Progressive Geographies

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 how communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and environmental justice. Hecht outlines how mining in South Africa is a prime example of what she theorizes as residual governance—the governance of waste and discard, governance that is purposefully inefficient, and governance that treats people and places as waste and wastelands. She centers the voices of people who resist residual governance and the harms of toxic mining waste to highlight how mining’s centrality to South African history reveals the links between race, capitalism, the state, and the environment. In this way, Hecht shows how the history of mining in South Africa and the resistance to residual governance and environmental degradation is a planetary story: the underlying logic of residual governance lies at the heart of contemporary global racial capitalism and is a major accelerant of the Anthropocene.

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 Rhoda Cronin-Allanic of his French book, Mais où sont passés les Indo-Européens? (2014), which was revised in 2017.

The existence of an Indo-European linguistic family, allowing for the fact that several languages widely dispersed across Eurasia share numerous traits, has been demonstrated for several centuries now. But the underlying factors for this shared heritage have been fiercely debated by linguists, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. The leading theory, of which countless variations exist, argues that this similarity is best explained by the existence, at one given point in time and space, of a common language and corresponding population. This ancient, prehistoric, population would then have diffused across Eurasia, eventually leading to the variation observed in historical and modern times. 

The Indo-Europeans: Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West argues that despite its acceptance and use by most researchers from different disciplines, such a model is inherently flawed. This book describes how, beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans began a quest for a supposed original homeland, from which a small conquering people would one day spread out, bringing their language to Europe and parts of Asia (India, Iran, Afghanistan). This quest was often closely tied to ideological preoccupations and it was in its name that the Nazi leadership, claiming for the Germans the status of the purest Indo-Europeans (or Aryans), waged genocide. The last part of the book summarizes the current state of knowledge and current hypotheses in the fields of linguistics, archaeology, comparative mythology, and genetics. The culmination of three decades of research, this book offers a sweeping survey of the historiography of the Indo-European debate and poses a devastating challenge to the Indo-European origin story at its roots.

Christopher S. Browning, Nation Branding and International Politics – McGill-Queen’s University Press, October 2023

Nation branding is regarded as essential for competitiveness among countries, but the idea of branding nations is often derided as lacking seriousness. While nation branding has been on the radar of scholars of marketing, communication, and media studies, as well as political geography for decades, it has only made a small dent into the international relations field.

In Nation Branding and International Politics Christopher Browning argues that international relations should take nation branding seriously. Nation branding not only involves the issues of culture, identity, and status – which are of principal concern to IR – but it is also a different and potentially fruitful way of reconceptualizing statehood. Mobilizing work on ontological security, anxiety, status, and distinction, and grounding the analysis in a broader historical context, Browning finds that nation branding is politically significant, though not necessarily for the reasons its advocates claim. Specifically, the book raises important questions about nation branding’s influence on the constitution of national identity, the reframing of citizenship, and the topography of contemporary geopolitics.

Nation Branding and International Politics considers how status, prestige, and reputation are constructed and maintained in international society, and how, perhaps, this construction and maintenance may be changing – just as the practice of nation branding is changing.

Susan Slyomovics (ed.), Ordering Imperial Worlds: From Late Medieval Spain to the Modern Middle East, Edinburgh University Press, November 2023

Studies cross-cultural exchanges across the Mediterranean using new interdisciplinary methodologies

• An edited volume that provides architectural, literary, historical and visual analyses
• A strong focus on interpreting archives
• A work of comparative cultural studies
• Each chapter opens an original and critical perspective, the book coalescing into a wealth of new ways of thinking about the history of the Islamic world
• Represents new developments in theories of empire
• Discusses cases from medieval Spain, Ottoman Empire, colonial North Africa, and France and Algeria based on primary sources

This volume of original essays invites 10 preeminent scholars to think through a rich corpus on cities, empires, images and archaeological sites produced by the distinguished architectural historian Zeynep Çelik. Awarded the prestigious 2019 Giorgio Della Vida medal for excellence in Islamic studies by the University of California, the occasion allowed researchers from various universities, countries and disciplines to reflect on her rich body of work. Inspired by Çelik’s works, chapters travel between Muslim and Christian Spain, the Ottoman Empire and France, Europe and its overseas empire in North Africa, and more.

Angelo Del Boca, As Cruel as Anyone Else: Italians, Colonies and Empire – trans. Richard Braude, Seagull, July 2024

Reveals a dark chapter in the Italian government’s colonial history that has been largely hidden from view.
 
Between the end of the nineteenth century and over the first half of the twentieth, Italy invaded and occupied the Horn of Africa, Libya, and several other territories. Yet recognition of this history of colonial destruction, racist violence, and genocidal aerial and chemical warfare—carried out not only during the Fascist dictatorship but also under preceding liberal governments—has been consistently repressed beneath the myth that the Italians never truly practiced colonialism.
 
The late journalist, historian, novelist, campaigner, and former Resistance fighter Angelo Del Boca dismantles this myth. He expertly narrates episodes of state violence committed by Italians both abroad—from Ethiopia to Slovenia, from China to Libya—and “at home” during the civil war following Unification in the 1860s or when the anti-Fascist Resistance faced off against the Republic of Salò after 1943. Attentive to the losses and pain suffered by all sides in war, Del Boca deftly demonstrates how such violence was not only a tool of domination but has also been central to creating and shaping an Italian “people.”
 
Drawing on a lifetime of interviews as a special correspondent, decades of work in private and state archives, and his own experiences during the Second World War, Del Boca’s popular and influential work has contributed to overturning views of Italian history. Presenting many historical episodes in English for the first time, As Cruel as Anyone Else provides a key to reading contemporary Italy, its place in international politics, and the disturbing permanence of the far-right within mainstream Italian politics.