books

ABOUT – We’re a group of scholars working across a number of fields and intellectual traditions. We come together to read and discuss new ideas with relevance to our teaching and research. The group has a broad interest in developing our knowledge of critical theory as it pertains to a range of other theoretical traditions, empirical fields and geographical regions. By closely reading and debating new and old books we aim to enhance and enrich our research, teaching and practice in ways that further challenge the structures we are all embedded in. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, the Australian academy itself.

CONVENERS Dallas Rogers, Naama Blatman & Tooran Alizadeh

Email if you’d like to read a book with us.

Publications

The following are some of the publications enriched by the discussions of the group: 


zone-112. The Everyday Life of Memorials

Our second book for 2023 is The Everyday Life of Memorials by Andrew M. Shanken, published by Zone Books. 

Support the author and publisher, and keep academic book publishing alive, buy the book here.

DescriptionMemorials are commonly studied as part of the commemorative infrastructure of modern society. Just as often, they are understood as sites of political contestation, where people battle over the meaning of events. But most of the time, they are neither. Instead, they take their rest as ordinary objects, part of the street furniture of urban life. Most memorials are “turned on” only on special days, such as Memorial Day, or at heated moments, as in August 2017, when the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville was overtaken by a political maelstrom. The rest of the time they are turned off. This book is about the everyday life of memorials. It explores their relationship to the pulses of daily life, their meaning within this quotidian context, and their place within the development of modern cities. Through Andrew Shanken’s close historical readings of memorials, both well-known and obscure, two distinct strands of scholarship are thus brought together: the study of the everyday and memory studies. From the introduction of modern memorials in the wake of the French Revolution through the recent destruction of Confederate monuments, memorials have oscillated between the everyday and the “not-everyday.” In fact, memorials have been implicated in the very structure of these categories. The Everyday Life of Memorials explores how memorials end up where they are, grow invisible, fight with traffic, get moved, are assembled into memorial zones, and are drawn anew into commemorations and political maelstroms that their original sponsors never could have imagined. Finally, exploring how people behave at memorials and what memorials ask of people reveals just how strange the commemorative infrastructure of modernity is.

Schedule — to be confirmed

DATE

TIME

CHAPTER

CHAIR

READER

19th Apr

12-1

Introduction

1. Everyday Memory

Dallas Rogers

Adam Morton

26th Apr

12-1

2. Labile Memory

Pranita Shrestha Nicholas Bromfield

3rd May

12-1

3. Placing Memory: Cemeteries and Parks

Dallas Rogers

Catherine Townsend

10th May

12-1

4. Misplacing Memory: Memorials in Circles, Squares, and Medians

Dallas Rogers

Adam Morton

17th May

12-1

5. Displacing Memory

Dallas RogersDr Lutfun Nahar Lata

24th May

 6. Mustering Memory Dallas Rogers

Pranita Shrestha 

31th May

12-1

7. Assembling Memory

Dallas RogersRebecca Clements

7th June

12-1

8. What we do at Memorials 

Dallas RogersNatalie Osborne

14th June

12-1

9. What Memorials do at Memorials

Conclusion

Dallas RogersZahra Nasreen
     

978-0-8223-5655-4_pr-211. Mohawk Interruptions: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States

Our first book for 2023 is Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States by Audra Simpson, published by Duke.

Support the author and publisher, and keep academic book publishing alive, buy the book here.

DescriptionMohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.

Schedule — to be confirmed

DATE

TIME

CHAPTER

CHAIR

READER

1st Feb

12-1

1. Indigenous Interruptions- Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State

Naama BlatmanCathy Eatock

8th Feb

12-1

2. A Brief History of Land, Meaning, and Membership in Iroquoia and Kahnawà:ka

Naama BlatmanNicholas Bromfield

15th Feb

12-1

3. Constructing Kahnawà:ka as an “Out-of-the-Way” Place: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy

Naama BlatmanAndrew Clarke

22nd Feb

12-1

4. Ethnographic Refusal: Anthropological Need

Dallas RogersNaama Blatman

1st Mar

12-1

5. Borders, Cigarettes, and Sovereignty

Naama BlatmanDallas Rogers

8th Mar

12-1

6. The Gender of the Flint: Mohawk Nationhood and Citizenship in the Face of Empire

Conclusion. Interruptus 177

Naama BlatmanNatalie Osborne

FLzpzouVIAwlvZN10. The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture

Our last book for 2022 is The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture by AbdouMaliq Simone, published by Duke.

