What We're Reading This Week
Mahia Bashir, London School of Economics and Political Science
Uilleam Blacker, Ukrainian Tales, History Today
Blacker offers a synoptic account of Russia’s imperial anxieties about “unruly borderlands”—Crimea, Poland and Ukraine—during the reign of Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century.
Perry Blankson, Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-African Socialism, Tribune
A succinct recounting of Kwame Nkrumah’s legacy on his 49th death anniversary underscoring his commitment towards a united free Africa, his critique of neocolonial order, his fall from grace and drift towards autocratic rule, and exile from the homeland whose liberation he had spearheaded in 1957.
Tom Menger, “Routes of Violence: Transimperial Mobility and Colonial War in the British, German, and Dutch Empires, c.1880-1913”, Transimperial History Blog
An exposition delineating the inter-imperial transfers of knowledge and actors of colonial warfare between fin-de-Siecle European empires in Africa and South-East Asia, and highlighting the centrality of peripheries and margins of empires in the epistemic osmosis.
Tiger Zhifu Li, University of Sydney
Eryk Bagshaw and Sean Na, "Throwing uppercuts, ‘K-Trump’ candidate divides South Korea on gender", Sydney Morning Herald
Yoon Suk-yeol’s signature move is bold, angry and ambitious. The front-runner populist has vowed to abolish the Gender Equality Ministry.
Priti Gupta & Ben Morris, "Can tech help revive India's 'crumbling' health system?", BBC News
Much of the chaos back then can be attributed to lack of resources, according to Indian health care workers.
Pre-pandemic, India reported one of the lowest levels of public spending on healthcare in the world.
Cheng Yuanzhou, "China obtains global gravity field data using home-made satellite for first time", People's Daily
Tianqin-1, China’s first satellite for space-based gravitational wave detection, recently collected global gravity field data, marking the first time China has obtained such data by self-developed satellite, according to Luo Jun, chief scientist of China’s Tianqin program for space gravitational wave detection.
Antoney Bell, McGill University
Sudhir Chella Rajan, “High Crimes and Cabals,” Aeon
From corporate giants that deny rising greenhouse gas emissions to major financial firms that went unscathed after the Wall Street Bailout, Sudhir characterizes grand corruption as tight networks of wealthy and powerful elites who “maintain informal relationships with key actors in society” to strengthen their economic and political interests. These networks of elites generate a slow societal decay through established patterns of economic exploitation and political corruption, further entrenching rising wealth inequalities and cultural divides.
Patrick Gathara, “Covering Ukraine: A mean streak of racist exceptionalism,” Al Jazerra
As conflict rages between Russia and Ukraine, the war between the two Slavic nations has exposed several blatantly racist comments from Western government officials and media outlets towards refugees from the Global South. This rhetoric of white European exceptionalism has been used to justify the warm welcome accorded to European refugees in sharp contrast to the hostile reception experienced by refugees from Africa and the Middle East. Gathara argues that Western countries ironically come to the aid of European refugees suffering from Russian aggression, “while shutting out those [refugees] generated by their own invasions and occupations...”
Vinson Cunningham, “Cornel West Sees A Spiritual Decay in the Culture,” The New Yorker
A conversation with acclaimed American philosopher and social critic Dr. Cornel West who recently wrote, in his letter of resignation to Harvard University, about a “spiritual bankruptcy” that is affecting our market-driven universities after being labelled an anti-Semitic for speaking out on behalf of Palestine. West discusses several topics that are causing a spiritual decay in modern society including the culture of conformity and careerism that has plagued the academy, the corruption of the electoral political system, and the hypocrisy of NATO’s moral critique of Russian imperialism. A must read…