In this episode of New Books in Literary Studies, John Yargo spoke with Mahshid Mayar about how children’s puzzles and schoolbooks at the turn of the 20th century helped shape U.S. political relations with the world. Professor Mayar is an assistant professor of American Studies at Bielefeld University and research associate at the English Department, Amherst College. Mahshid has just published Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire , with t...
Jun 27, 2022•38 min•Ep. 154
Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso, 2022) presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present. Edited and introduced by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano , Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on ...
Jun 27, 2022•56 min•Ep. 66
Today we are joined by Douglas Booth, Dean of Adventure, Culinary Arts and Tourism at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, Canada and Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago. He is also the author of Bondi Beach: Representations of an Iconic Australian (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022). In our conversation, we discussed the geological and climatological origins of Bondi Beach; the contested histories of iconic Australian archetypes such as surf bathers, surf life savers, and surf board...
Jun 21, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 220
As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cag...
Jun 17, 2022•59 min•Ep. 5
The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As such, it will take a class struggle to solve. In Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022), Matthew T. Huber argues that the carbon-intensive capitalist class must be confronted for producing climate change. Yet, the narrow and unpopular roots of climate politics...
Jun 17, 2022•45 min•Ep. 64
Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (Oxford UP, 2022) examines the meteoric rise of ethnographic mapmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a form of visual and material culture that gave expression to territorialised visions of nationhood. In the Russian Empire's Baltic provinces, the development of ethnographic cartography, as part of the broader field of statistical data visualisation, progressively became a tool that l...
Jun 17, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 200
Offering a fresh perspective, this timely book analyzes the socio-cultural and physical production of planned capital cities through the theoretical lens of feminism. In Trophy Cities: A Feminist Perspective on New Capitals (Edward Elgar, 2021), Dorina Pojani evaluates the historical, spatial and symbolic manifestations of new capital cities, as well as the everyday experiences of those living there, to shed light on planning processes, outcomes and contemporary planning issues. Chapters explore...
Jun 16, 2022•45 min•Ep. 65
The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, equal in size to China or the United States. Yet, this arid expanse was once a verdant, pleasant land, fed by rivers and lakes. The Sahara sustained abundant plant and animal life, such as Nile perch, turtles, crocodiles, and hippos, and attracted prehistoric hunters and herders. What transformed this land of lakes into a sea of sands? When the Sahara Was Green describes the remarkable history of Earth's greatest desert--including why its climat...
Jun 10, 2022•52 min•Ep. 118
Peer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022). Schouten mapped more than 1000 roadblocks in both the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In so doing, he illuminates the relationship between road blocks and what he calls “frictions of terrain” (p 262). These frictions demonstrate how rebels, locals and state security forces interact in...
Jun 08, 2022•51 min•Ep. 134
Originally published in 1978 in Portuguese, For a New Geography is a milestone in the history of critical geography and it marked the emergence of its author, Milton Santos (1926–2001), as a major interpreter of geographical thought, a prominent Afro-Brazilian public intellectual, and one of the foremost global theorists of space. Published in the midst of a crisis in geographical thought, For a New Geography functioned as a bridge between geography’s past and its future. In advancing his vision...
Jun 08, 2022•54 min•Ep. 63
In Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Cornell UP, 2021), Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies. In the 1620s, Dutch colonial settlers brought slavery to the banks of the Hudson River and...
Jun 07, 2022•53 min•Ep. 1216
In this episode, I talk to Chris Gratien, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia, about his new book, The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2022). The Unsettled Plain studies agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined with mi...
Jun 03, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 172
The Appalachian Trail, a thin ribbon of wilderness running through the densely populated eastern United States, offers a refuge from modern society and a place apart from human ideas and institutions. But as environmental historian—and thru-hiker—Sarah Mittlefehldt argues, the trail is also a conduit for community engagement and a model for public-private cooperation and environmental stewardship. In Tangled Roots: The Appalachian Trail and American Environmental Politics (U Washington Press, 20...
Jun 02, 2022•50 min•Ep. 112
What happens when the written words of biblical scripture are transformed into experiential, choreographed environments? To answer this question, anthropologist James Bielo explores a diverse range of practices and places that “materialize the Bible,” including gardens, theme parks, shrines, museums, memorials, exhibitions, theatrical productions, and other forms of replication. Integrating ethnographic, archival, and mass media data, case studies focus primarily on U.S. Christianity from the la...
Jun 02, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 166
In Nature's Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis (University of Regina Press, 2020), Paul Huebener argues that "the environmental crisis is, in many ways, a crisis of time." From the distress cries of birds that no longer know when to migrate, to the rapid dying of coral reefs, to the quickening pace of extreme weather events, the patterns and timekeeping of the natural world are falling apart. We have broken nature's clocks. Lying hidden at the root of this pr...
