New Books in Geography

John Garth's The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-Earth (Princeton University Press, 2020) takes you to the places that inspired J. R. R. Tolkien to create his fictional locations in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and other classic works. Written by renowned Tolkien expert John Garth, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien features a wealth of illustrations, including Tolkien's own drawings, contributions from other artists, rare archival images, and color photos of contemporary locations across Britain and beyond, from the battlefields of World War I to Africa. Garth identifies the locales that served as the basis for Hobbiton, the Elven valley of Rivendell, the Glittering Caves of Helm's Deep, and many other settings in Middle-earth, from mountains and forests to rivers, lakes, and shorelands. He reveals the rich interplay between Tolkien's personal travels, his wide reading, and his deep scholarship as an Oxford don. Garth debunks popular misconceptions about the inspirations for Middle-Earth and puts forward strong new claims of his own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in the Indian city of Mumbai, Waiting Town: Life in Transit and Mumbai's Other World-Class Histories (Association for Asian Studies, 2020) is an unconventional little book – experimental in form – about how we come to know the worlds about which we write. The narrative follows the author’s fieldnotes diaries as they wend their way through a series of ethnographic puzzles that emerge in the wake of a high-profile mega-infrastructure project that became an internationally celebrated prototype and model. Waiting Town complicates this celebratory narrative by revealing the conflicting temporalities and procedural pretentions of ‘world class’ developmentalism. On one level, Waiting Town is a book about Mumbai – about housing schemes and scams, about ‘duplicate’ documents (and ‘duplicate duplicates’), and about the material wreckage wrought by the city’s ‘world-class’ ambitions. And at the same time, it has a larger story to tell about truth and falsehood, time and memory – and about the promises and pitfalls of knowledge production, interpretation and representation more generally. Lisa Björkman is Assistant Professor of Urban and Public Affairs at University of Louisville and Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) arrives at an extraordinarily consequential moment for the future of asylum protections. Even as more and more people around the world find themselves displaced and endangered by violent conflict, climate change, and material deprivation, the small set of countries that once welcomed refugees and asylum seekers have closed themselves off. From the outside, we see Fortress Europe, kids in cages, and the criminalization of asylum seekers--but look closer, and there are far more elaborate geographical games taking place to effectively erase the possibility of asylum. In this award-winning book, Mountz traces the global chain of remote detention centers used by states of the Global North to confine migrants fleeing violence and poverty, using cruel measures that, if unchecked, will lead to the death of asylum as an ethical idea, along with the continued death of asylum seekers themselves. Alongside her written work, Mountz and her colleague Kim Rygiel have started a podcast called Displacements that follows ongoing ongoing scholarship and activism in the migration space. Alongside her collaborate Lisa Molomot, she has released a documentary film called Safe Haven that follows Vietnam-war era resistors who sought protection in Canada. Alison Mountz is Professor of Geography and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration, and she is Director of the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. You can follow Alison on Twitter @AlisonMountz, and the host, Dino Kadich, @dinokadich. The New Books in Geography Twitter page is @NewBooksGeog. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Feminist Geography Unbound: Discomfort, Bodies, and Prefigured Futures, edited by Banu Gökarıksel, Michael Hawkins, Christopher Neubert, and Sara Smith (West Virginia University Press, 2021) is a collection of papers by a diverse range of up-and-coming scholars in feminist geography. Addressing topics from Dalit activism to tiny houses to restrictions on transgender bathroom use, the collection challenges the "comfort feminism" promoted by white middle-class feminists and asks us to embrace productive discomfort in scholarship and activism to seek out a better future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Brian Foster, self-identified Black boy from rural Mississippi, joins us today for a conversation about his book, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020). In this interview, he shares with us how his experiences growing up in, leaving and returning home to Mississippi shaped his storytelling. Foster first began this ethnographic project as a doctoral student in Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill. As he tells us, the project started as an exploration of educational inequality and race. It became something very different as he let himself be guided by the stories and experiences of the community he was researching. Brian tells us about a few of the folks he met while living in Clarksdale who shaped the direction and core ideas of this book; their stories highlighted perplexing and sometimes uncomfortable contradictions about what it meant to love and not like the Blues. We learn about Clarksdale, MI and the unique history of the Mississippi Delta, the development of the Blues Commission and Blues tourism as an effort to combat declining manufacturing and agricultural industries, the significance of the Blues to the Delta region, and the contradictions between investing in the Blues and investing in Black communities. We discuss storytelling, examining positionality in ethnographic research and how Foster sees Blues Epistemology as a lens to prioritize seeing Black Southerners as complex human rather than constructed caricatures. I Don’t Like the Blues tells us an often-overlooked history of a community who has come to be defined as just one thing – Black Southerners – by just one thing – the Blues. By taking us into the homes, cars, backyards and neighborhoods of Black Clarksdalians, Foster gives us the stories and the framework for thinking about how race, place and community development has shaped the lives of Black folks in contemporary Mississippi. Recently, his public writing “How We Got Here” on his Mississippian family and the tradition of hog slaughter, was developed into an award-winning short film. You can learn more about Brian’s ongoing work on his website. Nafeesa Andrabi a 4th year Sociology PhD student with specialization in Race/Ethnicity and