Stop, Look, and Listen #35
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
Content warnings: The Holocaust; Ethnic cleansing; Death; Violence.
Five things to look at:
Heather Sullivan reflected for Good Authority about how the bipartisan consensus in the US on hardening border security has increased the perilousness of the journey made by migrants, and has seen Central American countries like Mexico and Panama effectively enforcing US border policies for financial gain.
Silke Hackenesch has written for the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives blog about the activism of journalist Mabel Grammer, who campaigned after the Second World War for African American families to adopt biracial children born in Germany to Black servicemen and local women.
In this post for his Global Inequality and More 3.0 newsletter, Branko Milanovic ruminates on the narrow purview of Eastern European nationalist elites who have allied with the West against Russian imperialism, ostensibly as champions of liberalism, only to become increasingly imperialist after gaining statehood.
Writing for his An Africanist Perspective newsletter, Ken Opalo has discussed how the absence of effective metropolitan governance in Nigerian cities beyond its capitals of Abuja and Lagos undermines the country’s ability to use its relatively dispersed urban expansion to generate higher economic growth.
Giovanni Pigni has written for New Lines Magazine about the way Russia has enlisted its prison population to fight its war in Ukraine, exploiting their predilection for violence, desire for freedom and fulfilment, and unquestioning patriotism, and deploying them as fodder for its most lethal missions.
Five things to listen to:
On the Polar Geopolitics podcast, host Eric Paglia spoke with Ingrid Medby about the ways in which a range of international actors mobilise claims to a form of Arctic identity to legitimise their involvement in the region’s governance, and the ways these draw upon ideas of both geography and temporality.
Kerry Anderson interviewed Daniel Chardell for the Horns of a Dilemma podcast about the need to locate the first Gulf War within the context of the end of the Cold War, and how the decline of the Soviet Union as a counterbalance to American influence fuelled Saddam Hussein’s paranoid worldview.
On the The Fire These Times podcast, Elia Ayoub and daniel voskoboynik discuss what it means to consider the Holocaust and the Nakba in conjunction with each other, and how Israeli state memory of the former erases other traditions of its commemoration and facilitates the forms of settler colonialism it was rooted in.
Jen Hoyer spoke on the New Books Network podcast to Lisa Fletcher and Elizabeth Leane about their book Space, Place, and Bestsellers: Moving Books, and about exploring the geographies and parameters of the bestseller category, combining analysis of these texts with the spaces in which they are sold.
On this episode of the The American Vandal podcast, Matt Seybold and guests discussed the inevitability and necessity of presentism in historical research, and the shortcomings of forms of activism among historians that draw them closer to liberal elites while ignoring the material conditions harming their discipline.
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