New Books in Geography

Not quite a colony, not quite independent, fiercely nationalist, what is Puerto Rico’s status, exactly? Jorge Duany‘s Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers clear answers to complicated questions about Puerto Rico’s politics and history, as well as accounting for many phenomena that characterize the island today; migration to and from the island, the state of its economy, the role of language in shaping Puerto Rican identities. Whether you know nothing or a great deal, this book is sure to surprise and inform you.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Latino City: Urban Planning, Politics, and the Grassroots (Routledge 2017) Dr. Erualdo R. Gonzalez addresses the salient issue of gentrification and its effect on immigrant and working-class populations in the city of Santa Ana, California. Centering his analysis on one of the nations most “Mexican” cities, Gonzalez tracks redevelopment discourse and practice in the city of Santa Ana over the course of four decades. Engaging the concepts of new urbanism, creative class, and transit-oriented models of planning, he explains how city officials and developers have worked in concert to displace Latina/o businesses and populations through urban revitalization efforts. Equally important, Gonzalez illuminates the grassroots response of Santa Anas Latina/o community and their effect on planning discourse and policy. Combining archival research with participant observation, Latino City provides an in-depth community study that adds to the growing body of scholarly literature referred to as Latino urbanism. David-James Gonzales (DJ) has a PhD in History from the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the intersection of Latina/o civic engagement and politics on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The world order was in crisis at mid-century. Intellectuals in England and the United States perceived the rise of totalitarianism, the Second World War, the invention of the atomic bomb, the start of the Cold War, and the end of imperial rule as threats to stability and, in some cases, to mankind itself. But these intellectuals also theorized alternative political structures, legal frameworks, and communities and, thereby, sought to invent a new world order. Or Rosenboim’s The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950 (Princeton University Press, 2017), traces this exciting and uncertain moment in international thought. For Rosenboim, the period between the start of World War II in Europe and the beginning of the U.S.-led war in Korea witnessed the emergence of “globalism” itself. The book is a deep engagement with the ideas of an eclectic assortment of intellectuals–H.G. Wells, Lewis Mumford, Raymond Aron, Friedrich Hayek, just to name a handful–who all participated in discussions of the global. For these intellectuals, the global was both a geographic and conceptual space. This space, however, had notable gaps, particularly in relation to the Global South. Given that our present “global” moment inherited these intellectuals’ categories, this book should be read by scholars of history and IR, along with anyone interested in world politics. Or Rosenboim is a Junior Research Fellow in Politics at Queens College and POLIS, both at the University of Cambridge. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Policymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, maps were a necessity for war, navigation, and countless other activities. Yet by the 1960s and 1970s, interest in maps waned while electronic coordinate systems emerged. But this was not solely a shift in technology, as William Rankin writes in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016). The shift from maps to coordinate systems, and then eventually to GPS produced novel geographical subjectivities, navigational experiences and geopolitical arrangements. It was a shift in the meaning of territory itself. By day, William Rankin is an assistant professor of history at Yale; by night, he is an award-winning cartographer, whose work you can find here. Rankin has also set up a website to accompany the book, at which readers can see the books images, data, and bibliography. Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps us understand why that matters not just for how we understand outer space, but also for how we understand the Earth and ourselves. Based on 15 months of participant observation in 2009 and 2010 that included interviews, involvement in research projects, conferences, email exchanges, informal chats, and more, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2016) guides readers through four different field sites in order to analyze the significance of four different activities of place-making therein: narrating, mapping, visualizing, and inhabiting. As we move from the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah (where Earth itself is transformed into a Martian place) to the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, to exoplanetary research at MIT, to Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, and more, we come to see how geological, digital, pedagogical, observational, and other tools help shape how we understand Mars, exoplanets, and the earth itself. It’s a fascinating study that will be of wide interest! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

As our name makes clear, the New Books Network focuses on books. And as a host who looks at contemporary literature, I have the pleasure of interviewing authors with new books, ones often published by smaller presses without the huge PR machines of larger presses and ones that consequently are often overlooked by larger media outlets. For me, thats one of the rewards of hosting at the New Books Network: I have the chance to showcase important work that you might otherwise miss, work that adds to the richness and diversity of our national literary culture. Now you might be thinking that I’m about to ask you for a donation. I’m not. Though if you want to contribute to the New Books Network and its public mission to widen the intellectual life of America, by all means please do so. We’d appreciate it. No, what I want to do is make the point that, while books from small literary presses are one place that our literary culture thrives, it’s not the only one. Crucial to our national literature are the small journals and reviews that publish our writers. These venues–and there are hundreds of them in print and, increasingly, online–foster our younger writers and promote the work of our established one, especially work that is non-commercial or experimental. Literary journals and reviews offer readers diverse voices and diverse aesthetics. They’re the forum through which our literary culture thrives and expands and reinvigorates itself. And they are usually run by editors who work for almost nothing, on almost-nothing budgets, editors who believe in literature as much as the authors they publish. Today I talk to one of those editors. Tommy Mira y Lopez is the co-founder and co-editor of Territory, a new venue that has not only taken up the time-honored task of providing readers with new work from newer writers, but that’s also creating something like a new micro-genre of literature, one that combines visual maps and literary text. If you’ve ever found yourself looking at an old map and thinking how intriguing it is or, when reading a story, if you’ve ever imagined yourself picturing its imaginary landscape, you’ll be excited to explore Territory and the new terrains of literature its fostering.