New Books In Geography

Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016), William Cavert examines how Londoners first grappled with the problem of air pollution created by the burning of coal. With concerns expressed for the dwindling supply of wood in England, Londoners in the 16th and 17th centuries increasingly turned to coal to heat their homes and power their businesses. As the amount of smoke produced by burning coal grew it prompted a variety of responses, from crown-directed efforts to prevent it from contaminating the royal space to its adoption in poems and plays as a symbol of modern urban life. As Cavert reveals, these efforts to grapple with the problem of coal smoke presaged the reaction to the much larger issue of industrial pollution throughout England during the Industrial Revolution and, in the process, framed many o

D. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation into a “world class”city. Based on deep ethnographic engagement in one of the city’s slums that is destined to be demolished, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) weaves the experiences of these slum dwellers together with an analysis of middle class Resident Welfare Associations, legal rulings, influential reports, and idle chatter to argue that mapping and surveying are no longer the primary means for administering urban space. Rather it is a set of vague and powerful aesthetic norms derived from notions of what it is to be world class that set the contours of Delhi’s change.Theoretically stimulating and rich in narrative drive, Rule by Aesthetics opens up new ways for thinking about urban governance in India and beyond.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Starting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th through the 21st century to explore the various forms the Balkan region has taken in Europe’s political and cultural imagination. Her analysis of these literary works reveals concepts of belonging, multi-belonging and unbelonging among Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians, Slovenes and even Austrians. Ana Foteva applies postmodern geography, literary, and colonial theories to demonstrate the relationship between the development of national identity, the pull of Habsburg imperial identity, the shaping of Yugoslav identity, and the fracturing of the Balkans in the 1990s. In our podcast conversation, she discusses and challenges stereotypes of the Balkans as a region of perpetual conflict. Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe (Peter Lang, 20speaks to comp

Emily T. Yeh‘s Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press, 2013) is an award-winning critical analysis of the production and transformation of the Tibetan landscape since 1950, construing development as a “state project that is presented as a gift to the Tibetan people” especially as it works to territorialize Tibet. Focusing on Lhasa and its environs, Yeh takes readers through three key transformations that each formed an important stage in this territorialization and motivates the focus of one part of the book. Part I (“Soil”) looks at the introduction of state farms and communes in the 1950s and continuing through the early 1980s, paying careful attention to the ways that Tibetan laborers & commune members produced “a new socialist landscape” by working the soil. Part II (“Plastic”) looks at development and market reforms in the 1990s that allowed large numbers of Han Chinese to migrate into

Political ecology is among the most vibrant sub-fields in the discipline of geography. Since the field first developed in the 1980s, political ecologists have pioneered new approaches to studying relations between society and the environment. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (Routledge, 2015), co-edited by Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, is a compendium of over fifty essays by leading scholars in the field on different aspects of political ecology. In the field’s early years, political ecologists mostly addressed resource conflicts and rural livelihoods in the global South. Most recently, political ecologists have begun studying environmental questions in the global North and tackled topics such as mining and industrialization, the metabolism of cities, and energy production and consumption. This podcast is less an overview of the handbook and more a conversation about the state of political ecology: where it has been, where it is now, and where it might be headed in the futu

Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad range of media that used both text and image to engage with the non-European world. Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) takes readers into the Dutch ateliers in which exotic geography was produced by bookmakers, paying special attention to frontispieces and other paratexts through which these editor-printer-booksellers created a new way of looking at the world. Picturing, here, was a kind of performance. Schmidt considers how the exotic, non-European body was produced not just in texts and pictures but also in a range of material arts that depicted the body experiencing pleasure and pain. The book concludes by looking ahead to the middle of the eighteenth century, when there was a backlash against exotic geography, and a call

Julie Sze‘s new book opens by bringing readers into the wetlands of Dongtan, introducing us to an ambitious but unrealized project to create the “world’s first great eco-city.” Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (University of California Press, 2015) considers Dongtan, the Chongming Island eco-development, suburban real estate developments, and other fantasies of wild and urban lives to explore the nature of eco-desire in contemporary China. Sze suggests that three factors undergird Chinese eco-desire: a technocratic faith in engineering, a reliance on authoritarian political structures to enable environmental improvements, and a discourse of “ecological harmony” between man and nature. The chapters of Fantasy Islands trace these phenomena as they have manifest in the context of the 2008 Olympics, the opening of a Tunnel-Bridge Expressway in 2010, the planning of an eco-city, the marketing of “Thames Town” and other

Oil-soaked birds in Prince William Sound. The “crying Indian” in a 1970s anti-littering ad. A lonely polar bear on an Arctic ice floe. Such environmental images have proliferated over the past half-century, and have played a pivotal role in alerting the public about ecological problems and galvanizing public action. Yet scholars are more likely to focus on the science related to environmental problems or the policy responses to them. Finis Dunaway‘s new book, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (University of Chicago, 2015) takes such images seriously. He examines these iconic photos and films, as well as many others, and he argues that they were crucial in developing popular environmentalism. Dunaway, associate professor of history at Trent University, shows how such images were produced and traces the effect they had on American culture. More importantly, he argues that such images implicitly or explicitly encouraged consumer-based, individually-oriented respon

Our guest today tells us that the seemingly straightforward field of logistics lies at the heart of contemporary globalization, imperialism, and economic inequality. Listen to Deb Cowen, the author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), discuss how the field of logistics reshaped global capitalism, undermined worker power, and even transformed how we think about life and death.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. R

Identity, performance and globalisation are at the heart of the cultural practices interrogated by Amanda Rogers in Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geography of Performance (Routledge, 2015).The book explores the global networks of theatre that have emerged between Asia, America and Europe, using a variety of policy, practice and political examples. The book argues that globalisation, and the attendant transnational flows of people and culture, has both the potential to create theatre careers and new, important, works, whist at the same time constraining individuals, communities and cultural forms. The book draws on a rich combination of ethnographic and interview data, along with theoretically informed cultural analysis, using examples ranging from The British Council and the Singapore Art Festival, through Asian American and British East Asian identities, to controversial performances of theOrphan of Zhao. The book will be of primary interest to cultural,geography and performan

Geographer Carolyn Finney wrote Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), out of a frustration with the dominant environmental discourse that, she asserts, doesn’t fully take into consideration the perspectives and interests of African Americans.Finney takes care to recognize the multiplicity of African American relationships to the natural environment and to the environmental movement, broadly understood.Finney’sapproach to the subject matter, in which the personal (family history and herpersonal politics) is fully integrated into her scholarly project, is deliberately directed to a diverse audience in order to allowthe broadest possible cross section of readers to engage meaningfully with issues surrounding the environmental movement and natural resource management in the United States.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Evolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Yet despite its central place in the life sciences, relatively few geographers employ evolutionary theory in their work. In his new book Evolutionary History:Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Edmund Russell makes a compelling case for why evolution matters for human history. Russell argues that evolution is both important and common. Through a number of case studies, he shows how poaching in Africa led to the evolution of tuskless elephants and intensive fishing fostered the development of smaller salmon and cod. But perhaps more importantly, he shows how anthropogenic, or human shaped, evolution played a pivotal role in two of the fundamental developments of human history: the agricultural and industrial revolutions. His book is a challenge to historians

Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigration, or politics and raised questions about society and geography. In many ways, these nineteenth-century maps were the predecessors to the maps made through Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In the past decade, geographers and historians have begun using GIS for innovative historical research. Among the most innovative scholars using this technology is Anne Knowles, professor of geography at Middlebury College. Her new books Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Geographies of the Holocaust (co-edited with Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano) are superb examples of how scholars can use GIS to better understand the past. In this podcast, Professor Knowles discusses the iron industry in Antebellum America, the Holocaust, and how GIS can help

Our everyday lives are saturated with maps. We use maps on our smart phones to help us navigate from place to place. Maps in the newspaper and online show us the spread of disease, the state of the planet, and the conflicts among nations. Susan Schulten‘s Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines how the very idea of a map radically changed it the nineteenth century. Author Susan Schulten shows the pivotal role maps played in nineteenth-century American life, from helping Americans forge a national identity and better understand their past to showing the pervasiveness of slavery in different parts of the South and the prospect for emancipation. Those with a keen interest in cartography–or even a passing interest–will find her book and this interview fascinating. Professor Schulten has also created an excellent companion site for the book, www.mappingthenation.com. There you will find hi-resolution digital copies of

Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth century. Author Matthew Huber shows the crucial role oil and housing policy played in the New Deal and how, in subsequent decades, government policies drove many Americans to the suburbs and increased their dependence on petroleum. Although such policies were central to suburbanization, Americans in these new neighborhoods tended to forget this fact, and instead, saw their success in the suburbs as the outcome of private achievements. Over time, such places became the crucible for the growth of neoliberalism. Lifeblood demonstrates the role oil played not only in suburbanization, but in the rightward shift of American politics over the past four decades.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ruhuna National Park and ‘tropical modernism’ architecture are aesthetically analysed in Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood (Liverpool University Press, 2013) by Tariq Jazeel. The book uses these two sites to explore the ways in which non-secular experiences of nature inscribe Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism into the spaces of everyday life. Skilfully weaving together ethnographic and archival material, the book pushes us to re-read the seemingly secular spaces of modernity in Sri Lanka.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The spatial politics of brothels in late-British India are the subject of Stephen Legg‘s second book Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India, published by Duke University Press in 2014. The book explores the complexities of the brothel at the urban, national and imperial scales as campaigns (and campaigners) attempted to reform prostitution. Theoretically driven by a critical reading of Foucault, the book draws on rich archival material to explore the networks, naming and nature that these reforms addressed.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013) is a deeply contextualized study of the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake and its reverberations into the twenty-first century, arguing that the quake not only played an important role in shaping ideas about politics, religion, geography, and the sciences in Japan, but also generated new ways of thinking about human agency and earthquakes that continue to be influential today. When the Earth Roars: Lessons from the History of Earthquakes in Japan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) is a synthetic account of earthquakes along the Sanriku coast of Japan from early modernity to now, offering a deep contextualization of the 3/11 disaster and some important lessons for how we might cope with the possibilities of further seismic activity (in Japan an

The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014), occurred to him when he was interviewing a “lean, laconic, geologist,” named Bob Taylor who works at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “A beach stores sand in dunes behind it,” Taylor said. “When it’s attacked, it draws material from the dunes for itself and for building a protective shoal or bar offshore. When it’s less stressed, it takes sand and gravel from offshore and stores it back on the beach and in the dunes.” “You talk as though the damn thing were alive,” Cameron said. “I think of it that way,” said Taylor. At the time, Silver Donald Cameron thought of it as a vivid metaphor. But, in his newly revised version of The Living Beach, he argues that it’s true: the beach is alive with the right to be prot