A cultural history of technological breakdown, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World.
The Broken Machine explores the intertwined histories of breaking machines, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World. Edward Jones-Imhotep reveals how breakdowns are not the kinds of objects we imagine. More than just material failures or social disruptions, since the 18th century, breakdowns served as moments for defining a modern technological self and the core values of social order in Western democracies: what kinds of people belonged to it, what virtues they should possess, and who stood outside it.
Tracing this politics of breakdown and belonging across two centuries and two continents, the book rewrites five well-known episodes in the history of technology, influential histories that we thought we knew: the politics of the guillotine during the French Revolution, the causes of railway accidents and the rise of “systems” as a tool of self-responsibility and self-governance in Victorian Britain, the surprising antebellum history of breakdown in American slave cultures, the Gantt chart’s origins as a Progressive Era tool for linking failure as a condition of industrial machinery to failure as a kind of person in the US, and, finally, the electronic malfunctions during the Cold War that helped define the rational selves underpinning Western democracy.
This book offers a detailed analysis and reappraisal of Michel Foucault’s work on power, law, and society.
Highlighting the ambiguities, tensions, inconsistencies, and transformations in Foucault’s work, the book shows how, in Foucault’s later years, his ideas gradually converged toward a conception of power that was significantly different from the one that emerges from the works and courses of the mid-1970s, and which came to provide the mainstream understanding of his thought. From the vantage point of this later conception, the book is then able to reframe the tensions and inconsistencies in Foucault’s thought as parts of a multiplex but coherent conceptual system. Foucault’s theses on the development of techniques of power since the 18th century, and on the impact of these developments affected the structure of modern law, are then reformulated to offer a more comprehensive and more balanced appraisal of their significance.
Foucault on Power, Law, and Society will appeal to theorists in law, philosophy, and political science, as well as others with interests in the perpetually influential work of Michel Foucault on power.
Trevor and Alex kindly sent copies of their books. I read Alex’s book in manuscript, and Trevor sent his after I shared his very interesting “Roland Barthes: Writer, Intellectual, and also Professor”, Barthes Studies, 2025 (open access). The Hubert is perhaps the saddest of all books – a former library copy with uncut pages. The new Heidegger translation is interesting – I plan a post probably on Sunday with an initial analysis of some of the passages about space and spatiality.
In Predatory Welfare, Erin Torkelson explores how the direct cash transfer program instituted in South Africa revised and reworked post-apartheid racialized and gendered dispossession, despite its promise of ameliorating extreme poverty. Beginning in 2012, she focuses on how poor Black South African women asserted their entitlements to social assistance and responsibilities for familial care against the pressures of expropriation built into the grant payment system. Because the grants did not cover monthly bills, recipients were pushed into predatory loans collateralized by welfare payments. Torkelson finds that the state-sponsored but privately-run program was fundamentally undermined by its reliance on digital financial technologies which encoded wider forces of colonial rule, nationalist politics, and global development. Even when the government assumed control of grant payment in 2018, the neoliberal bent of fiscal policy continued to drive recipients into debt in new ways. Drawing on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork and organization—in grant payment queues, loan offices, grocery stores, Parliament, and the Constitutional Court—Torkelson demonstrates how cash transfers can offer a means to making racial capitalism more acceptable and how recipients can push back to demand reparation.
Shakespeare and Early Modern Madness, the first collection to focus on madness and mental health in early modern drama, is energized by the belief that madness is a variable concept, situated among a rapidly shifting series of cultural vectors. In addition to investigating the ubiquity of mental health tropes in Shakespearean theater, and their appearance in plays by Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, the volume showcases Renaissance madness’s impressive variety: its affiliation with mental states as different as demonic possession, melancholic dreams, ecstasy and rapture, rage and fury, excessive grief, and aesthetic pleasure. The essays further demonstrate that madness in early modern drama can be approached through a diverse array of critical perspectives; their authors pull not only from historicist methodologies, disability studies, mad studies, and theories of gender and race, but also from the psychological and psychiatric sciences. The volume concludes with a section on activism and pedagogy, which asks how we can use early modern plays to promote the inclusion of students and scholars with lived experience of neurodiversity.
In 1932, the mythologist Georges Dumézil was advertised as having a forthcoming book entitled Le Monde Russe [The Russian World] for a new series called ‘Géographie pour tous’ [Geography for everyone].
The book never appeared. At the time Dumézil was teaching in Uppsala, and trying to get a post back in France. He returned in 1933 for a temporary position at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and eventually secured a permanent teaching role there in 1935. Fatefully, between 1933 and 1935 he supplemented his teaching income with journalism, published under a pseudonym. This included both book and travel reviews for a few different newspapers, including Candide, Ric et Rac, and much more extensive work as the foreign politics reporter for the right-wing Le Jour. Dumézil’s journalism is a story which is discussed in various places, notably by Didier Eribon in Faut-il brûler Dumézil, and which I am revisiting with some new evidence and references in my manuscript on Benveniste and Dumézil.
La Nouvelle Revue des jeunes, 15 June 1932
It’s interesting that Dumézil was planning to write a book for a popular audience. Presumably this was also something he considered doing for income. The source was a full-page advertisement in La Nouvelle Revue des jeunes, 15 June 1932, p. 677. The series description reads:
Geography, like History / can be attractive, / unfortunately… / There is currently no geography book that falls between a school textbook and a major, very expensive work only for specialists. / Geography for all / New collection / will fill this gap, as was done for History by the well-known collection: “Great Historical Studies”.
There are three books mentioned, beyond Dumézil’s possible study: Ernest Granger, La France; son visage, son peuple, ses ressources, just published; and two forthcoming studies, Raoul Blanchard, Les États-Unis et le Canada; and Jacques Weulersse, L’Afrique Noire. “Les grande études historiques” was another Fayard series, edited by Dumézil’s close friend Pierre Gaxotte, who also edited Je Suis Partout in this period, before being replaced by Robert Brasillach. Some of these newspapers were published by Fayard – Candide, Ric et Rac, and Je Suis Partout. (There is a history of Fayard on their website.) Gaxotte was a journalist and writer, author of a conservative critique of the French Revolution, which was dedicated to Dumézil. Although Gaxotte held reactionary views, and was close to Charles Maurras of Action française, it was when Brasillach took over Je Suis Partout that the newspaper went fully fascist, and later collaborationist. Brasillach was executed after the war; Gaxotte was elected to the Académie française.
Granger’s book was published in 1932; Blanchard’s book as L’Amérique du nord: États-Unis, Canada et Alaska in 1933, and Weulersse’s in 1934. E.F. Gautier published L’Afrique blanche in 1939. A companion to Weulersse’s book on sub-Saharan Africa, Gautier discussed north and east Africa. This division is remarkable in itself, with Gautier seeing the Tropic of Cancer as the divide between ‘White Africa’ and ‘Black Africa. This is, for him, racial as well as geographic, though his book on ‘White Africa’ includes Egypt, Abyssinia, and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan as well as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. His division, as well as the regions of Weulersse’s study, are interesting and revealing in terms of a 1930s French colonial view of the continent.
As far as I can tell, no other books in the series appeared. The list of other books in the series found in the early volumes does not mention Dumézil’s possible book, and I have never found another trace of it.
A curiosity, but not implausible, especially given Dumézil’s friendship with Gaxotte and his work for the press’s newspapers. Nor is the subject matter outside of his competence. While he was teaching abroad, initially in Turkey and then Sweden, Dumézil began a parallel career on Caucasian linguistics and legends. He would publish extensively in Caucasian studies, especially on the dying Ubykh language, he taught Armenian for several years in Paris, and published collections of folktales and especially about the Nart sagas. He said it was while he was based in Turkey that he first visited an exhibition on the non-Russian people of the Soviet Union and it led him to this enduring interest, with works published between the late 1920s and his 1986 death. But I hadn’t previously known he was considering a work on the geography of Russia. There are some comments on linguistic geography throughout his work, and he provides elements of a historical geography of the Ubykh people, particularly in the introduction to the third volume of his Documents anatoliens sur les langues et les traditions du Caucase series, Nouvelles Études Oubykhs in 1965.
