Progressive Geographies

Racism in America: A Reader – open access e-book from Harvard University Press

Racism in America has been the subject of serious scholarship for decades. At Harvard University Press, we’ve had the honor of publishing some of the most influential books on the subject. The excerpts in this volume—culled from works of history, law, sociology, medicine, economics, critical theory, philosophy, art, and literature—are an invitation to understand anti-Black racism through the eyes of our most incisive commentators.

Readers will find such classic selections as Toni Morrison’s description of the Africanist presence in the White American literary imagination, Walter Johnson’s depiction of the nation’s largest slave market, and Stuart Hall’s theorization of the relationship between race and nationhood. More recent voices include Khalil Gibran Muhammad on the pernicious myth of Black criminality, Elizabeth Hinton on the link between mass incarceration and 1960s social welfare programs, Anthony Abraham Jack on how elite institutions continue to fail first-generation college students, Mehrsa Baradaran on the racial wealth gap, Nicole Fleetwood on carceral art, and Joshua Bennett on the anti-Black bias implicit in how we talk about animals and the environment.

Because the experiences of non-White people are integral to the history of racism and often bound up in the story of Black Americans, we have included writers who focus on the struggles of Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians as well. Racism in America is for all curious readers, teachers, and students who wish to discover for themselves the complex and rewarding intellectual work that has sustained our national conversation on race and will continue to guide us in future years.

Thanks to dmf for this link.

Verso Book Club launched – three levels of subscription, from e-book access to e-book and some physical copies a month, to e-book and more physical copies a month. A good way to support this press at this difficult time for publishing. All levels give a 50% discount for all Verso books.

In our 50th year, we are excited to announce the Verso Book Club! Join now and get every new ebook that we publish, as well as one or more new books in the mail if you choose a print subscription. All Book Club members will also get 50% off everything on our website, for as long as you are a subscriber. To celebrate our 50th year of radical publishing and the launch of our book club, each member tier is 50% off for the first three months.

You can choose between three options: the Verso Reader digital subscription, Verso Subscriber for print and digital, and Verso Comrade to receive even more books in the mail (including one new work of politics or theory every month, as well as the occasional classic from Verso’s backlist). Learn more about the different member options here.

Every month we’ll offer a carefully curated selection of our best new titles, across a wide range of topics and subject areas, to bring you books that everyone at Verso regards as essential reading. In mid-July, we’ll email all members with more details about the August book club selection—including a letter from the editor—so that you can choose which one you want to receive, any time before the end of the month.

Laleh Khalili and Rowland Atkinson – global flows of capital, commodities and people (video, via The Gamming)

As part of Verso Live events, Rowland Atkinson (author of Alpha City) and Laleh Khalili (author of Sinews of War and Trade) in conversation about global flows of capital, commodities and people.

Bradley Garrett, Bunker: Building for the End Times – Allen Lane, August 2020

Update: see also this piece in The Guardian

‘Bunker is an extraordinary achievement; a big-thinking, deep-diving, page-turning study of fear, privilege and apocalypse told through the space of the bunker. Garrett has written a gripping, grim, witty work of geography and ethnography, which he completed – with eerie timeliness – in the first weeks of the COVID pandemic. A book about prepping and prognostication, then, which had already foretold its own future’ Robert MacFarlane

Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears: from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn’t take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere.

In Bunker, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of ‘prepping’ for social and environmental collapse, or ‘Doomsday’. From the ‘dread merchants’ hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a brilliant, original and never less than deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now: an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus.

The bunker, Garrett shows, is all around us: in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he shows, it’s in our minds.