Books received – a couple by Julia Kristeva, Jean-Paul Demoule, Ernst Cassirer, Pour Emile Benveniste, Mircea Eliade, Carlo Ginzburg, and Tiphaine Samayoult on Roland Barthes.

Andy Merrifield, Lefebvre in the age of COVID: Lessons from The Urban Revolution and Paris Commune – Monthly Review online

Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution (1970) quietly celebrated its 50^th birthday under lockdown, and our greatest ever urban revolution, the Paris Commune (1871), just toasted its 150^th. Both book and event have lost none of their lustre for helping progressive people think about city life, even as COVID-19 threatens to destroy that life. We might say especially as COVID-19 threatens that life, because both The Urban Revolution and the Paris Commune offer vital instruction about how we might rebuild a post-pandemic urban world, rebuild it democratically.

COVID has upended urban life as we once knew it. But it intensified already existing pathologies, those contaminating “normal,” pre-pandemic life. For decades, business-as-usual exploitation has meant cities have become not only functionally and financially standardised, but also unaffordable and unequal. Recent social distancing disrupts these inequities even more, crimping cities as sites of physical encounters, hurting poorer, immobile denizens the most. Nowadays, our urban reality is one of the de-encounter, a thinning down rather than thickening up, the dispersion and dilution of city life, its fear and loathing. [continues here]

Nick Vaughan-Williams, Vernacular Border Security: Citizens’ Narratives of Europe’s ‘Migration Crisis’ – Oxford University Press, June 2021

Since the peak of Europe’s so-called 2015 ‘migration crisis’, the dominant governmental response has been to turn to deterrent border security across the Mediterranean and construct border walls throughout the EU. During the same timeframe, EU citizens are widely represented – by politicians, by media sources, and by opinion polls – as fearing a loss of control over national and EU borders. Despite the intensification of EU border security with visibly violent effects, EU citizens are portrayed as ‘threatened majorities’. These dynamics beg the question: Why is it that tougher deterrent border security and walling appear to have heightened rather than diminished border anxieties among EU citizens? While the populist mantra of ‘taking back control’ purports to speak on behalf of EU citizens, little is known about how diverse EU citizens conceptualize, understand, and talk about the so-called ‘crisis’. Yet, if social and cultural meanings of ‘migration’ and ‘border security’ are constructed intersubjectively and contested politically, then EU citizens —as well as governmental elites and people on the move— are significant in shaping dominant framings of and responses to the ‘crisis’. This book argues that, in order to address the overarching puzzle, a conceptual and methodological shift is required in the way that border security is understood: a new approach is urgently required that complements ‘top-down’ analyses of elite governmental practices with ‘bottom-up’ vernacular studies of how those practices are both reproduced and contested in everyday life.

Tuomo Alhojärvi, For Postcapitalist Studies: Inheriting Futures of Space and Economy – Nordia, March 2021

The worldwide social and ecological unravelling of the 21st century presents an unprecedented challenge for thinking and practising liveable economies. As life support systems are annihilated in view of the sustainable accumulation of capital, social and economic alternatives are rapidly emerging to shelter possibilities for life amidst the ruins. Postcapitalism has gained increasing attention as an invitation to amplify existing alternatives to systemic scale. The transformations required are the focus of social movements, political projects and academic research that demand the theorisation and organisation of alternatives to capitalist realism today. What has often received less attention is how such emancipatory alternatives are burdened with problematic legacies living on within, in the epistemic heritage enabling and organising societal transformation. The ‘post-’ prefix, and the break from capitalism that it announces, has largely been treated as a given. This study resists such temptations of the affirmative in order to ask how restrictive and counterproductive burdens are carried along in emancipatory thought and practice, and how their continuous negotiation might have to redefine postcapitalism itself. Taking the ‘post-’ seriously demands critical and theoretical skills capable of examining the complexity of our inherited troubles.

Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i – Duke University Press, March 2021

The Introduction is open access here.

In Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, Candace Fujikane contends that the practice of mapping abundance is a radical act in the face of settler capital’s fear of an abundance that feeds. Cartographies of capital enable the seizure of abundant lands by enclosing “wastelands” claimed to be underdeveloped. By contrast, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) cartographies map the continuities of abundant worlds. Vital to restoration movements is the art of kilo, intergenerational observation of elemental forms encoded in storied histories, chants, and songs. As a participant in these movements, Fujikane maps the ecological lessons of these elemental forms: reptilian deities who protect the waterways, sharks who swim into the mountains, the navigator Maui who fishes up the islands, the deities of snow and mists on Mauna Kea. The laws of these elements are now being violated by toxic waste dumping, leaking military jet fuel tanks, and astronomical-industrial complexes. As Kanaka Maoli and their allies stand as land and water protectors, Fujikane calls for a profound attunement to the elemental forms in order to transform climate events into renewed possibilities for planetary abundance.

“Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future slays settler colonial cartographies that diminish life. The book breathes with the voices of Hawaiian communities, lands, movements, elements, and Candace Fujikane herself, at her best. Saturated in the abundance of Kanaka Maoli mappings and mo‘olelo, this book is a spear and a spade, medicine and masterpiece, a diagnosis and a portal, a lei and a ho‘okupu.” — Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘opua, author of The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School

“With intellectual verve, analytical agility, and ethnographic gracefulness, Candace Fujikane unpacks the perversity of settler capitalism, which produces scarcity in order to claim its toxic surplus, as she amplifies Kanaka Maoli support of an earth cartography of abundant healing and protection. A groundbreaking work; a must-read.” — Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of The Inheritance

Maria Koinova, Diaspora Entrepreneurs and Contested States – Oxford University Press, March 2021

Why do conflict-generated diasporas mobilize in contentious and non-contentious ways or use mixed strategies?

This book develops a theory of socio-spatial positionality and its implications for the individual agency of diaspora entrepreneurs. A novel typology features four types of diaspora entrepreneurs—Broker, Local, Distant, and Reserved—depending on the relative strength of their socio-spatial linkages to host-land, original homeland, and other global locations. A two-level typological theory captures nine causal pathways unravelling how diaspora entrepreneurs operate in transnational social fields and interact with host-land foreign policies, homeland governments, parties, non-state actors, critical events, and limited global influences. Non-contention often occurs when diaspora entrepreneurs act autonomously and when host-state foreign policies converge with their goals. Dual-pronged contention is common under the influence of homeland governments, non-state actors, and political parties. The most contention occurs in response to violent events in the original homeland or adjacent to it fragile states. The book is informed by 300 interviews among the Albanian, Armenian, and Palestinian diasporas connected to de facto states, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Palestine respectively. Interviews were conducted in the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Brussels in Belgium, as well as Kosovo and Armenia in the European neighbourhood.