Category Archives: Uncategorized

Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History – Bloomsbury, February 2024 What does history look like without ‘civilisations’? Josephine Quinn calls for a major reassessment of the West and the concepts that define it. The West, … Continue reading →

Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital – Verso, January 2023 Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital’s paradoxical expansion and … Continue reading →

Sergei Prozorov, Biopolitics After Truth: Knowledge, Power and Democratic Life – Edinburgh University Press, May 2023 (print and open access)

John Brewer, Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions – Yale University Press, November 2023 A vibrant, diverse history of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples in the age of Romanticism Vesuvius is best known for its disastrous eruption of 79CE. … Continue reading →

Susan Bredlau and Talia Welsh (eds.), Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology in Merleau-Ponty, SUNY Press, August 2022 Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work draws our attention to how the body is always our way of having a world and never merely a thing in … Continue reading →

Jared D. Margulies, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade – University of Minnesota Press, November 2023 Cacti and succulents are phenomenally popular worldwide among plant enthusiasts, despite being among the world’s most threatened species. The … Continue reading →

Gabrielle Hecht, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures – Duke University Press, November 2023 The Introduction is open access here. In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore … Continue reading →

Jean-Paul Demoule, The Indo-Europeans: Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West – Oxford University Press, May/August 2023 The OUP site shows a hardback in May 2023, and paperback in August. It is a translation by … Continue reading →