Progressive Geographies

David Myer Temin, Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought – University of Chicago Press, August 2023

An examination of anticolonial thought and practice across key Indigenous thinkers.

Accounts of decolonization routinely neglect Indigenous societies, yet Native communities have made unique contributions to anticolonial thought and activism. Remapping Sovereignty examines how twentieth-century Indigenous activists in North America debated questions of decolonization and self-determination, developing distinctive conceptual approaches that both resonate with and reformulate key strands in other civil rights and global decolonization movements. In contrast to decolonization projects that envisioned liberation through state sovereignty, Indigenous theorists emphasized the self-determination of peoples against sovereign state supremacy and articulated a visionary politics of decolonization as earthmaking. Temin traces the interplay between anticolonial thought and practice across key thinkers, interweaving history and textual analysis. He shows how these insights broaden the political and intellectual horizons open to us today.

Cornelius Castoriadis, The Greek Imaginary: From Homer to Heraclitus, Seminars 1982-1983, translated by John Garner, María-Constanza Garrido Sierralta – Edinburgh University Press, 2023

Update December 2024 – now available in paperback and e-book.

Offers in English for the first time philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis’s earliest surviving lectures on the ancient Greeks 

• Includes renowned scholar Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s essay, “’Castoriadis and Ancient Greece’” (1999), which provides an introduction and memorial to Castoriadis’s research
• Includes Castoriadis’s previously untranslated, substantive essay, “’Political Thought’” (1979), which presages many of the key themes in the seminars
• Includes Castoriadis’s thematic reports on his teaching in the 1980-1984 seminars
• Includes an “Editors’ Introduction” plus extensive editorial commentary on the seminars and an Analytic Table of Contents provided by the academic editor of the French edition of the volume (from 2004)
• Includes a “Foreword” by the translator, which highlights key terms in the seminars

This book collects 12 previously untranslated lectures by Castoriadis from 1982 to 1983. Castoriadis focuses on the interconnection between philosophy and democracy and the way both emerge within a self-critical imaginary already in development in the work of early Greek poets and Presocratic philosophers.

Maria Kaika, Roger Keil, Tait Mandler and Yannis Tzaninis (eds.), Turning up the heat: Urban political ecology for a climate emergency – Manchester University Press, February 2023

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) has focused on unsettling traditional understandings of the ‘city’ as entirely distinct from nature, showing instead how cities are metabolically linked with ecological processes and the flow of resources. More recently, a new generation of scholars has turned the focus towards the climate emergency. Turning up the heat seeks to turn UPE’s critical energies towards a politically engaged debate over the role of extensive urbanisation in addressing socio-environmental equality in the context of climate change.

The collection brings together theoretical discussions and rigorous empirical analysis by key scholars spanning three generations, engaging UPE in current debates about urbanisation and climate change. Engaging with cutting edge approaches including feminist political ecology, circular economies, and the Anthropocene, case studies in the book range from Singapore and Amsterdam to Nairobi and Vancouver. Contributors make the case for a UPE better informed by situated knowledges: an embodied UPE that pays equal attention to the role of postcolonial processes and more-than-human ontologies of capital accumulation within the context of the climate emergency. Acknowledging UPE’s rich intellectual history and aiming to enrich rather than split the field, Turning up the heat reveals how UPE is ideally positioned to address contemporary environmental issues in theory and practice.

Stephen Legg, Roundtable Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London – Cambridge University Press, March 2023

Just an expensive hardback at present, unfortunately.

Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India’s constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India’s future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India. This book argues that the conference’s three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city, and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.