Progressive Geographies

Strabo’s Geography: A Translation for the Modern World, trans. Sarah Pothecary – Princeton University Press, June/August 2024

Strabo’s Geography is an encyclopedic description of the ancient world as it appeared to a contemporary observer in the early Roman empire. Information about taming elephants, collecting saffron, producing asphalt, and practicing yoga is found alongside accounts of prostitution, volcanic activity, religious festivals, and obscure eastern dynasties—all set against the shifting backdrop of political power in the first century CE. Traveling around the Mediterranean, Strabo gathered knowledge of places and people, supplementing his firsthand experiences with an immense amount of reading to create a sweeping chronicle that attempts to answer the implicit questions “Who are we?” and “Where do we come from?” Sarah Pothecary’s new translation of Strabo’s complete Geography makes this important work more accessible, relevant, and enjoyable than ever before.

Conveying the informal, lively, and almost journalistic style of Strabo’s Greek, this translation connects the ancient and modern worlds by providing modern names and maps for places mentioned in the text, a generous page layout, and marginal notes, allowing readers to appreciate Strabo’s work directly and immediately. The result mimics what Strabo was doing two thousand years ago—relating the rapidly changing present of his original readers to their own ancient past.

A remarkably modern translation of a revealing window on the ancient world, this is essential reading for anyone interested in how we look at both antiquity and the world today.

Danielle Rosvally, Theatres of Value: Buying and Selling Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century New York City – SUNY Press, July 2024

Theatres of Value explores the idea that buying and selling are performative acts and offers a paradigm for deeper study of these acts—”the dramaturgy of value.” Modeling this multifaceted approach, the book explores six case studies to show how and why Shakespeare had value for nineteenth-century New Yorkers. In considering William Brown’s African Theater, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum and Lecture Hall, Fanny Kemble’s American reading career, the Booth family brand, the memorial statue of Shakespeare in Central Park, and an 1888 benefit performance of Hamlet to theatrical impresario Lester Wallack, Theatres of Value traces a history of audience engagement with Shakespearean cultural capital and the myriad ways this engagement was leveraged by theatrical businesspeople.

Jacques Rancière on Eric Hazan at Sidecar – Grand Éditeur

There is an infinitely reductive way of commemorating Eric Hazan, simply by saluting him as a courageous publisher and defender of the radical left, an unyielding supporter of the rights of the Palestinians and a man who, against the grain of his times, so believed in revolution that he devoted a book to the first measures to be taken on the morning after.

He was certainly all these things, but we first need to register the essential point: in an age when the word ‘publishing’ conjures up empires of businessmen for whom everything is a commodity, even the most nauseating ideas, he was first and foremost a great publisher. This was not simply a matter of competence. It was much more a question of personality. And Eric was an exceptional personality: possessed of a mind curious about everything, a scientist by training and neurosurgeon in a previous life, but also a connoisseur of the arts and lover of literature; a city-dweller, sensitive to the living history of every stone in the street; an open and welcoming man with a radiant smile and eloquent handshake, eager to communicate his passions, to share his discoveries and convince others – without preaching – of what he considered to be the exigences of justice.

…

This article was originally published in French in Libération.

Read on: Eric Hazan, ‘Faces of Paris’, NLR 62.

Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory – Afterword by Martin Jay, edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Robert Lucas Scott, Verso Books, July 2024

Update October 2024: there is a review by Adrian Wilding in Historical Materialism (open access)

Lectures on art, Marxism, and critical theory by the legendary philosopher, collected for the first time

Marxist Modernism is a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School. It is also a new resource from one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers: Gillian Rose.

Her 1979 lectures on the Frankfurt School explore the lives and philosophies of a range of the school’s members and affiliates, including Adorno, Lukács, Brecht, Bloch, Benjamin, and Horkheimer, and outline the way each theorist developed Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism into a Marxist theory of culture.

Stanley Aronowitz, Live Theory: The Aronowitz Reader, foreword by Cornel West, edited by Peter Bratsis, Bruno Gulli, Kristin Lawler, and Michael Pelias – Columbia University Press, September 2024

Stanley Aronowitz was a towering figure on the American Left for over sixty years. Both a tireless organizer and a militant social and political theorist, Aronowitz was a highly perceptive analyst of class power. He was dedicated throughout his career to the development and circulation of conceptual weapons for the working class and for all those who faced oppression within American society.

Live Theory: The Stanley Aronowitz Reader brings together in thirteen seminal essays Aronowitz’s theoretical contributions to fundamental questions regarding science, class, culture, and education, alongside his pioneering interventions on labor, contract unionism, and the ongoing struggle for radical democracy. It is a crucial introduction to an indispensable thinker.

