Progressive Geographies

Steve Mentz, Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels – Fordham University Press, 2024; foreword by Suzanne Conklin Akbari.

Navigate the Depths of a Timeless Classic, Reimagined.

Come sail with I.

We’re not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiarcourse. This time, the Pequod’s American voyage steers its course acrossthe curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality – multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today we sail headless without any Captain. Instead of binding ourselves to the dismasted tyrant’s rage, the ship’s crew seeks only what we will find: currents teeming with life, a blue-watered alien globe, toothy cetacean smiles from vasty deeps. Treasures await those who sail without.

This cycle of one hundred thirty-eight poems – one for each chapter in Moby-Dick, plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue – launches into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these poems seek an alien ecopoetics of marine depths, the refraction of light, the taste of salt on skin. Directionless, these poems reach out to touch oceanic expanse and depth. It’s not an easy voyage, and not a certain one. It lures you forward. It has fixed its barbed hook in I.

Sailing without means relinquishing goals, sleeping at the masthead, forgetting obsessions. I. welcomes you to trace wayward ways through these poems. Read them any way you can – back to front, at random, sideways, following the obscure promptings of your heart. It’s the turning that matters. It’s a blue wonder world that beckons.

Steve reflects on writing the book here

Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis – Verso, October 2023

Looks great, though tempting to repeat the question of Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism – how do we know it’s late?

In a world shaken by ecological, economic and political crises, the forces of authoritarianism and reaction seem to have the upper hand. How should we name, map and respond to this state of affairs?

The rich archive of twentieth-century debates on fascism can steer a path through an increasingly authoritarian present. Developing anti-fascist theory is an urgent and vital task. From the ‘Great Replacement’ to campaigns against critical race theory and ‘gender ideology’, today’s global far right is launching lethal panics about the threats to traditional political, sexual and racial hierarchies.

Drawing especially on Black radical and anti-colonial theories of fascism, Toscano makes clear the limits of associating fascism primarily with the kind of political violence experienced by past European regimes. Rather than looking for analogies from history, we should see fascism as a mutable process, one anchored in racial and colonial capitalism, which both predates and survives its crystallization in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. It is a threat that continues to evolve in the present day.

Proposals for activities should be sent to: foucault40after@gmail.com to the Coordinator of the International Scientific Committee: Prof. Rodrigo Castro. Information about activities should include:

a) The title of the activity
b) A short description (5 lines)
c) The city and country in which the activity is to be held
d) The dates on which the activity is to be carried out
e) The name of the coordinator or person in charge of the activity and their e-mail address.

The deadline for submission of proposals is 29th of September 2023.
Decisions on proposals will be communicated in October 2023.

Not long left to submit proposals for an event to be linked. All details at the Foucault News page.

Charlotte Lydia Riley, Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain – Penguin, August 2023

After the Second World War, Britain’s overseas empire disintegrated. As white settlers from Rhodesia returned home to a country they barely recognised, Commonwealth citizens from Asia and the Caribbean migrated to a motherland that often refused to recognise them. Race riots erupted in Liverpool and Notting Hill even as communities lived and loved across the colour line. In the 1950s and 60s, imperial violence came home too, pervading the policing of immigrant communities, including their sex lives. In the decade that followed, a surge of support for the far-right inspired an invigorated anti-racist movement.

These tensions, and the imperial mindset that birthed them, have dominated Britain’s relationship with itself and the world ever since: from the jingoism of the Falklands War to the simplistic moral equation of Band Aid, from the rise of the gap year abroad to the invasion of Iraq. Most recently, in the tragedy of Stephen Lawrence and the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, we see how Britain’s contradictory relationship with its past has undermined its self-image as a multicultural nation, helping explain the Windrush deportations and Brexit.

Drawing on a mass of new research, from personal letters to pop culture, Imperial Island tells a story of immigration and fractured identity, of social strife and communal solidarity, of people on the move and of a people wrestling with their past. It is the story that best explains Britain today.

There is a New Books discussion with Dave O’Brien here.

Marie Allitt, Medical Caregiving Narratives of the First World War: Geographies of Care – Edinburgh University Press, May 2023 (print and open access)

Explores how military medical practitioners articulated and represented their spatial and sensory experiences of caregiving

• A sustained literary critical focus on medical caregiving narratives 
• Novel theorisation of life writing and its relationship to somatic and sensuous geographies 
• Argues for the centrality of spaces and spatiality in critical medical humanities 
• A conceptualisation of medical and military-medical spaces 
• Lays out a new theoretical framework for critical engagements in medical humanities, through the lens of the First World War 

This book offers a novel critical intervention in medical humanities, foregrounding the importance of spaces and senses in medical experiences. It explores the distinctive experience and literary representations of somatic and sensuous geographies in First World War medical caregiving life writing. It demonstrates the complex situation of the medic, who is vulnerable both vicariously and directly to the effects of physical and psychological harm. Chapters look at the medic’s relationship with the war environment; the spaces in which medical care takes place; bodies and the wounds of patients in medical narratives; and psychological and imaginative landscapes and textual spaces where complex emotions, trauma, coping and survival are examined.

Teresa Degenhardt, War as Protection from Punishment: Armed International Intervention at the ‘End of History’ – Routledge, September 2023

This book provides an analysis of how penal discourses are used to legitimate post-Cold War military interventions through three main case studies: Kosovo, Iraq and Libya. These cases reveal the operation of diverse modalities of punishment in extending the ambit of international liberal governance. 

The argument starts from an analysis of these discourses to trace the historical arc in which military interventions have increasingly been launched through reference to both the human rights discourse and humanitarian sentiments, and a desire to punish the perpetrators. The book continues with the analysis of practices involved in the post-intervention phase, looking at the ways in which states have been established as modes of governance (Kosovo), how punitive atmospheres have animated soldiers’ violence in the conduct of war (Iraq), and finally how interventions can expand moral control and a system of devolved surveillance in conjunction with both border control and the engagement of the International Criminal Court (Libya). In all these case, tensions and ambiguities emerge. These practices underscore how punitive intents were also present in the expansion of liberal governance, demonstrating how the rhetoric of punishment was useful in legitimating Western state powers and recomposing the borders of the liberal world at the periphery. 

War as Protection and Punishment ends with a number of critical comments on the diffusion of punitive discourse in the international arena, considering how issues of crime and justice have also animated, at least in part, the current engagement with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, politics and those interested in how penal discourses are used to legitimize military conventions.