Progressive Geographies

Coming up next week – 20 May, 3pm book launch for Canguilhem, gloknos/CRASSH, S1, Alison Richard Building, University of Cambridge (with Inanna Hamati-Ataya and Simon Reid-Henry)

Simon Reid-Henry, Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971–2017 – Simon & Schuster, 2019

Book launch – London Review Bookshop, 24 June 2019, 7pm

The first panoramic history of the Western world from the 1970s to the present day, Empire of Democracy is the story for those asking how we got to where we are.

Half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War and amidst a world economic crisis, the Western democracies were forced to undergo a profound transformation. Against what some saw as a full-scale “crisis of democracy”— with race riots, anti-Vietnam marches and a wave of worker discontent sowing crisis from one nation to the next— a new political-economic order was devised and the postwar social contract was torn up and written anew.

In this epic narrative of the events that have shaped our own times, Simon Reid-Henry shows how liberal democracy, and western history with it, was profoundly reimagined when the postwar Golden Age ended. As the institutions of liberal rule were reinvented, a new generation of politicians emerged: Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterrand, Kohl. The late twentieth century heyday they oversaw carried the Western democracies triumphantly to victory in the Cold War and into the economic boom of the 1990s. But equally it led them into the fiasco of Iraq, to the high drama of the financial crisis in 2007/8, and ultimately to the anti-liberal surge of our own times.

The present crisis of liberalism enjoins us to revisit these as yet unscripted decades. The era we have all been living through is closing out, democracy is turning on its axis once again. As this panoramic history poignantly reminds us, the choices we make going forward require us first to come to terms with where we have been.

After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response, edited by Dan Bulley, Jenny Edkins, Nadine El-Enany – Pluto 2019

Currently 50% off – royalties to charity

On the 14th June 2017, a fire engulfed a tower block in West London, seventy-two people lost their lives and hundreds of others were left displaced and traumatised. The Grenfell Tower fire is the epicentre of a long history of violence enacted by government and corporations. On its second anniversary activists, artists and academics come together to respond, remember and recover the disaster.

The Grenfell Tower fire illustrates Britain’s symbolic order; the continued logic of colonialism, the disposability of working class lives, the marketisation of social provision and global austerity politics, and the negligence and malfeasance of multinational contractors. Exploring these topics and more, the contributors construct critical analysis from legal, cultural, media, community and government responses to the fire, asking whether, without remedy for multifaceted power and violence, we will ever really be ‘after’ Grenfell?

With poetry by Ben Okri and Tony Walsh, and photographs by Parveen Ali, Sam Boal and Yolanthe Fawehinmi.

With contributions from Phil Scraton, Daniel Renwick, Nadine El-Enany, Sarah Keenan, Gracie Mae Bradley and The Radical Housing Network.

‘No other account names those to blame so clearly, or so convincingly uncovers the slow violence, the racist attitudes, and the legacy of empire that led to this disaster’ – Danny Dorling, author of ‘Inequality and the 1%’

Professor Couze Venn: Memorial and Celebration – Goldsmiths, May 22nd 2019 6-8 pm

Professor Couze Venn

Memorial and Celebration

Please come to this event to remember and celebrate the life of Couze Venn, the pioneering cultural, social and post-colonial theorist.

Wednesday, May 22^nd 2019 6-8 pm

LG01, lower atrium

Professor Stuart Hall Building

All welcome