Health/Illness. I am currently a Biosocial Fellow at Carolina Population Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In the Anthropocene, the thawing of frozen earth due to global warming has drawn worldwide attention to permafrost. Contemporary scientists define permafrost as ground that maintains a negative temperature for at least two years. But where did this particular conception of permafrost originate, and what alternatives existed? The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science (University of Toronto Press, 2021) provides an intellectual history of permafrost, placing the phenomenon squarely in the political, social, and material context of Russian and Soviet science. Pey-Yi Chu shows that understandings of frozen earth were shaped by two key experiences in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. On one hand, the colonization and industrialization of Siberia nourished an engineering perspective on frozen earth that viewed the phenomenon as an aggregate physical structure: ground. On the other, a Russian and Soviet tradition of systems thinking encouraged approaching frozen earth as a process, condition, and space tied to planetary exchanges of energy and matter. Aided by the US militarization of the Arctic during the Cold War, the engineering view of frozen earth as an obstacle to construction became dominant. The Life of Permafrost tells the fascinating story of how permafrost came to acquire life as Russian and Soviet scientists studied, named, and defined it. Pey-Yi Chu is an associate professor of history at Pomona College, where she teaches courses in modern European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Two stores sit side-by-side. One with signage overflowing with text: a full list of business services (income tax returns, notary public, a variety of insurance) on the storefront, twenty-two words in all. It provides business services (a lot of them). The other showing a single word—james—in small font in the corner of a drab, brown-colored overhanging sign. It’s a restaurant (obviously). Such a juxtaposition has become increasingly common in gentrifying neighborhoods, revealing more than just commercial offerings. In their new book, What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification, and Place-Making in Brooklyn (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr examine the importance of signs and “linguistic landscapes” in shaping urban spaces as well as how we experience them. It argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation of place in Brooklyn, New York. Using a sample of more than 2,000 storefronts and over a decade of ethnographic observation and interviews, Trinch and Snajdr chart two types of local Brooklyn retail signage: Old School, which uses many words, large lettering, and repetition to convey inclusiveness, and New School, with hallmarks of brevity, wordplay, and more exclusive meanings. Through in-depth ethnographic analyses they reveal how gentrification and corporate redevelopment in Brooklyn are connected to public communication, literacy practices, the transformation of motherhood and gender roles, notions of historical preservation, urban planning, and systems of racial privilege. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What is the nature of place, and how does one undertake to write about it? To answer these questions, geographer and poet Tim Cresswell looks to Chicago’s iconic Maxwell Street Market area. Maxwell Street was for decades a place where people from all corners of the city mingled to buy and sell goods, play and listen to the blues, and encounter new foods and cultures. Now, redeveloped and renamed University Village, it could hardly be more different. In Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place (U Chicago Press, 2019), Cresswell advocates approaching the study of place as an “assemblage” of things, meanings, and practices. He models this innovative approach through a montage format that exposes the different types of texts—primary, secondary, and photographic sources—that have attempted to capture the essence of the area. Cresswell studies his historical sources just as he explores the different elements of Maxwell Street—exposing them layer by layer. Brilliantly interweaving words and images, Maxwell Street sheds light on a historic Chicago neighborhood and offers a new model for how to write about place that will interest anyone in the fields of geography, urban studies, or cultural history. Tim Cresswell is the Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place was published in 2019 by the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Since the early twentieth-century, Kurds have challenged the borders and national identities of the states they inhabit. Nowhere is this more evident than in their promotion of the 'Map of Greater Kurdistan', an ideal of a unified Kurdish homeland in an ethnically and geographically complex region. This powerful image is embedded in the consciousness of the Kurdish people, both within the region and, perhaps even more strongly, in the diaspora. Addressing the lack of rigorous research and analysis of Kurdish politics from an international perspective, Zeynep Kaya focuses on self-determination, territorial identity and international norms to suggest how these imaginations of homelands have been socially, politically and historically constructed (much like the state territories the Kurds inhabit), as opposed to their perception of being natural, perennial or intrinsic. Adopting a non-political approach to notions of nationhood and territoriality, Mapping Kurdistan: Territory, Self-Determination and Nationalism (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a systematic examination of the international processes that have enabled a wide range of actors to imagine and create the cartographic image of greater Kurdistan that is in use today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis (Cornell University Press, 2020), Dr. Jodi Rios examines relationships between blackness, space, and racism, in the northern suburbs of St. Louis. She argues that the “double bind of living as Black in North St. Louis County means that Black residents both suffer from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability that occurs when they simply occupy space” (1). Rios theorizes “Blackness-as-risk” as foundational to the historical and contemporary construction of metropolitan space. She documents the ways in which Black residents in the north St. Louis suburbs are subject to excessive ordinances and constant policing. Yet, these residents also resist such constraints. After the murder of Michael Brown in August 2014, Black Lives Matter protests erupted throughout St. Louis as well as across the country. Through the lens of such protests, Rios theorizes “Blackness-as-freedom” as “the unique capacity of blackness to embody freedom in the face of death and to imagine other worlds, other futures” (5). Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a transdisciplinary work that draws from history, ethnography, geography, as well as architecture and design, to show how anti-blackness is produced and contested when Black people occupy space. Jodi Rios is a scholar, designer, and educator whose work is located at the intersection of physical, social, and political space. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The British Library preserves a unique collection of pictorial maps and descriptions of places and cultures along the road from Lhasa to Leh. But finding the people behind this collection and decoding it have been journeys of their own. In this latest podcast episode, Dr. Diana Lange of Humboldt University, Germany, opens her book “An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Lama: A Journey of Discovery” published in Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library, and talks about how she made these journeys, what her experiences were of travelling to the region in the modern day, and the differences between Western and Eastern art and cartography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What can Shakespeare tell us about territory, and what can territory tell us about Shakespeare? In Shakespearean Territories (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and author of the Progressive Geographies blog, explores both of these questions, drawing on his earlier work theorising territory, as well as an extensive discussion of numerous works of Shakespeare. The book considers a range of subjects associated with the concept of territory, from the geo-politics of King Lear, the idea of sovereignty in King John, and power in Richard II, to questions of the body in Coriolanus, and ideas of calculation and measurement in The Merchant of Venice. Alongside Shakespeare’s relevance for understanding territory, territory offers a framework for alternative readings of Macbeth and Hamlet, and draws attention to often neglected or even completely ignored parts of Henry V. Fascinating and wide ranging, at the intersection of geography and English literature, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

History and geography delineate the operation of power, not only its range but also the capacity to plan and the ability to implement. Approaching state strategy and policy from the spatial angle, Jeremy Black argues that just as the perception of power is central to issues of power, so place, and its constraints and relationships, is partly a matter of perception, not merely map coordinates. Geopolitics, he maintains, is as much about ideas and perception as it is about the actual spatial dimensions of power. Black's study Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance (Indiana UP, 2015) ranges widely, examining geography and the spatial nature of state power from the 15th century to the present day. He considers the rise of British power, geopolitics and the age of Imperialism, the Nazis and World War II, and the Cold War, and he looks at the key theorists of the latter 20th century, including Henry Kissinger, Francis Fukuyama and Samuel P. Huntington, Philip Bobbitt, Niall Ferguson, and others. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In 1996 Argentina adopted genetically modified (GM) soybeans as a central part of its national development strategy. Today, Argentina is the third largest global grower and exporter of GM crops. Its soybeans—which have been modified to tolerate being sprayed with herbicides—now cover half of the country's arable land and represent a third of its total exports. While soy has brought about modernization and economic growth, it has also created tremendous social and ecological harm: rural displacement, concentration of landownership, food insecurity, deforestation, violence, and the negative health effects of toxic agrochemical exposure. In Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina (Duke UP, 2020), Amalia Leguizamón explores why Argentines largely support GM soy despite the widespread damage it creates. She reveals how agribusiness, the state, and their allies in the media and sciences deploy narratives of economic redistribution, scientific expertise, and national identity as a way to elicit compliance among the country’s most vulnerable rural residents. In this way, Leguizamón demonstrates that GM soy operates as a tool of power to obtain consent, to legitimate injustice, and to quell potential dissent in the face of environmental and social violence. Stentor Danielson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment at Slippery Rock University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Michael Mascarenhas's book Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More (Sage, 2020) provides an entry point to the field by bringing together the works of individuals who are creating a new and vibrant wave of environmental justice scholarship. methodology, and activism. The 18 essays in this collection explore a wide range of controversies and debates, from the U.S. and other societies. An important theme throughout the book is how vulnerable and marginalized populations—the incarcerated, undocumented workers, rural populations, racial and ethnic minorities—bear a disproportionate share of environmental risks. Each reading concludes with a suggested assignment that helps student explore the topic independently and deepen their understanding of the issues raised. Stentor Danielson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment at Slippery Rock University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, scientific thinking and regional geopolitics. In The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland (D.S. Brewer, 2020), Dale Kedwards explores the plethora of meanings that medieval Icelandic mapmakers invested into their works, from political statements about national origin, to diagrammatic expressions of cosmological theories. The mappae mundi provided a medium for medieval Icelanders to imagine their place in relation to the wider world, and even the physical universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton UP, 2018) is the first cartographic reference book on one of the modern era’s most vibrant and important mystical movements. Featuring seventy-four large-format maps and a wealth of illustrations, charts, and tables, this one-of-a-kind atlas charts Hasidism’s emergence and expansion; its dynasties, courts, and prayer houses; its spread to the New World; the crisis of the two world wars and the Holocaust; and Hasidism’s remarkable postwar rebirth. This spatial history of a movement that has often been understood as aterritorial combines painstaking source work, cartographic skill, and inventive visualisations to create a masterful contribution to the history of Hasidism and the history of religion more broadly. Marcin Wodziński is Professor of Jewish History and Literature, and head of the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław (Poland). Waldemar Spallek is Assistant Professor of geographic information systems and cartography at the University of Wrocław (Poland). Luca Scholz is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester (UK). His research focuses on European and spatial history. He tweets at @DrLucaScholz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Representations of Poverty and Place: Using Geographical Text Analysis to Understand Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) explores a novel methodological approach which combines analytical techniques from linguistics and geography to bring fresh insights to the study of poverty. Using Geographical Text Analysis, the authors - Laura Paterson and Ian N. Gregory - map the discursive construction of poverty in the UK and compares the results to what administrative data reveal. The analysis draws together qualitative and quantitative techniques from corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, Geographical Information Science, and the spatial humanities. By identifying the place-names that occur within close proximity to search terms associated with to poverty it shows how different newspapers use place to foreground different aspects of poverty (including employment, housing, money, and benefits), and how the London-centric nature of newspaper reporting dominates the discursive construction of UK poverty. This book demonstrates how interdisciplinary research methods can illuminate complex social issues and will appeal to researchers in a number of disciplines from sociology, geography and the spatial humanities, economics, linguistics, health, and public policy, in addition to policymakers and practitioners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020) explores how texts—literary and visual—help us engage with the space that goes beyond the limits of visible geographical borders and legal regulations. By drawing attention to the loci that produce borderline experiences (detention camps, consulates, international waters), Matthew Hart guides his readers through experiences that ask to reconsider the ways in which geographical places and the implications they produce are perceived. The repercussions of the extraterritorial experiences may include transitional modes for constructing and re-discovering one’s identity. This opens up a broader dimension with which Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction engages. With his book, Hart offers an acute intervention into how a text functions in a globalized community, which entails the reconsideration of how literature and art respond to the twenty-first-century transcultural shifts that are often marked with political anxieties. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What is an art school? In Art Schools and Place: Geographies of Emerging Artists and Art Scenes (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Dr Silvie Jacobi, a researcher and head of education at London School of Mosaic, thinks through the status of art schools and arts education in the contemporary world. The book draws on ethnographic research in Manchester and Leipzig, comparting and contrasting two nations, two educational systems, and two cities, to show the different approaches to training and supporting contemporary culture. The book also compares artforms, considering both traditional practices, alongside the emergence of digital and media arts. Bridging geography, sociology, and the history of art, the book is essential reading for scholars of cultural and creative industries, as well as anyone interested in the continuing value and importance of the arts in education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern. Since the rise of Google Earth in 2005, there has been an explosion in the use of mapping tools to quantify and assess the needs of those in crisis, including those affected by climate change and the wider neo-liberal agenda. Yet, while there has been a huge upsurge in the data produced around these issues, the representation of people remains questionable. Some have argued that representation has diminished in humanitarian crises as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data has become ever more difficult to analyse without vast computing power, leading to a dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data collected from people in crisis, before selling it back to them. Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping (University of London Press, 2020) brings together critical perspectives on the role that mapping people, knowledges and data now plays in humanitarian work, both in cartographic terms and through data visualisations, and questions whether, as we map crises, it is the map itself that is in crisis. Doug Sprecht is a Chartered Geographer (CGeog. FRGS), a Senior Lecturer (SFHEA) and the Director of Teaching and Learning in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. His research examines how knowledge is constructed and codified through digital and cartographic artefacts, focusing on development issues in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, where he has carried out extensive fieldwork. He also writes and researches on pedagogy, and is author of the Media and Communications Student Study Guide. He speaks and writes on topics of data ethics, development, education and mapping practices at conferences and invited lectures around the world. He is a member of the editorial board at Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, and the journal Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. He is also Chair of the Environmental Network for Central America. