Progressive Geographies

Read Teju Cole’s essay “A Reader’s War,” which tries to square Obama’s reputation as a man “widely read in philosophy, literature, and history” with the White House’s policies of drone warfare. From the essay:

How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

Alessandro Fontana 1939 -2013

Alessandro Fontana was Emeritus Professor of Italian Studies at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the author of numerous essays which were partially collected in Il vizio occulto (1989) and La polizia dell’anima (1990). He  collaborated with François Furet (Livre et société au XVIII^e siècle, 1970) and Michel Foucault (I, Pierre Rivière… 1973). He contributed to the Storia d’Italia Einaudi (La scena, 1972), the Einaudi Enciclopedia (La scena, 1972) and the Einaudi Letteratura Italiana (Piazza, corte, salotto e caffè, 1986). On the bicentenary of the fall of the Venetian Republic, he edited a collective work Venise 1297-1797. La république des castors (ENS Éditions, 1997), as well as the collection Venise et la Révolution Française (Éditions Laffont, 1997).  He was general editor with François Ewald of the volumes of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France (Gallimard –…

Social Science Bites has a podcast and interview transcript of an interview with Doreen Massey up. You can listen to the interview here or view the transcript and other info here. Here is the teaser from the site:

“Doreen Massey has made her reputation by studying space, not outer space, space here on planet Earth. Professor Massey is a geographer who wants us to rethink many of our assumptions about space, including the assumption that it is simply something we pass through. She believes that an analysis of spatial relations between, for example, people, cities, jobs, is key to an understanding of politics and power.”