Étienne Achille and Oana Panaïté, Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature: French Writers, White Writing – Oxford University Press, March 2024

Fictions of Race in Contemporary French Literature: French Writers, White Writingengages with Whiteness in French literature to provide an unprecedented critique of the institutionally and symbolically hegemonic figure that has gone heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized. The book identifies a set of formal features, functions, and aesthetic dispositions which reveal the ways in which White writers grapple with the postcolonial subject matter. We focus on seven case studies featuring texts by Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Nicolas Fargues, Pierre Lemaitre, Édouard Louis, and Nicolas Mathieu, representative of a larger body of works published by left-leaning, politically progressive writers who stand in stark ideological contrast while sharing certain thematic and aesthetic similarities with books published by neo-reactionary authors such as Michel Houellebecq, purportedly the epitomic French writer of our age. By positing the operative and transitional concept of White writer, our analysis surpasses disciplinary boundaries established in distinct historical and political contexts and maintained by institutional inertia and ideological inducements, to foreshadow the poetics of White writing in contemporary France and offer a replicable model for engaging with a literary field pervaded by (post)colonial themes. We argue that it is imperative to recast critically the enduring boundedness of race and empire as a matter of equal concern to White and non-White writers. Ultimately, this epistemological gesture, stemming from the recognition that Whiteness constitutes a determining factor in the construction of the modern literary field, allows readers and scholars to grasp the relationality of contemporary writing and to uncover the ‘common library’ of literature in French.

Somogy Varga, Science, Medicine, and the Aims of Inquiry: A Philosophical Analysis – Cambridge Univesity Press, May 2024

After its unparalleled rise and expansion over the past century, medicine is increasingly criticized both as a science and clinical practice for lacking scientific rigor, for contributing to overmedicalization, and for failing to offer patient-centered care. This criticism highlights serious challenges which indicate that the scope and societal role of medicine are likely to be altered in the 21st century. Somogy Varga’s ground-breaking book offers a new perspective on the challenges, showing that they converge on fundamental philosophical questions about the nature and aim of medicine. Addressing these questions, Varga presents a philosophical examination of the norms and values constitutive of medicine and offers new perspectives on how to address the challenges that the criticism raises. His book will offer valuable input for rethinking the agenda of medical research, health care delivery, and the education of health care personnel.

David Lay Williams, The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx – Princeton University Press, Sept/Oct 2024

Economic inequality is one of the most daunting challenges of our time, with public debate often turning to questions of whether it is an inevitable outcome of economic systems and what, if anything, can be done about it. But why, exactly, should inequality worry us? The Greatest of All Plagues demonstrates that this underlying question has been a central preoccupation of some of the most eminent political thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition.

David Lay Williams shares bold new perspectives on the writings and ideas of Plato, Jesus, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. He shows how they describe economic inequality as a source of political instability and a corrupter of character and soul, and how they view unchecked inequality as a threat to their most cherished values, such as justice, faith, civic harmony, peace, democracy, and freedom. Williams draws invaluable insights into the societal problems generated by what Plato called “the greatest of all plagues,” and examines the solutions employed through the centuries.

An eye-opening work of intellectual history, The Greatest of All Plagues recovers a forgotten past for some of the most timeless books in the Western canon, revealing how economic inequality has been a paramount problem throughout the history of political thought.

Louise Boyle, Anxious Geographies: Worlds of Social Anxiety – Routledge, June 2024

Anxious Geographies offers a unique perspective on social anxiety, framing it as both a social and spatial phenomenon. Through a meticulous exploration using online questionnaires and interviews, the book provides a crucial examination of the intricacies of anxious lives.

This book presents a critical intervention in the experience of mental health in 21st-century society and provides a compelling geographical account of the underpinnings of the anxious experience. The book pivots on the in-depth perspectives of people with social anxiety, diagnosed or “sub-clinical”, but with an academic commentary that relates their experience to the medicalisation of a disrupted relational life, offering lessons for all of us in modern societies. Each chapter considers a unique aspect of social anxiety accounting for the social, spatial, temporal, relational and embodied dynamics, a geographical approach that enriches our understanding of the contexts and conditions that exacerbate and sustain anxious distress. The phenomenological descriptions herein, capture how social anxiety can profoundly alter a person’s coherent, habitual and embodied sense of being in and navigating through their social and spatial worlds. Through the experiential accounts of anxious distress and by considering the social contexts in which they emerge, this book provides readers with crucial insights into the hidden lives of those living with social anxiety.

This book will be of appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of human geography and across the social sciences and humanities. It will also provide useful insights for academics and health professionals in social psychiatry, social psychology, counselling studies and therapeutic practice.