History. Examines the interconnections between colonialism in the British Empire and slavery in the United States, primarily over the period from the abolition of slavery in the former in the 1830s to its abolition in the latter in the 1860s. At least in part because of how history is so often written in national silos, …
A scholarly history of workers in media, publishing, design, advertising, and related professions in New York from the 1930s to the 1970s. Across the decades in which capitalism took on a mass consumerist shape, it traces changes in these industries that were so central in that process. And it examines the ways in which workers …
Historical scholarship. A sweeping history of the long sixteenth century, from the first voyage of Columbus in 1492 to the establishment of the first permanent English-speaking settlement in North America in 1607. Though it was really in the seventeenth century that it became clear that all of these interlinked phenomena would become the defining features …
Scholarly collection. Earlier this year, I read and reviewed *The Racial Contract* by philosopher Charles Mills, which inserts the realities of global white supremacy into the social contract tradition within political philosophy. As I said then, I’m not super interested in the social contract as a way of understanding the world, but one of the …
Scholarly. About habit – what it is, the role it plays in lives and worlds, and how it relates to struggles for social transformation. (Not, btw, the philosophy book I alluded to feeling resistant to reading in a post last week…I had already finished this by that point!) Draws on US pragmatist philosophers, more recent …
Scholarly. Listed as “Indigenous studies” and “health studies”, but also contains lots of important history and at least a little attention to social struggle. Focused on the role that the medical establishment has played in genocide and colonization in Canada – that is, medical colonialism. Written by a pediatric emergency physician who practices in Montreal. …
Scholarly. Edited collection. Pieces from a range of authors examining how people in different social movements and communities-in-struggle have engaged with material and ideas from earlier movements and made use of them in political education and struggle in the present. Read it because I thought it might be useful to something I’m working on. Turns …
Scholarly. Focused on the work of radical Jamaican intellectual Sylvia Wynter. Includes a lengthy dialogue between the editor and Wynter that explores key elements of her work and thought, and then a series of essays which do a mix of laying out the basics, applying her work in specific areas, and extending it in various …
Scholarly. Anthropology, Indigenous studies. The book emerges from ethnographic research conducted among Mohawk people from Kahnawà:ke, and the author herself is Mohawk and from Kahnawà:ke. Unlike a lot of anthropological research, the book takes up questions of key concern to the community itself – things like membership, belonging, and borders – in the context of …
History. A reexamination of the Black civil rights movement in the US. The conventional narrative frames it as a struggle that took place from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and that involved pushing the US nation and state to more completely live up to the supposed high principles of its founding by admitting Black people …