Progressive Geographies

Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations, edited by Felix Rösch and Atsuko Watanabe – forthcoming in September 2018

In an ever more globalized world, sustainable global development requires effective intercultural co-operations. This dialogue between non-western and western cultures is essential to identifying global solutions for global socio-political challenges.

Modern Japanese Political Thought and International Relations critiques the formation of non-western International Relations by assessing Japanese political concepts to contemporary IR discourses since the Meji Restoration, to better understand knowledge exchanges in intercultural contexts. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of this dialogue, from international law and nationalism to concepts of peace and Daoism, this collection grapples with postcolonial questions of Japan’s indigenous IR theory.

Goldsmiths Annual Philosophy Lecture – Alienation & Freedom: Frantz Fanon – 1 June 2018, 4pm – free, but registration required

Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young give the first Goldsmiths Annual Philosophy Lecture, on the hitherto unpublished and unavailable works of Frantz Fanon.

Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon’s work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals, philosophers and activists seeking to radically interrogate our understandings of violence, race, political subjectivity, mental illness and the challenges of decolonization. In CPCT’s first annual lecture, we are joined by the editors of the landmark collection Alienation and Freedom. This volume collects together unpublished and unavailable works comprising around half of Fanon’s entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. Khalfa and Young will explore how these writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanon’s entire oeuvre, revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. The talk will shed new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, and on newly available texts which oblige us to take a fresh look at the intellectual history of anti-colonial and post-colonial thought, as well as to address with Fanon some of the most pressing theoretical issues of our time.

The lecture will be followed by a response by Jane Hiddleston and will also feature a performance-reading of excerpts from the two plays by Fanon included in Alienation & Freedom: The Drowning Eye and Parallel Hands.

Jean Khalfa is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He is the editor of the first complete edition of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (2006) and author of Poetics of the Antilles (2016) and an upcoming work on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

Robert J. C. Young, FBA, is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, USA. He is the author of White Mythologies (1990), Colonial Desire (1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008), Empire, Colony, Postcolony (2015).

Jane Hiddleston is Exeter College Professor of Literatures in French at the University of Oxford, and the author, most recently of Writing after Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition.

All welcome.

https://cpct.uk/

https://www.gold.ac.uk/cpct/

Antipode Foundation Scholar-Activist Project and International Workshop Awards – application deadline 31 May 2018 – full details here.

As many will know, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography is owned by the Antipode Foundation, a charity registered here in the UK. The Foundation grants an exclusive right to publish the journal to Wiley, and the surplus received is reinvested in the wider critical geography community. As well as Antipode’s Lecture Series and the Institute for the Geographies of Justice, among other things the Foundation makes two kinds of grants. 2018 is the sixth year of the Antipode Foundation’s Scholar-Activist Project and International Workshop Awards.

Applications are invited for an indefinite Assistant Professorship in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) at the University of Warwick. The position is open with respect to specialism within political theory, but preference will be given to candidates who are able and willing to teach modules addressing historical political thought.

Applications from female candidates and those from a minority ethnic background are particularly welcome as these groups are currently underrepresented within the Department.

The successful candidate will have a demonstrable track record of delivering high-quality research publications ahead of REF2021 and a commitment to securing external grant income in support of their research programme.

For an informal and confidential discussion about this opportunity, please contact Professor Simon Caney (s.caney@warwick.ac.uk).

For more information, and to apply, please see: https://atsv7.wcn.co.uk/search_engine/jobs.cgi?owner=5062452&ownertype=fair&jcode=1727017&vt_template=1457&adminview=1

Franco Farinelli, Blinding Polyphemus: Geography and the Models of the World, translated by Christina Chalmers and in Seagull Books Italian list.

This appeared over a year ago, but I didn’t realise this was in English until Alberto Toscano kindly gave me a copy today. Italian geographer friends have long told me of the importance of Farinelli’s work, and I’ve only read a little of it in French – this is the first book of his in English.

Today, we believe that the map is a copy of the Earth, without realizing that the opposite is true: in our culture, the Earth has assumed the form of a map. In Blinding Polyphemus, Franco Farinelli elucidates the philosophical correlation between cultural evolution and shifting cartographies of modern society, giving readers an interdisciplinary study that attempts to understand and redefine the fundamental structures of cartography, architecture and the notion of ‘space’.

Following the lessons of nineteenth-century critical German geography, this is a manual of geography without any map. To indicate where things are means already responding, in implicit and unreflective ways, to prior questions about their nature. Blinding Polyphemus not only takes account of the present state of the Earth and of human geography, it redefines the principal models we possess for the description of the world: the map, above all, as well as the landscape, subject, place, city and space.

Franco Farinelli is an Italian geographer who researches the intersections of cartography, logic, philosophy, politics and economics which underlie the phenomena of the built environment through history. He is a professor of human geography and head of the Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies at the Università di Bologna, and the president of the Italian Geographers Association. He has taught at Nordplan, the Università di Ginevra, University of California Los Angeles, Univeristy of California Berkeley, the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure. He is the author of several books, including Geografia (2003), L’invenzione della Terra (2007) and La Crisi della Ragione Cartografica (2009).

Christina Chalmers is a poet, writer and translator who lives in London. She is in the editorial collective of the journal Cesura/Acceso.