What We're Reading

Antoney Bell, McGill University

Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

Lise Lowe’s The Intimacies of the Four Continents examines the obscure and interconnected global processes that linked Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa and created the conditions for nineteenth-century Western liberalism. Lowe uses this era of transition from mercantile colonialism and transatlantic slavery to liberal free trade and overseas Empire as a framework for understanding the development of modern Western polity and the foundations of global history. In many ways, the interconnected nature of these four continents has become relatively obscure in modern Eurocentric historiography due to racial classifications and state interests that formed colonial archives and historical narratives, and profoundly shaped national histories by suppressing any evidence of these interconnected histories.

Aimé Césaire and Robin D.G. Kelly, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: NYU Press, 2000).

Discourse on Colonialism is a foundational piece of literatures in the Black radical tradition. It is a critical racial intervention from African descended writers of the former French colonies who opposed colonial rule and the universal oppression of racialized peoples. In this canonical text, Aimé Cesaire makes a compelling argument, declaring that imperialism and colonialism were not centered on civilizing “inferior” races. Colonial capitalist rule was a system of brutality, economic greed, and exploitation that pulled the masterclass deeper into barbarism through slavery and genocidal violence. This violence creates a void that eventually leads to the decadence of Western societies. Cesaire further argues that, contrary to mainstream liberal narratives, the rise of European fascism during Second World War was not an anomaly in the linear progression of modernity and freedom. European Fascism was rooted in a colonial capitalist economy that had engrained violence and brutality in the world order since the dawn of modernity. Western intellectuals and officials had in fact tolerated and legitimized Nazism and genocidal violence towards non-Europeans until it was inflicted upon them, and Europe itself was transformed into the Third World.

W.E.B. Du Bois, “The White Worker,” Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Harcout, Brace and Company, 1935).

Du Bois explains how racial difference and class oppression led to the downfall of a unified labour movements and a proletarian revolution that challenged the political power of northern industrialists and southern planters in America. Du Bois contends that newly arriving immigrants of Irish, Jewish, and Italian descent in the northern U.S. states were unwilling to conform to a vision of racial unity among labourers, believing that they could join the petty bourgeoisie and thereby exploit other newly arriving immigrants. In turn, poor European immigrants in northern industrial cities massacred Black communities, fearing competition from cheap Black labour. Likewise, the southern White working classes could not see past racial division, overlooking Black labourers as a fellow class of exploited workers. Both European immigrants and southern white peasants, who aspired to become a part of the southern plantocracy or the northern industrial elite, were unable to recognize that these capitalists were the very elite who were exploiting them. Thus, the inability of the white man to cope with the Black man turned American “democracy into Roman imperialism and fascism,” further entrenching caste and oligarchy into a society where the haute bourgeoisie inconspicuously controls the masses through racial division and class struggle.

Anirban Karak, New York University.

Paula López Caballero and Arianda Acevedo-Rodrigo eds. Beyond Alterity: Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico (2018)

This superb and timely collection of essays challenges the easy and almost automatic identification of indigeneity with radical alterity. The supposed otherness of indigenous communities gets reinforced through the idea that they have always constituted themselves through alternative politics: ecological, communal, anti-capitalist and so on. The chapters in this volume show that a variety of social experiences remain marginalized in analysis because they do not coincide with the alterity that is in principle ascribed to indigenous groups. Both Emilio Kourí and Gabriel Torres-Mazuera, for instance, demonstrate that the idea of private property in land was not as unpalatable to indigenous peoples as has been hitherto assumed, and that in the gradual move away from communal landholding and towards capitalism, the lines of division were primarily political and socio-economic, and not “racial” or “ethnic.” Although the volume is focused on Mexico, it has major implications for historiography overall, because it raises serious questions about whether the categories of “capitalism” and “colonialism”/“settler colonialism” can simply be assumed to be congruent at all times.

Josef Burton, “Team Qatar Wanted Immigrant Players – Not Citizens.” Foreign Policy Magazine, December 16, 2022

Josef Burton argues that Qatar’s treatment of the players on its national soccer team is a symptom of the long-term erosion of citizenship rights in the region. Reuters, “Billionaire Adani to Control Nearly 65% of NDTV as Founders Sell Stake,” December 23, 2022

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who hails from the same state (Gujarat) as India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has close ties with the government, has acquired majority stakes in New Delhi Television Ltd. (NDTV). The company is highly respected, and considered by many to be the last bastion of journalistic independence among the major TV networks in India. Amidst speculation about how the takeover will affect the autonomy of NDTV, the founders Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy have released this statement, stating that they are hopeful Mr. Adani will preserve the values of “trust, credibility, and independence.” Others do not seem to share the same optimisim, however. A few weeks ago, one of India’s most well-known TV presenters, Ravish Kumar, quit NDTV, citing the hostile takeover as the precipitating cause. It remains to be seen what Mr. Adani does with this newest addition to his ever-expanding empire.

Joseph Satish, University of Hyderabad.

Cherylann Molla, "The young Indians saving crumbling ancestral homes", BBC News

Young Indians are trying to shine a spotlight on centuries-old homes to save them from being demolished, and erased from collective memory. They are documenting the buildings on Instagram, where families share interesting stories about the places they have called home, and sometimes even brainstorm how to crowdsource funds to maintain them.

Maxime Polleri, "Our contaminated future", Aeon

In Fukushima, communities are adapting to life in a time of permanent pollution: a glimpse of what’s to come for us all

Alexandra Witze, "Fifty years after astronauts left the Moon, they are going back. Why?", Nature

The launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission aims to rekindle the spirit of Apollo a half century after the United States left the lunar surface. As ever, science is the least of the driving forces.