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In his new book, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America (UNC Press, 2020), Dr. Jeffrey Erbig charts the interplay between imperial and indigenous spatial imaginaries and shows the critical role that indigenous actors played in imperial border-making between the Spanish and the Portuguese in the Río de la Plata region during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Dr. Erbig demonstrates how this process does not fit neatly into concepts of resistance or accommodation, as Hispano-Portuguese border-drawing from 1750 to the end of the century was in-part necessitated by indigenous actions, shaped by indigenous actors, and even reinforced the authority and autonomy of certain native polities. Far from peripheral players on an inevitable path to destruction as they are mostly remembered today, native peoples were essential to determining the early-modern history of the Río de la Plata. Centering the actions of indigenous agents and incorporating archival material from seven countries along with digital mapping techniques, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met will prove to be an enduring contribution to the historiography of indigenous studies, the Río de la Plata region, cartography, and borderlands topics. Dr. Jeffrey Erbig is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What is the relationship between race, technology and sound? How can we access the ways that Latin Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought about, and importantly, heard, race? In his book Audible Geographies in Latin America: Sounds of Race and Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Dylon Robbins approaches this question in a stunning series of chapters that move between Cuba and Brazil just as both nations were moving into post-emancipation and increasingly intense appeals to nationalist ideologies. New media such as the phonograph, as well as changing techniques in medicine and ethnography contributed to the complex entanglements of race, place and voice. Robbins uncovers new sites in which to explore these questions, such as the Experimental Phonetics Laboratory in Havana and revisits more familiar material, such as the work of Alejo Carpentier, with new frameworks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world’s most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed by its successive protagonists. Intrigued by the absence of a holistic portrayal of this body of water and inspired by Fernand Braudel’s famous work on the Mediterranean, this book brings alive a dynamic Red Sea world across time, revealing the particular features of a unique historical actor. In capturing this heretofore lost space, it also presents a critical, conceptual history of the sea, leading the reader into the heart of Eurocentrism. The Sea, it is shown, is a vital element of the modern philosophy of history. Alexis Wick is not satisfied with this inclusion of the Red Sea into history and attendant critique of Eurocentrism. Contrapuntally, in The Red Sea In Search of Lost Space (University of California Press, 2016) he explores how the world and the sea were imagined differently before imperial European hegemony. Searching for the lost space of Ottoman visions of the sea, The Red Sea makes a deeper argument about the discipline of history and the historian’s craft. Alexis Wick is Associate Professor of History at the American University of Beirut. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Intrinsic to the practice of empire is the creation of boundaries. We tend to think of such boundaries as borders, physical lines of demarcation past which the empire’s sovereignty has no purchase. But, in fact, the picture is much fuzzier than that. A foundational task of empire is to define, to categorize, and in so doing, to make peoples and places knowable; only once something is known can it be controlled. For this reason, the peoples that stalk the edges of empire have been a constant source of anxiety. These peoples, defying the state’s power of comprehension and inhabiting the very limits of its reach, are the empire’s frontier. In Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State (Harvard University Press, 2020), Dr. Benjamin D. Hopkins makes the case that such peoples and the practices used to control them constitute “frontier governmentality.” In Hopkins’ formulation, the frontier is not a place, but rather a practice. Frontiers are an ideational space in which empires define liminal peoples and deploy a unique set of tactics to manage them. They recruit imaginative “customs” and “traditions” to institute the illusion of self-rule. They deny them access to state courts without surrendering legal claims to them. And they render them economically dependent while withholding access to the state’s economy. Ranging from India’s Northwest Frontier to the TransJordan, South Africa, Apache reservations and beyond, Ruling the Savage Periphery documents in clear and convincing prose the startling breadth of frontier governmentality, and its tragic legacy still with us today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Water and diplomatic historian Dan MacFarlane has written a fascinating book on a fundamental debate in environmental history: What is a natural landscape? Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall (UBC Press, 2020) argues that one of the world's most famous natural attractions is not wholly natural but is an engineered landscape. Though the falls have been altered, it's designers seemingly found a balance between preserving its wonder and utilizing its power, MacFarlane argues. The first people to record their reactions to the falls in North America were fascinated by its beauty and power. By the end of the nineteenth century, the falls had drawn the attention of both Canadian and American industrialist who saw in its majesty a great potential for energy generation. Since the falls is located on the border, it provoked conflict and negotiations between these two countries over how much water could be drawn upon by each. Utilizing the falls for power generation provoked another conflict over the extent to which power generation might hinder the natural beauty of this thriving tourist attraction. These two conflicts—one about power the other about natural appeal— would continue into the twenty-first century. The book unravels the details of these conflicts while at the same time drawing the readers' attention to the often unseen changes being made in, around, and behind the falls. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are those that explain technocrats' debates over, and explorations into, how water reduction might change the natural look of the falls. Exposing these engineered elements of Niagara encourages readers to reimagine this popular natural attraction, and others like it. Jason L. Newton is a post-doctoral fellow in the history of capitalism and the environment at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His book manuscript, Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest, 1850-1950, is a history of the changing types of labor performed by people, trees, and the landscape in the American Northeast as that area industrialized. He has also published on nature, race, and immigration. He teaches classes on capitalism and the environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

