Episodes

  • Sasikumar Harikrishnan, "Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala" (Routledge, 2023)

    Sasikumar Harikrishnan, "Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala" (Routledge, 2023)
    Nov 20 2024
    What can social spaces tell us about social relations in society? How do everyday social spaces like teashops, reading rooms and libraries reify-or subvert-dominant social structures like caste and gender? These are the questions that Social Spaces and the Public Sphere:: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala (Routledge, 2023) explores through a study of modern Kerala. Using archival material, discourse analysis, participant observation and personal interviews, this book traces the transformation of public spaces through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume focuses on how 'modernity' has also been a struggle for access to public spaces, and non-institutional spaces like teashops, markets, public roads, temple grounds, reading-rooms and libraries have all been crucial to how political culture was shaped, and how dominant hegemonies-caste, class or capital-have been challenged. It suggests that the secular public sphere that emerged in the last century in Kerala was a result of the constant negotiations between conflicting ideas which were put to test in these social spaces. At a time when digital spaces are fast replacing physical ones, this book is a timely reminder of the struggles that led to the emergence of secular public spaces in Kerala. It contributes to similar studies on public space that have emerged from other parts of the world over the last decades. A major contribution to understanding modern India, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of social history, political science, political sociology, gender studies, linguistics, and South Asian studies. DISCOUNT CODES: Routledge has offered two discount codes that you can use to purchase this book on their website. The discount codes are ESA03 (UK) and SMA24 (USA). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    1 hr and 17 mins
  • Adam Bobbette, "The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java" (Duke UP, 2023)

    Adam Bobbette, "The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java" (Duke UP, 2023)
    Nov 15 2024
    In The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java (Duke UP, 2023), Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia's volcanoes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scientists became concerned with protecting the colonial plantation economy from the unpredictable bursts and shudders of volcanoes. Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries to show how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and fieldwork at Javanese volcanoes and in scientific observatories, he explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the earth. In this way, Bobbette decenters the significance of Western scientists to expand our understanding of the evolution of planetary thought and rethinks the politics of geological knowledge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    43 mins
  • Scott J. Weiner, "Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

    Scott J. Weiner, "Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
    Nov 13 2024
    Tribe-state relations are a foundational element of authoritarian bargains in the Middle East, and in particular in the Gulf States. However, the structures of governance built upon that foundation exhibit wide differences. What explains this variation in the salience of kinship authority? Through a case comparison of Kuwait, Qatar and Oman, in Kinship, State Formation and Governance in the Arab Gulf States (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) Dr. Scott Weiner shows that variation in tribal access to limited resources before state building can account for these differences. Its conclusions are based on seven months of archival research and interviews in Arabic and English, and reveal new details about state formation on the Arabian Peninsula. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    46 mins
  • Andrea Benvenuti, "Nehru's Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Andrea Benvenuti, "Nehru's Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Oct 24 2024
    In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India and its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role in organizing the conference, and Bandung is now seen as a part of Nehru’s push to create a non-Western foreign policy that aligned with neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union. But as Andrea Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy (Oxford UP, 2024) points out, Nehru wasn’t actually keen on the idea at all. Nor was Nehru keen on a second summit, feeling that the summit merely highlighted divisions rather than forge consensus. And wrapped up in this whole discussion is Nehru’s attempt to bring China into the fold, perhaps best exemplified by Zhou Enlai, the only leader to emerge as a bigger star from Bandung than Nehru. Andrea Benvenuti is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales, teaching twentieth-century international history at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Nehru’s Bandung. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    1 hr and 18 mins
  • Sharad Chari, "Apartheid Remains" (Duke UP, 2024)

    Sharad Chari, "Apartheid Remains" (Duke UP, 2024)
    Oct 13 2024
    Over the course of the 20th century, the South African state attempted to construct a “White Man’s Country” on the African continent using the biopolitical tools and spatial and economic planning strategies that characterized modern statecraft. My guest today, the geographer Sharad Chari, examines how racialized subaltern populations of Blacks, Indians, and coloureds resisted and circumvented these efforts to construct a racialized social order. At the same time, the book also examines how the legacies of Apartheid shape the experiences of denizens of South Africa’s cities today. Focusing on the Indian Ocean city of Durban from the turn of the 20th century, Apartheid Remains (Duke UP, 2024) is a rich historical and ethnographic account of racialized capitalist space-making and the resistance that it continues to provoke. Sharad Chari is Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley. He is also the author of Fraternal Capital: Peasant-workers, self-made men and globalization in provincial India (Stanford, 2004) and Gramsci at Sea (Minnesota, 2023). You can download Apartheid Remains for free here: https://library.oapen.org/hand... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • Arang Keshavarzian, "Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East" (Stanford UP, 2024)

    Arang Keshavarzian, "Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East" (Stanford UP, 2024)
    Jul 21 2024
    The Persian Gulf has long been a contested space--an object of imperial ambitions, national antagonisms, and migratory dreams. The roots of these contestations lie in the different ways the Gulf has been defined as a region, both by those who live there and those beyond its shore. Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (Stanford UP, 2024) reveals how capitalism, empire-building, geopolitics, and urbanism have each shaped understandings of the region over the last two centuries. Here, the Gulf comes into view as a created space, encompassing dynamic social relations and competing interests. Arang Keshavarzian writes a new history of the region that places Iran, Iraq, and the Arab Peninsula together within global processes. He connects moments more often treated as ruptures--the discovery of oil, the Iranian Revolution, the rise and decline of British empire, the emergence of American power--and crafts a narrative populated by a diverse range of people--migrants and ruling families, pearl-divers and star architects, striking taxi drivers and dethroned rulers, protectors of British India and stewards of globalized American universities. Tacking across geographic scales, Keshavarzian reveals how the Gulf has been globalized through transnational relations, regionalized as a geopolitical category, and cleaved along national divisions and social inequalities. When understood as a process, not an object, the Persian Gulf reveals much about how regions and the world have been made in modern times. Making Space for the Gulf offers a fresh understanding of this globally consequential place. Arang Keshavarzian is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (2007) and coeditor of Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (2021). Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Jonathan Connolly, "Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Jonathan Connolly, "Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Jul 13 2024
    In Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Jonathan Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Initially viewed as a covert revival of slavery, indenture caused a scandal in Britain and India. But over time, economic conflict in the colonies altered public perceptions of indenture, now increasingly viewed as a legitimate form of free labor and a means of preserving the promise of abolition. Connolly explains how the large-scale, state-sponsored migration of Indian subjects to work on sugar plantations across Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad transformed both the notion of post-slavery free labor and the political economy of emancipation. Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of “freedom” in a post-abolition world. Jonathan Connolly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago. Connolly is a historian of the British empire with transnational interests in migration, the history of emancipation, and legal history. His research primarily concerns abolition and emancipation, imperial political and legal culture, and the category of free labor in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Your host for this episode is Mahishan Gnanaseharan, a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University. Mahishan studies the social, political, and intellectual histories of South Asian migrants across the Indian Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow, "A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History: Ten Design Principles" (Duke UP, 2024)

    Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow, "A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History: Ten Design Principles" (Duke UP, 2024)
    Jun 25 2024
    A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History: Ten Design Principles (Duke UP, 2024) is a guide for college and high school educators who are teaching Indian Ocean histories for the first time or who want to reinvigorate their courses. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi as well as those who want to incorporate Indian Ocean histories into their world history courses. Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow offer course design principles that will help students navigate topics ranging from empire, geography, slavery, and trade to mobility, disease, and the environment. In addition to exploring non-European sources and diverse historical methodologies, they discuss classroom pedagogy and provide curriculum possibilities that will help instructors at any level enrich and deepen standard approaches to world history. Alpers and McDow draw readers into strategically designing courses that will challenge students to think critically about a vast area with which many of them are almost entirely unfamiliar. Edward A. Alpers is an Emeritus Research Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014). Thomas F. McDow is an Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University and the author of Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Ohio University Press, 2018). Scott Thomas Erich is the Howell Postdoctoral Research Associate in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. His current book project is Taming the Sea: Southeastern Arabia's Extractive Seascape c. 1820-present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-ocean-world
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    1 hr and 21 mins