Progressive Geographies

Charlotte Epstein, Birth of the State: The Place of the Body in Crafting Modern Politics – Oxford University Press, December 2020

This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted ideas about the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers two revolutions. The first, scientific, threw humanity out of the centre of the universe, and transformed the very meanings of matter, space, and the body; while the second, legal and political, re-established humans as the centre-point of the framework of modern rights. 

The book analyses the fundamental rights to security, liberty, and property respectively as the initial knots where the state-subject relation was first sealed. It develops three arguments, that the body served to naturalise security; to individualise liberty; and to privatise property. Covering a wide range of materials–from early modern Dutch painting, to the canon of English political thought, the Anglo-Scottish legal struggles of naturalization, and medical and religious practices–it shows both how the body has operated as history’s great naturaliser, and how it can be mobilised instead as a critical tool that lays bare the deeply racialised and gendered constructions that made the state and the subject of rights. The book returns to the origins of constructivist and constitutive theorising to reclaim their radical and critical potential.

Craig Robertson, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information – University of Minnesota Press, May 2021

The ubiquity of the filing cabinet in the twentieth-century office space, along with its noticeable absence of style, has obscured its transformative role in the histories of both information technology and work. In the first in-depth history of this neglected artifact, Craig Robertson explores how the filing cabinet profoundly shaped the way that information and data have been sorted, stored, retrieved, and used.

Invented in the 1890s, the filing cabinet was a result of the nineteenth-century faith in efficiency. Previously, paper records were arranged haphazardly: bound into books, stacked in piles, curled into slots, or impaled on spindles. The filing cabinet organized loose papers in tabbed folders that could be sorted alphanumerically, radically changing how people accessed, circulated, and structured information.

Robertson’s unconventional history of the origins of the information age posits the filing cabinet as an information storage container, an “automatic memory” machine that contributed to a new type of information labor privileging manual dexterity over mental deliberation. Gendered assumptions about women’s nimble fingers helped to naturalize the changes that brought women into the workforce as low-level clerical workers. The filing cabinet emerges from this unexpected account as a sophisticated piece of information technology and a site of gendered labor that with its folders, files, and tabs continues to shape how we interact with information and data in today’s digital world.

Matthew Hart, Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction – Columbia University Press, 2020 is discussed at New Books Network

Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020) explores how texts—literary and visual—help us engage with the space that goes beyond the limits of visible geographical borders and legal regulations. By drawing attention to the loci that produce borderline experiences (detention camps, consulates, international waters), Matthew Hart guides his readers through experiences that ask to reconsider the ways in which geographical places and the implications they produce are perceived. The repercussions of the extraterritorial experiences may include transitional modes for constructing and re-discovering one’s identity. This opens up a broader dimension with which Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction engages. With his book, Hart offers an acute intervention into how a text functions in a globalized community, which entails the reconsideration of how literature and art respond to the twenty-first-century transcultural shifts that are often marked with political anxieties.

Betty Rojtman, The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought:  A Longing for the Abyss – Palgrave Pivot, 2020 – with discussion at New Books with Renee Garfinkel

This book analyses a cultural phenomenon that goes to the very roots of Western civilization: the centrality of death in our sense of human existence. It does so through a close reading of seminal works by the most creative authors of modern French thought, such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. These works encode an entire ethics of postmodernism. Betty Rojtman offers the reader a prism through which to see anew the key issues of the twentieth century: tragedy, finitude, nothingness–but also contestation, liberty, and sovereignty. Little by little we understand that this fascination with death may be just the other side of humankind’s great protest, its thirst for the infinite and its desire to be. Finally, Rojtman tries to offer another view on these fundamental questions by shifting to a parallel cultural reference: Kabbalah. 

Thanks to dmf for this link.

Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm, Animated Lands: Studies in Territoriology – University of Nebraska Press, November 2020

In Animated Lands Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm focus on territory as a living phenomenon—and territoriality as an active and constantly reshaping force. They explore the complexity of territorial production through a series of parallel investigations into fundamental territorial themes, such as rhythm, synchronization, melody, morphogenesis, and animism.

The notion of territory is excavated through case studies including the analysis of urban playgrounds, homemaking, the transformations of urban walls, and the stabilization of peculiar building types such as the house-museum. These empirical examples span such cities as Ahmedabad, Amsterdam, London, and Rome. Animated Lands provides a broad introduction to what a theory of territories could be and how it could help to advance sociospatial studies.

Robert J. Mayhew and Charles W. J. Withers (eds.), Geographies of Knowledge: Science, Scale, and Spatiality in the Nineteenth Century – Johns Hopkins University Press, August 2020

There is a short blog post about the collection here.

Over the past twenty years, scholars have increasingly questioned not just historical presumptions about the putative rise of modern science during the long nineteenth century but also the geographical contexts for and variability of science during the era. In Geographies of Knowledge, an internationally distinguished array of historians and geographers examine the spatialization of science in the period, tracing the ways in which scale and space are crucial to understanding the production, dissemination, and reception of scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century.

Engaging with and extending the influential work of David Livingstone and others on science’s spatial dimensions, the book touches on themes of empire, gender, religion, Darwinism, and much more. In exploring the practice of science across four continents, these essays illuminate the importance of geographical perspectives to the study of science and knowledge, and how these ideas made and contested locally could travel the globe.

Dealing with everything from the local spaces of the Surrey countryside to the global negotiations that proposed a single prime meridian, from imperial knowledge creation and exploration in Burma, India, and Africa to studies of metropolitan scientific-cum-theological tussles in Belfast and in Confederate America, Geographies of Knowledge outlines an interdisciplinary agenda for the study of science as geographically situated sets of practices in the era of its modern disciplinary construction. More than that, it outlines new possibilities for all those interested in knowledge’s spatial characteristics in other periods. 

Contributors: John A. Agnew, Vinita Damodaran, Diarmid A. Finnegan, Nuala C. Johnson, Dane Kennedy, Robert J. Mayhew, Mark Noll, Ronald L. Numbers, Nicolaas Rupke, Yvonne Sherratt, Charles W. J. Withers

Celia Lury, Problem Spaces: How and Why Methodology Matters – Polity, November 2020

In this innovative book, Celia Lury argues that the time has come for us to explore the world not only with new methods, but with a new approach to methodology itself. Fundamental changes are taking place in how we produce knowledge, how we communicate it and, indeed, what we consider to be knowledge. These changes demand innovative and creative responses to research questions.   

Lury’s rethinking of the nature of social inquiry starts by reconceptualizing the ‘problem space’. Problems are not static or a ‘given’; rather, they are created and continually recomposed as part of the methodological process itself. Following the line of thought that methods are practices that articulate as much as capture a social problem, Lury further develops the notion of compositional methodology to think through its implications. With remarkable fluency, the book draws into conversation a range of hot-button issues, both longstanding and novel, from observation, reflexivity, recursive measurement and feminist methodologies, to participation, context, datafication and platformization.   

Always with an eye to the methodological potential of new trends, the book provides a strong challenge to much received wisdom and argues that a combination of techniques can contribute to better understanding of the problem spaces we all inhabit.