Progressive Geographies

W.C. Hackett, Outside the Gates – Angelico, 2021

The gates of Drancy Internment Camp in the northeast suburbs of Paris served as a holding pen for thousands of Jews during the German occupation of France in World War II. Jean Wahl, philosophy professor, poet, bachelor at the top of Parisian society before his arrest, was among those very few who escaped. 

In this searing historical novel by W. C. Hackett, the story is told in Wahl’s own voice, from the moment he passed beyond the gates of the camp to his harrowing flight for the Free Zone in the south. Based on extensive archival research, Outside the Gates binds by spell in a work of vast interior proportions, bringing the reader face to face with the defining mortal questions Jean Wahl himself faces recollecting his year of trial.

Dana Luciano, How The Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century America – Duke University Press, January 2024

The introduction is available open access here

In How the Earth Feels Dana Luciano examines the impacts of the new science of geology on nineteenth-century US culture. Drawing on early geological writings, Indigenous and settler accounts of earthquakes, African American antislavery literature, and other works, Luciano reveals how geology catalyzed transformative conversations regarding the intersections between humans and the nonhuman world. She shows that understanding the earth’s history geologically involved confronting the dynamic nature of inorganic matter over vast spans of time, challenging preconceived notions of human agency. Nineteenth-century Americans came to terms with these changes through a fusion of fact and imagination that Luciano calls geological fantasy. Geological fantasy transformed the science into a sensory experience, sponsoring affective and even erotic connections to the matter of the earth. At the same time, it was often used to justify accounts of evolution that posited a modern, civilized, and Anglo-American whiteness as the pinnacle of human development. By tracing geology’s relationship with biopower, Luciano illuminates how imagined connections with the earth shaped American dynamics of power, race, and colonization. 

Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume I – trans. Paul Reitter, ed. Paul Reitter and Paul North, preface by Wendy Brown, afterword by William Clare Roberts – Princeton University Press, September 2024

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx’s lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx’s thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source.

For Marx, our global economic system is relentlessly driven by “value”—to produce it, capture it, trade it, and most of all, to increase it. Lifespans are shortened under the demand for ever-greater value. Days are lengthened, work is intensified, and the division of labor deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannize our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonization, and enslavement.

With a foreword by Wendy Brown and an afterword by William Clare Roberts, this is a critical edition of Capital for our time, one that faithfully preserves the vitality and directness of Marx’s German prose and renders his ideas newly relevant to modern readers.

David Storey, Territories: The Claiming of Space – new edition, Routledge, May 2024

(The Routledge description says second edition, but there was one before their first with a different press.)

Territories are more than simply bounded spaces; they reflect the ways in which we think of geographic space. Territoriality, or laying claim to territory, can be seen as the spatial expression of power, with borders dividing those inside from those outside. The book provides an introduction to the concept of territory, the ways in which ideologies and social practices are manifested in space, the deployment of territorial strategies and the geographical outcomes of these.

This revised and updated third edition focuses on both macro-scale examples and those less obvious micro-scale ones, and it explores how territorial strategies are used in the maintaining of power, or as a means of resistance. Throughout the book, key questions emerge concerning geographic space. Who is ‘allowed’ to be in particular spaces and who is excluded or discouraged from being there? How are territorial practices utilized in conflicts concerned with socio-political power and identity and how are ideologies transposed onto space?

Written from a geographical perspective, the book is interdisciplinary, drawing on ideas and material from a range of academic disciplines including, history, political science, sociology, international relations, cultural studies. Theoretical underpinnings are supported by a variety of historical and contemporary examples, drawn from a range of geographic contexts.

Jure Vidmar, Territorial Status in International Law – Bloomsbury, January 2024

This book develops a new theory of territorialism and international legal status of territories. It (i) defines the concept of territory, explaining how territories are created; (ii) redefines the concept of statehood, illustrating that statehood (rather than the statehood criteria) is territorial legal status established in the formal sources of international law; and (iii) grounds non-state territorial entities in the sources of international law to explain their international legal status. This fresh new theoretical perspective has both scholarly and practical importance, providing a tool helping decision-makers and judges in the practical application of international law both internationally and domestically.