Progressive Geographies

Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani (eds.), The Biopolitical Animal – Edinburgh University Press, November 2024

No description on the EUP website, so here’s the table of contents – shame about the price.

Introduction: What is a Biopolitical Animal? – Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani

Part I: The Animal of Biopolitics

Chapter 1: Turning Back to Nature: Foucault and the Practice of Animality – Matthew Calarco

Chapter 2: Community and Animality in the Ancient Cynics – Vanessa Lemm

Chapter 3: Biopolitics of COVID-19 and the Space of Animals: A Planetary Perspective – Miguel Vatter

Chapter 4: How to Chirp like a Cricket: Agamben and the Reversal of Anthropogenesis – Sergei Prozorov

Chapter 5: Animality and Inoperativity: Interspecies Form-of-Life – Sherryl Vint

Part II: Tales of Biopolitics and Animality

Chapter 6: Restraining Biopolitics: On Dino Buzzati’s Living Animals – Timothy Campbell

Chapter 7: Cages and Mirrors: Mr. Palomar and the Albino Gorilla – Serenella Iovino

Chapter 8: Bunnies and Biopolitics: Killing, Culling and Caring for Rabbits – David Redmalm and Erica von Essen

Chapter 9: Deading Life and the Undying Animal: Necropolitics After the Factory Farm – James K. Stanescu

Chapter 10: Factory Farms for Fishes: Aquaculture, Biopolitics and Resistance – Dinesh Wadiwel

Part III: Reconceptualising Biopolitics

Chapter 11: Imagining Liberation beyond Biopolitics: The Biopolitical ‘War against Animals’ and Strategies for Ending It – Zipporah Weisberg

Chapter 12: Animal Magnetism: (Bio)Political Theologies Between the Creature and the Animal – Diego Rossello

Chapter 13: Creaturely Biopolitics – Carlo Salzani

Chapter 14: A Dog’s Life: From the Biopolitical Animal to the Posthuman – Felice Cimatti

Afterword: Locating Race and Animality amidst the Politics of Interspecies Life – Neel Ahuja

Michael Hardt, The Subversive Seventies – Oxford University Press, September 2023

Discussion with Hardt at the New Books Network with Morteza Hajizadeh.

Thanks to Dave Beer for the links.

A thought-provoking reconsideration of how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mold for today’s activism.

The 1970s was a decade of “subversives”. Faced with various progressive and revolutionary social movements, the forces of order—politicians, law enforcement, journalists, and conservative intellectuals—saw subversives everywhere. From indigenous peasant armies and gay liberation organizations, to anti-nuclear activists and Black liberation militants, subversives challenged authority, laid siege to the established order, and undermined time-honored ways of life. Every corner of the left was fertile ground for subversive elements, which the forces of order had to root out and destroy—a project they pursued with zeal and brutality. 

In The Subversive Seventies, Michael Hardt sets out to show that popular understandings of the political movements of the seventies—often seen as fractious, violent, and largely unsuccessful—are not just inaccurate, but foreclose valuable lessons for the political struggles of today. While many accounts of the 1970s have been written about the regimes of domination that emerged throughout the decade, Hardt approaches the subversive from the perspectives of those who sought to undermine the base of established authority and transform the fundamental structures of society. In so doing, he provides a novel account of the theoretical and practical projects of liberation that still speak to us today, too many of which have been all but forgotten. 

Departing from popular and scholarly accounts that focus on the social movements of the 1960s, Hardt argues that the 1970s offers an inspiring and useful guide for contemporary radical political thought and action. Although we can still learn much from the movements of the sixties, that decade’s struggles for peace, justice, and freedom fundamentally marked the end of an era. The movements of the seventies, in contrast, responded directly to emerging neoliberal frameworks and other structures of power that continue to rule over us today. They identified and confronted political problems that remain central for us. The 1970s, in this sense, marks the beginning of our time. Looking at a wide range of movements around the globe, from the United States, to Guinea Bissau, South Korea, Chile, Turkey, and Italy, The Subversive Seventies provides a reassessment of the political action of the 1970s that sheds new light not only on our revolutionary past but also on what liberation can be and do today.

Cristina Vatulescu, Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and their Challenges – Stanford University Press, November 2024

The opening of classified documents from the Soviet era has been dubbed the “archival revolution” due to its unprecedented scale, drama, and impact. With a storyteller’s sensibility, Cristina Vatulescu identifies and takes on the main challenges of reading in these archives.

This transnational study foregrounds peripheral Eastern European perspectives and the ethical stakes of archival research. In so doing, it contributes to the urgent task of decolonizing the field of Eastern European and Russian studies at this critical moment in the region’s history. Drawing on diverse work ranging from Mikhail Bakhtin to Tina Campt, the book enters into broader conversations about the limits and potential of reading documents, fictions, and one another. Pairing one key reading challenge with a particularly arresting story, Vatulescu in turn investigates Michel Foucault’s traces in Polish secret police archives; tackles the files, reenactment film, and photo albums of a socialist bank heist; pits autofiction against disinformation in the secret police files of Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller; and takes on the digital remediation of Soviet-era archives by analyzing contested translations of the Iron Curtain trope from its 1946 origins to the current war in Ukraine. The result is a bona fide reader’s guide to Eastern Europe’s ongoing archival revolution.

Matthew Watson, False Prophets of Economics Imperialism: The Limits of Mathematical Market Models – Agenda, November 2024

This book studies the methodological revolution that has resulted in economists’ mathematical market models being exported across the social sciences. The ensuing process of economics imperialism has struck fear into subject specialists worried that their disciplinary knowledge will subsequently count for less. Yet even though mathematical market models facilitate important abstract thought experiments, they are no substitute for carefully contextualised empirical investigations of real social phenomena. The two exist on completely different ontological planes, producing very different types of explanation.

In this deeply researched and wide-ranging intellectual history, Matthew Watson surveys the evolution of modern economics and its modelling methodology. With its origins in Jevons and Robbins and its culmination in Samuelson, Arrow and Debreu, he charts the escape from reality that has allowed economists’ hypothetical mathematical models to speak to increasingly self-referential mathematical truths. These are shown to perform badly as social truths, consequently imposing strict epistemic limits on economics imperialism.

The book is a formidable analysis of the epistemic limitations of modern-day economics and marks a significant counter to its methodology’s encroachment across the wider social sciences.