy nonprofit. Her
writing has been supported by Assets for Artists at Massachusetts Museum
of Contemporary Art, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Vermont Studio
Center, the Mass Cultural Council, the Writers’ Room of Boston, The
Mastheads, and The Garrett on the Green. You can find Maria at her Website and on Instagram.

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Stealing the future and concealing the theft—capitalism’s method, as examined by the author of the acclaimed Carbon Democracy Today,
extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from nowhere. The trick of
conjuring this unearned wealth is, in fact, the key to understanding
capital­ism’s origins and a clue to why the catastrophe of climate
collapse is upon us: value is created by consuming the future. In The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow
(Verso, 2026), Professor Timothy Michell explains how this came about
through the imperial expansion of the West, en­cumbering today’s
generations with repayments on earlier extractions. Timothy Mitchell
identifies the forms of capitalisation, credit, and coercion that turn
prospective assets into present income. Rejecting the common idea that
claims on the future create only financial or fictitious capital, he
traces the terraforming projects – the destruction of rivers, the
colonising of territory, the expan­sion of infrastructure, and the
burning of carbon—through which the future has been squandered. Terms
such as finance, technology, the economy, and growth function as alibis
that conceal this devastating form of extraction.
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False Idols: How Diversion is Destroying Democracy (Vernon Press, 2024) examines how modern forms of diversion shape civic life and weaken democratic responsibility. Drawing on the ancient Roman idea of “bread and circuses,” Kurt Warner explores how contemporary society is saturated with distractions that keep citizens focused on what is immediate, pleasurable, profitable, or spectacular, rather than on what is politically and socially meaningful.

The conversation introduces listeners to the book’s central concern: how celebrity culture, consumerism, economic pressures, sports, politics, art, music, literature, the internet, social media, and video games can become “false idols.” These forces do not merely entertain us; they influence how we think, what we value, and how we understand our responsibilities to one another.

A key point of discussion is the book’s comparison between ancient Rome and the contemporary United States. Warner uses “bread and circuses” to consider how societies become complacent when citizens are absorbed by basic needs and entertainment while civic duty fades into the background.

The episode also explores the book’s opening narrative, which follows an ordinary man, Chris, through a day filled with advertising, media, branding, and social pressure. This scene illustrates one of the book’s central arguments: distraction is often woven into everyday life before people have noticed its influence.

Warner’s background in psychotherapy adds an important dimension to the discussion. 'False Idols' connects personal awareness with civic awareness, asking how people can recognize the forces directing their attention and reclaim the ability to think critically.

Ultimately, this episode invites listeners to reflect on the relationship between attention and democracy. 'False Idols' asks what it would mean to wake up from the collective daze of distraction and choose more meaningful forms of civic, ethical, and social engagement.

Key Themes and Context:

“Bread and circuses” in the modern world - One of the book’s central ideas is that Juvenal’s famous phrase “bread and circuses” remains relevant today. Warner uses it to examine how entertainment, consumption, and everyday distraction can draw citizens away from civic responsibility.

The many forms of diversion- The book considers a wide range of modern distractions, including celebrity worship, money, sports, politics, art, music, literature, the internet, social media, and video games. Together, these examples show how distraction can operate across culture, politics, economics, and everyday life.

Democracy and civic duty - At the heart of the book is a concern with democracy. Warner argues that distraction becomes dangerous when it weakens civic engagement and allows people to avoid the difficult work of political and ethical responsibility.

Critical thinking as resistance - The later chapters of 'False Idols' focus on critical thinking as a way of resisting manipulation and recovering agency. The book invites readers to examine not only what they consume, but also how their attention, values, and judgments are shaped.

The psychological dimension of distraction - Warner’s background in psychotherapy informs the book’s attention to emotion, avoidance, and self-awareness. Distraction is presented not only as a social or political problem, but also as something that affects how individuals relate to themselves and others.

Vernon Press – Bridging Scholarly Ideas and Global Readership

Vernon Press stands out as a bilingual independent publisher of scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences. Their mission is crucial — to provide a home for ideas of international importance and to embrace scholarship from underrepresented voices and perspectives. Through its diverse catalog, Vernon Press engages with global readers, contributing to academic and public discourse.

Dessy Vassileva, the Marketing & Design expert at Vernon Press, brings a 360º multidisciplinary approach to her work at Vernon Press.
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Elad Lapidot is Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Indiana UP, forthcoming), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2025), Jews Out of the Question: A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation of Hegel’sPhänomenologie des Geistes (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logique de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010).
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