Progressive Geographies

Human Geography special issue – Friedrich Engels and Geography

The Introduction by Camilla Royle is open access, the rest requires subscription

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) was Marx’s closest collaborator. He was influential in promoting Marxism both during Marx’s lifetime and after it. However, he is mentioned less often than Marx in geography. This editorial introduces a special issue of Human Geography on Friedrich Engels and Geography. It gives a brief overview of the key events in his life, discusses some of the geographical themes in Engels’ work – especially his relevance for work in political ecology, urbanism and geopolitics – and outlines the contents of the special issue.

Karla Mallette, Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean – University of Chicago Press, 2021

The story of how Latin and Arabic spread across the Mediterranean to create a cosmopolitan world of letters.

In this ambitious book, Karla Mallette studies the nature and behaviors of the medieval cosmopolitan languages of learning—classical Arabic and medieval Latin—as they crossed the Mediterranean. Through anecdotes of relationships among writers, compilers, translators, commentators, and copyists, Mallette tells a complex story about the transmission of knowledge in the period before the emergence of a national language system in the late Middle Ages and early modernity.

Mallette shows how the elite languages of learning and culture were only tenuously related to the languages of everyday life. These languages took years of study to master, marking the passage from intellectual childhood to maturity. In a coda to the book, Mallette speculates on the afterlife of cosmopolitan languages in the twenty-first century, the perils of monolingualism, and the ethics of language choice. The book offers insight for anyone interested in rethinking linguistic and literary tradition, the transmission of ideas, and cultural expression in an increasingly multilingual world.

Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi

In this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and “schoolification” of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR’s contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy.

Japhy Wilson, Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon – Yale University Press, September 2021

An exploration of radical megaprojects in the Ecuadorian Amazon, considering the fate of utopian fantasies under conditions of global capitalism

From 2007 to 2017, the “Citizens’ Revolution” launched an ambitious series of post-neoliberal megaprojects in the remote Amazonian region of Ecuador, including an interoceanic transport corridor, a world-leading biotechnology university, and a planned network of two hundred “Millennium Cities.” The aim was to liberate the nation from its ecologically catastrophic dependence on Amazonian oil reserves, while transforming its jungle region from a wild neoliberal frontier into a brave new world of “twenty-first-century socialism.” This book documents the heroic scale of this endeavor, the surreal extent of its failure, and the paradoxical process through which it ended up reinforcing the economic model that it had been designed to overcome. It explores the phantasmatic and absurd dimensions of the transformation of social reality under conditions of global capitalism, deconstructing the utopian fantasies of the state, and drawing attention to the eruption of insurgent utopias staged by those with nothing left to lose.

“Reality of Dreams is theoretically and empirically rich, deeply researched, closely argued, and very well written. This highly original work dismantles the developmental fantasies of the petro-state, showing how they crash miserably against the reality of petro-capitalism and how possibilities of radical social change emerge spontaneously from their debris.”—Mazen Labban, author of Space, Oil and Capital

“Reality of Dreams hovers in exciting ways over shadows cast by the secret dread animating all theory—that in the not so long run, nothing makes sense. What we have are fantasies rendered in ruins midst the juggernaut of ‘development.’ It is grotesque. It is absurd. It is unbelievable.”—Michael Taussig, author of Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown

“Reality of Dreams is an epic tale of heroic modernization that takes us into the dark, dystopian heart of the post-neoliberal Citizens’ Revolution and President Correa’s petro-dream world, emerging into a world ever more fit for capitalist plunder.”—Michael J. Watts, Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

“From the Jesuits, to Jonestown, to the (failed) from-scratch urban modernist ventures, Amazonia has not lacked for utopian experiments. Japhy Wilson’s fantastic book explores the Ecuadorian iteration of yet another tropical urban utopia fever dream.”—Susanna B. Hecht, author of Scramble for the Amazon and Fate of the Forest

Paul Ricoeur, Politics, Economy, and Society: Writings and Lectures – translated by Kathleen Blamey, Polity, Sept 2021

The philosophy of Paul Ricoeur is rarely viewed through the lens of political philosophy, and yet questions of power, and of how to live together in the polis, were a constant preoccupation of his writings.  This volume brings together a selection of his texts spanning six decades, from 1958 to 2003, which together present Ricoeur’s political project in its coherence and diversity.

In Ricoeur’s view, the political is the realm of a tension between ‘rationality’ (the attempt to provide a coherent explanation of the world) and ‘irrationality’, which manifests itself in force and repression.  This ‘political paradox’ lies at the heart of politics, for the claim to explain the world generates its own form of violence : the more one desires the good, the more one is inclined to impose it.  Ricoeur warns citizens, the guardians of democracy, against any totalizing system of thought and any dogmatic understanding of history.  Power should be divided and controlled, and Ricoeur defends a form of political liberalism in which states are conscious of the limits of their power and respectful of the freedom of their citizens.Ranging from questions of power and repression to those of ethics, identity and responsibility, these little-known political texts by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, politics and theology and to anyone concerned with the great political questions of our time.