Book Review Archive

They Eat Our Sweat Review

Daniel Agbiboa's 'They Eat Our Sweat' is a vivid ethnographic portrait of informal transport in Lagos, providing us with a vantage point to understand the experiences of corruption and informality in everyday urban life.

By

Allen Xiao

Cartographic Memory Review

In Cartographic Memory, Juan Herrera carefully and elegantly examines Chicano movement activism and its legacies in Oakland, California’s Fruitvale neighborhood, and argues for measuring social movements’ impact in a manner that foregrounds the production the brick-and-mortar achievements of community organizations, as well as the networks of support, solidarity and care that those sites and landscapes continue to facilitate.

By

Laura Barraclough

The Digital Factory Review

What if instead of an age of automation we are currently living through the dawn of a new era of exploitation?

By

Fabian Namberger

Menace to Empire Review

"Menace to Empire" is notable for how it offers a relational history of US national security practices in Asia: one that situates them in relation to the other forms of violence work that have always been central to the everyday reproduction of other Pacific empires.

By

Wesley Attewell

Animal Traffic Review

In Animal Traffic, Rosemary-Claire Collard combines Marxist theory with animal studies to offer a powerful analysis of how capitalism structures human-animal relations, and what the “oddity” (2020: 8) of the exotic pet case can teach us about our more common relations with animals.

By

Sam E. Morton

Review, Citizen Designs, by Eli Elinoff

Citizen Designs is a careful depiction of what democracy feels like, with all its discomforts, disagreements, and unresolved tensions. Elinoff manages to present a picture of the struggle for equal citizenship that is at once optimistic and unromantic. In this, the book makes a timely and important contribution to understandings of the relationship between politics and design

By

Hayden Shelby

Review, Unmanning, by Katherine Chandler

As drone use becomes increasingly democratised and diversified, Katherine Chandler’s Unmanning is a timely excavation of drone technology’s history of American political and postcolonial violence.

By

Beryl Pong

Review, Visibility Interrupted, by Carly Thomsen

By urging queer activists and scholars to let go of visibility as our main focus, Thomsen points to a much broader, and potentially more life-giving, queer politics. Sewer systems, too, need to be put on queer agendas.

By

Stina Soderling

“Clapping on the 2 and 4”. A Review of "Progressive Dystopia" by Savannah Shange

"Progressive Dystopia" provides a rich example of how Black Studies, and Black and other radical scholars can and do intervene in academia with emancipatory research that not only informs but can transform critical praxis.

By

rosalind hampton

Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine Review

Stamatopoulou-Robbins exposes how waste management is used to control the exposure of Palestinian bodies to slow violence, as an alternative to direct Israeli military violence, which is condemned by the international community.

By

Tina Guirguis