Progressive Geographies

Siân Echard, Facsimile: Making, Likeness, and Medieval Manuscripts – Penn Press, October 2025

An unprecedented cultural history of reproductions of medieval manuscripts

Facsimiles are, or claim to be, exact copies of objects, and medieval manuscripts have long been a focus for this kind of reproduction. Today, digitization delivers complete, high-resolution, full-color digital copies of thousands of medieval manuscripts to anyone with an internet connection. But for centuries, scholars in fields like art history, or paleography, or textual editing had to travel to see the manuscripts their work depended on. When they couldn’t, they relied on copies—drawings, engravings, lithographs, and eventually monochrome photographs, usually of parts of a manuscript rather than the whole thing.

Facsimile explores the prehistory of our digital present, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that witnessed rapid technological change; a renewal of interest in the Middle Ages in the public at large; the consolidation and emergence of scholarly disciplines; and the increase in institutions that cared for medieval manuscripts. Siân Echard shows how facsimiles of medieval manuscripts were central to all these developments. Focusing on Britain, Echard traces how predigital technologies of reproduction were viewed by their practitioners and consumers, and how they helped to form the ways people related to the medieval past. Facsimile users were scholarly and popular, with interests in text, or image, or books, or all these things at once. Four chapters—Letter, Figure, Color, Catastrophe—show how the human hand, the human eye, and the human imagination intertwined with technology, creating modern-medieval hybrids that sit at the intersection of past and present.

From the rise of paleography and diplomatics as disciplines to the emergence of calligraphy as a craft and hobby, from the use of facsimiles in shaping narratives of national identity to the substitution of facsimiles for destroyed or damaged manuscripts in the development of preservation practices, Facsimile offers an unprecedented cultural history of reproductions of medieval manuscripts.

Nataša Kovačević, Nonaligned Imagination: Yugoslavia, the Global South, and Literary Solidarities Beyond the Cold War Blocs – Northwestern University Press, September 2025

Recovering the literary and intellectual history of anticolonial collaborations
 
Preoccupied with developing a multiethnic, postcolonial culture and seeking an alternative to Cold War–bloc politics, socialist Yugoslavia turned to the decolonizing countries of the Global South. It forged political, economic, and cultural links with postcolonial states and anticolonial liberation movements through the Non-Aligned Movement, of which it was a founding member in 1961. NAM spanned political and economic systems, uniting members in opposition to superpower politics and around policies of nuclear disarmament, active peaceful coexistence, anticolonialism, and respect for national sovereignty.
 
Nataša Kovačević reconstructs the forgotten literary and cultural history of this movement, tracing the development of new networks of intellectual engagement and cultural exchange between writers, journalists, and scholars who connected postwar Yugoslavia with 1950s India, 1960s Algeria and Guinea, 1970s Vietnam, and beyond. Nonaligned narratives attempted to reconfigure the understanding of the globe outside Eurocentric tropes and hegemonic political stratifications and to articulate Yugoslavs’ own internationalist sensibility. With Cold War–era rhetoric intensifying again in the twenty-first century, Nonaligned Imagination assumes the urgent task of unearthing a history of engaged writing and cultural diplomacy that imagined alternatives to superpower conflicts and a bipolar vision of the world.

The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History: A JHI Blog Forum

Introduction by Jonathon Catlin, Paige Pendarvis, and Jacob Saliba

In recent years, intellectual history has been said to be undergoing a renaissance at the same time as it has been institutionally hollowed out. Rather than bemoan the “death” of the field, this forum seeks to chart its new lives in more materialist and global histories that may have once been the purview of other subfields and area studies. Shifting economic winds sparked by the global movement against neoliberalism surrounding Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and, more recently, the rise of new economic populism and protectionism, have helped to inspire a groundswell of new histories of capitalism and political economy. This forum highlights methodological reflection on intellectual history’s foundations and how new work in the field is taking them up by re-anchoring historical ideas to their under-examined material, economic, and political contexts…

The first two contributions are now up:

Mikkel Flohr, The Political Economy of Ideas: Historical Materialism and the History of Ideas

Marie Louise Krogh, Hegel’s “Brown Rivulet of Coffee”: Colonies, Commodities, and Context

More will be added.

Theo Riofrancos, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism – WW Norton, October 2025

“Dazzling in the bold questions it asks.…An immense contribution.” —Naomi Klein

An in-depth investigation into the growing industry of green technologies and the environmental, social, and political consequences of the mining it requires.

Lithium, a crucial input in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has the potential to save the world from climate change. But even green solutions come at a cost. Mining lithium is environmentally destructive. We therefore confront a dilemma: Is it possible to save the world by harming it in the process?

Having spent over a decade researching mining and oil sectors in Latin America, Thea Riofrancos is a leading voice on resource extraction. In Extraction, she draws on groundbreaking fieldwork on the global race for lithium. Taking readers from the breathtaking salt flats of Chile’s Atacama Desert, to Nevada’s glorious Silver Peak Range, to the rolling hills of the Barroso Region of Portugal, she reveals the social and environmental costs of “critical minerals.” In Washington, DC, and Brussels, she tracks the escalating geopolitics of green technology supply chains. And she takes stock of new policy paradigms in the Global South, where governments seek to leverage mineral assets to jumpstart green development. In the process, Riofrancos uncovers surprising links across history, from colonial conquest to the 1970s energy crisis, to our still uncertain green future.

