Progressive Geographies

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. 

Andrea Pavoni and Simone Tulumello, Urban Violence: Security, Imaginary, Atmosphere – Rowman & Littlefield, September 2023

Urban violence still has a peculiar standing within social and urban research. This book works to unpack the link between urban, violence, and security with three main arguments. 

The first is that urban violence is under-theorized because long-term theoretical problems with both of its elements (‘urban’ and ‘violence’).

The second is to answer these questions: (1) how can violence be conceptualized in a way that opens to an understanding of the specificity of urban violence? (2) What is the urban in urban violence? And (3) How can ‘urban’ and ‘violence’ be articulated in a way that makes urban violence a category with both analytical and strategic power? 

The third, and central, argument of this book is that, through a genealogy that articulates political economic and vital materialism, urban violence can ultimately be framed as a precise category shaped by three interlocking trajectories: the process of (capitalist) urbanization, the spatio-political project of the urban, and the concrete urban atmospheres in and through which the process and the project materialize, often violently so, in the urban.

Zdenka Sokolíčková, The Paradox of Svalbard: Climate Change and Globalisation in the Arctic – Pluto, July 2023

There is a New Books discussion with Stentor Danielson here. Thanks to dmf for this link.

The town of Longyearbyen in the high Arctic is the world’s northernmost settlement. Here, climate change is happening fast. It is clearly seen and sensed by the locals; with higher temperatures, more rain and permafrost thaw. At the same time, the town is shifting from state-controlled coal production to tourism, research and development, rapidly globalising, with numerous languages spoken, cruise ships sounding the horn in the harbour and planes landing and taking off.

Zdenka Sokolickova lived here between 2019 and 2021, and her research in the community uncovered a story about the conflict between sustainability and the driving forces of politics and economy in the rich global North. A small town of 2,400 inhabitants at 78 degrees latitude north on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, Longyearbyen provided a unique view into the unmistakable relationship between global capitalism and climate change.

The Paradox of Svalbard looks at both local and global trends to access a deep understanding of the effects of tourism, immigration, labour and many other elements on the trajectory of climate crisis, and whether anything can be done to reverse them.

T. Corey Brennan, The Fasces: A History of Ancient Rome’s Most Dangerous Political Symbol – Oxford University Press, November 2022

“Fascism” is a word ubiquitous in our contemporary political discourse, but few know about its roots in the ancient past or its long, strange evolution to the present.

In ancient Rome, the fasces were a bundle of wooden rods bound with a leather cord, in which an axe was placed—in essence, a mobile kit for corporal or capital punishment. Attendants typically carried fasces before Rome’s higher officials, to induce feelings of respect and fear for the relevant authority. This highly performative Roman institution had a lifespan of almost two millennia, and made a deep impression on subsequent eras, from the Byzantine period to the present.

Starting in the Renaissance, we find revivals and reinterpretations of the ancient fasces, accelerating especially after 1789, the first year of the United States’ Constitution and the opening volley of the French Revolution. But it was Benito Mussolini, who, beginning in 1919, propagated the fasces on an unprecedented scale. Oddly, today the emblem has grown largely unfamiliar, which in turn has offered an opening to contemporary extremist groups.

In The Fasces, T. Corey Brennan offers the first global history of the nature, development, and competing meanings of this stark symbol, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. The word “fascism” has universal awareness in contemporary political discourse, which thus makes this, the first book to trace the full arc of the fasces’ almost 3,000-year history, essential reading for all who wish to understand how the past informs the present.

Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice – University of Nebraska Press, December 2022

I’m late in noticing the second part of this biography – the first part Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist was published in November 2019.

Franz Boas defined the concept of cultural relativism and reoriented the humanities and social sciences away from race science toward an antiracist and anticolonialist understanding of human biology and culture. Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justiceis the second volume in Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt’s two-part biography of the renowned anthropologist and public intellectual.

Zumwalt takes the reader through the most vital period in the development of Americanist anthropology and Boas’s rise to dominance in the subfields of cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. Boas’s emergence as a prominent public intellectual, particularly his opposition to U.S. entry into World War I, reveals his struggle against the forces of nativism, racial hatred, ethnic chauvinism, scientific racism, and uncritical nationalism.

Boas was instrumental in the American cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, training students and influencing colleagues such as Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, Benjamin Botkin, Alan Lomax, Langston Hughes, and others involved in combating racism and the flourishing Harlem Renaissance. He assisted German and European émigré intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany to relocate in the United States and was instrumental in organizing the denunciation of Nazi racial science and American eugenics. At the end of his career Boas guided a network of former student anthropologists, who spread across the country to university departments, museums, and government agencies, imprinting his social science more broadly in the world of learned knowledge.

Franz Boas is a magisterial biography of Franz Boas and his influence in shaping not only anthropology but also the sciences, humanities, social science, visual and performing arts, and America’s public sphere during a period of great global upheaval and democratic and social struggle.