Progressive Geographies

Christoph Schuringa, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy – Verso, June 2025

How a supposedly apolitical form of philosophy owes its continuing power to social and political forces

Analytic philosophy is the leading form of philosophy in the English-speaking world. What explains its continued success? Christoph Schuringa argues that its enduring power can only be understood by examining its social history. Analytic philosophy tends to think of itself as concerned with eternal questions, transcending the changing scenes of history. It thinks of itself as apolitical. This book, however, convincingly shows that the opposite is true.

The origins of analytic philosophy are in a set of distinct movements, shaped by high-ly specific sets of political and social forces. Only after the Second World War were these disparate, often dynamic movements joined together to make ‘analytic philosophy’ as we know it. In the climate of McCarthyism, analytic philosophy was robbed of political force.

To this day, analytic philosophy is the ideology of the status quo. It may seem arcane and largely removed from the real world, but it is a crucial component in upholding liberalism, through its central role in elite educational institutions. As Schuringa concludes, the apparently increasing friendliness of analytic philosophers to rival approaches in philosophy should be understood as a form of colonization; thanks to its hegemonic status, it reformats all it touches in service of its own imperatives, going so far as to colonize decolonial efforts in the discipline.

Schuringa discusses his book Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) at the New Books Network. Thanks to dmf for this link.

Luna Vives, The Gates of the Sea: Migration and Rescue at the Edges of Europe – Fernwood, September 2025

The Gates of the Sea examines the paradoxes of maritime search and rescue at Europe’s frontier. Focusing on Spain, Luna Vives explores how governments have redefined maritime rescue systems towards border control. Unlike other European countries, Spain chose not to assign this responsibility to a militarized state security force, but to a civilian agency whose workers often liken themselves to firefighters of the sea: they are dedicated to saving lives, not enforcing borders. Caught between their duty to protect life at sea and government efforts to transform them into border enforcers, rescuers have pushed back, primarily through their anarcho-syndicalist union, the CGT. Committed to border abolition and international solidarity, the rescuers’ struggle positions them within a global movement of resistance to the politics of organized abandonment along the external borders of the European Union. Vives’ revelatory, deeply researched and accessible book grapples with both state methods of control and containment and, crucially, ways in which solidarity activism can thrive in unexpected places.

Foucault, “Les Hermaphrodites” – forthcoming in September 2025. France 24 reports on this here.

Not that many details, except it will be with Gallimard, and have a preface by Arianna Sforzini and a postface by Éric Fassin. The text is described as ‘substantial’, but it is more like a long essay or part of a book rather a full manuscript.

Update July 2025: Gallimard have a page for the book, with the title Histoire des hermaphrodites, 160 pages. [Update 23 July: now Les Hermaphrodites.] It’s listed as part of the Bibliothèque des Histoires series, in which several of Foucault’s books appeared, including the four volumes of the History of Sexuality. There is a piece by Hocine Bouhadjera about the book at Actualitté.

Clive Barnett’s website Pop Theory is back online

The personal website of Prof. Clive Barnett, who sadly and unexpectedly passed away in December 2021 is being maintained by colleagues to enable ongoing access to Clive’s work held here. The site was unavailable, unfortunately, for some time. However, with the help of Clive’s family and support from the University of Exeter Geography department the site will remain online.

You can find several tributes and obituaries of/for Clive online, some are linked here:

• Geographies of generosity: Remembering Clive Barnett – Nick Clarke
• Clive Barnett, RIP – Andy Merrifield
• Remembering Clive Barnett (1968-2021) – Noel Castree (published in the academic journal Progress in Human Geography)

For any queries please contact: Sam Kinsley

Frank Jacob (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg: Periphery and Perception -Büchner Verlag, 2024 (print and open access)

Rosa Luxemburg was a critical thinker and author of many political and social reflections which to readers of today seem quite up to date. Particularly in the Global South, there seems to exist a stronger interest in Luxemburg’s work today, which is not surprising at all, considering that many problems she thought about are still existent – especially there. The participants of the International Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Bodø, Norway, in March 2023, discussed her role in the 21st century in quite some detail. The present anthology contains the conference’s extended proceedings and particularly focuses on two important elements in regard to Luxemburg: Her role for and within the global ›periphery‹ and her ›perception‹ in relation to other intellectuals, social democracy or the political left in a broader sense of the spectrum.

Lipokmar Dzüvichü, Manjeet Baruah eds. At the Margins of Empire: Frontiers and Boundaries in British India, London: Routledge, May 2025

Empire building in British India was inseparably tied to the processes of frontier-making and the creation of boundaries. Through a range of complex practices and developments, the constitution of these spaces took shape at various historical conjunctures. The making of these spaces was also shaped by a variety of imperial concerns, including local and global processes, connections, and entanglements. Focusing on the period between the 19th and the early 20th centuries, this book looks at how the dynamics of frontier and boundary creation were shaped by a variety of agents, institutions, infrastructure and technologies, events, economy, travel, forms of representation, and imperial rivalries. The role of capital, war, and violence was also intrinsic to the creation of such spaces. Further, societies in these spaces responded to these processes in various ways. The book examines how they negotiated and mediated these complex developments of modern space-making in multiple ways at the margins of empire.

Part of the Empire and Frontiers series, this book will be of interest to researchers and readers of history, anthropology, cultural studies, social and cultural history, frontiers, boundaries and borderland studies, Himalayan studies, and studies of commodities and circulations.

May Hawas and Bruce Robbins eds., Teaching Politically: Global Perspectives on Pedagogy and Autonomy – Fordham University Press, July 2025

Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live. 

Teaching Politically addresses some of the political constraints that shape our pedagogical spaces, especially in the teaching of literature. The book brings together a global group of academics, activists, public intellectuals, poets, and novelists to examine the way politics manifest pedagogically, and how a commitment to educating manifests politically, in and beyond the classroom. At the heart of the discussion is how political and professional paradigms chafe against, intersect with, or otherwise become inseparable from each other in any vocation that attempts to educate: from writing, journalism, and public speaking to art, activism, and medicine.

Contributors: Dimitris Christopoulos, Dimitri Dimoulis, Khaled Fahmy, Rishi Goyal, May Hawas, Bonnie Honig, Mona Kareem, Benjamin Mangrum, Nora Parr, Bruce Robbins, Ahdaf Soueif, Omid Tofighian, Elahe Zivardar