Support the author and publisher, and keep academic book publishing alive, buy the book here.

DescriptionIn The Surrounds renowned urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone offers a new theorization of the interface of the urban and the political. Working at the intersection of Black studies, urban theory, and decolonial and Islamic thought, Simone centers the surrounds—those urban spaces beyond control and capture that exist as a locus of rebellion and invention. He shows that even in clearly defined city environments, whether industrial, carceral, administrative, or domestic, residents use spaces for purposes they were not designed for: schools become housing, markets turn into classrooms, tax offices transform into repair shops. The surrounds, Simone contends, are where nothing fits according to design. They are where forgotten and marginalized populations invent new relations and ways of living and being, continuously reshaping what individuals and collectives can do. Focusing less on what new worlds may come to be and more on what people are creating now, Simone shows how the surrounds are an integral part of the expansiveness of urban imagination.

The talk below by AbdouMaliq Simone is a handy introduction to the broader landscape of this work. 

Schedule

DATE

TIME

CHAPTER

CHAIR

READER

2nd Nov

12-1

Introduction Exposing the Surrounds as Urban Infrastructure

Dallas Rogers

Simon Marvin

9th Nov

12-1

1. Without Capture: From Extinction to Abolition

Tooran Alizadeh

Alison Young

16th Nov

12-1

2. Forgetting Being Forgotten

Dallas Rogers

Pranita Shrestha 

23rd Nov

12-1

Chapter 3 + coda

Naama Blatman

Adam Morton

 


97802415141779. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

Our third book for 2022 is Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J Robinson, published by Penguin. 

July and August 2022

Description — A foundational work of Black Radical critical theory, now to be widely available here for the first time. Any struggle must be fought on a people’s own terms, argues Cedric Robinson’s landmark account of Black radicalism. Marxism is a western construction, and therefore inadequate to describe the significance of Black communities as agents of change against ‘racial capitalism’. Tracing the emergence of European radicalism, the history of Black African resistance and the influence of these on such key thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, Black Marxism reclaims the story of a movement.

Read this review of Black Marxism: The Making Of The Black Radical Tradition by Austin Smidt.

Below is a talk by Robin D. G. Kelley on What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter? It’s a handy introduction to the concept of racial capitalism.  

Schedule

DATE

TIME

CHAPTER

CHAIR

READER

13th July

12-1

1. Racial Capitalism

2. The English Working Class as the Mirror of Production

Dallas Rogers

Naama Blatman

20th July

12-1

3. Socialist Theory and Nationalism +

4. Process and Consequences of Africa’s Transmutation

Tooran Alizadeh

Nicholas Bromfield

27th July

12-1

5. The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Labor +

6. The Historical Archaeology of the Black Radical Tradition

Naama Blatman

Rebecca Clements

Pranita Shrestha

3rd Aug

12-1

7. The Nature of the Black Radical Tradition +

8. The Formation of an Intelligentsia

Tooran Alizadeh

Dallas Rogers

10th Aug

12-1

9. Historiography and the Black Radical Tradition

Dallas Rogers

Dr Lutfun Nahar Lata

17th Aug

12-1

10. C.L.R James and the Black Radical Tradition

Naama Blatman

 
 

12-1

11. Richard Wright and the Critique of Class Theory + Conclusion 

  
     

978-1-4780-1133-0_pr

8. The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine

Our second book for 2022 is The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine by Hagar Kotef, published by Duke University Press.

April and June 2022

DescriptionColonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef traces the cultural, political, and spatial apparatuses that enable people and nations to settle on the ruins of other people’s homes.

