Progressive Geographies

Sheryl Lightfoot and Elsa Stamatopoulou (eds.), Indigeneous People and Borders – Duke University Press, January 2024

The legacies of borders are far-reaching for Indigenous Peoples. This collection offers new ways of understanding borders by departing from statist approaches to territoriality. Bringing together the fields of border studies, human rights, international relations, and Indigenous studies, it features a wide range of voices from across academia, public policy, and civil society. The contributors explore the profound and varying impacts of borders on Indigenous Peoples around the world and the ways borders are challenged and worked around. From Bangladesh’s colonially imposed militarized borders to resource extraction in the Russian Arctic and along the Colombia-Ecuador border to the transportation of toxic pesticides from the United States to Mexico, the chapters examine sovereignty, power, and obstructions to Indigenous rights and self-determination as well as globalization and the economic impacts of borders. Indigenous Peoples and Borders proposes future action that is informed by Indigenous Peoples’ voices, needs, and advocacy.

Contributor(s): Andrea Carmen, Hana Shams Ahmed, Tone Bleie, Jacqueline Gillis, Rauna Kuokkanen, Elifuraha Laltaika, David B. MacDonald, Toa Maldonado, Bina Nepram, Melissa Zeba Patel, Manoel Prado, Liubov Sulyandziga, Rodion Sulyandziga, Yifat Susskind, Erika Yamada

The Introduction is available open access.

Radical online collections and archives – New Historical Express

I am very interested in the growing amount of radical literature from around the world that is being scanned and digitised. As there are so many and from many different places, I thought it would be useful to make a list. All of those that are included are free to access (there are others that require some form of subscription). If there are any that I have missed or if any links are broken, do let me know, either by commenting below or sending me an email.

Edit (Feb 2022): I have added categories of the list below for ease of finding the relevant collections.

Open Access e-books from Pluto Press – here

Ananya Agustin Malhotra, Tran Duc Thao’s Anticolonial Phenomenology: In Theory and in Practice – JHI blog

In February 1946, before the outbreak of the first Indochina War, the Vietnamese Marxist philosopher Tran Duc Thao (1917–93) outlined for the French reading public a nascent philosophy on the phenomenology of colonized existence. From the pages of Les Temps Modernes, Thao argued that the French and the Vietnamese lived in different worlds of possibilities. “Annamites,” he wrote, “live in a world where the possibilities of an independent Vietnam are part of a project, a Vietnam free to industrialize, to create the number of schools it would have seen fit, to send its students to all the universities of Europe and America.” In contrast, the French are “taught in school that Indochina is French” and that it is “contradictory” to think “something that is part of French domain” could ever “have an independent existence. This is unthinkable.”

In Conversation: Achille Mbembe and David Theo Goldberg on ‘Critique of Black Reason’ (2017)

Achille Mbembe, The Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press, 2016

Achille Mbembe, Brutalism – Duke University Press, January 2024

In Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale. Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic. Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.

The Introduction is available open access

Nivedita Menon, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South – Duke University Press, May 2024

In Secularism as Misdirection, Nivedita Menon traces how the discourse of secularism fixes attention to and hyper-visualizes women and religion while obscuring other related issues. Showing how secularism is often invoked to serve capital and antiminority politics, Menon exposes it as a strategy of governance that is compatible with both democracy and authoritarianism, capitalism and socialism. Secularism also delegitimizes the nonindividuated nonrational self, Menon argues, and exploring this aspect, tracks the journey of psychoanalysis in the global South. Menon further examines the interconnectedness of religion, caste, the state, and women, showing how the discourse of secularism can also be mobilized by Hindu supremacist politics in India. Menon puts Latin American decolonial theorists in conversation with Asian and African thinkers to examine twenty-first-century global reimaginings of selfhood, constitutionalism, citizenship, and anticapitalist existence. Through a feminist and global perspective, Menon suggests that transformative politics is better imagined by stepping out of the frame offered by secularism and focusing on substantive values such as democracy, social justice, and ecological justice.

Jonathan Wolff & Avner De-Shalt, City of Equals – Oxford University Press, December 2023 (print and open access)

When we think about equality in the city, we are very likely to think first of the wide and growing divide between rich and poor, in material terms. Yet when we think more about a ‘city of equals’ it becomes apparent that how people feel treated by the city and those around them, and whether they can live according to their values, are much more central. Accordingly, combining their own reflections, a multi-disciplinary literature review, and, distinctively, more than 180 interviews in 10 cities in 6 countries, Wolff and de Shalit have derived an account of a city of equals based on the idea that it should give each of its city-zens a secure sense of place or belonging. 

Four underlying values structure this account. First, access to the goods and services of the city should not be based purely on the market. Second, each person should be able to live a life they find meaningful. Third, there should be diversity and wide social mixing. Fourth, there should be ‘non-deferential inclusion’: each person should be able to get access to what they are entitled to without being treated as less worthy than others. They should be able to enjoy their rights without bowing and scraping, waiting longer than others, or going through special bureaucratic hurdles. In sum, in a city of equals each person is proud of their city and has the (justified) feeling that their city is proud of (people like) them.