John W. Traphagan’s Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan (Cambria Press, 2020) presents a series of deeply contextualized ethnographies of small-business entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial ecosystem of contemporary rural Japan. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japan has been experiencing an unprecedented decline in population that is expected to accelerate over the coming decades. Rural areas, in particular, have been at the cutting edge of this demographic transition as young people often out-migrate to urban areas to pursue education and career opportunities and to explore spaces and lifeways viewed as cosmopolitan and international. At the same time, some urbanites have decided to either return to the rural climes of their upbringing or move there for the first time to start small businesses. And rural communities have attempted to attract large projects, such as the International Linear Collider, that it is hoped will draw in new people, prevent younger people from out-migrating, and bolster local economies. A combination of individual and institutional entrepreneurial activities is changing the social and geographical landscape of rural Japan and reinventing that space as one that blends perceptions and experiences of the urban and rural, cosmopolitan and rustic. While there has been considerable research on rural Japan and numerous studies that focus on entrepreneurs, only limited attention has been paid to the intersection of entrepreneurial activities in rural Japan and the ways in which entrepreneurs more generally are contributing to the re-formation of rural space and place. This ethnographic study develops the concept of cosmopolitan rurality as a social and geographical space that cannot be characterized as either urban or rural nor as specifically cosmopolitan or rustic. In the "rural" Japan of the early twenty-first, as in many other parts of the industrial world, we see the emergence of a new type of social context forming a hybrid space of neo-rurality that brings together people and ideas reflecting local, national, and global frames of experience. One of the key drivers behind this hybrid space is expressed in entrepreneurial activities by locals to generate an entrepreneurial ecosystem that it is hoped can attract new people and ideas while retaining ideational and geographical elements associated with traditional values and spaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Blessed with numerous safe harbors, accessible ports, and a rich hinterland, Gujarat has been central to the history of Indian Ocean maritime exchange that involved not only goods, but also people and ideas. Transregional Trade and Traders: Situating Gujarat in the Indian Ocean from Early Times to 1900 (Oxford University Press) maps the trajectory of the extra-continental interactions of Gujarat and how it shaped the history of the Indian Ocean. Chronologically, the volume spans two millennia, and geographically, it ranges from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia. The book focuses on specific groups of Gujarati traders and their accessibility and trading activities with maritime merchants from Africa, Arabia, Southeast Asia, China, and Europe. It not only analyses the complex process of commodity circulation, involving a host of players, huge investments, and numerous commercial operations, but also engages with questions of migration and diaspora. Paying close attention to current historiographical debates, the contributors make serious efforts to challenge the neat regional boundaries that are often drawn around the trading history of Gujarat. Edward A. Alpers is a research professor of history at UCLA. Professor Alpers’ research and writing focus on the political economy of international trade in precolonial eastern Africa, including the manifold cultural dimensions of this exchange system, with special attention to the wider world of the Indian Ocean. Chhaya Goswami is the head of the Department of History, S.K. Somaiya College, Mumbai, India. She specializes in the maritime history of South Asia and the western Indian Ocean. She has authored the award-winning book The Call of the Sea, Kachchhi Traders in Muscat and Zanzibar c.1800–1880 (Orient Blackswan, 2011). Her current research project focuses on maritime trade and piracy in the Gulfs of Kachchh and Persia between 1650 and 1820. Kelvin Ng, co-hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality (Oxford UP, 2020) brings together more than a decade’s worth of research during one of the most consequential moments in Cambodian history. After years of staggering economic growth and a political breakthrough in 2013, disappointment set in as the fruits of this growth failed to reach many Cambodians and the party of the country’s long-time prime minister, Hun Sen, returned to its authoritarian crackdown. But the scope of this book is much wider than the array of settings where Lawreniuk and Parsons investigate the experiences, narratives, and consequences of inequality. Instead, their research speaks to larger global articulations, such as the limits of inequality, as a concept, to account for contexts outside of the Global North, the rise of right-wing and anti-immigration political movements, and the pernicious mobility of poverty. Sabina Lawreniuk is Nottingham Research Fellow at the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. You can find her on Twitter @SabinaLawreniuk. Laurie Parsons is Lecturer in Human Geography and British Academy Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. You can find him on Twitter @lauriefdparsons. Dino Kadich is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. You can find him on Twitter @dinokadich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. From its source in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau it snakes down through southern China and then borders or runs through all the countries of mainland Southeast Asia: Myanmar, Thailand, Lao, Cambodia and Vietnam. Almost 70 million people depend either directly or indirectly on the Mekong for their livelihoods. It is the world’s largest inland freshwater fishery. It’s also a place of great ecological and human diversity. Until recently, the Mekong was one of the world’s least tamed rivers, but that has rapidly changed. In Last Days of the Mighty Mekong (Zed Book, 2019), Bryan Eyler documents the huge disruption, both to the Mekong’s ecosystem and to the lives of the people who depend on it, caused by rampant dam construction, tourism development, pollution, not to mention climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In the thoroughly researched, lucidly narrated new book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press), Sai Balakrishnan (Assistant Professor of City and Urban Planning at UC Berkeley) examines the novel phenomenon of the conversion of agrarian landowners into urban shareholders in India’s newly emerging “corridor cities.” Working at the unique intersection of urban planning and agrarian politics in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, the book centers an unusual cast of characters based in agrarian space -- propertied sugar elites, marginal cultivators, landless workers – in explaining the production of India’s new urban corridors. Through a meticulous case-study of three privately developed real estate enclaves, the book empirically teases out the tensions between economic liberalization and political decentralization. In the first two corridor cities, the author shows how local, decentralized structures of democratic governance (exemplified in village councils or Gram Sabhas) could not be activated to challenge the unequal processes of economic transformation, but in third enclave, Gram Sabhas were able to be much more active. Through this comparative study, we learn of the critical factors which determine democratic horizons in rural land politics. With its keen attention to the historical production of spatial unevenness and its textured ethnography of a crucial yet understudied topic in Indian social science, this book will be essential reading for geographers, anthropologists, historians, and urbanists working across South Asia and beyond. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student at Harvard University with interests in agrarian capitalism in rural Rajasthan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Who owns the street? This is the question that animates The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914-1945 (Cambridge University Press) by Molly Loberg. Interwar Berliners faced this question with great hope yet devastating consequences. In Germany, the First World War and 1918 Revolution transformed the city streets into the most important media for politics and commerce. There, partisans and entrepreneurs fought for the attention of crowds with posters, illuminated advertisements, parades, traffic jams, and violence. The Nazi Party relied on how people already experienced the city to stage aggressive political theater, including the April Boycott and Kristallnacht. Observers in Germany and abroad looked to Berlin's streets to predict the future. They saw dazzling window displays that radiated optimism. They also witnessed crime waves, antisemitic rioting, and failed policing that pointed toward societal collapse. Recognizing the power of urban space, officials pursued increasingly radical policies to 'revitalize' the city, culminating in Albert Speer's plan to eradicate the heart of Berlin and build Germania. The book was awarded the prestigious Hans Rosenberg Book Prize of 2018 and has recently been released in paperback. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

While the term ‘Europe’ was used sporadically in ancient and medieval times, it proliferated between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and gained a prevalence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which it did not possess before. Although studies on the history of the idea of Europe abound, much of the vast body of early modern sources has still been neglected. Assuming that discourses tend to transcend linguistic, historical and generic boundaries, Contesting Europe: Comparative Perspectives on Early Modern Discourses on Europe, 1400–1800 (Brill) has gathered experts from various fields of study who examine vernacular and Latin negotiations of Europe from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century. This multi-angled approach serves to identify similarities and differences in the discourses on Europe within their different national and cultural communities. Isabella Walser-Bürgler is principal investigator at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies in Innsbruck (Austria). Nicolas Detering is a Junior Professor of German Literature at the University of Bern. Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Katherine Zien examines the ways politicians, activists, artists, and residents performed and interpreted sovereignty in the Canal Zone from U.S. control over the zone in 1903 to its withdrawal in 1999. Moving beyond the big ditch and construction of the interoceanic canal, Zien explores how white Zonians, West Indian laborers and their descendants, and Panamanians wrestled with the issue of sovereignty over the Canal Zone in the area of popular entertainment. From clubhouses to the national theatre, Zien notes the performative nature of sovereignty as various historical actors challenged or upheld the performance of U.S. new imperialism. Enjoy this refreshing take on the history of the Canal Zone. Sharika Crawford is associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity (Island Press), Sandra Postel acknowledges society’s past mishaps with managing water and emphasizes our future is contingent upon rehabilitating our science, tech, and political solutions. To understand our past and provide hope for our future Sandra takes readers around the world to explore water projects that work with, rather than against, nature’s rhythms. Sandra discusses her journey to learning about these projects. What’s more, Sandra recognizes the complex nature of issues and addresses all aspects of water issues and solutions. In our conversation, Postel discusses water as a gift and leaves the audience to think about how they will use this great gift. Chris Gambino is an Assistant Professor in the School of Agriculture and Environmental Science at Delaware Valley University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Today I talked to Thaisa Way, editor of River Cities, City Rivers (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2018). Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history. These rivers can shape a city’s success or cause its destruction. At the same time, city-building reshapes rivers and their landscapes. Cities have harnessed, modified, and engineered rivers, altering ecologies and creating new landscapes in the process of urbanization. Rivers are also shaped by the development of cities as urban landscapes, just as the cities are shaped by their relationship to the river. In the river city, the city river is a dynamic contributor to the urban landscape with its flow of urban economies, geographies, and cultures. Yet we have rarely given these urban landscapes their due. Building on emerging interest in the resilience of cities, this book and the original symposium consider river cities and city rivers to explore how histories have shaped the present and how they might inform our visions of the future. Thaisa Way is Program Director, Garden & Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks Professor Urban University Of Washington Tricia Keffer ASLA, MLA Landscape Architecture with a design practice in the Florida Keys PlantsPeopleLove.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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 [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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 [email protected] and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

