Just finished doing the proofs of Reading Kant’s Geography. It’s a long book (ix + 372 pages without index), but I think it’s a good read – I feel I can be slightly objective since I co-edited it, rather than wrote it.

One thing that is sometimes missed about edited books is that they are not simply compilations of already existing work. This book exists because Eduardo and I went after people and actively encouraged them to write about this topic. Few of them had written about it before, and several said that this book gave them the reason or opportunity to tackle it. We held two workshops on the book – one in Manhattan, one in Durham – where initial versions of the chapters were presented and discussed. Most of the contributors attended one; some both. They were really positive and intellectually interesting events. It might seem unfair to single out one contributor, but learning of the Herculean labours of Werner Stark was a highlight. Werner has been working on the volumes of the Akademie edition of Kant’s work for many years, producing critical editions of Kant’s lectures on anthropology and geography from extant student transcripts.

After an introduction by me, the book comprises chapters by Michael Church, Charles W.J. Withers (setting the lectures in the context of physical and human geography, respectively), Werner Stark on editing the lectures, Olaf Reinhardt and Max Marcuzzi on translating them, Robert Louden, Holly Wilson, David Morris on their relation to Kant’s Anthropology and work on nature and teleology, Jeff Malpas and Karsten Thiel on Kant’s geography of reason more generally, Onora O’Neill on orientation in thinking, Jeffrey Edwards on acquisition of land in Kant’s legal thought, David Harvey and Edward Casey discussing his cosmopolitanism, Robert Bernasconi on race, Walter Mignolo on the ‘darker side of the Enlightenment’, and Eduardo Mendieta on sex, race and geography.