Noémie Ndiaye and Lia Markey (eds.), Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World – ACMRS Press, April 2023 (print and open access)

The capacious visual archive studied in this volume includes a trove of materials such as annotated or illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance costume books and travel books, maps and cartographic volumes produced by Europeans as well as Indigenous peoples, mass-printed pamphlets, jewelry, decorative arts, religious iconography, paintings from around the world, ceremonial objects, festival books, and play texts intended for live performance.

Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noémie Ndiaye calls “the racial matrix” and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. This volume uses items from the Fall 2023 exhibition “Seeing Race Before Race”— a collaboration between RaceB4Race® and the Newberry Library — as a starting point for an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory.

Thanks to Adalbert Saurma for the link.

Johannes Angermuller and Philippe Blanchard, Careers of the Professoriate: Academic Pathways of the Linguists and Sociologists in Germany, France and the UK – Palgrave, 2023

This book examines career patterns of the professoriate. Professors may appear as specialised individualists in their fields, and yet they follow pathways which are anything but unique. Drawing from a unique data set, the authors analyse the trajectories of the almost 2000 linguists and sociologists who hold full professorships in Germany, France and the UK in 2015.  With a background in social theory, they reveal models, structures and rules that organise the professional lives and biographies of the most senior academics. This book presents the results of a systematic empirical study, which will be of interest to specialists in higher education studies as well as to linguists and sociologists, and to all academics more generally.

Ian Klinke, Life, Earth, Colony: Friedrich Ratzel’s Necropolitical Geography – University of Michigan Press, August 2023

The book is available in print and open access.

Life, Earth, Colony explores the ideas, life, and historical significance of German zoologist turned geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), famous for developing the foundations of geopolitical thought. Ratzel produced a remarkable body of work that revolutionized the study of space, movement, colonization, and war. He also served as a source of intellectual inspiration for national socialism, particularly through his Lebensraum (living space) concept, which understood all life as being caught in an eternal struggle for space. This book closely analyzes this radical conservative intellectual, focusing on his often-overlooked ethnography, biogeography, travel, and creative writing, and colonial activism as well as his more widely-known political geography.

Life, Earth, Colony finds that there is an as yet unexplored necropolitical impulse at the heart of Ratzel’s entire oeuvre, a preoccupation with death and dying, which had a profound impact on twentieth-century history.

Gregory J. Seigworth & Carolyn Pedwell (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader 2 – Duke University Press, October 2023

The Introduction is available open access here.

Building on the foundational Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect’s resonances with today’s most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future potentials of affect theory.

Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Lisa Blackman, Rizvana Bradley, Ann Cvetkovich, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, Adam J. Frank, M. Gail Hamner, Omar Kasmani, Cecilia Macón, Hil Malatino, Erin Manning, Derek P. McCormack, Patrick Nickleson, Susanna Paasonen, Tyrone S. Palmer, Carolyn Pedwell, Jasbir K. Puar, Jason Read, Michael Richardson, Dylan Robinson, Tony D. Sampson, Kyla Schuller, Gregory J. Seigworth, Nathan Snaza, Kathleen Stewart, Elizabeth A. Wilson

Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and our Obsession with Human Origins – Liveright, April 2024

No publisher page yet, though it is appearing in online bookstores. There is more info about the book and related essays on the author’s website.

[Update November 2023 – the publisher page is here]

Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while major newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculation about what those findings might tell us about ourselves. We are obsessed with prehistory―and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating history of prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos moves from Rousseau’s “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled. Yet as he shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past, Geroulanos argues―and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started.

Mark Carrigan, “Where now for academics on social media, post Twitter?“

James Tyner, Academic Writing for Geographers: A Handbook – De Gruyter, 2023

Expensive hardback and e-book only at this point; paperback coming next year.

There are many ‘how-to’ books on writing for academics; none of these, however, relate specifically to the discipline of geography. In this book, the author identifies the principle modes of academic writing that graduate students and early-career faculty will encounter – specifically focusing on those forms expected of geographers, that is, those modes that are reviewed by academic peers. 

This book is readily accessible to senior undergraduate and graduate students and early-career faculty who may feel intimidated by the process of writing. This volume is not strictly a ‘how-to’ or ‘step-by-step’ manual for writing an article or book; rather, through the use of real, concrete examples from published and unpublished works, the author de-mystifies the process of different types of scholarly pieces geographers have to write with the specific needs and challenges of the discipline in mind. 

Although chapters are thematic-based, e.g., stand-alone chapters on book reviews, articles, and books, the manuscript is structured around the concept of story-telling, for it is the author’s contention that all writing, whether a ‘scientific’ study or more humanist essay, is a form of story-telling. 

• The first and only book on academic writing for geographers.
• An explicit focus on academic writing as a holistic process/skill.
• A comprehensive book on academic writing in geography sensitive to the myriad subfields of the discipline.

Andy Merrifield, John Berger and Gramsci in Rome

I’m sitting at the bar of Blackmarket Hall in Rome, a trendy food and drink hang out not far from my new home in Monti. It’s Friday night and the joint is heaving. I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and a whole world spins around in my head. I’m conscious that I’ve been inactive for a few months now, feeling exhausted, a bit overwhelmed by the practical chores my recent move necessitated. My brain felt dead. Yet sitting here, amid a crowded scene of noisy, young revelers, listening to seventies funk music boom out, tunes I remember first-time around, I knew I had to try to do something creative again soon.

The feeling–a kind of urgency of the moment–was prompted by what I was reading. I had with me a copy of John Berger’s book of essays, The White Bird, from the mid-1980s, taking it along to offset my aloneness. A book is always a good cover for the solitary person in public, an effective disguise. I was in awe at how good these pieces were. White Bird’s most famous essay is “The Moment of Cubism”; but tonight, I guess I was having my “Moment of John Berger.” I remember John once telling me–or else I’d read it somewhere–that he’d hated White Bird; when it first appeared, in disgust, he threw it across the room, launched it like a missile. He never thought it any good. My God, what could he have been thinking? Was he talking about its form or content? Its content, after all, while previously published material, is as brilliant as I recall, maybe even better now than upon my first reading decades ago. [continues here]