Progressive Geographies

William Paris, Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation – Oxford University Press, 2025

NDPR review by Aaron Berman

Racial injustice, at its core, is the domination of time. Utopia has been one response to this domination. The racially dominated are not free to define what counts as “progress,” they are not free from the accumulation of past injustices, and, most importantly, they are not free from the arbitrary organization of work in capitalist labor markets. Racially unjust societies are forms of life where the justifications for how to organize time around life, labor, and leisure are out of the hands of the dominated. In Race, Time, and Utopia, William Paris provides a theoretical account of utopia as the critical analysis of the sources of time domination and the struggle to create emancipatory forms of life.

Rather than focusing on inclusion and equality before the law, as found in liberal theories of racial injustice, Paris analyses the neglected “utopian” tradition of justice in black political thought that insists justice can only be secured through the transformation of society as a whole. This transformation is nothing less than the democratic transformation of how organize and narrate our shared time. Bringing into conversation the work W.E.B Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs with the critical theory of Karl Marx, Ernst Bloch, Rahel Jaeggi, and Rainer Forst, Paris reconstructs a social theory and normative account of forms of life as the struggle over how time will be organized, asking “Can there be freedom without a new order of time?”

Siniša Malešević, Nationalism as a Way of Life: The Rise and Transformation of Modern Subjectivities – Cambridge University Press, November 2025

While nationalism is a term that is often associated with instability, violence, extremism, terrorism, wars and even genocide, in fact most forms of nationalism are nonviolent. Beyond politics, it is a set of discourses and practices that shape economic, social, legal, and cultural life all over the globe. This book explores the global rise and transformation of nationalism and analyses the organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional mechanisms that have made it the dominant way of life in the twenty-first century. In a series of case studies across time and space, the book zooms in on three key forms of lived experience: how nationalism operates as a multi-faceted meta-ideology, how national categories have become organisationally embedded in everyday practices and why nationalism has become the dominant form of modern subjectivity. The book is aimed at readers interested in understanding how nation-states and nationalisms have attained such influence in contemporary world.

• A comprehensive sociological explanation of the dominance of nation-states
• Based on the author’s theoretical and empirical research on nation-state formation
• For scholars and students in sociology, history, anthropology, geography, and nationalism studies

Joseph Petek and Brian G. Henning eds. Whitehead at Harvard, 1925-1927 – Edinburgh University Press, August 2025

This book examines the significance of the second volume of The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead: The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1925–1927: General Metaphysical Problems of Science, published in 2021, which covers Whitehead’s second and third years of American lectures in philosophy

• Aims to catalyse the broader scholarly community’s engagement with the new materials published in the second volume of the Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead
• Questions how the Harvard Lectures and the Edinburgh Critical Editions change our understanding of the meaning or development of Whitehead’s thought
• Covers a broad range of ways in which Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures change and broaden our understanding of his work, from mathematics, to ethics, his view of time, and the role of biology in his thought

Long-standing theories about Whitehead’s early philosophical efforts can now be challenged or overturned. In this volume, leading Whitehead scholars address the ways in which the 1925-1927 Harvard lectures challenge or confirm previous understanding of Whitehead’s published works, trace the development of Whitehead’s thought in the crucial period after Science and the Modern World but before Process and Reality, examine Whitehead’s singular guest lecture in Richard Clarke Cabot’s seminar in social ethics – a topic which Whitehead usually avoided – and elucidate how these lectures be seen as a bridge between his mathematical and philosophical work.

Aleks Krotoski, The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life – Bodley Head, October 2025

Thanks to Adalbert Saurma for the link.

From the epic of Gilgamesh to the alchemy of the philosopher’s stone, humanity’s eternal quest for immortality – and its rejuvenation tricks, therapies and tinctures – has always been our most mortal endeavour.

But now the giants of invention and investment are building a fountain of youth of their own creation: one they not only engineer, but also own and control. Death is simply their next problem to solve, the latest expression of a hubris that regards humans as appliances to be fixed and machines to be upgraded. By harnessing technology to ‘cure’ ageing, and funding cutting-edge – and often controversial – research, today’s immortalists are locked in an arms race to be the first to pocket the profits of longevity.

What was once a wild west of experimentation has wormed its way into Washington’s corridors of power. Award-winning broadcaster and academic Aleks Krotoski journeys from those cult fringes to the heartlands of government to meet the moguls, effective altruists, geroscientists and entrepreneurs who are disrupting death. Along the way she encounters radical life extensionists transfusing their teenage son’s blood, transhumanists who want to upload consciousness to the cloud, biohackers flogging AI-powered wellness apps and billionaire kingmakers building brand-new nations.

This razor-sharp, powerful and at times chilling investigation empowers us to consider what it truly means to be human, asking: do we really want a handful of Silicon Valley techno-fundamentalists to be the architects of our forever?

Leonie Ansems de Vries, Politics of Exhaustion: Border Violence and Struggles Over Movement – Bristol University Press, April 2026

This book exposes the strategies that make migrants’ lives unliveable and explores their resistance to this violence. Drawing on years of research across Europe, the author captures the lived reality of asylum seekers, refugees and other marginalised migrants, including their struggles with constant evictions, detention, push-backs, deportations and violence. 

Blending feminist, intersectional and decolonial perspectives, the book reframes exhaustion as both a tool of governance and a site of struggle. By amplifying neglected voices and envisioning politics grounded in solidarity, care and friendship, this is a powerful call to rethink how movement, borders and resistance are understood.

Laury Sarti, Mediterranean Connections: The Frankish Kingdoms and the Roman Empire (476–756) – Brill, October 2025 (print and open access)

This monograph challenges the idea that Roman imperial authority in the West ended in 476. It shows how the Frankish realm maintained ties to the empire, with real separation only emerging in the late sixth century.
Tracing enduring Frankish-Byzantine diplomacy, shared identities, religious controversy, and trade into the seventh century, it reveals a landscape of continued exchange rather than abrupt decline. Including previously overlooked sources, the study offers a new perspective on Frankish identity, imperial affiliation, and the evolving relationship between Rome, the empire, and the Merovingians from the fifth to the eighth century.

David Glimp, Security, Fiscal Policy, and Sovereignty in Renaissance English Literature – Cambridge University Press, September 2025

Taxation was a central challenge for England’s rulers during the Renaissance, and consequently became a major theme for some of the period’s greatest writers. Through close readings of works by Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, and John Milton, David Glimp reveals how these writers and others grappled with the period’s expanding systems of taxation and changing understandings of collective security. Such debates involved questions of political obligation, what it meant to be safe, and the nature of political community itself. Challenging dominant understandings of Renaissance sovereignty, Glimp explores in greater detail than ever before how early modern authors thought about and engaged the fiscal realities of government. From Utopia to Paradise Lost, his groundbreaking analysis illuminates how Renaissance literature addressed concerns about fiscal policy, state power, and collective wellbeing and will appeal to scholars of Renaissance literature, political theory, and economic history alike.

• Explores in greater detail than ever before how early modern authors thought about and engaged the fiscal realities of government, tracing a historically rich moment in the long tradition of literary responses to governmental controversy
• Challenges dominant understandings of sovereign authority in the period, showing how fiscal reality limited and often undermined the seemingly decisive power of Early modern English rulers
• Reveals how a striking majority of authors engaged with the unsustainability of growth through imperial expansion, foregrounding geopolitical reality and national security as central concerns in the Renaissance literary imagination

Lowell Duckert, Arcticologies: Early Modern Actions for our Warmer World – University of Minnesota Press, August 2025

Exploring the frozen past to rethink our warming future

Do we really know what cold is? In Arcticologies, Lowell Duckert delves into early modern European texts to trace how representations of frigidity from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have contributed to historical understandings of climate and contemporary debates on climate change. Arguing that human culture and science are, in fact, indebted to the cold, Duckert suggests that these early depictions offer critical terms for advancing the aims of climate-change activism and assisting in counterapocalyptic thinking. 

An imaginative and intellectual journey, Arcticologies reveals the enduring role of cold in wide-ranging storytelling traditions. It draws on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Othello and the works of Thomas Dekker, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes and is informed throughout by contemporary Indigenous writing, including that of Sheila Watt-Cloutier and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. In reflecting on these assorted accounts, Duckert sees cold as not only an environmental hardship but a source of cultural creativity and resilience, highlighting moments of collaboration between humans and the icy world, from arctic exploration to urban fairs on frozen rivers. 

Cold, Duckert makes clear, is more than the absence of warmth. Situating our contemporary obsession with impending planetary meltdown within the mazelike arcticologies of the past, Duckert shows how early modern cold brought about forms of curiosity, vocabulary, and interspecies relationality that can serve us today. In doing so, he asks us to identify what has been lost and who is at risk in today’s thinning cold—while also urging us to imagine alternative futures focused not on inevitable and total collapse but on adaptation and preserving what remains.