A number of books have come to our attention as our interests in urban and visual space, time, the scales and tempos of climate warming and architectural issues including architects’ northern, boreal and Arctic utopian cities, housing crises, deoclonization and Indigeneity. All these are linked by concerns over the geopolitical respatialisation and struggle over the meaning of sites, regions and the built environment. Here are some books with blurbs. Other books, new and old, one my table include the recent new French translation of Virgil’s Aeneid: Souci de la Terre or ‘Concern for the Land,’ the stupendous Cooper Hewitt exhibition catalogue of the works of Es Devlin. I’ve finished the outstanding Quotidien politique by Geneviève Pruvost…
We welcome your short commentaries on these or other noteworthy texts. Send to <[email protected]> Below are some of the books with blurbs:
.
Pyromania: Fire, Power and Geopolitics in a Climate-disrupted World
We are the only species that uses fire. It has determined how we have made our home on this planet and it has propelled us to the role of the dominant species in the biosphere. But at the heart of contemporary climate change is the process of combustion. Simon Dalby explores what a life without burning things might look like, and how we might get there. Fires make the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is heating the planet, melting the ice sheets, changing weather patterns and making wildfires worse. Our civilization is burning things, especially fossil fuels, at prodigious rates.
.
It’s All about the Land: Collected Talks and Interviews on Indigenous Resurgence
Illuminating the First Nations struggles against the Canadian state, It’s All about the Land exposes how racism underpins and shapes Indigenous-settler relationships. Renowned Kahnawà:ke Mohawk activist and scholar Taiaiake Alfred explains how the Canadian government’s reconciliation agenda is a new form of colonization that is guaranteed to fail. Bringing together Alfred’s speeches and interviews from over the past two decades, the book shows that Indigenous peoples across the world face a stark choice: reconnect with their authentic cultures and values or continue following a slow road to annihilation. Rooted in ancestral spirit, knowledge, and law, It’s All about the Land presents a passionate argument for Indigenous Resurgence as the pathway toward justice for Indigenous peoples.
.
If Cars Could Walk; Postsocialist Streets in Transformation
Ger Duijzings, Gerlachlus Duijzings, Tauri Tuvikene
In the last twenty-five years, the explosive rise of car mobility has transformed street life in postsocialist cities. Whereas previously the social fabric of these cities ran on socialist modes of mobility, they are now overtaken by a culture of privately owned cars. If Cars Could Walk uses ethnographic case studies documenting these changes in terms of street interaction, vehicles used, and the parameters of speed, maneuverability, and cultural and symbolic values. The altered reality of people’s movements, replacing public transport, bicycles and other former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility with privatized mobility reflect an evolving political and cultural imagination, which in turn shapes their current political reality.
.
Black Scare / Red Scare; Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States
Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.
.
Tours Inside the Snow Globe: Ottawa Monuments and National Belonging
The toppling of monuments globally in the last few years has highlighted the potency of monuments as dynamic and affectively loaded participants in society. In the context of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, monuments inspire colonial and imperial nostalgia, compelling visitors to consistently re-imagine Canada as a white, Anglophone nation, built through the labour of white men: politicians, soldiers, and businessmen. At the same time, Ottawa monuments allow for dominant affective relationships to the nation to be challenged, demonstrated through subtle and explicit forms of defacement and other interactions that compel us to remember colonial violence, pacifism, violence against women, and racisms.
Organized as a series of walking tours throughout Ottawa, the chapters in Tours Inside the Snow Globe demonstrate the affective capacities of monuments and highlight how these monuments have ongoing relationships with their sites, the city, other monuments, and local, deliberate, national, and casual communities of users. The tours focus on the lives of a monument to an unnamed Indigenous scout, the National War Memorial, Enclave: the Ottawa Women’s Monument, and the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights. Two of the tours offer analyses of the ambivalent representations of women and Indigeneity in Ottawa’s statue landscape.
-Darush Farrokh, Rob Shields (Univeristy of Alberta)