Jun 01, 2022•33 min•Ep. 62
In Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine (Duke UP, 2020), Christopher Harker demonstrates that financial debt is as much a spatial phenomenon as it is a temporal and social one. Harker traces the emergence of debt in Ramallah after 2008 as part of the financialization of the Palestinian economy under Israeli settler colonialism. Debt contributes to processes through which Palestinians are kept economically unstable and subordinate. Harker draws extensively on ...
May 31, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 174
Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Plastic is not just any material—it is emblematic of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022) , Heather Davis traces plastic’s relations to geology, media, biology, and race to show how matter itself has come to be understood as pliable, d...
May 31, 2022•58 min•Ep. 113
Think of a platypus: they lay eggs (that hatch into so-called platypups), they produce milk without nipples and venom without fangs and they can detect electricity. Or a wombat: their teeth never stop growing, they poo cubes and they defend themselves with reinforced rears. Platypuses, possums, wombats, echidnas, devils, kangaroos, quolls, dibblers, dunnarts, kowaris: Australia has some truly astonishing mammals with incredible, unfamiliar features. But how does the world regard these creatures?...
May 30, 2022•50 min•Ep. 61
In The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism & Barbarism (Indigo Press, 2022), Richard Seymour, one of the UK's leading left-wing writers, gives an account of his 'ecological awakening'. A search for transcendence, beyond the illusory eternal present. These essays chronicle the kindling of ecological consciousness in a confessed ignoramus. They track the first enchantment of the author, his striving to comprehend the coming catastrophe, and his attempt to formulate a new global sen...
May 27, 2022•41 min•Ep. 141
In Unsettled Heritage: Living Next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces After the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 2022), Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors. After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidate...
May 26, 2022•39 min•Ep. 289
The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans. The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age i...
May 25, 2022•59 min•Ep. 57
New York City is a preeminent global city, serving as the headquarters for hundreds of multinational firms and a world-renowned cultural hub for fashion, art, and music. It is among the most multicultural cities in the world and also one of the most segregated cities in the United States. The people that make this global city function—immigrants, people of color, and the working classes—reside largely in the so-called outer boroughs, outside the corporations, neon, and skyscrapers of Manhattan. ...
May 24, 2022•58 min•Ep. 187
Rivers host vibrant multispecies communities in their waters and along their banks, and, according to queer-trans-feminist river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, their future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty, and dynamism. At the intersection of river sciences, queer and trans theory, and environmental justice, Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice (U Washington Press, 2022) explores river cultures and politics at five sites of water conflict and restorat...
May 23, 2022•44 min•Ep. 60
Corey Byrnes’ Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges (Columbia University Press, 2019) is a work of considerable historical and disciplinary depth. Byrnes brings together the Tang dynasty poetry of Du Fu, Song travel writing about the same, late Qing cartographic ventures, texts written by Western travelers in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as contemporary Chinese film and landscape art (among many other sources) to analyze how the Three Gorges region has been wr...
May 19, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 28
The important new book by Alicia Puglionesi , In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022), is a fat sampler of episodes that show how origin stories get made, what happens when white-supremacist origin stories are mistaken for empirical fact, and how the political impacts persist. The book is decidedly anti-capitalist; resoundingly anti-colonial. It is an invitation not to jettison story-work, but to imagine, collectively, origin stories of the presen...
May 18, 2022•59 min•Ep. 107
Immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse—yet, in most cases, the things we believe about immigration are based largely on myth, not facts. Using the tools of modern data analysis and ten years of pioneering research, Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success (Public Affairs, 2022) provides new evidence about the past and present of the American Dream, debunking myths fostered by political opportunism and senti...
May 18, 2022•48 min•Ep. 103
Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction. Here Bosworth argues that p...
May 16, 2022•45 min•Ep. 59
The American Association of Geographers (AAG) is a non-profit scientific and educational society aimed at advancing the understanding, study, and importance of geography and related fields. Its headquarters is located in Washington, D.C. The organization was founded on December 29, 1904, in Philadelphia. As of 2020, the association has more than 10,000 members, from nearly 100 countries. Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder and President of the AAG. Cal...
May 12, 2022•31 min•Ep. 61
In 2002, a government-owned Senegalese ferry named the Joola capsized in a storm off the coast of The Gambia in a tragedy that killed 1,863 people and left 64 survivors, only one of them female. The Joola caused more human suffering than the Titanic yet no scholarly research to date has explored the political and environmental conditions in which this African crisis occurred. Africa’s Joola Shipwreck: Causes and Consequences of a Humanitarian Disaster (Lexington Books, 2020) investigates the roo...
May 11, 2022•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 130
Saronik talks to Shweta Krishnan , doctoral candidate in Anthropology at George Washington University. She speaks about how she uses Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization in her work on the emergent religious discourse of Donyipolo in the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. Shweta thinks with the geological metaphors and mythological stories of the Mising and Adi tribes, and brings them into conversation with Deleuze and others. Donyipolo (sometimes referre...
May 10, 2022•19 min•Ep. 33
