LSA Book Prize 2025
news / August 5, 2025
Winners +
The LSA Executive Committee received an unprecedented number of submissions for the annual book prize award. We thank all that submitted this year and look forward to learning of the important work across our membership next year.
The winners:
Living with the Party: How Leisure Shaped a New China
————-[by Yifan Shi]
City of Hip Hop: New York City, The Bronx, and a Peace Meeting
————-[by Rob Swift & Rasul A. Mowatt]
Learn more:
— Living with the Party: How Leisure Shaped a New China [by Yifan Shi]
This book explores the subcultures, cultural trends and regulations of leisure and subcultures among young people in Beijing from 1949 to the 1980s. It complicates our understanding of the successes of the CCP and the nature of those successes—more a synergy or synthesis than victory over society or defeat. It argues that while the CCP aimed to direct the most private sphere in people’s everyday life (i.e., leisure), it did not achieve this goal by coercive means, but by appealing ways through organized leisure activities. This book suggests that although elements of youth subcultures can be observed throughout the Mao era, we should not treat them as a way of passive resistance. Instead, we must position these subcultures between different layers of the Party’s leisure regulation to examine what the CCP actually achieved. Many people who engaged in subcultures defied the blatant politicization of their leisure, some might have defied the process of collectivization, but few defied the process of institutionalization during which people did not find state intervention contradictory to their own way of pleasure-seeking. This book also suggests that instead of regarding the Deng Xiaoping era as a breakaway from Maoist interventionist rule, we need to see the historical continuity as revealed by the Party’s uninterrupted policy of leisure regulation. Thought provoking and at times amusing, this book will interest sinologists, historians, and scholars of China’s social form.
Find + Order:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-99-0208-8
Learn more:
City of Hip Hop: New York City, The Bronx, and a Peace Meeting [by Rob Swift & Rasul A. Mowatt]
The City of Hip-Hop positions a unique conceptualization of the history of Hip-Hop, that it was a combination of forces that produced the environment for Hip-Hop to specifically grow in the geographies of New York City and its boroughs. This book argues it was the political forces of the 1970s combined with the economic forces of free market capitalism and privatization of public services, neoliberalism, and the social forces of the deindustrialization of major cities and displacement of populations that led the cultural creation of the “Boogie Down” Bronx. The City of Hip-Hop shows how Hip-Hop is a socio-political reaction that created an alternate reality with a geographic specificity, and it is the interplay with those forces that nurtured it to become the culture force that we know it today in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Manchester, Liverpool, Berlin, São Paulo, Tokyo, Washington D.C., Seattle, Paris, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, Detroit, Toronto, Cleveland, Johannesburg, Barcelona, Belfast, Gaza City, and elsewhere. Once those of us as fans of the culture zoom out to see such a bigger picture, a much-needed criticism and retelling of the culture and art of Hip-Hop emerges as our understanding.
This book is essential for preservers of the culture, students, scholars, and general readers interested in urban planning, urban design, urban geography, place-making, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Black Studies, and Latin American Studies.
Find + Order:
