Progressive Geographies

Another useful contribution to the debate from Liz Morrish at Academic Irregularities.

Jasmine Cooper, Lili Owen Rowlands and Katie Pleming (eds.), Rage: Affect and Resistance in French and Francophone Culture and Thought, 1968–2020 – Peter Lang, June 2024

This volume explores the political life of rage as it has been experienced and mobilized in the Francosphere since 1968. If mai is remembered as a failure to convert insurrectionary feeling into lasting political change, the vast number of activist groups who have alchemized their anger into resistance over the past fifty years are a testament to the continued, necessary role of rage in political life.
This volume traces the various morphologies of anger across French-language literature, thought, cinema and activism. From Black feminisms to punk, flamboyance to suicide, cacophonous sound to riotous song, the contributions probe the aesthetics and politics of rage. This collection also examines the uneven legitimization of political anger – how rage is allowed to be expressed, by whom and in which contexts. Rage is often dismissed as inimical to proper academic inquiry: what unites the contributions in this publication is a commitment to thinking with feeling.

Vanessa Christina Wills, Marx’s Ethical Vision – Oxford University Press, July 2024

“The communists do not preach morality at all”; this line from The Communist Manifesto might seem to settle the question of whether Marxism has anything to offer moral philosophy. Yet, Marx issued both trenchant critiques of “bourgeois” morality and thundering condemnations of capitalism’s “vampire-like” destructiveness. He decried commodity-exchange for corroding our ability to value one another for who we are, not how much our lives could be traded away for. He expressed apparently ethical views about human nature, the conditions necessary for human flourishing, and the desirability of bringing such conditions about–views that are interwoven throughout his life’s work, from his youthful philosophical poetry to his unfinished masterpiece, Capital.

Renewed attention to Marx’s distinctively “dialectical” and historical materialist approach to conflict and change makes sense of this apparent tension in his thought. Following Marx, Vanessa Christina Wills centers labor–human beings satisfying their needs through conscious, purpose-driven, and transformative interaction with the material world–as the essential human activity. Working people’s struggles reveal capitalism’s worst ravages while pointing to a better future and embodying the only way there: rational transformation of our relationships to ourselves, to one another, and to the natural world, so that the human condition emerges not as a burden we must bear but as life we joyfully create. The purposiveness of labor gives rise to a normativity already inherent in the present state of things, one that can guide us in knowing what sort of world we should build and that further prepares us to build it.

Rather than “preach morality,” the key task for moral philosophy is to theorize in the light that working peoples’ struggles for survival shine on capitalism–an existential threat to humanity and the defining ethical problem of our time.

Marco Bresciani, Learning from the Enemy: An Intellectual History of Antifascism in Interwar Europe – Verso, June 2024

The first comprehensive history of Italian revolutionary group Giustizia e Libertà

When democracy is under threat from authoritarianism, models of resistance must come to the fore. Giustizia e Libertà, founded by the Italian thinker and activist Carlo Rosselli in 1929, is one intriguing historical example. Operating both in exile and as part of a clandestine network at home, the organization fought against fascism and Nazism, while criticizing Stalinism. To defeat the enemy, the group aimed to go beyond the Marxist notion of class and to assert fresh concepts of nationhood and Europe. The book traces the group’s trajectories and debates and follows its legacy to the present.

Corey Ross, Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World – Princeton University Press, July 2024

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today.

Spanning the major European empires of the period, Corey Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order.

Revealing how the legacies of empire have persisted long after colonialism ebbed away, Liquid Empire provides needed historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world’s waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people are faced with mounting water shortages, rising flood risks, and the relentless depletion of sea life.

Susan Slyomovics, Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage – Stanford University Press, July 2024

Introduction open access at the Stanford UP site; 20% discount code currently at www.sup.org with SLYOMOVICS20 (July 2024)

“Statuomania” overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria’s hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meaning and some were “repatriated” to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage.

Susan Slyomovics follows the afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in both countries and interviews with French and Algerian heritage actors and artists, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Monuments emerge here as objects with a soul, offering visual records of the colonized Algerian native, the European settler colonizer, and the contemporary efforts to engage with a dark colonial past. Richly illustrated with more than 100 color images, Monuments Decolonized offers a fresh aesthetic take on the increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate settler colonial histories.

Martijn Konings, The Bailout State: Why Governments Rescue Banks, Not People – Polity, October 2024

How did we end up in a world where social programs are routinely cut in the name of market discipline and fiscal austerity, yet large banks get bailed out whenever they get into trouble?

In The Bailout State, Martijn Konings exposes the inner workings of this sprawling infrastructure of government guarantees. Backstopping financial markets and securing banks’ balance sheets, this contemporary Leviathan manages the inflationary pressures that its generosity produces by tightening the financial screws on the rest of the population.

To a large extent, the bailout state was built by progressives seeking to buttress the institutions of the early postwar period. The resulting tide of capital gains fostered an asset-centered politics that experienced its heyday in the nineties. But ever since the financial crisis of 2007-08, promises of inclusive economic growth have looked increasingly thin. A colossus locked in place, the bailout state disburses its benefits to a rapidly shrinking group of property owners.  Against the backdrop of a ferocious post-pandemic turn to anti-inflationary policy, the only remaining way to exit the logic of the bailout, Konings argues, is to challenge the monetary drivers at the heart of capitalist society.