When is the last time you looked at/consulted a paper map? Perhaps you have one hanging on a wall at home or work, framed or not. Or maybe you have some old road maps in a stack somewhere, as I do, sitting untouched since various digital forms have made printed map reading and handling something most of us rarely (if ever) do. Reading Kory E. Olson’s The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris (Liverpool University Press, 2018) reminded me how much I used to, and still sort of love maps, especially maps of the French capital. Coming at the history of urbanism through the city’s official maps over several decades, the book examines an evolving map discourse and literacy in France that was caught up with the evolution of technologies for producing, printing, and distributing maps; the history of public education; and the massive changes to the city brought about by industrialization, population growth, and new forms of transportation and mobility. Pursuing the period that followed Haussmannization’s massive overhaul of the city, including those plans and changes that continued to be implemented for decades after Haussmann’s own tenure as Prefect of the Seine, The Cartographic Capital situates the urban geography of Paris and the very material of maps of the city at the heart of the story of Republican national consolidation, from the initial stabilization of the Third Republic to the 1930s. A history of depictions of the capital over time, the book also charts (!) a shift in the temporal orientation of maps, from their use as a form of historical documentation, to an emphasis on maps as accurate representations of geographic space in the present, to the emergence of maps intended to plan and shape the future of the city and its environs. Maps were a means by which government at different levels attempted to organize and control urban space. They were also a changing medium that reflected and shaped the geographic imaginations of map makers and map readers over time. The Cartographic Capital will be of tremendous interest to readers captivated by the history of Paris per se, as well as those fascinated by the histories of urbanism and space more broadly. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

Through a series of provocative case studies on mobility, transgression, and intimacy, David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) interrogates the spatial and ideological formations of modern Japan in its first seven decades or so as a nation-state and empire, especially vis-à-vis China. The slippage between the individual and collective/national (geo)body is a critical theme as Ambaras highlights the roles of both media and government narratives in defining a shared national vision of Japan, and the powerful alchemy of pride and anxieties around the transgression of its borders. With case studies on human trafficking, international marriage, middlebrow literature, and a pirate queen (!), this study of marginalized people on the margins throws new light on Japan and maritime East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

In the 1870s, as colonial India witnessed some of the worst famines in its history where 6-10 million perished, observers watched in astonishment as famished people set out for the city of Bombay on foot in human caravans thousands of people long. Recently, images of a similar scale of deprivation have resurfaced in India as the COVID-19 crisis has once again forced the laboring poor to migrate in duress, this time in the opposite direction from city to country. Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (University of Washington Press, 2019) seems like a book written to explain precisely this moment. It asks: how can we understand the relationship between “the city” and its laboring poor? Inaugurating a paradigm shift in how we think of cities and urban space, the author Sheetal Chhabria argues that cities are not naturally occurring spaces or innocent administrative categories marked by lines on a map: instead they are spaced produced by constant labors of inclusion and exclusion which serve to keep capital flowing while stigmatizing the laboring poor. The book shows how “the wellbeing of the city–rather than of its people” took precedence starting in the late 19th century, thereby “positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded” rather than as constitutive parts of city space. This argument is crucial. It shows that the injustices faced by the laboring poor are not mistakes or signs of incomplete or failed urbanism. Those injustices are instead the very essence of what it means to mark a space as a “city.” Combining theoretical acuity and empirical depth with an abiding concern for economic justice, the book takes us on a journey through colonial Bombay as it lurched from crisis to crisis at the turn of the 20th century: poverty, famine, plague, and political unrest. In this volatile climate, it was the continual appeals to the “health of the city” which served to render class warfare subterranean, to generate consensus on anti-poor measures across the colonial divide, and to invent a stigmatized object called “the slum” which could be used as a perpetual foil to the city, making the results of deep capitalist inequality (poverty, unsanitary dwellings, hunger) appear instead like vestiges of an incompletely capitalist society which could then be further commercialized. This book is a must read for everyone interested in urban, housing, and economic justice, as well as for scholars of South Asia concerned with the subcontinent’s enduring inequalities. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University studying the reproduction of inequality through development projects in rural western India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

What happens when a court tries to become a “new” court? What happens to the many artifacts of its history—previous laws and jurisprudence, the building that it inhabits, the people who weave in and out of it? This is the question that grounds Alex Jeffrey’s new book, The Edge of Law: Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores the making of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through extensive engagements with the different actors working in and around the Court, as well as with the Court itself, Jeffrey shows how the law is productive of many different edges, which are themselves both practical (in the sense that they reflect real-world conditions) and idealized (in the sense that they allow the law to take responsibility for some things but not others). By looking at the ways that a court that is imagined to be above the small concerns of the world that it inhabits must, in fact, encounter those small concerns, Jeffrey is able to shine light on the ways that courts, too, are socialized. Dino Kadich is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. You can follow him on Twitter, @dinokadich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography