Progressive Geographies

Elizabeth Fentress and Adam Rabinowitz, Slaving States: From West Africa to the Ancient Mediterranean – Princeton University Press, August/October 2026

The growing economies of ancient Greece and Rome created an ever-increasing demand for enslaved labor, which was supplied by states on the peripheries of their empires. In Slaving States, archaeologists Elizabeth Fentress and Adam Rabinowitz examine how violent bands of warriors in the outlying regions of Gaul, Scythia, and the Fezzan (part of modern-day Libya) gradually became states that specialized in selling humans to the slave economies of Greece and Rome. They trace a series of transformations—of people into objects that could be bought and sold, of warrior bands into state-level societies, and of opportunistic captive-taking into slaving economies.

Fentress and Rabinowitz use as a model the West African state of Dahomey, whose development into a slaving state between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries is, unlike that of their ancient counterparts, well documented. Drawing on textual and archaeological evidence, they show that the slaving zones of early modern West Africa and of antiquity have much in common, rooted in the structure of slaving itself. The evolution of the ancient warriors of Gaul, Scythia, and the Fezzan from head-takers to slave merchants may have taken different paths, but it is clearly written in their histories. With Slaving States, Fentress and Rabinowitz offer an entirely new perspective on ancient slavery. By exploring the supply side of the market for enslaved people, they show that that slavery transforms the society that supplies enslaved people as much as it transforms the society that uses them.

Richard Fallon, Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860-1935: Believers and Visionaries on the Borderlines of Geology and Palaeontology – Oxford University Press, April 2025

By the mid-nineteenth century, geologists and palaeontologists had reconstructed an authoritative narrative of Earth’s deep history, from the planet’s molten origins to the rise of humanity. Many figures in transatlantic science across subsequent decades, however, had problems with this narrative: it was too secular, inhuman, and evolutionary, or controlled too exclusively by elite scientists. Speaking from palaeoscience’s unevenly professionalized and controversy-racked borders, Christian fundamentalists, charismatic psychics, and respected scholars alike voiced their objections. Until now, no study has brought their work together for detailed comparative analysis.

Spanning from the 1860s to the interwar decades, Contesting Earth’s History examines the fascinating stories of five significant examples of fringe or ‘borderline’ palaeoscience: old- and young-earth creationism, hollow-earth theory, clairvoyant time-travel, and sunken-continent catastrophism. Innovatively combining methods from literary studies with the history of science, this book attends not just to the conceptual content of these strange sciences, but also to their proponents’ communication of truth claims through diverse genres ranging from the scientific textbook and the technical monograph to the lost-world romance and the epic poem. By paying close attention to the hitherto overlooked textual forms and literary strategies of these works of ‘pseudoscience’, this volume throws into relief the variant conceptions of audience, evidence, and method that jostled and competed in wider scientific culture during this period. It also demonstrates that, for all their diversity, authors of borderline palaeoscience shared the desire to shift the balance of power, creating textual spaces where exclusive hierarchies of scientific expertise could be levelled away.

These conjurors of lost worlds often captivated wide audiences and many of their bizarre, astonishing, and iconoclastic ideas remain with us to this day. Some even inspired early science fiction by the likes of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Hijacking geologists’ and palaeontologists’ longstanding effort at making the prehistoric past visible, authors on the borderlines of palaeoscience asserted their right to scientific authority and encouraged readers to gaze into time’s abyss with bold new eyes.

Samuel Mace, Carl Schmitt in the Middle East: Unstable Decisionism and the Failure of Political Orders – Palgrave Macmillan, August 2026

This book presents a critical examination of Carl Schmitt’s political framework, particularly in the context of decisionist regimes in the Middle East. Departing from conventional discussions on Schmitt, it challenges the perceived stability and power promised by the ‘friend-enemy’ dichotomy, revealing the inherent chaos and dysfunction beneath the decisionist facade. By contextualizing Schmitt’s ideas within the complex political landscape of the Middle East, it sheds light on the region’s regimes, hitherto unexplored through a Schmittian lens. Distinctive in its approach, the book reframes Schmitt’s theoretical contributions, diverging from normative assessments and legal dichotomies to explore the functionality of his proposed political alternative. Through an interdisciplinary lens that integrates discussions of sectarianization, coup-proofing, and neopatrimonialism, it unveils the broader implications of decisionist practices, transcending conventional elite-centric power analyses. Offering a unique dual contribution to the literature, this book presents a fresh critique of Schmitt’s ideology, challenging its efficacy in ensuring long-term regime stability. Moreover, by applying a Schmittian perspective to the Middle Eastern context, it not only recontextualizes Schmitt’s concepts but also prompts new inquiries into the region’s political stability, marking a significant advancement in the understanding of decisionism and governance dynamics in the Middle East.

Michael R. Griffiths, The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought – Palgrave Macmillan, 2025

New Books discussion with Maths Frickhoeffer – thanks to dmf for the link

The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South background from both before 1967 and Barthes’s declaration and in its wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishised and also reviled of figures: the author.

Jennifer C. James, Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery – Duke University Press, August 2026

Introduction open access at the above link

Captive Ecologies makes a case for the ecological significance of slavery’s afterlife, tracing the complex entanglements between racial capitalism and Black ecological freedom. Attending to the ways that racial capitalism implicates both captive bodies and captive land, Jennifer C. James brings into relief the harm that racial capitalism does to Black people as well as the human and non-human worlds they inhabit. James looks to a range of case studies and media from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including Black music, ecopoetics, literature, social history, biography, and Black feminist and queer art, tracing the various ways that the environmental stakes of racial capitalism have shaped the Black ecological imagination. In these works, the concept of captivity signals not only slavery but also Black life in the “wake”: carceral spaces and enclosures, exploitative economic systems, sacrifice zones, and more. James offers novel concepts and frameworks to generate new modes of ecocriticism that are equipped to grapple with the unique demands and stakes of captive ecologies.