Progressive Geographies

Hans Demeyer and Sven Vitse, Affective Crisis and the Possibility of Attachment: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Fiction in Neoliberal Ruins – UCL Press, April 2026 (print and open access)

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.

Randall L. Schweller, Broken Cycle: World Politics in the Age of Dissent – Cambridge University Press, February 2026

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

Patrick Brodie, Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland – Duke University Press, March 2026

In Wild Tides, Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for economic recovery. Brodie contends that, while the Irish state’s investment in creative and technological sectors of media was supposed to bring resources back into the country and stabilize the economy, it instead rendered the country even more vulnerable to future instability and transferred wealth into the hands of multinational corporations. Through ethnographic work and close engagement with the Irish state’s policy and planning across a number of key media infrastructure sites, Brodie unfolds the very real environmental and social impacts of Ireland’s naturalized model of financialized, foreign direct investment-led infrastructural development. Richly researched and comprehensively argued, Wild Tides reveals the multifarious, unexpected ways that financialization reaches into the daily life of a nation.

Ana Oancea, Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-Siècle France – University of Toronto Press, July 2025

Dangerous Creations presents a master narrative of the inventor in fin-de-siècle French literature by analyzing the works of Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Émile Zola, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Their writings challenge the role of science in shaping French national identity and aim to transform contemporary understandings of science and technology. The book reveals how Verne, Robida, Zola, and de l’Isle-Adam reimagine the figure of the inventor, reshaping the literary standards of their time. Universally male in these narratives, the inventor serves as a flawed exemplar of national heroism during the Age of Empire – a period marked by significant external threats and internal strife – while also embodying unrestrained creativity. Ultimately, the inventor novel reflects broader French anxieties surrounding scientific progress, empire, and gender. Ana Oancea explores the transmedia and transnational legacy of the fin-de-siècle inventor novel through vignettes that highlight similarly themed narratives in contemporary popular culture. These sections engage with films, television series, graphic narratives, and video games that reinterpret key aspects of the inventor narrative, shedding light on its power structures, racial and gender politics, and colonial aspirations.

New Books discussion with Gina Stamm – thanks to dmf for the link

Robin James, Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology and the Biopolitics of Algorithmic Legitimation – Duke University Press, November 2026

In Good Vibes Only, Robin James argues that the vibes, the mathematical vectors driving modern technologies, have shifted. Considering the forms of governance performed by the algorithms fueling AI, recommender systems, facial recognition, and other contemporary technologies, James vividly illustrates our new biopolitical regime, one in which discourses of legitimacy function in place of norms to draw patriarchal, racial, and capitalist lines around personhood. James innovatively combines continental philosophy, popular music studies, and media studies to show how the math driving modern technologies translates into both political forms of governance and colloquial cultural practices ranging from social media posts to playlist categories to hip hop aesthetics. Qualitative atmospheres and abstractions are undergirded by quantitative orientations, utilized by users and platforms alike. Good Vibes Only breaks down the phenomenology of how these algorithmic “vibes” have shifted the way biopower governs, not with disciplinary or regulatory norms, but with orientations or lineages that it assesses for their capacity to carry patriarchal, racial, capitalist property relations into speculative realities.

Alex Tomas Fusco, The Production of Camp Space: An Analysis of a Refugee Camp in Mainland Greece – Springer, May 2026

This book uses a Lefebvrian spatial framework to explore the ‘production’ of Ritsona refugee camp in Central Greece. Lefebvre’s multifaceted and reflexive conceptualisation of space allows for a macro analysis that locates the camp within the global structure and layout of society, but simultaneously facilitates a more localised exploration of space as an interplay between people, social practices and the built environment of the material camp. 
The first half of the book contextualises the camp and examines the broader processes and structures implicated in its production, exploring the emergence of the camp as an idea, and of the birth, development and proliferation of the material camp as a technology of control. The second half of the book, meanwhile, engages with the production of camp space at the level of the everyday and from the perspective of camp residents themselves, and is structured around concepts of domestic, neighbourhood and public space.

Franco Basaglia ed. The Negated Institution: Report from a Psychiatric Hospital – trans. John Foot, Brainstorm Books, October 2025 (print and open access)

Thanks to dmf for the link

The Negated Institution: Report from a Psychiatric Hospital was first published in 1968 in Italian and caused an immediate sensation. It was an instant bestseller and was translated into numerous languages, but never into English. Edited by the Venetian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, the book is a collection of writings, interviews, and debates which tell the story of the transformation of the Psychiatric Hospital in Gorizia, on the northeast border of Italy, into an open and “negated” institution. This story of an historically unique process of de-institutionalization—with the elimination of walls and barriers, the humanization of the hospital, the introduction of debates and meetings, the unlocking of wards, and the questioning of the very basis of all psychiatric hospitals—struck a nerve with the student and worker movements of 1968. It also gave a voice to the patients themselves, telling their stories of violence but also of liberation.

The Negated Institution was highly sensitive to the contradictions of this project of opening up and negation, and called for the abolition of the entire system of psychiatric asylums, as well as new ways of understanding and contextualising mental illness and mental health. It led to debates in many countries within and outside of psychiatry and played a part in the 1978 “Basaglia law,” which eventually closed down the entire psychiatric hospital system in Italy—the first example of such total closure in the world, which endures to our contemporary moment.

This is the first translation into English of this seminal text. The translator, John Foot, is an expert in the life and work of Franco Basaglia and has added notes and a critical introduction.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World: A New Translation, trans. Sergeiy Sandler, Cambridge: MIT Press, October 2025

A new and improved translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s classic and celebrated study of carnival.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s classic study of carnival, laughter, the grotesque, and medieval and renaissance folk culture has been the inspiration for countless new ideas in the humanities, in literature and the arts, and throughout human culture over the last half century.

Rabelais and His World is a study devoted to French Renaissance writer François Rabelais, author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais, Bakhtin argues, can only be properly understood against the backdrop of a millennia-old tradition of festivity and laughter, a tradition that included the Roman Saturnalia, medieval carnivals and feasts of fools, and Greek satyr plays and symposia from antiquity, as well as countless medieval works belonging to various smaller genres, circus shows, foul language and gesture, and much more.

Bakhtin claims this tradition is united by the imagery it uses and the worldview it expresses. Its imagery is ambivalent. It effaces the boundaries between bodies, connects in one image birth with death, praise with invective. Its worldview is optimistic, defeating all fears and all official seriousness with laughter.

The book’s new translation is informed by recent scholarship on Bakhtin and contains the most extensive scholarly apparatus this book has received to date.