The other books in the series do discuss elements of human geography, including administrative and political divisions, populations, and economic resources, but concentrate on physical geography.
References
Raoul Blanchard, L’Amérique du nord: États-Unis, Canada et Alaska, Paris: A. Fayard, 1933.
Georges Dumézil, “Notes pour un centenaire”, Documents anatoliens sur les langues et les traditions du Caucase III: Nouvelles Études Oubykhs, Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1965, 15-36.
E.F. Gautier, L’Afrique blanche, Paris: A. Fared, 1939.
Pierre Gaxotte, La Révolution française, Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1928; French Revolution, trans. Walter Alison Phillips, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1932.
Ernest Granger, La France: son visage, son peuple, ses ressources, Paris: A. Fayard, 1932.
Jacques Weulersse, L’Afrique Noire, Paris: A. Fayard, 1934.
This is the 72nd post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm throughout 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment offers a comparative critical study of contemporary fiction. It intervenes in discussions about contemporary fiction in its literary-historical relationship to postmodernism and in its socio-historical relationship to neoliberalism. It argues that contemporary literature is dominated by affective questions that are rooted in, but not fully subsumed by, neoliberalism: ‘How can I experience reality (as real)?’; ‘How can I feel attached to someone?’ This ‘affective dominant’ signals a diachronical shift from postmodernist fiction’s pervasive epistemological and ontological reflections to a focus on questions of an affective nature in contemporary fiction. It also offers a perspective on contemporary fiction as mediating neoliberalism’s double-edged dynamics of commodifying affective experience while privatising collective experience.
The book argues that contemporary fiction develops emergent mediations of neoliberal dynamics, with the affective crises the latter yield. It studies this affective crisis in relation to central themes as identity and climate crisis, and through prevalent contemporary genres as autofiction and coming-of-age narratives. The book explores a transnational corpus, including authors Heike Geissler, Ben Lerner, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Ling Ma, Lieke Marsman, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Niña Weijers and Alejandro Zambra, amongst others.
Why is the Liberal International Order unraveling – and will this lead to global disorder? Broken Cycle explores this urgent question by viewing international politics through a dynamic lens focused on the rise and fall of great powers – whose periodic global wars determine who rules and which ideas and values prevail in the reordered international system. Randall L. Schweller uncovers recurring patterns of change, offering a framework to anticipate the contours of the emerging world. Rather than tracking short-term diplomatic shifts, this book seeks the deeper rhythms of history – cycles of growth, expansion, and decline – that shape international politics over centuries. These patterns are not inevitable, but they are powerful. By understanding them, we gain insight into the forces driving today’s dissent – and tomorrow’s possibilities. This is a study of the structural forces that govern change, the crises that break the old order, and the ideas that rise in its place.
Patrick Brodie and Darin Barney eds. Media Rurality – Duke University Press, April 2026
Media Rurality investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike. From the boglands of Ireland to data centers in the Oregon countryside to the homemade media systems of rural Tanzania, the contributors to this volume show how rural territories are highly mediated, technologized spaces profoundly enmeshed with global capitalism and colonialism. Approaching the study of rurality through a materialist lens that foregrounds infrastructure, this collection shows how rural spaces often bear the environmental brunt of capitalist development while being relegated to the economic and cultural periphery.
Contributors. Christopher Ali, Patrick Bresnihan, Patrick Brodie, Darin Barney, Jenna Burrell, Jordan B. Kinder, Burç Köstem, Cindy Lin, Emily Ng, Lisa Parks, Anne Pasek, Esther Peeren, Nicole Starosielski, Ishita Tiwary, Hunter Vaughan, Ayesha Vemuri, Megan Wiessner, Assatu Wisseh
