New Books in Geography

By most accounts, Blackdom, New Mexico existed from 1900-1930. However, as historian and artist Dr. Timothy Nelson argues in his new book, the Black colony founded in the then-territory of New Mexico has a much longer history and many afterlives, even after the residents moved away. In Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930 (Texas Tech University Press, 2023), Nelson weaves together the history of a particular place with philosophy, personal vulnerability, and the historiography of the American West to provide a unique account of the rise, decline, and continuance of Blackdom as both myth and reality. A unique book, Blackdom, New Mexico places Nelson as the storyteller front and center in the narrative, tracing his own life and family history growing up in Compton, California and training as a historian in New Mexico, and connecting these threads with the history of Black colonization along what he terms the Afro-Frontier. Blackdom, New Mexico is an excellent example of how even when the past seems dead in the past, its legacies and ghosts live on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Darwin called the Galápagos archipelago “a little world within itself,” unaffected by humans and set on its own evolutionary path – strange, diverse, and unique. Islands are repositories of unique cultures and ways of living, seed banks built up in relative isolation. Island is an archipelago of ideas, drawing from research and first-hand experience living, working, and travelling to islands as far afield as Madeira and Cape Verde, Orkney and Svalbard, the Aran Islands and the Gulf Islands, Hong Kong and Manhattan.Islands have long been viewed as both paradise and prison – we project onto them our deepest desires for freedom and escape, but also our greatest fears of forced isolation. This book asks: what can islands teach us about living sustainably, being alone or coexisting with others, coping with uncertainty, and making do?Island (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Julian Hanna, part of the Object Lessons series, explores these and other questions and ideas, but is constructed above all from the stories and experiences gathered during a lifetime of island hopping.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Whether it’s in commerce or conflict, today’s world pays rapt attention to the Persian Gulf. But the centrality of the Gulf to world history stretches far beyond the oil age–its ancient ports created the first proper trading system and the launching point for the spread of global Islam.Allen James Fromherz’s new book The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present (University of California Press, 2024) puts the Gulf at the center of a centuries-long story of world history, showing how societies across the region worked around–or even shrugged off–empires to create a system of international commerce that persists today.Allen James Fromherz is Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at Georgia State University. He is author of Qatar: A Modern History (Georgetown University Press: 2012) and Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh University Press: 2010) and editor of The Gulf in World History: Arabia at the Global Crossroads (Edinburgh University Press: 2018)You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Center of the World. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms and libraries reify-or subvert-dominant social structures like caste and gender? These are the questions that Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala (Routledge, 2023) explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation and personal interviews, this book traces the transformation of public spaces through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume focuses on how 'modernity' has also been a struggle for access to public spaces, and non-institutional spaces like teashops, markets, public roads, temple grounds, reading-rooms and libraries have all been crucial to how political culture was shaped, and how dominant hegemonies-caste, class or capital-have been challenged. It suggests that the secular public sphere that emerged in the last century in Kerala was a result of the constant negotiations between conflicting ideas which were put to test in these social spaces. At a time when digital spaces are fast replacing physical ones, this book is a timely reminder of the struggles that led to the emergence of secular public spaces in Kerala. It contributes to similar studies on public space that have emerged from other parts of the world over the last decades. A major contribution to understanding modern India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of social history, political science, political sociology, gender studies, linguistics, and South Asian studies.DISCOUNT CODES: Routledge has offered two discount codes that you can use to purchase this book on their website. The discount codes are ESA03 (UK) and SMA24 (USA).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke UP, 2023), Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia's volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries to show how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork at Javanese volcanoes and in scientific observatories, he explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the earth. In this way, Bobbette decenters the significance of Western scientists to expand our understanding of the evolution of planetary thought and rethinks the politics of geological knowledge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting where they are. For millennia, these four directions have been foundational to our travel, navigation and exploration and are central to the imaginative, moral and political geography of virtually every culture in the world. Yet they are far more subjective and various – sometimes contradictory – than we might realise.Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024) by Dr. Jerry Brotton takes the reader on a journey of directional discovery. Dr. Brotton reveals why Hebrew culture privileges east; why Renaissance Europeans began drawing north at the top of their maps; why the early Islam revered the south; why the Aztecs used five colour-coded cardinal directions; and why no societies, primitive or modern, have ever orientated themselves westwards. He ends by reflecting on our digital age in which we, the little blue dot on the screen, have become the most important compass point. Throughout, Dr. Brotton shows that the directions reflect a human desire to create order and that they only have meaning, literally and metaphorically, depending on where you stand.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

With Go to Hell: A Traveler's Guide to Earth's Most Otherworldly Destinations (National Geographic, 2024) by Erika Engelhaupt, you can go to hell and back with the help of this one-of-a-kind illustrated travel guide to real-life underworld destinations around the globe. Full of intrigue, lore, and plenty of brimstone and fire, each of the 54 destinations—from Antarctica's Blood Falls to a tropical hell on Grand Cayman island—will be worth adding to your devilish bucket list.The world over, humans have been fascinated by hell in some form or another for thousands of years and across cultures. Now, with this illustrated collection, you can add hell to your travel bucket list with more than 50 one-of-a-kind underworld destinations, from ghost towns where Halloween is always in season, to ancient caves long viewed as entrances to Hades, to volcanoes that brim with fire and legend.Don’t be scared: Along with the fascinating history of each location, star author Erika Engelhaupt also offers practical tips to make the most of your visit to the underbelly of the world.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today’s interconnected landscape of high-frequency trading and cryptocurrency, the story of finance has always taken place on an international stage. Finance is one of the most globalized and networked of human activities, and one of the most important social technologies ever invented.Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money (Yale University Press, 2024) by Dr. Dariusz Wójcik is the first visually based book dedicated to finance and uses graphics and maps to bring the complex and abstract world of finance down to earth, showing how geography is fundamental for understanding finance, and vice versa. It illuminates the people—including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes—who have shaped our thinking about global finance; brings to life the ways that place-specific histories, laws, regulations, and institutions influence finance; shows how finance relates to innovation, globalization, and environmental change; and details how finance plays a key part in drawing the landscape of uneven development, inequality, and instability.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) grapples with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict and examines how people attempt to flourish despite and alongside continuing violence. Departing from conventional approaches to the study of disaster and conflict that have dominated academic studies of Kashmir, Omer Aijazi’s ethnography of life in the borderlands instead explores possibilities for imagining life otherwise, in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric.Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control and its surrounding mountainscapes, the book takes us to two remote mountainous valleys that have been shaped by recurring environmental disasters, as well as by the landscape of no-go zones, army barracks, and security checkpoints of the contested India/Pakistan border. Through a series of interconnected scenes from the lives of five protagonists, all of whom are precariously situated within their families or societies and rarely enjoy the expected protections of state or community, Aijazi reveals the movements, flows, and intimacies sustained by a landscape that enables alternative modes of life. Blurring the distinctions between story, theory, and activism, he explores what emerges when theory becomes a project of seeing and feeling from the non-normative standpoint of those who, like the book’s protagonists, do not subscribe to the rules by which most others have come to know the world.Bringing the critical study of disaster into conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and the capaciousness of affect theory, held accountable to Black studies and Indigenous studies, Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labor through which communities living with disaster refuse the conditions of death imposed upon them and create viable lives for themselves, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What is the future of the film industry? In Mobile Hollywood Labor and the Geography of Production (U California Press, 2024), Kevin Sanson, Professor of Media Studies and Head of the School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology, examines the way Hollywood film production has become a global industry. The book theorises Hollywood as a distinct spatial assemblage, and examines the consequences of the rise of global, mobile film production for places and for workers. Offering a unique perspective on the challenges of this new mode of production, alongside insights on how ‘good work’ can be defended and preserved in media industries, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in media today. The book is also available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography