Progressive Geographies

Marie-Eve Loiselle, Building Walls, Constructing Identities: Legal Discourse and the Creation of National Borders – Stanford University Press, November 2024

States are erecting walls at their borders at a pace unmatched in history, and the wall between the United States and Mexico stands as an icon among these dividing structures. Much has been said about the US-Mexico border wall in the last few decades, yet American walling projects have a much longer history, dating back almost a century. Building Walls, Constructing Identities offers a rich account of this legal history, informed by two episodes of wall-building—the Act of August 19, 1935, and the Secure Fence Act of 2006. These two legislative periods illustrate that today’s wall imprints onto the landscape a grammar of racial inequality underpinned by a settler colonial rationality. Marie-Eve Loiselle argues in favor of an account of the law that considers its material translation into space and identifies discursive processes by which the law and the wall come together to communicate legal knowledge about territory and identity.

Adam Warren, Julia E. Rodriguez and Stephen T. Casper (eds.), Empire, Colonialism and the Human Sciences: Troubling Encounters in the Americas and Pacific – Cambridge University Press, October 2024 (print and open access)

In this bold reconsideration of the human sciences, an interdisciplinary team employ an expanded theoretical and geographical critical lens centering the notion of the encounter. Drawing insights from Indigenous and Latin American Studies, nine case studies delve into the dynamics of encounters between researchers, intermediaries, and research subjects in imperial and colonial contexts across the Americas and Pacific. Essays explore ethical considerations and knowledge production practices that prevailed in field and expedition science, custodial institutions, and governance debates. They reevaluate how individuals and communities subjected to research projects embraced, critiqued, or subverted them. Often, research subjects expressed their own aspirations, asserted sovereignty or autonomy, and exercised forms of power through interactions or acts of refusal. This book signals the transformative potential of Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies for shaping future scholarship on the history of the human sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought – Princeton University Press, November 2024

In Citizen Marx, Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism. Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism. One of Marx’s principal political values, Leipold contends, was a republican conception of freedom, according to which one is unfree when subjected to arbitrary power.

Placing Marx’s republican communism in its historical context—but not consigning him to that context—Leipold traces Marx’s shifting relationship to republicanism across three broad periods. First, Marx began his political life as a republican committed to a democratic republic in which citizens held active popular sovereignty. Second, he transitioned to communism, criticizing republicanism but incorporating the republican opposition to arbitrary power into his social critiques. He argued that although a democratic republic was not sufficient for emancipation, it was necessary for it. Third, spurred by the events of the Paris Commune of 1871, he came to view popular control in representation and public administration as essential to the realization of communism. Leipold shows how Marx positioned his republican communism to displace both antipolitical socialism and anticommunist republicanism. One of Marx’s great contributions, Leipold suggests, was to place politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of socialism.

Reiner Schürmann, Selected Writings and Lecture Notes – Diaphenes, 2019-

I hadn’t realised this project was ongoing… five volumes already and two more in December.

Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property – Duke University Press, August 2024

Open access introduction at the link above

In The Politics of Collecting, Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp’s canonization has more to do with his patron’s donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp’s work, and she uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry’s collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic success and talent and calls for a new vision of art beyond the cultural institution.

Kristof Smeyers, Supernatural Bodies: Stigmata in Modern Britain and Ireland – Manchester University Press, September 2024

This book is the first in-depth study of the changing perceptions and receptions of supernatural bodies in modern Britain and Ireland. It focuses on one phenomenon that became hotly contested and discussed in the public sphere between 1840 and 1940: the stigmata. In 1874, an Irish reporter asked why the wounds of the crucified Christ on mortal bodies could ‘not be discussed with calmness. without indulging in angry rhetoric’. Supernatural bodies takes that question seriously. It draws on previously unexamined archival materials to place supernatural bodies at the heart of long-lasting discussions about the position of Roman Catholicism in society; the supernatural in modern Christianity and society; the authority of sciences; the relationship between Britain and Ireland, and between Britain and the Continent. Through the lens of stigmata controversies, this book shows how these discussions could converge around supernatural bodies.

Jacob Chamberlain, Migrant Justice in the Age of Removal: Rights, Law, and Resistance against Territory’s Exclusions – University of Georgia Press, March 2025

Migrant Justice in the Age of Removal details the story of Migrant Justice, a migrant rights organization led by undocumented workers in a complicated and perhaps unexpected location: Vermont, U.S. This compelling story, which includes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s use of a covert informant to infiltrate the group and deport key members of their community, provides a detailed analysis of the state of immigration enforcement in the country today, alongside an intimate portrait of successful modes of resistance against it.

Migrant Justice has gone on to improve rights for migrants in Vermont and across the country in these incredibly precarious times for migrant activists. This book places Migrant Justice’s activism within what is defined as the Age of Removal, or the last three decades in which immigration enforcement in the U.S. has increasingly used enhanced enforcement mechanisms like the “order of removal,” which aids in the confinement, control, and exploitation of migrants. Migrant Justice’s work also fits within a growing landscape of migrant rights movements that have arisen during this time, and Jacob Chamberlain provides a crucial snapshot of their work to better understand their successful forms of organizing in these contexts. In this confluence of opposing forces, we see egregious abuses against migrant actors, but we also see new and progressively powerful forms of resistance that are posing a specific challenge to bordered and territorially based limitations on rights and democracy. Migrant Justice’s work expands rights access to people, regardless of citizenship, which essentially works towards a deterritorialization of rights access—or the opening of sociopolitical belonging to new actors.

Update: there is a review essay on the book by Leah Montange in Antipode (open access pdf)