Progressive Geographies

New Perspectives, 01/2019 – full Issue to download

Editorial

1. Über Berlin

Benjamin Tallis

Research Articles

2. Great Expectations: The EU’s Social Role as a Great Power Manager

David M. McCourt & Andrew Glencross

3. The (Small) State of the Union: Assessing the EU’s Ability to Implement Its Global Strategy

Rebecca Pedi

4. The Wrong Critiques: Why Internal Border Controls Don’t Mean the End of Schengen

Markéta Votoupalová

Fora

5. Russia and the World: IMEMO Forecast 2018

Mark Galeotti, Minda Holm, Tuomas Forsberg, Ruth Deyermond & Irina Kobrinskaya

6. Twilight of the Proletariat: Reading Critical Balkanology as Liberal Ideology

Catherine Baker, Nataša Kovačević, Dragan Kujundžić & Rade Zinaić

Cultural Cut

7. Bauhaus Imaginista: Framing Renshichirō Kawakita’s Transcultural Legacy and Pedagogy

Helena Čapková

Thomas Nail, Theory of the Image – OUP, May 2019

We live in an age of the mobile image. The world today is absolutely saturated with images of all kinds circulating around the world at an incredible rate. The movement of the image has never been more extraordinary than it is today. This recent kinetic revolution of the image has enormous consequences not only for the way we think about contemporary art and aesthetics but also for art history as well.

Responding to this historical moment, Theory of the Image offers a fresh new theory and history of art from the perspective of this epoch-defining mobility. The image has been understood in many ways, but it is rarely understood to be fundamentally in motion. The original and materialist approach is what defines Theory of the Image and what allows it to offer the first kinetic history of the Western art tradition. In this book, Thomas Nail further develops his larger philosophy of movement into a comprehensive

“This is an engaging book with a fascinating argument. Thomas Nail stakes out new territory, building a theory from the group up of the image as kinetic” — David Morgan , Duke University

“Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Image is an ambitious and original attempt to re-theorize the material and cognitive dynamics of the image. In this respect, his model is kinetic as opposed to representational, mimetic, or hermeneutical. The book is eminently suitable for use on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, in particular, philosophy, cultural theory, and art history.” — John Roberts , University of Wolverhampton

Also next week, I’ll be giving the Fourth Denis Cosgrove Lecture in the GeoHumanities, at the British Academy, 23 May 2019, 6.15pm

The title of the talk is “Shakespearean Landscapes”, and while I will say something about the Shakespearean Territories book, I will be mainly discussing this related but distinct theme.

This lecture explores how Shakespeare’s plays evoke a sense of landscape. Shakespeare’s grasp of specific geographies could be shaky, but his plays are rich with a range of geographical themes, language and detail. Shakespeare lived and wrote at a time of colonial exploration and saw the development of many cartographic, navigational and land-measuring techniques. The lecture builds on the argument of my recent book, Shakespearean Territories, but explores a different yet related geographical theme – that of landscape. This is of course a theme which Denis Cosgrove examined so perceptively. The plays discussed will include some of Shakespeare’s most famous, such as Macbeth and King Lear, and lesser known ones including Timon of Athens.

The lecture is free to attend, but the organisers have asked that people do register beforehand. Full details here.

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%’