Progressive Geographies

Neal Alexander and David Cooper (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies – Routledge, August 2024

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies provides a comprehensive overview of recent research and a range of innovative ways of thinking literature and geography together. It maps the history of literary geography and identifies key developments and debates in the field.

Written by leading and emerging scholars from around the world, the 38 chapters are organised into six themed sections, which consider: differing critical methodologies; keywords and concepts; literary geography in the light of literary history; a variety of places, spaces, and landforms; the significance of literary forms and genres; and the role of literary geographies beyond the academy. Presenting the work of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, each section offers readers new angles from which to view the convergence of literary creativity and geographical thought. Collectively, the contributors also address some of the major issues of our time including the climate emergency, movement and migration, and the politics of place.

Literary geography is a dynamic interdisciplinary field dedicated to exploring the complex relationships between geography and literature. This cutting-edge collection will be an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in both Geography and Literary Studies, and scholars interested in the evolving interface between the two disciplines.

This is a good innovation. The third edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place updates many entries from earlier editions, removes some and adds many entirely new ones. The editors have made the removed entries available online open access.

Archived Key Thinkers from 2nd Edition of Key Thinkers on Space and Place

Uday Chandra, Resistance as Negotiation: Making States and Tribes in the Margins of Modern India – Stanford University Press, June 2024

“Tribes” appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as “tribal” have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by “subaltern” groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, this book draws on fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research to argue that statemaking is intertwined inextricably with the politics of tribal resistance in the margins of modern India.

Uday Chandra demonstrates how the modern Indian state and its tribal or adivasi subjects have made and remade each other throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, historical processes of modern statemaking shaping and being shaped by myriad forms of resistance by tribal subjects. Accordingly, tribal resistance, whether peaceful or violent, is better understood vis-à-vis negotiations with the modern state, rather than its negation, over the past two centuries. How certain people and places came to be seen as “tribal” in modern India is, therefore, tied intimately to how “tribal” subjects remade their customs and community in the course of negotiations with colonial and postcolonial states. Ultimately, the empirical material unearthed in this book requires rethinking and rewriting the political history of modern India from its “tribal” margins.

Cary J Nederman & Guillaume Bogiaris (eds.), Research Handbook on the History of Political Thought – Edward Elgar, 2024

This insightful Handbook reviews the key frameworks guiding political scientists and historians of political thought. Comprehensive in scope, it covers historical methodology, traditions, epochs, and classic authors and texts, spanning from ancient Greece until the nineteenth century.

Elucidating the evolution and current state of the field, the Handbook emphasizes the value of studying the history of political ideas to gain a critical perspective on our own embedded cultural predispositions. Authors analyze various intellectual schools, such as Stoicism, Christianity, Islam, Liberalism, Republicanism, and Libertarianism, and discuss hermeneutical strategies to reading historical texts, including approaches from the Cambridge School and the Straussians. Providing a broad overview of Western political ideas, an international range of contributors also demonstrate cognizance of global theoretical movements and their significance for historical inquiry. They reexamine the standard canon of political thinkers in light of topics such as gender, colonization, and race, exploring the ideas of, amongst others, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Wollstonecraft, and Marx.

Accessible to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as established scholars, this Handbook is a crucial resource for academics in political science, philosophy, intellectual history, and economics, as well as scholars who study economic thought, law and politics. It will also appeal to scholars seeking a clear understanding of the key concepts that continue to influence contemporary theory and research across the social sciences.

Peter E. Gordon, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity – University of Chicago Press, January 2024

A strikingly original account of Theodor Adorno’s work as a critique animated by happiness.

“Gordon’s confidently gripping and persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism.”—Jürgen Habermas
 
Theodor Adorno is often portrayed as a totalizing negativist, a scowling contrarian who looked upon modern society with despair. Peter E. Gordon thinks we have this wrong: if Adorno is uncompromising in his critique, it is because he sees in modernity an unfulfilled possibility of human flourishing. In a damaged world, Gordon argues, all happiness is likewise damaged but not wholly absent. Through a comprehensive rereading of Adorno’s work, A Precarious Happiness recovers Adorno’s commitment to traces of happiness—fragments of the good amid the bad. Ultimately, Gordon argues that social criticism, while exposing falsehoods, must also cast a vision for an unrealized better world.

Marvin Esler interviews Peter Gordon at the Critical Theory in Context podcast. Thanks to dmf for this link.

John Breuilly, Introduction

The three texts published here were written in the mid-1970s….

Here I explain how these came about.

Back in 1974, I was teaching on a Modern Politics and History degree at Manchester. This involved modern historians from the History Department and members of POLSIS, the politics department. There was some concern that the academics from the two departments did not communicate with each other but taught their respective courses quite separately.

It was suggested that one way to address this problem would be to organise joint seminars on subjects of shared concern. The running was made by Terry Ranger of the History department. His initiative, which turned out to be a one-off achievement, took the form of organising three seminars discussing two recently published books by Perry Anderson: Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolute State. In each seminar, Mike Evans of POLSIS considered questions of Marxist theory and method involved in the particular historical problems under consideration. He was then followed by an historian. In the second seminar, Ian Kershaw (best known now as an historian of the Third Reich, especially his biography of Hitler, but, at the time, a lecturer in medieval economic history) criticised Anderson’s arguments about the feudal mode of production and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. So, the first two seminars were devoted to the slimmer, first volume. I was the historian tasked subjecting the whole of the Lineages book to critique in the third seminar. What is more, Ranger invited Anderson to attend that seminar. (Mischievously, Ranger did not introduce us to each other before the seminar began and challenged me to recognise Anderson – whom I had never met before – from how he listened to my critique! It was obvious who he was within about 30 seconds.) We had a very good discussion.

The surviving texts are now published:

John Breuilly, “Critique of P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State”

Theodor Shanin, “The Marxism(s) of Our Time”

Michael Evans, “Some Notes on Perry Anderson”