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Almost daily in popular media the Muslim World is pinpointed as a homogeneous entity that stands separate and parallel to the similarly imagined West. But even scratching the surface of the idea of a Muslim World reveals the geographic, social, linguistic, and religious diversity of Muslims throughout the world. So what work is performed through the employment and use of this phrase? And in what context did the idea of the Muslim World emerge? Cemil Aydin, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tackles these questions in his wonderful new book The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, 2017). It in he weaves distant and interconnecting social, intellectual, and political histories of modern Muslims societies with clarity and detail. Altogether, he reveals the complex story of how the concept is constructed as a device intended to point to a geopolitical, religious, and civilizational unity among Muslims. The term is defined and employed by Muslim and non-Muslim actors alike across imperial and national contexts over the past nearly 150 years. In our conversation we discussed the justifications for imperial conflicts, the effects of Christian nationalistic liberation and the colonization of Muslims, orientalism, social Darwinism, the racialization of Muslims, the global role of the Ottomans, European and Russian imperialism, Muslim modernists thinkers, the effects of the World Wars, and the changing political landscape of the late 20th century. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What is a book? The answer, at first glance, may seem apparent: printed material consisting of a certain amount of pages. However, when a printed item goes under the scrutiny of readers, writers, editors, scholars, etc., the discussion gets complicated. The matter is that, when read, discussed, or analyzed, a book is situated in a specific environment that creates additional layers for consideration; furthermore, a printed item itself shapes the environment, revealing and producing further developments and proliferations. In From the Edge: Chicana/Chicano Border Literature and the Politics of Print (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Allison E. Fagan invites her readers to explore not only a magic world of the literature that arises out of collaboration of national, ethnic, political, social, literary borders, but also multilayered networks produced by books, which infiltrate readers’, writers’, editors’, publishers’, and translators’ communication. As the title prompts, From the Edge discusses border literature; however, Fagan makes a step further and includes in her analysis books which do not fall under the category of conventional border literature. Through this gesture, From the Edge broadens the area of inquiry and brings a wider scope of questions for the discussion: what is border literature and what borders do we (or should we) consider? The borders Fagan discusses and negotiates are connected with books as printed items. Outlining a theoretical framework which to some extent relies on the postmodern principles, Fagan seems to initiate a conversation about books as in-flux items: when printed and circulated among the participants of readership (understood in its broadest sense), books not only deliver different stories about writing, reading, and publishing, but also shape current discourses strengthening some aspects and weakening others. From the Edge shifts conventional margins to centers. This research offers a detailed discussion of paratextual elements: glossaries, typography, editorial paratexts, readers notes. In “My Book Has Been the Light of Day,” Fagan brings attention to recovery projects: books that were re-discovered and re-introduced to readers. While the stories about books that were once considered lost are intriguing and captivating, an academic inquiry brings forth a wide range of discussions: How are books re-discovered? How is their readership established? What do recovered books communicate about the past and present reading environments? What is accomplished through recovery projects? In her research, Fagan initiates, among others, these questions and invites readers, writers, editors, critics, scholars, translators to shift the boundaries of the existing conversations about print cultures and communication, literary traditions and language, ethnicity and nationality, self and identity. Allison E. Fagan is an assistant professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok (University of Hawaii Press, 2016), Serhat Unaldi offers a provocative and original interpretation of the relationship between space, architecture and power in one of Southeast Asia’s biggest and most complicated cities. Climbing the towers and exploring the alleyways of Siam-Ratchaprasong, that part of Bangkok famous for its gaudy malls, pretentious hotels and tourist strips, Unaldi finds that the charismatic authority of the royal institution has combined with the political economy of the capitalist marketplace to form a highly potent yet unstable admixture of elements for modern state formation. The dense concentration of forces for elite domination of Thailand in these few city blocks at once affirms and celebrates the project’s success, enabling the dominant classes to be seen exactly as they would have themselves seen. But these spaces are also fraught with danger, subject to instability caused by realignments among erstwhile allies within, and to increasingly overt challenges to the status quo from opponents without — expressed most dramatically in the antigovernment protests of 2010, which left in their wake the smoldering ruins of the very architectural hierarchy intended to signify modernity via proper relations of inequality. Serhat Unaldi joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Siam Paragon and the politics of space, the appeal of Thaksin Shinawatra, the Erawan Shrine and its others, disappeared and hidden palaces, Phibun Songkhram and the making of Chulalongkorn University, and how all roads in Bangkok lead to the monarchy. Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University and in 2016-17 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He can be reached at nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The crossing of the Israelites through the Red Sea is one of the most famous scenes in the story of the Exodus out of Egypt. But can it be that for the last couple thousand years, historians, geographers, and scholars have had the wrong sea in mind? Dr. Glen A. Fritz believes the answer is yes, and he’s here to tell us why. Well be discussing his recent book, The Lost Sea of the Exodus: A Modern Geographical Analysis (Fritz, 2016). Glen A. Fritz has been involved in the study of the Exodus geography for seventeen years. He holds a PhD in environmental geography from Texas State University-San Marcos. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 2006, pursued the location of Israel’s sea crossing. Listeners can visit his website: www.ancientexodus.com where Fritz explores questions of locating both the correct sea of the Exodus as well as the correct Mount Sinai. L. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Peeters, 2012), and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography