What We're Reading
Zaib Aziz, University of South Florida.
Adom Getachew, Naomi Kebede, "Monument Gallery", The American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 2, June 2022, Pages 831–846.
Part of the Monuments Series for the AHR's Engaged History, this short piece takes the reader through public campaigns around monuments from around the world including in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Belgium, and the United States.
Nelson Lichtenstein, The Largest Strike in the History of American Higher Ed, Dissent Magazine, Nov 22nd 2022.
This fall 48,000 student workers at the University of California went on strike. Nelson Lichtenstein discusses the implications of this unprecedented mobilization on the future of higher education in America.
Laleh Khalili, In Sharm El-Sheikh, London Review of Books, December 1st 2022.
The COP27 meeting was intended to provide for world leaders to urgently collaborate on the urgent challenge of climate change. But Khalili's reports on a meeting that appears to be dominated by the very corporate and political interests that have led the world to this catastrophe.
Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, The Graduate Institute Geneva.
Pitts, J. (2021). “Law of Nations, World of Empires: The Politics of Law’s Conceptual Frames.” In A. Brett, M. Donaldson, & M. Koskenniemi (Eds.), History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International (pp. 191-207). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
In her recent chapter, Pitt’s offers her latest salvo in a long series of explorations of the ambitious intersections between liberalism and empire. In particular, through a reading of Emer Vattel’s Droit des Gens and its reception in the British Empire, she seeks to understand the ambivalent promises of international law in global history.
Gerstle, G. (2022) The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
As a Latin American, I come from a region which has long been saturated by debates regarding the (im)pertinence of ‘neoliberalism’ as a category of analysis. In his recent monograph, Gerstle offers a compelling case in defense of the purchase of the notion of a ‘neoliberal political order’ to make sense of the transformations of domestic Unitedstatesean and international politics during the so-called ‘American century.’
Tafuri, M. (1987). The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Translated by Pellegrino d’Acierno & Robert Connolly. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
While remarkably different from the two previous readings, this week I also finished a course in architectural theory & history devoted to Tafuri’s The Sphere and the Labyrinth. In this riveting monograph (originally published in Italian in 1980), Tafuri offers a challenging but rewarding account of the rise and fall of the project of avant-garde architecture. Due to the way in which this book places different world-systems of architectural production in conversation (for example, Soviet urban planning and the pioneer appearance of New York’s skyscrapers as part of a common set of avant-garde adventures), it has much to offer to wider audiences of historians and social theorists.