Kotef demonstrates how the mass and structural modes of violence that are necessary for the establishment and sustainment of the colony dwell within settler-colonial homemaking, and through it shape collective and individual identities. She thus powerfully shows how the possibility to live amid the destruction one generates is not merely the possibility to turn one’s gaze away from violence but also the possibility to develop an attachment to violence itself. Kotef thereby offers a theoretical framework for understanding how settler-colonial violence becomes inseparable from one’s sense of self.

The University of Sydney Library link here

Schedule

DATE

TIME

CHAPTER

CHAIR

READER

6th April

12-1

Preface + Introduction- Home

Naama BlatmanDallas Rogers

13th April

12-1

Theoretical OverviewTooran AlizadehDallas Rogers

20th April

12-1

Home/Homelessness: A reading in Arendt

Dallas RogersBlanche Verlie

27th April

12-1

1_The Consuming self- On Locke, Aristotle, Feminist theory, and domestic violences

Tooran AlizadehNaama Blatman

4th May

12-1

Unsettlement

Tooran AlizadehPranita Shrestha

11th May

12-1

USYD Strike: No Reading Group. Solidarity ✊

  

18th May

12-1

A brief reflection on death and decolonisation

2. Home_and the ruins that remain

Dallas Rogers

Xiao Ma

Andrew Clarke

25th May

12-1

A phenomenology of violence: ruins

Tooran Alizadeh

Alison Young

1st June

12-1

A moment of popular culture_The home of MasterChef

Naama BlatmanRebecca Clements

15th June

12-1

3_On eggs and dispossession_Organic agriculture and the New Settlement Movement

Dallas RogersDallas Rogers

22nd June

12-1

An ethic of violence_organics washing

Tooran AlizadehNicholas Bromfield

9780520386228

7. Shaking up the City: Ignorance, Inequality and the Urban Question

Our first book for 2022 is Shaking up the city: ignorance, inequality and the urban question by Tom Slater, published by University of California Press.

February and March 2022

Description Shaking Up the City critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater “shakes up” mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent control, neighborhood effects, territorial stigmatization, and ethnoracial segregation.

With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, urban planning, and public policy, this book engages closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice to offer numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of an urbanism rooted in vested interest.

The University of Sydney Library link here

Read a book review by Dallas Rogers: Shaking up the City Review

Schedule

DATE

TIME

CHAPTER

CHAIR

READER

2nd February 

12 – 1

Foreward & 1. Challenging the Heteronomy of Urban Research

Naama BlatmanDallas Rogers

9th February 

12 – 1

2. The resilience of neoliberal urbanism

Dallas RogersPranita Shrestha

16th February 

12 – 1

3 Gentrification beyond False Choice Urbanism

Naama BlatmanTooran Alizadeh

23rd February 

12 – 1

4. Displacement, rent control, and housing justice

Dallas RogersAndrew Clarke

2nd March

12 – 1

5. Neighborhood Effects as Tautological Urbanism

Dallas RogersRebecca Clements

9th March

12 – 1

6. The production and activation of territorial stigma

Naama BlatmanAlistair Sisson

16th March

12 – 1

7. Ghetto Blasting

Tooran Alizadeh

Natalie Osborne

23rd March

12 – 1

8 Some possibilities for critical urban studies

Dallas RogersNaama Blatman

6. The Asset Economy

Our fourth and final book for 2021 is The Asset Economy, by Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings, published by Polity.

November 2021

Description Rising inequality is the defining feature of our age. With the lion’s share of wealth growth going to the top, for a growing percentage of society a middle-class existence is out of reach. What exactly are the economic shifts that have driven the social transformations taking place in Anglo-capitalist societies?  Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings argue that the rise of the asset economy has produced a new logic of inequality. Several decades of property inflation have seen asset ownership overshadow employment as a determinant of class position. Exploring the impact of generational dynamics in this new class landscape, the book advances an original perspective on a range of phenomena that are widely debated but poorly understood – including the growth of wealth inequalities and precarity, the dynamics of urban property inflation, changes in fiscal and monetary policy and the predicament of the “millennial” generation. Despite widespread awareness of the harmful effects of Quantitative Easing and similar asset-supporting measures, we appear to have entered an era of policy “lock-in” that is responsible for a growing disconnect between popular expectations and institutional priorities. The resulting polarization underlies many of the volatile dynamics and rapidly shifting alliances that dominate today’s headlines.

The University of Sydney Library link here

Schedule

DATE

TIME

CHAPTER

CHAIR

READER

17 November

12 – 1

Introduction +

Asset logics + The making of the asset economy

Dallas Rogers

Alistair Sisson

24 November

12 – 1

New class realities +

Conclusion

Dallas Rogers

Laurence Troy


Sydney boom

5. Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust: The City And Its Property Market, 1850-1981

Special session with the Urban Crew

We’re excited to be revisiting this seminal work Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust (Allen & Unwin, 1982) by Australian geographer and former University of Sydney Professor Maurice T Daly. Sadly, Maurice passed away in 2021. You can read a statement by Bill Pritchard here.

DescriptionAt the heart of Daly’s exploration of Sydney is an interrogation of the implications of the property cycle on Australians. Daly predicted what now appears daily in the property pages of our national newspapers, and the quiet desperation of the suburban poor:

“At the end of it all the city had sprawled even further; services were even more inadequate; the young and the poor were relatively worse off; investment funds which might have been put into production or socially useful activities had been dissipated; and millions of dollars of small investors’ funds had been lost as sharks and charlatans grew rich,” writes Daly.

Schedule

DATE

TIME

CHAPTER

CHAIR

3 September

10 – 11

1. The story of a boom, 1968-74

Kurt Iveson

10 September

10 – 11

2. Office builders, 1966-81

Dallas Rogers

17 September

10 – 11

3. Finance companies_ fuelling the flames

Kurt Iveson

24 September

10 – 11

4. Subdividers, speculators and the games people play

Dallas Rogers

8 October

10 – 11

5. Origins of boom and bust

Kurt Iveson

15 October

10 – 11

6. Consequences of boom and bust

Dallas Rogers

22 October

10 – 11

7. Our cities, our sins

Kurt Iveson


4. Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

Our third book for 2021 is Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, by Priyamvada Gopal and published by Verso.

August to October 2021

Description – How rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.

The University of Sydney Library link here

Schedule

DATETIMECHAPTERCHAIRREADER
4 August12 – 1IntroductionTooran AlizadehDallas Rogers
11 August12 – 11. The spirt of the sepoy hostDallas RogersSomwrita Sarkar
18 August12 – 12. A barbaric IndependenceDallas RogersDiti Bhattacharya 
25 August12 – 13. The Accidental AnticolonialistDallas RogersRebecca Clements
1 September12 – 14. Passages to InternationalismTooran AlizadehJake Davies
8 September12 – 15. The Interpreter of InsurgenciesDallas RogersPranita Shrestha
29 September12 – 16. The Revolt of the Oppressed WorldTooran AlizadehCaitlin Buckle
6 October12 – 17. Black Voices MatterDallas RogersNaama Blatman
13 October12 – 18. Internationalising African OpinionTooran AlizadehSomwrita Sarkar
20 October12 – 19. Smash Our Own ImperialismDallas RogersCatherine Townsend
27 October12 – 1

10. A Terrible Assertion of Discontent + Epilogue

Tooran Alizadeh

Nicholas Bromfield

3 November 12 – 1

Sydney Review of Books – Writing Workshop

Dallas Rogers

Catriona Menzies-Pike


3. (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire

Our second book for 2021 is (B)ordering Britain: Law, race and empire by Nadine El-Enany and published by Manchester University Press.

April and May 2021

Description – (B)ordering Britain argues that Britain is the spoils of empire, its immigration law is colonial violence and irregular immigration is anti-colonial resistance. In announcing itself as postcolonial through immigration and nationality laws passed in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Britain cut itself off symbolically and physically from its colonies and the Commonwealth, taking with it what it had plundered. This imperial vanishing act cast Britain’s colonial history into the shadows. The British Empire, about which Britons know little, can be remembered fondly as a moment of past glory, as a gift once given to the world. Meanwhile immigration laws are justified on the basis that they keep the undeserving hordes out. In fact, immigration laws are acts of colonial seizure and violence. They obstruct the vast majority of racialised people from accessing colonial wealth amassed in the course of colonial conquest. Regardless of what the law, media and political discourse dictate, people with personal, ancestral or geographical links to colonialism, or those existing under the weight of its legacy of race and racism, have every right to come to Britain and take back what is theirs.

The University of Sydney Library link here

Schedule

DATETIMECHAPTERSESSION LEAD
14th April 202112 – 1pmIntroduction: Britain as the spoils of empireDallas Rogers
21st April 202112 – 1pm1. Bordering and orderingShanthi Robertson
28th April 202112 – 1pm2. Aliens: immigration law’s racial architectureRebecca Clements
5th May 202112 – 1pm3. Subjects and citizens: cordoning off colonial spoilsJake Davies
12th May 202112 – 1pm4. Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers: predictable arrivalsAndrew Burridge
19th May 202112 – 1pm5. European citizens and third country nationals: Europe’s colonial embraceTooran Alizadeh
26th May 202112 – 1pmConclusion- ‘Go home’ as an invitation to stayDallas Rogers

 


2. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World

Our first book for 2021 is Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World by Gary Wilder and published by Duke University Press.

February and March 2021

DescriptionFreedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.

The University of Sydney Library link here

Schedule

DATETIMECHAPTERSESSION LEAD
3rd February 202112 – 1pm1. Unthinking France, Rethinking DecolonizationAdam Morton
10th February 202112 – 1pm2. Situating Césaire- Antillean Awakening and Global RedemptionSha Liu
17th February 202112 – 1pm3. Situating Senghor: African Hospitality and Human SolidarityCaitlin Buckle
24th February 202112 – 1pm4. Freedom, Time, TerritoryMatthew Gill
3rd March 202112 – 1pm5. Departmentalization and the Spirit of SchoelcherCameron McAuliffe
10th March 202112 – 1pm6. Federalism and the Future of FranceGreta Werner
17th March 202112 – 1pm7. Antillean Autonomy and the Legacy of LouverturePranita Shrestha
24th March 202112 – 1pm8. African Socialism and the Fate of the WorldRebecca Clements
31st March 202112 – 1pm9. Decolonization and Postnational DemocracyNathan Etherington

 


1. Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory

Our first book for 2020 is Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory byRobert Nichols and published by Duke University Press.

November and December 2020

Description – Drawing on Indigenous peoples’ struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.

Schedule

DATETIMECHAPTERSESSION LEAD 
11th November 202012pm – 1pmIntroduction
1. That Sole and Despotic Dominion
Dallas Rogers
18th November 20201pm – 2pm2. Marx, after the FeastAdam Morton
25th November 202012pm – 1pm3. Indigenous Structural CritiqueNaama Blatman
2nd December 202012pm – 1pm4. Dilemmas of Self-Ownership, Rituals of AntiwillAlistair Sisson
9th December 202012pm – 1pmConclusionPratichi Chatterjee

Reading Group Ethics

The group is committed to the following three key reading group ethics.

  1. Acknowledge – We will formally acknowledge the reading group in any published works that draw on ideas generated or refined through this reading group (see sample text* below, which can be inserted into publications);
  2. Build – Any publications emerging out of the reading group will focus on HDR and ECR mentoring and capacity building as their purpose; and
  3. Collaborate – We will use the read group to explore old and new collaborative writing opportunities.

Formal acknowledgment

  • While the ideas and any mistakes in this work are our own, we are grateful for the stimulating conversations we have been having with the Place, Race and Critical Theory Reading Group at the University of Sydney, with whom we read and discussed the ideas in this work.