What We're Reading This Week
Mahdi Chowdhury, University of Cambridge
Rosie Bsheer, “Historicizing hope/lessness in revolutionary times,” Jadaliyya.
Connecting the author’s research on mid-century Saudi social mobilizations that were crushed and expunged from state records to the ten-year anniversary of the Arab uprisings, Bsheer reflects on how “future historians write about our contemporary uprisings” and how to navigate our “history of the present” mired by complexities of grief, uncertainty, and hopelessness.
Nazmul Sultan, “Independence, freedom, liberation: The promise of Bangladesh’s founding,” Economic and Political Weekly.
Sultan’s essay looks at the entangled histories of discourses of “independence,” “freedom,” and “liberation” that underwrote the founding articulation of Bangladesh as a state in 1971.
Ajay Kamalakaran, “An Ethiopian emperor’s special Kerala connection,” Onmanorama.
Through the figure of Paul Verghese, Kamalakaran charts the connections between Malayalis and Ethiopians through the common bonds of Orthodox Christianity and figures such as Haile Selassie.
Sugata Bose, “In search of young Asia,” Stanford Center for South Asia.
A globe-trotting lecture on interwar pan-Asianism by Bose which charts the itinerary of the hitherto untranslated travelogues of Benoy Kumar Sarkar.
Martin Crevier, University of Cambridge
Rana Mitter, “Truly global view of World War II,” The Critic.
Rana Mitter reviews Richard Overy Blood and Ruins. He focuses particularly on Overy’s claims that the Second World War was a global conflict not about democracy but about empires and their fate.
David Motadel, “Nazis on the run,” New York Review of Books.
Motadel on recent Nazi trials in Germany and the long whitewashing of the Nazi past.
Caroline Desruisseaux, “Définir l’«environnement» à l’ère de la décolonisation et de l’anthropocène,” Histoire Engagé.
Since the 1970s, interactions between Indigenous and environmentalist groups have augmented. How, asks Desruisseaux, has this contributed to the construction of “the environment” and of indigeneity as ontological categories?