While unregulated mining could inflict irreversible harm, Riofrancos offers optimistic proposals to transform the governance of mining while also reducing the sheer volume of global extraction. A rigorous and hopeful call to action, Extraction shares how we can harmonize climate goals with social justice—and set the planet on a course to ecological flourishing.

Amit Varshizky, The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview – Routledge< November 2024

New Books discussion with Amir Engel. Thanks to dmf for the link.

This book seeks to reframe debates on the conflicting scientific and spiritual traditions that underpinned the Nazi worldview, showing how despite the multitude of tensions and rivals among its adherents, it provided a coherent conceptual grid and possessed its own philosophical consistency.

Drawing on a large variety of works, the volume offers insights into the intellectual climate that allowed the radical ideology of National Socialism to take hold. It examines the emergence of nuanced conceptions of race in interwar Germany and the pursuit of a new ethical and existential fulcrum in biology. Accordingly, the volume calls for a re-examination of the place of genetics in Nazi racial thought, drawing attention to the multi-register voices within the framework of interwar racial theory. Varshizky explores the ways in which these ideas provided new justifications for the Nazi revolutionary enterprise and blurred the distinction between fact and value, knowledge and faith, the secular and the sacred, and how they allowed Nazi thinkers to bounce across these epistemological divisions.

This volume will be of interest to scholars of Nazi Germany and World War II, intellectual and cultural history, the history of science, and the philosophy of religion.

Mehdi Parsa, Machinic Ontology – Palgrave Macmillan, August 2025

This book considers the becoming-concept of the machine-metaphor. It explores the intersections between this becoming and the development of the concepts of life, organism, and technics. It seeks to introduce universal machinism as a metaphysical foundation with specific ethical and political implications. A machinic ontology proposes that the whole has no inside, the body has no head, a society needs no leader, and the brain has no center. While undoubtedly a Deleuzoguattarian idea, this book endeavors to explore its origins and echoes across various thinkers and domains. In this context, it examines and analyzes the concepts of monstrous machine, transindividual machine, plastic machine, abstract machine and biopolitical machine as they appear in the works of George Canguilhem, Gilbert Simondon, Catherine Malabou, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben.

Machinic Ontology is essential reading for all scholars and researchers in metaphysics especially those interested in the nature of living and non-living entities and natural systems.

Katja Diefenbach, Spinoza in Post-Marxist Philosophy: Speculative Materialism – trans. Gerrit Jackson, Edinburgh University Press, November 2025

Expensive, and e-book is currently listed for the same price, unfortunately.

Revises continental philosophy’s portrayals of the relationships between matter, affect, thought and the power of the multitude

• Provides a comprehensive overview and detailed analysis of central concepts and controversies in French post-Marxist and poststructuralist Spinoza scholarship
• Introduces, and intervenes in, the post-Marxist and poststructuralist controversies over Spinoza’s concepts of immanent causality, conatus, and power of the multitude as tools to rethink politics in contemporary radical thought
• Incorporates historical context with an extensive discussion of Dutch colonial capitalism
• Provides conceptual and contextual groundwork for further research in Spinoza studies, early modern political philosophy, post-Marxism, poststructuralism, and French intellectual history
• Widens access to the intellectual wealth of authors not yet widely translated into English, such as Ferdinand Alquié and Martial Gueroult

The book begins from the insight that very few seventeenth-century philosophers have received more antithetical interpretations than Baruch de Spinoza. He has been regarded as an atheist and a rationalist, as a pantheist and a vitalist, as a Jewish critic of religion and a great thinker in the Marrano tradition. In the twentieth century, however, Spinoza was conceived as a materialist who was strikingly ahead of his time, providing Marxism with concepts of overdetermined dialectics, plural temporality and nonteleological praxis.

Beginning with Althusser’s interest in the concept of immanent causality, the book reconstructs post-Marxist readings of Spinoza from Negri to Balibar, Matheron to Tosel, and Gueroult to Deleuze. It examines how these authors adapt Spinoza’s unconventional doctrines of the differentiality of being, the self-forming capacity of matter, the excess of the positive affects, and the multitude’s power of self-government. The book fundamentally revises continental philosophy’s portrayals of the relationships between matter, affect, thought, and the multitude.

Brett Heino, Literary Geographies and the Work of David Ireland: An Australian Atlas – Springer, 2025

book launch with Adam David Morton, 31 October 2025 – Glee books, Sydney

Update November 2025: Brett’s comments from the launch are here; Adam’s comments are here.

This book explores the spatiality of post-World War II Australian society through the vehicle of David Ireland’s literature. Employing concepts from radical geography and structural Marxist literary theory, it posits the existence of a spatial unconscious of literary texts, whereby they encode the spatiality of the society into which they are born. By mining the spatial unconscious of Ireland’s texts, we can create a complex, unique and highly fertile atlas of the spaces and places of Australia. In particular, Ireland’s works ideologically handle the contradictory relationship between capitalism’s regime of abstract space, rooted in the production process and the state, and the meaningful social places that can be forged out of the struggle of social forces including workers, lumpenproletarians, women and indigenous peoples. In the midst of the contemporary spatial crisis, this study of Ireland is a form of mapping, creating an atlas by which we might plot our past and present and orient ourselves to the future.