Book Review Archive

Bunker, Review by Ian Klinke

"Bunker" is the gripping story of Bradley Garrett’s encounters with contemporary survivalists and the structures they build as an antidote to their existential dread.

By

Ian Klinke

The Making of Migration, Review by Martino Sacchi Landriani

"The Making of Migration" offers a deep theoretical rethinking of long-term fieldwork, directing our attention on the multiplication of border zones.

By

Martino Sacchi Landriani

Epistemology and Decolonial Politics

These critiques of Eurocentric epistemes narrow activism to knowledge production and pedagogy but do not show how epistemic change weakens settler colonialism South and North or ongoing colonization in socio-cultural and material terms.

By

Joe Parker

Reflections on the An/aesthetics of 21st Century Empire Borders: A Review Essay

Two new books focus upon how creeping imperialism, (re)colonization and the exportation of the modern surveillance state are central to First Worldist border regimes and their responsibility to protect privilege. Andersson and Miller both unveil how the financing of states in the Global South to act like pre-emptive border forces, through ‘keeping people sedentary’ as much as through ‘dampening extremism,’ has become central to 21st century geopolitics.

By

Richard Vogt

Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South by AbdouMaliq Simone

Simone argues that the practices for living with instability will be found in those places with an infrastructure for moving forward despite sustained marginalization. It is in these places that we can see the infrastructure for making livable spaces out of unideal and less privileged circumstances.

By

Shannon Clarke

On Infertile Ground by Jade Sasser

Grounded in political ecology and feminist studies, "On Infertile Ground" argues that populationism is growing in popularity thanks to strategic alliances with science, climate change interventions, and “social justice” concerns that appeal to young people.

By

Javiera Barandiaran

Architectural Imaginations?

Design Earth's fourteen #Geostories offer us architectural imaginations for much needed new Earth Futures. They offer the chance to ponder our shared spatial consciousness, and the role it might play in both understanding and solving our current environmental crisis.

By

Harriet Hawkins

Race for Profit by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

This monograph focuses on how race has been utilized throughout the history of the American housing market to violently exploit and extract value from Black communities. To do this, Taylor furnishes readers with a meticulous account of the myriad ways private influence from the real estate sector along with the support of government entities helped to re-engineer key housing programs to extract profit from the very people they were designed to help.

By

Nemoy Lewis

Manufacturing Decline by Jason Hackworth

Jason Hackworth’s "Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt" offers a powerful explanation of how conservatives deployed racialization tactics to promote and sustain the traction of neoliberal governance in US rust belt cities.

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Matthew D. Wilson

Space after Deleuze by Arun Saldanha

We might say that the nomad should be related to the eternal return, as Saldanha also attempts to do. This cannot take place by simply spatializing the eternal return, however, but only by supplementing the nomad with an eternal willing.

By

Halit Evrim Bayindir