Stop, Look, and Listen #62
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 warning: Murder.
Five things to look at
In this piece for Literary Hub, Ed Simon examined the early 19th-century lexicographer Noah Webster’s efforts to establish American as linguistically and orthographically distinct from the English spoken across the Atlantic, language’s broader contentious status in the early republic, and its legacy for the US’s emergent literary culture.
Rameen Naseem reflected in this post for the Border Criminologies blog on her family’s experience of negotiating the bureaucratic opacity of immigration control on the Saudi-Bahraini border in 2023, and the way this ambiguity and arbitrariness functions as a system of control in itself, internalised by the very subjects it acts upon.
Alberto Rinaldi and Atiya Hussain examined the Chagos Islands’ stalled transfer from Britain to Mauritius for Critical Legal Thinking, as exemplifying the incomplete process of decolonisation following the formal end of the British Empire, with major powers’ military priorities continuing to hold sway over international legal instruments.
For his The Horn and the Gulf newsletter, Abdullahi Halakhe revisited Kenya’s transition to multiparty democracy at the 1992 general election, the US’s imperfect promotion at the time of fair vote-counting and transfer of power in the country, and the uneven and incomplete form of democracy that emerged in Kenya thereafter.
Vito De Lucia wrote for EJIL: Talk! about the China Institute for Marine Affairs’ recent paper on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the different arguments it combines as to how UNCLOS ought to operate, and the insight it offers into China’s approach to an international maritime legal order in a state of flux.
Five things to listen to
William Davies and Patrick Maguire joined host James Butler on the London Review of Books’ On Politics podcast to discuss the reasons for Keir Starmer’s premiership coming to such a dismal halt after two years, and what the prospects are for genuine political and economic transformation under expected successor Andy Burnham.
Sean Guillory and Rusana Novikova spoke to guest Mikhail Fishman on the Eurasian Knot podcast about the career of Russian politician Boris Nemtsov, from 1990s liberal beacon and anticipated successor to Boris Yeltsin, through marginalisation and opposition under Vladimir Putin in the 2000s, to his 2015 murder and its aftermath.
On Foreign Policy’s Ones and Tooze podcast, Adam Tooze and Cameron Abadi assessed the US’s historical competing models of political economy, between Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism, free and slave labour, being a global creditor and debtor, and promoting liberal international economic order and pursuing imperial hegemony.
Hosts Asma Khalid and Tristan Redmond welcomed Elizabeth Ingleson onto the BBC World Service’s The Global Story programme for a conversation about the US’s both deliberate and inadvertent roles in promoting China’s rise as an economic superpower since the 1970s, and the shifting image of Chinese manufacturing during this time.
Miranda Melcher interviewed Martina Baradel on the New Books Network about her book 21st Century Yakuza: Death of Japanese Organised Crime, the ideological and organisational bases of the Yakuza’s ascendancy after the Second World War, their complex relationship with the Japanese state, and the reasons for their recent decline.
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You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
Doubt (1991)
Jesus Jones’ breakthrough second album combines post-Cold War optimism, a rejection of moral certainties, and a multivalent response to postmodernity.
The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
In pitting the celebrated nineteenth-century politician against the devil himself, this film reimagines the economic and legal transformations of that era through the prism of the New Deal.
New Labour on Desert Island Discs
Labour politicians who appeared on the Radio 4 show between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s used their musical choices to try and tell stories about their politics and personal lives.