What We're Reading This Week
Credit: Diego Velázquez via Museo Nacional del Prado / My Modern Met
Henry Jacob, University of Cambridge
Michael Faciejew and Ricardo Roque, “The violence of collections,” The Order of Multitudes
In this fascinating interview, Ricardo Roque reflects on his research on “violence, colonialism, and race science;” this conversation provides lessons on the production, presentation, and preservation of knowledge and power.
Saul Dubow and William Beinart, The scientific imagination in South Africa: 1700 to the Present, Cambridge University Press
In this impressive monograph, Saul Dubow and William Beinart demonstrate their brilliant grasp of the key place scientific knowledge holds in the formation of modern South African politics, history, and society. Given its balance between the local and the global, this work should appeal to scholars from a variety of geographical and methodological specialties.
Carla Guerrón-Montero, From temporary migrants to permanent attractions: Tourism, cultural heritage, and Afro-Antillean identities in Panama, University of Alabama Press
Through a blend of deep archival work and ethnographic research, Carla Guerrón-Montero masterfully explores the role of Afro-Antilleans in the creation of Panamanian discourses of national identity and transnational tourism.
Martin Crevier, University of Cambridge
David Edgerton, “Why the left must abandon the myth of British decline,” New Statesman
Edgerton reconsiders a past debate between E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson and takes on what he sees as a particular form of British exceptionalism espoused by the left.
Susan Pederson, “Floculent and feculent,” London Review of Books
On Chris Otter’s Diet for a large planter: Industrial Britain, food systems and world ecology and the way in which industrial Britain played an outsize role in the creation of today’s planetary food systems.
Jean-François Nadeau and Dave Noël, “La délivrance de la Nouvelle-France,” Le Devoir
How Napoleon III’s France and its literature fostered, among some patriotic French-Canadian writers, the nostalgia of a lost colonial link.