A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
"Empire’s Labor" builds an explicitly spatial theory of empire: it foregrounds how empire-building has been grounded in the geographical management of bodies, populations, and circulations in the intimate spaces of everyday life.
"Empire’s Labor" builds an explicitly spatial theory of empire: it foregrounds how empire-building has been grounded in the geographical management of bodies, populations, and circulations in the intimate spaces of everyday life.
“The Licit Life of Capitalism” offers an intimate and eclectic portrait of the oil industry’s attempt to disentangle itself from a small country on - and off - Africa’s Atlantic coast. But beyond these empirics, how might Appel’s portrait push scholars to examine the effects of our centuries-old, critical concept of “Capitalism”?
Hesketh’s book describes the uneven and combined articulations of Gramsci’s concepts of “passive revolution” and “hegemony” in an analysis of the EZLN and APPO movements in Mexico. This is a must read for researchers who are trying to explore the potential for anti-capitalist resistance without simplifying it to a question of global capital versus global labor.
Engaging emerging, multidisciplinary conversations across anthropology, American studies, and postcolonial studies about how empire operates and endures, "Ethnographies of U.S. Empire" is a reflection both on empire and on ethnography. Together, the chapters make a case for ethnographic research as a way of studying empire, as a method that offers not a bounded or concise definition of what makes an empire, but rather an expansive sense of how people live with and within the imperial present.
What is strikingly novel in Signs in the Dust are Lyons' efforts to articulate and ground attempts to overcome the nature-culture binary by way of theories of signs found in the writings of three medieval and early modern thinkers. The scholastic semiotics of these three figures provides Lyons with the metaphysical means to find even in the very dust a physio-semiosis, or genuine exchange of signs.
Brett Story’s "Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power" across Neoliberal America is a brilliant and timely study on prison geographies. Story, who is from Canada, arrives to the U.S. prison through her personal experiences of eviction, first as a child and then as a young student fighting against gentrification and documenting it as an amateur filmmaker.
In Barandiarán's groundbreaking book, one of the questions she grapples with is: what are the criteria that a state should use to decide in favor of or against proposed natural resources infrastructure projects? Because infrastructure developments have uneven impacts across the social and physical terrains of cities and nations, they are frequently controversial, producing political liabilities and enemies as often as they reinforce or engender political alliances.
The celebrations of the railroad as a symbol of national unity and progress are a reminder of its continued power in writing the myth of the nation, and of the importance of challenging such nation-valorizing narratives. Karuka does exactly this in his timely and provocative book, creating new ideas with which to re-examine the well-worn story of the railroad, and studying it through a broad array of distinct cases.
Though not an exhaustive list, these are many of the main areas we cover.