What We're Reading This Week
Tiger Zhifu Li, University of Sydney
Marissa Carruthers, “Angkor: Asia's ancient ‘Hydraulic City,’” BBC.
Angkor Wat attracts millions of visitors a year, but most of them know little of the intricate and vast water system that led to the empire’s rise and demise.
Cameron Gooley, “‘Urgent’ reform needed after ten-year-old detained at infamous Don Dale,” Sydney Morning Herald.
Australia’s Children’s Commissioner demands the age children can be jailed rise to at least 14 after a 10-year-old boy held in infamous Don Dale youth detention centre. This incident highlights the racial tensions between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals in Australia.
Fan Anqi and Cao Siqi, “Beijing to provide cutting-edge tech to Africa on climate change, outlines promising, practical ties,” Global Times.
China and Africa have pledged to deepen cooperation on climate change in a joint declaration, announcing a slew of cutting-edge technologies to be provided by China to help Africa address climate change-related issues.
Anandita Chandra, “The invasion of Iraq: How to sell a war,” EPW Engage.
This comic is based on Sharat G Lin’s paper, “US lying about Halabja: Justifying the invasion of Iraq,” which argues that the central reasons the US stated for invading Iraq were “false and fabricated.”
Cindy Ewing, University of Toronto
Yousef M. Aljamal, “Hunger strikes show the history of Irish-Palestinian solidarity,” Al Jazeera.
Irish solidarity with Palestinians has a long history rooted in the late nineteenth-century Irish struggle against British empire, which deployed similar tactics and controls on both populations.
Jessica Namakkal, “Utopia’s settler colonialism problem,” Los Angeles Review of Books.
The commune movements of the 1960s, such Auroville in India, while pursuing revolutionary utopianism and an escape from Western capitalism, produced cycles of settler colonialism that erased the Indigenous pasts of such lands.
Rachel Anne Gillett, “What Josephine Baker’s induction to the French Panthéon reveals—and obscures,” The Washington Post.
The celebrated induction of Josephine Baker into the Panthéon belies the history of the French empire’s differential treatment of colonial subjects and Baker’s sometime exemption from its racial practices.
Collin Bernard, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Marco D’Eramo, “Rule by target,” Sidecar.
In this short reflection on Johann Chapoutot’s book Free to Obey (2020) about Nazi management practices and their afterlives in post-1945 Germany, D’Eramo explores whether a “frugal state” can be totalitarian. As the Gestapo and SS expanded their area of control during the Second World War, many intellectuals, academics, and bureaucrats developed strategies of management and administration that sought to deal with enormous logistical challenges without a comparable expansion in state officials. By reflecting on the key thinkers behind these ideas, D’Eramo offers a correction to theories of totalitarianism.
Adil Mauro, “Il colonialism italiano raccontato ai ragazzi,” Jacobin Italia.
This article explores the continued disconnect between a circumscribed world of academics, intellectuals, and activists whose understanding of Italian colonialism have evolved greatly and a wider population whose views on the topic have changed little. Italian history curriculum has failed to reflect the academic consensus that has challenged common myths about the shallowness of Italian colonialism which claim it had little impact on Italians and should be seen as an unfortunate parenthesis attached to the fascist era. Despite the best efforts of authors and activists today, failure to discredit these myths is evident today in many public statements by politicians and others.