New Books in Geography

What’s love got to do with it? Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by feminist political geographer Sara Smith tell us - everything! Smith’s book centers intimacy in the consideration of geopolitics which is otherwise only seen as a game between nation states. The accounts of realized and failed inter-faith love across generations of Ladakhi Buddhists and Ladakhi Muslims in Smith’s book become the ground for the contesting of demographic fantasies, territorial futures and generation vertigo. Written with a careful consideration of the complexities of territorial politics in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh and their intersections, Smith’s book also provides insights into the vulnerabilities of a minority identity--Shia Muslims and Buddhists, as well as its entanglements with the scalar politics of majoritarianism. By ‘populating territory’, Intimate Geopolitics is able to make clear the interweaving of reprosexuality, aspirations and intimacy as a territorial site in what is otherwise seen as a ‘remote’ region but crucial to the logic of the nation-state and its sovereign future.Sara Smith is associate professor of geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Today we speak with Luca Scholz, a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester. Dr. Scholz has varied interests: wide-ranging data analysis, the collection of that data, broad trends over space and time, all of which intersect in the topic of today’s talk, his first monograph, Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire (Oxford University Press).The book draws on sources discovered in twenty archives, from newly unearthed drawings to first-hand accounts by peasants, princes, and prisoners. Scholz's maps shift the focus from the border to the thoroughfare to show that controls of moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century.Uncovering a forgotten chapter in the history of free movement, the author presents a new look at the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe. We delve deeply into the issues under discussion, particularly the conceptions of borders and free movements. We hope you enjoy our conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Peter Naldrett, author of Around the Coast in 80 Days: A Guide to Britain’s Best Coastal Towns, Beaches, Cliffs, & Headlands (Bloomsbury) begins his enjoyable trip around the British coast with the notion that reaching the seaside for most Britons is a matter of only a 1-2 hour car ride. And the foreign reader begins to understand just why Britain’s seaside towns are so engrained in the nation’s culture.The appeal of the bracing English seaside as an attractive destination began in the eighteenth century, when resorts such as Scarborough attracted city dwellers with promises of renewed health and vigor and cures for ailments as diverse as gout and barrenness. From that time, port and coastal cities took on more significance than just places from which to embark on a journey or return from one.The energetic Victorian Age, with its rapid expansion of industry and transportation, made a journey to the seaside affordable and accessible for everyone from farm workers in the Midlands to factory workers from Manchester. Coastal towns vied with one another to deliver the most appealing experiences for visitors with esplanades, promenades, and piers and amusement parks, theaters with headline talent, and hotels and restaurants to lure visitors to extend their stay overnight.Peter Naldrett brings a boundless enthusiasm for his expedition: to circle Britain and curate 80 of the best seaside venues, and from these extrapolate three or four of the most iconic and enjoyable experiences. The result is an enjoyable and absorbing read whether you are in an armchair or hurtling around the M25 trying to decide which exit to take.Naldrett is an engaging writer with a total command of, and delight in, his subject. His exhaustive research has yielded something for almost everyone: sports fans, history buffs, and nature lovers. If walking is your thing, Around the Coast in 80 Days reveals not only the well-worn coastal paths, but lesser known deserted stretches of beach where you can revel in solitude with only birds and seals for company. There are also treacherous tidal walks, which can leave you stranded if you are not mindful of the timetables.The appealing pages of Around the Coast in 80 Days are heaving with intriguing sights, sounds, quirky traditions, delectable local fare, and historical milestones. We discover the lurid charms of the Goth Fest, the origins of the deep-fried Mars Bar and the tongue twister, “she sells seashells by the seashore,” and Britain’s smallest and largest pub.Naldrett explores the Britain’s coastline in a clockwise trip that begins in Liverpool and ends in Wales. The book is divided into nine regions as Naldrett makes his way through the region’s coastal cities.As one who loves to explore all of Britain’s highways and byways, I was delighted to reunite with old friends such as Rhossili and Folkestone, Padstow and St. Andrews, and added quite a few new venues to my bucket (and spade) list. At a very minimum, there are at least 80 fish and chip shops to sample, and isn’t that all the reason you need to embark on an exploration of Britain’s delightful coast? With Peter Naldrett as your guide, you can’t go wrong!Peter Naldrett is a seasoned travel writer and author of Days Out Underground: 50 subterranean adventures beneath Britain. To learn more, visit http://peter-naldrett.co.uk.Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Jeremy Black, the prolific professor of history at Exeter University, has published a stunningly attractive volume entitled, Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s World through Maps (Bloomsbury, 2018). This lavishly illustrated volume compiles maps of the world, of Europe, of England, of English counties, and of English villages, to illustrate its author’s detailed description of the history of cartography and of the ways in which space and locality was represented in the medieval period and early modernity. In this podcast, Professor Black talks about the book’s preparation, and how illustrated works require different kinds of writing processes from conventional monographs, as well as highlighting those parts of the history of cartography that he finds most compelling.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Over the last couple of decades, a number of books written both by the academics and journalists  have appeared on many dysfunctions of the Pakistani state, a few of them even predicting why and how and when it is going to collapse. Against this grain, Ayesha Siddiqi’s new book, In the Wake of Disaster Islamists, the State and a Social Contract in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is a forceful meditation on a number of key issues around the social contract, citizenship, and state provisions such as disaster relief and social protection. The book helps understand why, despite its many limitations, Pakistani state remains central to the lives of those it seeks to govern.Through an intensive ethnography conducted in the three of the worst hit districts – in the wake of the flooding disasters of 2010-2011 – in the Southern-most region of Pakistan’s Sindh province, Siddiqi demonstrates that the state and citizenship, even when expressed in vernacular idiom which doesn’t lend itself neatly to predominantly Eurocentric and structuralist sensibilities have meaning and resonance for the people. People look up to Sarkar (the “state”) both when they make claims for day to day provisions and also in the times of extraordinary distress. Though not always in time and effectively, as instantiated by the universal cash grants given to everyone who might have suffered in three districts of Badin, Thatha and Tharparkar, as a consequence of the floods, Sarkar also responds.Advancing a critical anthropology of the state, the book makes three major contentions: First, as already suggested, contrary to what the ‘master narratives’ claim, state remains very much present in the lives of the people even in the peripheral regions of Pakistan. Even when state remains unable to satisfy people’s demands, the fact that people have high expectations of it testifies to its centrality in their moral and political imaginaries. Second, since the local imaginaries of the state aren’t that of a monolithic entity represented by a coherence of institutional structures and purposes, major political parties and local influentials come to acquire some of the key “state-effects”, hence relations of clientship, to the extent that they remain relevant to the socio-political lives of many, aren’t necessarily an anathema to citizenship, instead they might actually be one of the constituent elements of a postcolonial social contract. Third, the specter of Islamist organizations coming in to occupy the space created by the presumed ‘absence’ of the state has no real grounding. This is so not because the state remains very much ‘present’ but also because the Islamists are afforded visibility only in so far as they are coopted by the state to partake in the relief activities.The book will be an indispensable reading for anyone interested in grasping the socio-political complexities inherent to the postcolonial states, societies, and their mutualities beyond the dominant tropes.Ali Mohsin is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva. His research focuses on the politics of poverty, inequality and social protection in Pakistan. He can be reached at ali.mohsin@graduateinstitute.ch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In this episode Jana Byars speaks with Elizabeth Horodowich, Professor of History at New Mexico State University, about her new book, The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and Print Culture in the Age of Encounters.We explore her primary argument, that Venetians used their knowledge, and their ability to employ that knowledge, to write Venetians into the story. Along the way, we talk about grand historical narratives, the Venetian archives, and what leads an historian to her topics. We end up with a quick preview of her newest work, Amerasia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

John Stratton Hawley's new book Krishna's Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2020) is about a deeply beloved place-many call it the spiritual capital of India. Located at a dramatic bend in the River Yamuna, a hundred miles from the center of Delhi, Vrindavan is the spot where the god Krishna is believed to have spent his childhood and youth. For Hindus it has always stood for youth writ large-a realm of love and beauty that enables one to retreat from the weight and harshness of world. Now, though, the world is gobbling up Vrindavan. Delhi's megalopolitan sprawl inches closer day by day-half the town is a vast real-estate development-and the waters of the Yamuna are too polluted to drink or even bathe in. Temples now style themselves as theme parks, and the world's tallest religious building is under construction in Krishna's pastoral paradise. What happens when the Anthropocene Age makes everything virtual? What happens when heaven gets plowed under? Like our age as a whole, Vrindavan throbs with feisty energy, but is it the religious canary in our collective coal mine?For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com/scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Alexander Bukh’s These Islands Are Ours: The Social Construction of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia (Stanford University Press 2020) provides critical historical perspective on the social construction of territorial disputes between Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia. In his analysis of Japan’s rows over the “Northern Territories” (with Russia), the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (China), and Takeshima/Dokdo (Korea), Bukh reveals in detail how the nonstate actors that he calls “national identity entrepreneurs” manufacture and maintain national salience for what are often militarily, economically, and geographically relatively unimportant territories, moving them from the national margins to the core in times of crisis. Bukh follows an often colorful cast of civil society actors as he places each dispute within the macro-level geopolitical climate of its times as well as the micropolitics of national crises and tensions between national regions and capitals. By marshaling a broad range of sources and compiling the histories of these disparate but interlinked disputes, These Islands makes a significant and welcome contribution to international relations and security audiences as well as specialists in the East Asian region. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (UNC Press, 2020), traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants to Amazonian Bolivia during the twentieth century, exploring how each of these communities forged and contested the landscape of agrarian citizenship in the country.The lowlands around Santa Cruz became a focal point for high modernist development projects in Bolivia, and as Ben Nobbs-Thiessen argues, such a vision of development was appealing to a broad range of actors: both the left(ish) Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, in power from 1952-1964, as well as the (often) right wing military governments that succeeded it, were deeply concerned with developing Bolivia through colonization of of the lowlands. Starting in the 1970s, however, as the state started to pull back from the day to day operations of such projects, it opened up space for NGOs and what Nobbs-Thiessen calls, "faith-based development practitioners," many of whom were connected to settler projects. Nobbs-Thiessen shows how each of these different communities came together after World War II, and each, for a time, came to play an important role in the development of Santa Cruz and the lowlands as a regional powerhouse in Bolivia and the Amazon region.By situating Andean migrants and development practitioners alongside other subnational migratory communities, Nobbs-Thiessen offers an exciting contribution to Latin American Studies, Migration History, and Environmental History. Nobbs-Thiessen’s wide-ranging work is attuned to the dynamics of both settler colonialism and internal colonialism as forms of migration, and contributes to a body of literature that refuses to provincialize Bolivian history. Several chapters would work well as standalone, teachable articles: The book begins with a chapter exploring the imagined frontier, through pamphlets and films and ends with the growth of the Mennonite-dominated soy industry in the transborder Amazonian region some have called the United Republic of Soybeans. Nobbs-Thiessen’s Landscape of Migration offers important background for both the devastating wildfires of 2019 and the Santa Cruz-led uprising that overthrew president Evo Morales in the months that followed.Ben Nobbs-Thiessen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Winnipeg.Elena McGrath is an Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography