Ian Merkel, Terms of Exchange: Brazilian Intellectuals and the French Social Sciences – University of Chicago Press, 2022

A collective intellectual biography that sheds new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy.

Would the most recognizable ideas in the French social sciences have developed without the influence of Brazilian intellectuals? While any study of Brazilian social sciences acknowledges the influence of French scholars, Ian Merkel argues the reverse is also true: the “French” social sciences were profoundly marked by Brazilian intellectual thought, particularly through the University of São Paulo. Through the idea of the “cluster,” Merkel traces the intertwined networks of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Roger Bastide, and Pierre Monbeig as they overlapped at USP and engaged with Brazilian scholars such as Mário de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, and Caio Prado Jr..

Through this collective intellectual biography of Brazilian and French social sciences, Terms of Exchange reveals connections that shed new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy, even as it prompts us to revisit established thinking on the process of knowledge formation through fieldwork and intellectual exchange. At a time when canons are being rewritten, this book reframes the history of modern social scientific thought.

There is a Journal of the History of Ideas discussion with Disha Karnad Jani here.

CfP: Conference of Critical Legal Geography – 21-23 February 2024, Turin

The first critical legal geography conference brings together transdisciplinary scholars to discuss the mutual constitution of space and law, broadly conceived. The conference in February 2024 (in Turin, Italy) will be the first of a series of annual meetings on critical legal geography. This open call intends to create a wide space for application and interpretation of critical legal geography. We do not intend to be prescriptive concerning its method, theory, object, or approach. The conference will be an inclusive and dialogical meeting, with a relaxed discussion and exchange of ideas.

Melvin L. Rogers, The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought – Princeton University Press, September 2023

Could the African American political tradition save American democracy? African Americans have had every reason to reject America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition—a tradition that is urgently needed today.

The book reexamines how figures as diverse as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin thought about the politics, people, character, and culture of a society that so often dominated them. Sharing a light of faith darkened but not extinguished by the tragic legacy of slavery, they resisted the conclusion that America would always be committed to white supremacy. They believed that democracy is always in the process of becoming and that they could use it to reimagine society. But they also saw that achieving racial justice wouldn’t absolve us of the darkest features of our shared past, and that democracy must be measured by how skillfully we confront a history that will forever remain with us.

An ambitious account of the profound ways African Americans have reimagined democracy, The Darkened Light of Faith offers invaluable lessons about how to grapple with racial injustice and make democracy work.

Jens Bartelson, Becoming International – Cambridge University Press, October 2023

When and how did the modern world become an international one? Jens Bartelson, a leading scholar of the history of international thought, provides new answers to this question by analyzing how relations between polities have been conceptualized across different historical contexts from the sixteenth century to the present day. A global intellectual history of the international system, this book challenges the widespread assumption that this system emerged as a result of a transition from empires to states, instead proposing that the international realm is but a continuation of imperial relations by other means. Showing how the international system spread through the creative appropriation of European concepts of nation and state by non-Europeans, Bartelson argues that this system has taken on a life of its own, to the point of becoming an empire in its own right.

• Provides the first comprehensive intellectual history of the international system, allowing readers to understand the key aspects of political modernity 
• Revises received views of empires and states, and explores the consequences of nationalism
• Delivers a new account of the global spread of the nation-state which will aid understanding of the rise and return of nationalism in international affairs

Andrew Drummond, The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer: The Life and Times of an Early German Revolutionary – Verso, February 2024

[Update: thanks to Philippe Theophanidis for a link to the author’s webpage with a lot more information]

‘The princes are nothing but tyrants who flay the people; they fritter away our blood and sweat on their pomp and whoring and knavery.’ These were the words of Thomas Müntzer at the head of the massed ranks of a peasant army in the year 1525. Ranged against him were the might of the princes of the German Nation. How did Müntzer, the son of a coin maker from central Germany, rise in just a few short years to become one of the most feared revolutionaries in early modern Europe?

In this brilliant work of historical excavation, Andrew Drummond charts the life and times of the man Martin Luther denounced as a ‘Ravening Wolf’ and ‘False Prophet’. Drummond shows us Müntzer as a human being. Far from the bloodthirsty devil of legend, he was a man of considerable learning and principle, deeply sympathetic to the misery of the peasantry and the poor. In his short life – he was beheaded at thirty-five – Müntzer promised to fundamentally upend German society.

Seeking to save Müntzer from the condescension of history, Drummond guides us through the religious and political disputes of the Reformation, placing his life and thought in the context of those turbulent years. The result is a portrait of an often contradictory but always radical figure, one who continues to inspire movements of the poor across the globe.

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.