book reviews
The Front Room: Diaspora Migrant Aesthetics in the Home – review
In The Front Room, Michael McMillan examines the significance of domestic spaces in creating a sense of belonging for Caribbean migrants in the UK. Delving into themes of resistance and creolisation, these sensitively curated essays and images reveal how ordinary objects shape diasporic identities, writes Antara Chakrabarty.
Migration, at its most basic level, means a physical relocation. However, this “mobility” entails a complex, polysemous reality whose consequences reverberate for those who leave one place for another. Michael McMillan’s The Front Room: Diaspora Migrant Aesthetics in the Home presents a poignant personal tale of materiality, memory and diasporic emotions. It connects with readers by presenting the past without falling prey to anachronism, narrating ordinary aspects of our day-to-day lives through pertinent sociological themes and recurring issues like racism, world politics, aspirations, diasporic memory and more. Michael McMillan, a playwright and artist, offers a text that unfolds as a choreopoem to the domestic spaces inhabited by migrants, infused with theatricality and a curatorial sensibility around the images and references shared. The book, originally published in 2009, has been re-released and is divided across several themes and including additional essays, including by eminent cultural anthropologist Stuart Hall.
Caribbean diaspora re-imagined the Victorian parlour, (the front room) through a sense of decolonial resistance, cultural survival and aspirational attempts to adapt to the new culture in which they found themselves.
The book takes us on a journey of discovery as to what spaces meant, looked, smelled and felt like for Caribbean diaspora settled in the UK from the mid-20th century. It describes how the tactile sensations and emotions held in a room amount to so much more than its aesthetics. The text begins with a section on how Caribbean diaspora re-imagined the Victorian parlour, (the front room) through a sense of decolonial resistance, cultural survival and aspirational attempts to adapt to the new culture in which they found themselves. The images used to showcase the different varieties of such front rooms were mostly taken from the response to the exhibition, A front room in 1976 , curated by McMillan at the Museum of the Home in London in 2005-06.
A primary thematic focus is the emergence of a significant cultural process of change often called as creolisation which gives rise to a third culture which is neither Caribbean, nor British, but a diasporic intermingling of the two. This creolisation also occurs as a result of intergenerational change in the wake of World War Two and apartheid. Moreover, it speaks to the changing imagination around what can be called a “home”, reflecting changes in identity in a foreign land. The lucidity of the essays and the various references to sociological and anthropological works on the perception of “self”, vis-à-vis place making like those by Erving Goffman, Emile Durkheim, Stuart Hall gears the book towards students beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Sociology, Anthropology, Arts and Aesthetics, History, Museology and more. Towards the latter part of the book, McMillan also brings in other diasporic communities beyond the Caribbean, such as Moroccan, Surinamese, Antillean and Indonesian migrant communities in the Netherlands.
Front rooms generally resisted change, carrying forward an aesthetic and sensibility as the badge or identifier of a community.
The book presents an important diasporic narrative underpinned by a critical struggle of the diasporic experience: underneath the subject of the ”front room” lies the process of subverted diasporic emotions and anti-assimilation cultural change. The emotional attachments are prioritised over fitting exactly within the typical British space. McMillan presents his readers with ten commodities that were normally seen in the Caribbean households which were also seen in the diasporic “front room” in the UK. These objects wordlessly communicated the Caribbean way of life without. A homogenisation of the objects found in the across the British Caribbean front room happened gradually as people visited one another, trying to emulate the aesthetics of a diasporic migrant culture. As someone from South Asia, I can vouch fora very similar pattern post-colonisation. Some chose to keep religious symbolic items at the forefront whereas the others chose to fit into the moral definition of aesthetics according to the British. A front room could become a Durkheimian quasi-sacred space which had to be seen beyond its mundane nature. McMillan emphasises the changes across generations and how front rooms generally resisted change, carrying forward an aesthetic and sensibility as the badge or identifier of a community. The book makes its readers aware of the significance contained in the spaces not just through imagery, but also literary compositions like songs, poems, and other varieties of literature.
The gendered division of aesthetics was apparent in the crochets made by the women in contrast to the glass cabinets and drinks trolleys that showcased men’s tastes.
The book describes the affective power of objects through ten examples including the paraffin heater, which gave a sense of reassurance and reminded migrants of their homes through the scent of paraffin oil. The radiogram (a piece of furniture that combined a radio and record player) played the role of “home” in another new land, a sonic gateway into the past. Several other items also acted in service of what Goffman would call ‘impression management’ to a larger audience. The gendered division of aesthetics was apparent in the crochets made by the women in contrast to the glass cabinets and drinks trolleys that showcased men’s tastes. Notably, the carpets and wallpapers, though quintessentially British in theory, could be reclaimed and subverted through the choice of colourful options rather than plain base colours. The book also captures the effects of technological evolution through the inclusion of televisions, telephones and pictures of revered role models such as politicians and singers on display.
McMillan’s work takes account of the constant search for refuge in the perfectly arranged room as a way of way of asserting one’s identity and materialising an authentic diasporic identity in one’s home.
One may make the mistake of perceiving this text as an over-romanticisation of material objects that convey diasporic identity. However, McMillan avoids this, convincing his readers of the deeply felt significance of the ordinary in connecting diaspora to the places they left behind. He bolsters this through setting ordinary items, spaces and lives in the context of unique epistemological nuances such as apartheid, cultural hybridisation, symbolic capital, taste and more. His work takes account of the constant search for refuge in the perfectly arranged room as a way of way of asserting one’s identity and materialising an authentic diasporic identity in one’s home.
The book is successful in its theatrical and thoughtful presentation and the depth it achieves over only a limited number of essays. Its effect is to fill readers’ minds with questions and to pave the way for similar studies in other postcolonial diasporic communities.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: 12matamoros on Pixabay
Being Human in Digital Cities – review
In Being Human in Digital Cities, Myria Georgiou explores how technology reshapes urban life, transforming how we relate to ourselves, each other and the space around us. Examining the digital order’s influence, including datafication, surveillance and mapping, Georgiou’s essential book advocates for centring humans through the paradigm of the “right to the city” based on social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability, writes Samira Allioui.
Being Human in Digital Cities. Myria Georgiou. Polity. 2023.
Technology, embodied through so-called smart cities (places where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital solutions for the benefit of their inhabitants and business), has been implemented into all aspects of public and private urban life. Recently, the United Nations created the Hub for Human Rights and Digital Technology as a way to encourage cities to strategise around their “right to have digital rights,” stating that: “Together, as we seek to recover from the pandemic, we must learn to better curtail harmful use of digital technology and better unleash its power as a democratising force and an enabler”.
Myria Georgiou’s Being Human in Digital Cities addresses the question, how do digital cities change what it means to be human in relation to digital urbanism and digital justice? It has never been more urgent to understand how the digital order functions and its implications for controlled cities and lives. The city is where so many hopes and fears emerge for the future of humanity, and therefore studying its changing nature in a digitalised world is crucial. Moreover, the relationship between the transformation of cities and the right to the city has not yet been seriously explored.
It has never been more urgent to understand how the digital order functions and its implications for controlled cities and lives.
Intrigued by the growing symbolic power of technology in regulating the city, Georgiou demonstrates how an unstable but tenacious urban order is planned, performed, and sometimes resisted on platforms and networks to sustain the social order in cities that experience perpetual crisis. Georgiou’s principal thesis is that the digital order reflects the revived and contradictory mobilisation of humanist values across different quarters of the city. Human-centric conceptions of technology are at the heart of an emerging digital urban order. According to Georgiou, these values are gaining renewed currency by imagining and planning relationships between humans and data.
The book identifies the rhetorics and performances of the digital order as core elements of processes of change in the relational constitution of cities, technologies, and power (42). The book’s generative force comes from Georgiou’s assertion that a dynamic comeback of humanist values in and for the digital city is underway. Her central argument is that humanism matters when it mobilises (populist humanism), normalises (demotic humanism) and contests (critical humanism) power (143-144). Considering the various implications of being human in digital cities is a critical topic at a time when declarations and manifestos have emerged worldwide claiming to protect citizens’ digital rights. Digital rights are a range of protections regarding access to the internet, privacy, transparency regarding how data is used, control over how data is used and democratic participation in municipal technology decisions. They need to be protected because they represent the bridge that links our traditional human rights with the complexities of the online world, ensuring that our digital identities, decisions, and interactions are treated with the same protection and respect as in the physical world.
[Digital rights] link our traditional human rights with the complexities of the online world, ensuring that our digital identities, decisions, and interactions are treated with the same protection and respect as in the physical world.
The digital order has become a post-neoliberal response to neoliberal crises, and it breaks from the strategies of neoliberalism in different ways (31). It is a new order which “emerges because of widespread pressures to recognize the sacredness of life and the value of society” (30). Through “the promotion of unpredictability, openness and diversity, the digital order integrates instability into stability” (31). The author subtly explains why she privileges the category of the human and consequently rehumanisation-dehumanisation in understanding the digital order. Since technology is more and more infiltrating our consciousness, we become addicted to our devices that distract us and feed us information. But paradoxically, while these changes drive us to retreat to corners of comfort, we try to conquer divisiveness by cultivating communities. A research journey across eight cities of the global North and South – from London to Seoul, and from Los Angeles to Athens – over seven years has shaped Georgiou’s understanding of the digital order. From this grounding, she explains how she adopts a decentred conception of the city which privileges a transnational and transurban vision and practice. Georgiou’s methodological choice of a critical humanist approach promotes an open, creative, and participant-led approach that includes the perspectives of humans.
Georgiou adopts a decentred conception of the city which privileges a transnational and transurban vision and practice.
Her compelling research reveals two paradoxes. First, migrants’ experiences, gathered through interviews conducted with 60 teens in Athens and Los Angeles, present rehumanisation-dehumanisation as a continuum rather than a blunt proposition. Second, the Global South is ever present in cities of the Global North (113). Georgiou’s findings suggest that becoming urban reinforces autonomy. For example, migrants’ everyday experiences, mediated and linked through urban migration and technology, reveal their acute awareness that the development of autonomy protects them from certain kinds of dehumanisation such as exclusion Moreover, during this research conducted in the context of a European project on young people’s digital lives, Georgiou witnessed sentiments of enthusiasm and relief when participants were talking about a commonly used urban technology: Google Maps, including Google Earth and Street View (115). Participants were relieved because “becoming urban is not only about learning but also about being an autonomous subject in navigating city”.
Her work evidences the value of everyday technologies (namely, smartphones and apps) and the concept of “secret city” (117) for those excluded from so many other spaces of representation. A secret city only exists in a sociotechnical imagination. As a place of consumption, it is imaginary in the sense that it remains discovered and consumed through technical devices. In fact, as smart cities begin to become dehumanised realms and behavioural data is neglected, the place of humans risks being devalued. Georgiou’s research is an invaluable attempt to claim and interrogate human experiences in their entanglement with the digital in urban settings.
Georgiou describes predictive policing, the practice of using algorithms to analyse massive amounts of information to predict and help prevent potential crimes as a mundane form of symbolic violence regularly applied in the city (126). This is part of a wider trend of states’ increasing the surveillance of citizens, with surveillance understood as any personal data acquisition for management influence or entitlement. Predictive policing systems have been empirically shown to create feedback loops, where police are frequently sent back to the same neighbourhoods, regardless of the true crime rate. In the US, predictive policing tends to disproportionately target more African Americans, areas with higher concentrations of Latinos and Black, Asian and Minority ethnic (BAME) people.
In response to these trends of profiling and surveillance, the right to the city emerges as a new paradigm that provides an alternative framework with which to rethink cities and human settlements based on the principles of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability.
In response to these trends of profiling and surveillance, the right to the city emerges as a new paradigm that provides an alternative framework with which to rethink cities and human settlements based on the principles of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability. According to Georgiou, it presents “a revamped moral vision which points to potentially democratising processes that recognize and address urban injustices” (97). It is worth noting that Georgiou, unlike other authors, prefers to address the concept of the right to the city rather than the “right to a smart city”, her research does not advocate an approach focused on “smart citizens”, “smart citizenship” and “smart cities”. She avoids a citizen-centred approach and instead privileges life, freedom, and wellbeing, expanding her framework to include all humans in urban settings, whether they are citizens or migrants.
Finally, the book, brimming with secondary research, opens new critical avenues into techno-political research on digital cities. More precisely, knowing that humans are less studies as agents involved in the creation of digital, the book sheds light on urban humanity which often remains an opaque category. It highlights humans as agents of change and the displacement of questions of power but also of rights to the city. She investigates essential questions about what it means to be human in digital cities, suggesting that “the most compelling claims to humanism come from those who experience dehumanisation”. Such offerings beg the question of readers, who is and isn’t seen as fully human within city spaces and how does the dawn of the digital city affect those boundaries?
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Goldilock Project on Shutterstock.
She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World – review
In She Who Struggles, Marral Shamshiri and Sorcha Thomson compile a selection of essays about women’s (often overlooked) contributions to revolutionary causes around the world, with particular focus on the Global South. According to Lydia Hiraide, the book is an accessible and stimulating read exploring the role of women and feminist thought in building transnational and anti-colonial and social movements.
As the title of Marral Shamshiri and Sorcha Thomson’s edited collection affirms, revolutionary women have shaped our world in various ways. This collection of thirteen chapters pays homage to the militant efforts of women revolutionaries whose efforts are often underacknowledged in the dominant narratives of historical and contemporary revolutionary movements. Each chapter is dedicated to one or more women and/or the movements in which they participated, providing space for their stories to be told and for scholars, activists, and students to learn from them.
Each chapter illuminates an example of radical grassroots politics with a fiery militant edge, focusing particularly on the Global South.
This book strikes a tone which departs from the various forms of ‘Lean In’ liberal feminisms, which remain common across the Global North. Each chapter illuminates an example of radical grassroots politics with a fiery militant edge, focusing particularly on the Global South. The movements and histories that the contributors celebrate highlight women’s leadership and deep personal sacrifice in revolutionary movements, paying tribute to women who have lost their lives and loved ones in the struggle for liberation. Maurice J. Casey’s chapter focuses on Mary Mooney, a working-class Irish woman whose campaign for the liberation of political prisoners sprang from the imprisonment of her son, trade unionist Tom Mooney. What started as a personal experience of state violence for Mooney grew into a transnational campaign across the African and Irish diaspora, joining up with the campaigners and mothers of the Scottsboro boys. These stories remind us that the personal losses of women can spur the genesis of transnational solidarity.
In relation to violence, women are not only its victims; they have also been its agents.
But, in relation to violence, women are not only its victims; they have also been its agents. Jeremy Randall’s chapter on Japanese communist Shigenobu Fusako and the Japanese Red Army (JRA) invites us to reflect on women’s capacity for violence in revolutionary settings. Shigenobu, who started out as a student activist, was militant in her commitment to the liberation of all peoples – and particularly, the people of Palestine. She and the JRA in fact relocated to Palestine as a key site from which to foment revolution, in collaboration with organisations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Under Shigenobu’s leadership, the JRA exploited “violence as a revolutionary tactic” (83). This is, of course, an approach which invites fundamental questions around the legitimacy of violence in the face of violence. Scholarship on the lives and work of figures like Shigenobu Fusako thus grapple with some of the key problematics at the heart of revolutionary political thought and practice. Such is the essence of the burning questions raised by other thinkers and activists, like Frantz Fanon, whose work and life addressed such themes in the context of colonial Algeria.
Chapters explore, for example, the active solidarity of figures like Madame Bình and Madame Nhu in Vietnam, Palestine and Iran as well as Shigenobu Fusako and the JRA across North Korea, Palestine, and Japan. These women’s histories remain startlingly relevant in today’s world
Though each chapter focuses on a different woman or women in their respective geographical and temporal contexts, several clear themes emerge throughout the book. Firstly, the exploration of women revolutionaries, past and present, affirms the central, rather than tangential, importance of women’s politics to nurturing and developing a revolutionary Left politics. Secondly, the book speaks back to dominant narratives which erase the names of women revolutionaries. More than recognising the role of women in general in revolutionary struggle, it names specific women and recounts their contributions. By doing so, it reminds us that these women were “all autonomous people with histories, feelings, dreams, desires and families” (152), while taking their work as serious sites from which to generate political thought and emancipatory action. Thirdly, a striking majority of the chapters emphasise the power of radical transnationalism in the revolutionary efforts of women worldwide. Chapters explore, for example, the active solidarity of figures like Madame Bình and Madame Nhu in Vietnam, Palestine and Iran as well as Shigenobu Fusako and the JRA across North Korea, Palestine, and Japan. These women’s histories remain startlingly relevant in today’s world, as we witness the unfolding of tragedy, resistance and waves of solidarity with Palestinian struggles, many led by women. In this regard, Jehan Helou’s chapter, “TESTIMONY: The Power of Women’s International Solidarity with the Palestinian Revolution” demands the recognition of women’s efforts as an important force in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
Additionally, the book offers an interesting and welcome engagement with the arts as an important medium of resistance, in particular, poetry. The chapter by Marral Shamshiri offers an articulate exploration of Marzieh Ahmadi Osku’i’s poetry across the contexts of Iran, Afghanistan and India. Shamshiri examines poetry’s permanence in the context of life’s precarity and impermanence: the words of women poets live on in revolution, even when they themselves do not. This chapter is one of several that reminds us that “[f]or women, poetry is not a luxury,” but rather, “a vital necessity for our existence” and resistance. Kebotlhale Motseothata’s chapter “Lindiwe Mabuza: Culture as a Weapon of Resistance in South Africa” likewise deals with poetry and the arts as crucial instruments used in the struggle against Apartheid. Motseothata affirms the creative, visionary ways in which women have articulated the pain, struggle, and politics they face in living and resisting the intersections of racial capitalism and patriarchy.
This important book undertakes the vital work of recording and examining the contributions of women revolutionaries, whose stories are too often obscured in the mainstream imaginary
Overall, this is an exciting, informative and timely book. The chapters are relatively short and self-contained, making them ideal materials to assign in politics or history courses exploring ideas around revolution, feminism, anti-colonialism and transnational social movement organising. They are written clearly and dynamically, allowing complex themes and histories to be explored in an intellectually stimulating and accessible way. This important book undertakes the vital work of recording and examining the contributions of women revolutionaries, whose stories are too often obscured in the mainstream imaginary.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: thomas koch on Shutterstock
One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax – review
In One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax, Dipesh Chakrabarty examines human interrelatedness with, and responsibility within, the Earth System from a decolonial perspective. Drawing on a diverse range of disciplines, this book is a critical intervention that considers perspectival gaps and differences around the climate crisis, writes Elisabeth Wennerström.
One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax. Dipesh Chakrabarty. Brandeis University Press. 2023.
In One Planet, Many Worlds, Dipesh Chakrabarty addresses existing perspectival gaps and differences around the Earth System. This latter term can be understood from the International Biosphere-Geosphere Programme’s definition (7) as a system integrated with the planet’s physical, chemical, and biological processes, of which humans are a part. Chakrabarty makes the “globe/planet distinction” (3) to navigate the climate crisis alongside the Earth System. The parallax is a helpful yet critical concept highlighting how appearances change depending on where the focal point rests.
Climate awareness is not a new concern, and the distribution of adverse climate impacts is highly unequal
The case in point: climate awareness is not a new concern, and the distribution of adverse climate impacts is highly unequal. Chakrabarty asserts that failures to act in relation to the Earth System are evidenced not only by the climate crisis but also in energy extraction politics (eg, 9 and19) and global justice debates (eg, 43 and 79). In contrast, he cites Kant’s emphasis on the “categorical imperative” to follow moral laws, regardless of their desires or extenuating circumstances. Arendt is further emphasised in the case for collective action. But in the Anthropocene, argues Chakrabarty (invoking Kant and Arendt on ethics), there are many signs of how the approach to addressing the climate crisis risks being “bereft of any sense of morality” (6).
Chakrabarty’s research interests intersect with themes in modern South Asian history and historiography, globalisation, climate change, and human history
As a leading scholar of postcolonial theory, comparative studies and the politics of modernity, Chakrabarty’s research interests intersect with themes in modern South Asian history and historiography, globalisation, climate change, and human history. This book demonstrates his extensive commitment to communicating change through a socio-historical narrative. The text is multidisciplinary in scope, moving freely between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. The critical premise is the need to learn from what may appear complex and from what is multifaceted.
He deconstructs “global warming” and “globalisation” by differentiating their relationship to the Earth System (eg, 19-21 and 56). Chakrabarty argues that the Earth System can be delimited as “a heuristic construct” when used in Earth System Science (ESS), wherein scholars’ focus on monitoring geological and biological factors (3). Chakrabarty finds a more fruitful discussion from a continued historicisation of “global histories” and the “geobiological history of the planet” in the different meanings of the “globe” – including “the 500-year-old entity brought into being by humans and their technologies of transport and communication…a human-told story with humans at its center” (3). The discussion includes the COVID-19 pandemic (Chapter One), postcolonial historiographies around an “Earth system” (Chapter Two), and the need to reconcile what Chakrabarty refers to “as ‘the One and the Many’ problem that makes climate change such a difficult issue to tackle” (15) (Chapter Three).
The climate crisis is entangled with political factors, economic growth processes and capitalism, in part seen in the reverberating effects of natural resource extraction
Chakrabarty contends that the climate crisis is entangled with political factors, economic growth processes and capitalism, in part seen in the reverberating effects of natural resource extraction – what many scholars refer to as the Great Acceleration. Complementary notes expand such negotiations to Derrida’s “democracy to come” (60) and Hartog’s discussion on the elements of time and space that pose a particular political problem in the Anthropocene (22, 69, 74). Here, perspectives differ not only over whether Anthropocenic humans lie at the centre, but around the Earth System, which is one while also entailing many differentiated and interrelated processes (7-8). He states: “Any human sense of planetary emergency will have to negotiate the histories of those conflicted and entangled multiplicities” (16).
Many injustices and inequalities in the Anthropocene are repressed, too; he gives the example of how many longed for the pandemic to be over and for life to return to normal, yet when it came to vaccinations, this desire turned political (22). The pandemic shows, according to Chakrabarty, how we are “entwined with the geological – over human scales of time and space” (73).
He references Foucault’s biopolitics where “natural history remains, ultimately, separate from human history” (31), and more of a critique on modern political thought: “We are a minority form of life that has behaved over the last hundred or so years as though the planet was created so that only humans would thrive” (39). In contrast, the biologist Margulis combined three Greek words (hólos for “whole,” bíos for “life,” and óntos for “being”), in the understanding of the holobiont, the superorganism that hosts a myriad of other life, of which humans are a part (38).
Chakrabarty offers no essential framework to address the climate crisis. Still, he contends that the critical question remains how to navigate the present and respond alongside the Earth System.
Chakrabarty offers no essential framework to address the climate crisis. Still, he contends that the critical question remains how to navigate the present and respond alongside the Earth System. He suggests that multiple entry points for the reconfiguration of hegemonic “contemporaneity,” can be found in the writings of thinkers across disciplines – from philosophers, physicists and botanists to activists, marine biologists and anthropologists, including Hartog (69), Latour (71), Todd (95), Winter (96), Haraway (98), and Kimmerer (103). By deconstructing “the globe” he reimagines the contours of connective global histories, citing the impetus of “Haraway and Indigenous philosophers—to make kin, intellectually and across historical difference” (102). Charabarty’s text draws together all these ideas to unpack the asymmetrical patterns of time and space in the Earth System and make a case for global environmental justice. Overall, Chakrabarty’s work One Planet. Many Worlds makes a critical intervention on how to think about the climate crisis, deconstructing the present way of being within the Anthropocene.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Triff on Shutterstock.
Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books…
(If you notice something missing from the weekly update, let us know.)
New: ∅
Revised:
- Tsongkhapa by Gareth Sparham and Chandra Chiara Ehm.
- Compatibilism by Michael McKenna and D. Justin Coates.
- Akan Philosophy of the Person by Ajume Wingo.
- Joseph Albo by Dror Ehrlich and Shira Weiss.
- Feminist Perspectives on the Body by Kathleen Lennon and Clara Fischer.
- The Arrow of Time by Bradley H. Dowden.
NDPR ∅
- Objects and Their Parts: The Problem of Material Composition by Jeremy Skrzypek.
- What do Newtonian Forces have to Do with the Standard Model? by James Ladyman and Lorenzo Lorenzetti.
Open-Access Book Reviews in Academic Philosophy Journals
- Epistemic Rationality and Epistemic Normativity by Bondy, P. is reviewed by Guido Tana in History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis.
- Kierkegaard on Politics by Stocker, B. is reviewed by Roel Wolters in History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis.
- Pragmatism and Idealism: Rorty and Hegel on Representation and Reality by Brandom, R.B. is reviewed by Kaveh Boveiri at History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis.
- Listening to Reason in Plato and Aristotle by Scott, D. is reviewed by Carlo DaVia in History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis.
- Understanding Human Conduct: The Innate and Acquired Meaning of Life, by Sam S. Rakover is reviewed by Asha Lancaster-Thomas in Philosophical Psychology.
Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media
- The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson is reviewed by Robert P. Crease at The Los Angeles Review of Books.
- How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind by Regan Penaluna, and The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro are together reviewed by Sophie Smith at The London Review of Books.
- Atheists and Atheism Before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience by Michael Hunter is reviewed by Alexandra Walsham at The London Review of Books.
- I’ve Been Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett is reviewed by Nigel Warburton at The Times Literary Supplement.
Compiled by Michael Glawson
BONUS: Batman and aggregation
The post Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update first appeared on Daily Nous.
The Inequality of Wealth: Why it Matters and How to Fix it – review
In The Inequality of Wealth: Why it Matters and How to Fix it, Liam Byrne examines the UK’s deep-seated inequality which has channelled wealth away from ordinary people (disproportionately youth and minority groups) and into the hands of the super-rich. While the solutions Byrne presents – from boosting wages to implementing an annual wealth tax – are not new, the book synthesises them into a coherent strategy for tackling this critical problem, writes Vamika Goel.
Liam Byrne launched the book at an LSE event in February 2024: watch it back on YouTube.
The Inequality of Wealth: Why it Matters and How to Fix it. Liam Byrne. Bloomsbury. 2024.
Wealth inequality, a pressing issue of our times, reinforces all other forms of inequality, from social and political to ecological inequality. In The Inequality of Wealth, Liam Byrne recognises this fact and emphasises the need to move away from a narrow focus on addressing income inequality. He reaffirms the need to deal with wealth inequality and address the issue of inequality holistically.
The book adopts a multi-pronged approach to addressing wealth inequality in the UK. It is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the extent of wealth inequality and how it affects democracy and damages meritocracy. The second part discusses the emergence of neoliberalism which has promoted unequal distribution of resources, while the third part proposes corrective measures to reverse wealth inequality.
According to Forbes, the world’s billionaires have doubled from 1001 to 2640 during 2010 and 2022, adding around £7.1 trillion to their combined wealth.
The first chapter reflects on the exorbitant surge in wealth globally during the past decade, primarily enjoyed by the world’s super-rich. According to Forbes, the world’s billionaires have doubled from 1001 to 2640 during 2010 and 2022, adding around £7.1 trillion to their combined wealth. In the UK, wealth disparity has risen, with the top 10 per cent holding about half of the wealth while the bottom 50 per cent held only 5 per cent in Great Britain in 2018-20, as per the Wealth and Assets Survey. Byrne claims that this inequality has only been exacerbated in recent years. Despite adverse negative shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, austerity, and Brexit, about £87 billion has been added to UK billionaire’s wealth during 2021 and 2023.
The book highlights that youth have borne the brunt of this widening wealth disparity. According to data from Office of National Statistics (ONS), those aged between twenty and forty, hold only eight per cent of Britain’s total wealth. In contrast, people aged between fifty-five and seventy-five owned over half of Britain’s total wealth in 2018-20. Their prospects of wealth accumulation have further declined with a squeeze in wages and booming asset prices as a result of quantitative easing. Byrne contends that this has made Britain an “inheritocracy” wherein a person’s parental wealth, social connections and the ability to access good education are more important determinants of wealth than hard work and talent.
Those aged between twenty and forty, hold only eight per cent of Britain’s total wealth.
The second part of the book explores the spread of the idea of neoliberalism since the 1980s, that helped sustain and flourish wealth inequality. Neoliberalism promoted the idea of market supremacism and reduced the role of the state. The later chapters in this section engage in depth with rent-seeking behaviour by corporates and the increase in market concentration via mergers and acquisitions.
The third part of the book proposes corrective measures needed to reverse wealth inequality. The book contends that the starting point of arresting wealth disparity is to boost labour incomes by creating well-paying, knowledge-intensive jobs. Byrne does not elucidate as to what he means by these knowledge-intensive jobs. Usually, knowledge-intensive jobs are those in financial services, high-tech manufacturing, health, telecommunications, and education. Byrne argues that earnings in knowledge-intensive jobs are about 30 per cent higher than average pay. However, these jobs accounted for only about a fifth of all jobs and a quarter of economic output in 2021. Hence, promoting such jobs will significantly raise workers’ earnings.
The author maintains that knowledge-intensive jobs can be generated by giving impetus to state-backed research and development (R&D) spending and innovation. He draws attention to low growth in R&D spending in UK at per cent between 2000 and 2020, when global R&D spending has more than tripled to £1.9 trillion. However, there are some fundamental concerns regarding the effectiveness of such reforms in curbing inequality and ensuring social mobility.
People of Black African ethnicity are disproportionately employed in caring, leisure and other service-based occupations. They also hold about eight times less wealth than their white counterparts.
First, knowledge-intensive jobs are highly capital-intensive and high R&D spending may not generate enough jobs or may make some existing jobs redundant. The author has not substantiated his claim with any empirical evidence. Second, it’s possible that innovation spending and jobs perpetuate the existing social and regional inequalities. In the UK, about half of all knowledge-intensive jobs are generated in just two regions: London and the South East. To address regional disparities, Byrne suggests setting up regional banks, training skills and integration at the regional level, and promoting Research and Development (R&D) in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) via tax credits and innovation vouchers. However, no mechanism is laid out with which to tackle social inequality. People of Black African ethnicity are disproportionately employed in caring, leisure and other service-based occupations. They also hold about eight times less wealth than their white counterparts. It seems likely that new knowledge-intensive jobs would disproportionately benefit people of white ethnicity from wealthy backgrounds with connections and access to good education.
Another measure specified to boost labour incomes is to shift towards a system that adequately rewards workers for their services, that is, a system of “civic capitalism”, as coined by Colin Hay. Byrne alleges that one step to ensure this is to create an in-built mechanism that ensures workers’ savings are channelled into companies that adopt sustainable and labour-friendly practices. One of the ways to achieve this is to require the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) sets up guidelines and benchmarks for social and environmental goals for the companies in which it invests. In this way, Byrne has adopted an indirect approach to workers’ welfare, as opposed to a direct approach through promoting trade unionisation among workers, which in the UK has fallen from 32.4 per cent in 1995 to 22.3 per cent in 2022 . This would enhance workers’ bargaining power to increase their wages and secure better benefits and security.
Apart from boosting workers’ wages, Byrne underscores the need to create wealth for all, ie, a wealth-owning democracy. Inspired by Michael Sherraden’s idea of “asset-based welfare” and Individual Development Accounts, Byrne proposes to create a Universal Savings Account that enables every individual to accumulate both pension and human capital. He advocates that a Universal Savings Account can be created by merging Auto-enrolment pension accounts, Lifetime Individual Savings Accounts (LISAs) and the Help to Save scheme. Re-iterating the proposals from the pioneering studies by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation, Byrne proposes to expand the coverage of the auto-enrolment pension scheme to low-income earners, the self-employed and youth aged between 16 and 18, to increase savings rates and to reduce withdrawal limits from the pension fund.
In the last chapter, Byrne emphasises the enlargement of net household wealth relative to GDP from 435 per cent in 2000 to about 700 per cent by 2017, without any commensurate change in wealth-related taxes to GDP share. This has created a problem of unequal taxation across income groups, which, he states, must be rectified. To do this, he endorses Arun Advani, Alex Cobham and James Meade’s proposals of introducing an annual wealth tax.
Byrne attempts to encapsulate an existing range of ideas for reform pertaining to diverse domains like state-backed institutions, corporate law restructuring, social security and tax reforms.
Overall, the book presents a coherent strategy to reverse wealth disparity and build a wealth-owning democracy through a guiding principle of delivering social justice and promoting equality. The remedies for reversing wealth inequality offered in the book are not new; rather, Byrne attempts to encapsulate an existing range of ideas for reform pertaining to diverse domains like state-backed institutions, corporate law restructuring, social security and tax reforms. The pathway for the acceptance and adoption of all these reforms is no mean feat; it would entail a shift from a narrow focus on profit-maximisation towards holistic attempts to adequately reward workers for their services and improve their wellbeing.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Cagkan Sayin on Shutterstock.
Who’s Afraid of Gender? – review
In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler confronts contemporary attacks on gender from right-wing movements that have undermined the rights of women, queer and trans people in areas from reproductive justice to protections against violence. The book deftly unpacks the phantasm of gender as it has been weaponised against queer and trans people and argues for countering it not with commensurate hate, but by making more desirable a way of living based in freedom and empathy, writes Elaine Coburn.
Judith Butler came to LSE to launch the book in March 2024: watch it back on YouTube.
Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler. Allen Lane. 2024.
This book is a ghost story. It is about phantasms conjured up by actors that include the Pope and the novelist JK Rowling. The ghost is sometimes “gender”, sometimes “gender ideology” and sometimes “Judith Butler.” This expansive, often contradictory phantasm is a repository for displaced fears of war, economic inequality, climate change and associated threats to existence.
Not to be confused with their phantasmagorical other, the flesh and blood philosopher Judith Butler seeks to exorcise the ghost. They do this by mobilising logic, argument and a deep care for the self and others. Amid rising fascisms and authoritarianisms, Butler maintains that what is at stake is the right to a “livable life” (264). When reasonable, justified fears of destruction are displaced onto “gender”, they warn, queer and trans people, as well as intellectuals like Butler, become targets.
Amid rising fascisms and authoritarianisms, Butler maintains that what is at stake is the right to a ‘livable life’.
Opponents are powerful figures. In 2015, Pope Francis condemned “gender theory”, because, he argued, it does not recognise the existence of men and women and therefore “does not recognize the order of creation” (6). Gender theory is contrary to natural law, as given by the Creator (79). The Pope then asserts that “Family is family!” (77), but he means only one kind of family: the heterosexual household, united in marriage. All other forms of love and kinship are disqualified.
As Butler observes, this is confused. Theories about sex and gender, including Butler’s own approach, do not argue that it is impossible to recognise sex and gender. Instead, the argument is that because sex and gender are socially constructed in different ways, in different times and places, they are mutable. Sex is variously defined: genetically, hormonally, and physically. It is not an unchanging, universal given, whether within contemporary medicine or socially and culturally.
Theories about sex and gender, including Butler’s own approach, do not argue that it is impossible to recognise sex and gender. Instead, the argument is that because sex and gender are socially constructed in different ways, in different times and places, they are mutable.
Likewise, despite colonialism, Butler observes, many genders have existed and persist today across different cultures, beyond the woman/man binary of Western modernity. The hijra in India are just one well-known example and, Butler observes, there are many languages where gender binaries are not systematically inscribed in descriptions of the human. In answer to the question, “What is my gender?”, queer theorists thus argue that there are possibilities beyond the binary statements, “I am a man,” or “I am a woman”.
The same is true for heterosexual marriages and families. Heterosexual married households exist, for some, as both a social fact and as a valued choice. They are but one reality and one possibility, however, amid more expansive understandings of kinship. The recognition of a plurality of genders and families, both in fact and as liberatory possibility, is a major contribution of gender and queer theory, as inspired by the feminist and LGBTQ+ movements that supported these intellectual developments.
Heterosexual married households exist, for some, as both a social fact and as a valued choice. They are but one reality and one possibility, however, amid more expansive understandings of kinship.
If the Pope is haunted by the ghost of “gender theory”, as the Catholic Church has resurrected it – not necessarily accurately – he has some unlikely allies. In June 2020, Rowling infamously wrote a series of texts on the social media platform X (then “Twitter”). Among her observations, she expressed empathy and solidarity with trans women. In particular, Rowling emphasised the need to support trans women against threats of male violence. “[T]he majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others,” Rowling wrote, “but are vulnerable…” (163). Such solidarity, Butler observes, unites cisgender and trans women.
Unfortunately, Butler adds, in focusing on threats posed by individual men, Rowling fails to critique patriarchal social orders that produce and sanction masculine violence. Worse, Rowling then suggests that “natal girls and women” (164) must be protected from trans women – whom she abruptly redescribes as men – in a context where men are habitually violent towards women. The evidence that Rowling offers is that many women, including herself, have suffered violence from men and that some trans women, notably Karen White in the United Kingdom, have assaulted women.
As Butler observes, in Rowling’s narrative, “Suddenly, the figure of the trans woman attacker seems to stand for all trans women, and the category of “trans women” is replaced simply by ‘men’” (164), deemed to be permanent threats. Rowling does not justify her argumentative moves, from a focus on an individual trans attacker to all trans women and from trans women to the supposedly unitary, naturalised category of men. Nor does she defend her ahistorical characterisations of men, or, in Butler’s broader description, “someone who has a penis” (157), as inevitably violent. These are givens.
Whatever the logical inconsistencies and despite Rowling’s unjustified argumentative moves, her rhetoric achieves its aim. The purpose, Butler argues, is to induce panic at the expense of trans women, cast as perpetrators of violence.
Whatever the logical inconsistencies and despite Rowling’s unjustified argumentative moves, her rhetoric achieves its aim. The purpose, Butler argues, is to induce panic at the expense of trans women, cast as perpetrators of violence. In so doing, among other harms, Rowling and her followers deny trans women’s existence. Butler emphasises the violence of the erasure:
“Imagine if you were Jewish and someone tells you that you are not. Imagine if you are lesbian and someone laughs in your face and says you are confused since you are really heterosexual….Or imagine you are Palestinian and someone tells you that Palestinians do not exist (which people do).” (151).
For Rowling and others like her, Butler observes, “their right to define you is apparently more important than any right you have to determine who you are” (151). Confronted with denials of your very existence, Butler remarks, “at some point you will feel and express rage, and you will doubtless be right to do so” (151, italics in original). Rage is justified when your self-determining right to assert your existence is purposefully undermined.
The strength of Butler’s approach is that they do not begin and end with anger. They unequivocally condemn bullying, especially online harassment, including the targeting of Rowling by trans activists. “I will not condone that kind of behaviour,” they emphasise, “no matter who does it” (151). They refuse “cancel culture” instead, carefully if unrelentingly critiquing the arguments of those with whom they disagree. Against the ghostly invocation of gender theory, “We need a better conversation” (150), Butler argues. Butler models what that better conversation might look like.
The ‘anti-gender’ elite undermines understandings of gender that ‘let many of us live’ (151). More broadly, they distract us from world concerns, including inequality, hunger, war and climate change, that require our urgent attention.
In the conclusions, Butler reminds us that the stakes of these conversations are high. Most immediately, the “anti-gender” elite undermines understandings of gender that “let many of us live” (151). More broadly, they distract us from world concerns, including inequality, hunger, war and climate change, that require our urgent attention. The immediate and broader stakes are linked, because we all have an interest in creating “equality and freedom within a livable world” (260). We will not get there, Butler warns, if rising authoritarian nationalism and “rights-stripping” (54) fascisms displace real threats onto the phantasmagorical spectre of “gender theory”.
As I write, the ghost of “Judith Butler” stalks contemporary right-wing rhetoric. In Who’s Afraid of Gender? the real Judith Butler is doing critical work. They remind us not to be distracted by phantasmal evils but to turn to each other. Against the spectral fears of the far right, they write, we must make ethical ideals of freedom, desire and love “so compelling that no one can look away” (264). Only then will we be able to end the all-too-material injustices and violence that haunt our present.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Pixel-Shot on Shutterstock.
Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times – review
In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Samuel Moyn dissects intellectual battles within Cold War liberalism through six key figures: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Teasing out their complex relationships with Enlightenment ideals, historicism, Freudianism and decolonisation, Moyn’s masterful group biography sheds light on the evolution of liberalism and the cause of the Red Scare, writes Atreyee Majumder.
In his most recent book, Samuel Moyn provides a set of intertwined intellectual profiles of six scholars of the Cold War, especially post-WWII era: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Before I read Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, I had never come across the term Cold War liberalism. As Moyn clarifies, the term was coined in the 1960s by enemies of liberal ideas (presumably from within the Free World) emerging at the time, blaming “domestic compromises and foreign policy mistakes”. Moyn offers an intriguing argument that liberalism arrived at its current iteration through its defenders in the Anglo-American region during the Cold War.
Moyn offers an intriguing argument that liberalism arrived at its current iteration through its defenders in the Anglo-American region during the Cold War.
Interestingly, all the scholars in Moyn’s study except for Karl Popper are Jewish intellectuals of the post-Holocaust era or are children of American Jewish immigrants. An Austrian émigré in England, Popper was born Jewish but later converted to Lutheranism. Moyn takes great care not to reduce their loyalty to a certain iteration of liberalism to their religious identity (111). He employs an interesting writing strategy whereby he establishes a grapevine of conversations among these six figures and their various compatriot liberals. For instance, Shklar appears as a sharp critic of Hannah Arendt in Chapter five, while Berlin provides a corrective to Shklar’s rejection and blaming of Rousseau for sowing the roots of the red spectre with which the free world was confronted with in the twentieth century.
The first two chapters elaborate on Shklar and Berlin who have divergent attitudes towards the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Rousseau. Both are critical of the Enlightenment to the extent that they find themselves amplifying liberalism’s state-limiting function over its dimension of emphasising creative agency of the individual. They differ on the extent to which the Enlightenment could be held responsible for the rise of the Red Scare. It is in the Karl Popper chapter (Chapter Three) that the plot thickens, as Popper rejects “historicism” by way of rejecting Hegel and his infusion of the idea of progress with Christian “inevitabilism” (77, 80). As Moyn narrates, Popper held that history, if embraced, would mean the inevitable progress as argued for Hegel and later, in Marx’s terms, would lead to a communist version of progress that would usurp liberalism’s dominance. This anxiety made Popper reject the category of history itself. In fact, Jacob Talmon, the “slavish follower” of Popper, described “the idolization of history” as a “nineteenth century novelty” (80).
It is through Hannah Arendt that we see the uncomfortable relationship the Cold War liberals had with the decolonisation movements outside the west
The book reaches a crescendo in the last two chapters on Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling, respectively. It is through Hannah Arendt that we see the uncomfortable relationship the Cold War liberals had with the decolonisation movements outside the west; those that claimed the word ”freedom” for colonised populations. As a reader from the postcolony, I found it instructive to read Moyn’s discussion of Arendt’s ambivalence about reconciling her liberalism with the growing liberalisms of the former colonies. In an insightful section at the end of the Arendt chapter (137-8), Moyn discusses how nationalisms of these fledgling nations were objects of suspicion for Arendt and the Cold War liberals while they were eager to embrace the cause of Israel’s nationalism. In the final chapter we witness Lionel Trilling’s strange embrace of Freud’s psychoanalysis, especially Freud’s late work Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Trilling wanted to render a reformed liberalism – one that wasn’t so naïve and shocked at crisis or evil in the world. Moyn writes of Trilling’s use of Freud in working out his own theory of liberty and liberalism (152):
“…..Freudianism affected the theory of liberty. It turns out that people are constrained in the control they can win from the passions, and therefore in the freedom they should have in their self-making. They must use what autonomy they can gain in pitiless struggle with their own proclivities in the service of self-control.”
Trilling’s own treatment of Cold War liberalism […] could have arisen from his repeated attempts to process what he witnessed in Europe in the 1930s as fascism took hold
Trilling’s own treatment of Cold War liberalism, Moyn speculates, could have arisen from his repeated attempts to process what he witnessed in Europe in the 1930s as fascism took hold; Moyn writes that “he rationalized out of it a new liberalism” (153) – a kind of “survivalist” one. Trilling’s move for a reformed and less idealistic liberalism marked liberalism’s slow shift towards the right.
Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals, unpacking arguments within the liberal establishment about what actually brought about the Red Scare.
Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals, unpacking arguments within the liberal establishment about what actually brought about the Red Scare. Moyn also makes clear that these figures are not particularly worried about the institutional arrangement that will bring about such actualisation of freedoms and hence, their version of liberalism. Moyn often uses the term neoliberal and I understand that his usage is quite different from the commonplace social science use of that word – which is a political form accompanying the condition of late capitalism. Hence, I would have liked Moyn to delineate his specific use of the term. Moyn does discuss, especially, in the chapter on Hannah Arendt (Chapter Five), the discomfiture of the Cold War liberals with the rise of new nations across the globe, claiming for themselves the political and social goods of liberalism through their own interpretation of what these might entail. He especially mentions, David Scott’s indictment of Arendt for her erasure of Haiti (138). A blind spot about the rest of the world seems to have existed among the Cold War liberals, which Moyn could have explored further. Finally, I was curious about whether Western Marxism – of the Althusser variety (I believe many of them are writing at the same time as Althusser in the 1960s) – were at all in the conversations that the Cold War liberals engaged in. If so, how would they respond to the Althusserian idea that “freedom” as ideology that hides actual class relations in the name of a pleasurable political ideal which thereafter encodes their worlds of desire? Nonetheless, Liberalism Against Itself is an illuminating and, at times, counterintuitive account of the intellectual wars internal to liberal establishment while it was under attack during the Cold War.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: DidemA on Shutterstock.
Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update
The weekly report on new and revised entries at online philosophy resources and new reviews of philosophy books…
(If you notice something missing from the weekly update, let us know.)
New: ∅
Revised:
- History of the Ontology of Art by Paisley Livingston.
- Feminist Perspectives on the Body by Kathleen Lennon and Clara Fischer.
- Joseph Albo by Dror Ehrlich and Shira Weiss.
IEP ∅
- Law is a Moral Practice by Scott Hershovitz is reviewed by Brian Leiter.
Open-Access Book Reviews in Academic Philosophy Journals
- Relational Liberalism: Democratic Co-Authorship in a Pluralistic World by Federica Liveriero is reviewed by Zhuoyao Li in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media
- I’ve Been Thinking by Daniel Dennett is reviewed by Matthew Lau at Jacobin.
- Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide bv Samir Chopra is reviewed by Julian Baggini at The Wall Street Journal.
- Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah by Ian Buruma is reviewed by Joe Moshenska at The Guardian.
- Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History by Eli Friedlander is reviewed by Sarah Moorhouse at The Los Angeles Review of Books.
- Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler is reviewed by Kathleen Stock at UnHerd, by Nina Power at Compact Magazine, by Alex Byrne at Fair Disputations, and by Holly Lawford-Smith at Quillette.
- The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion by Philipp Felsch, translated by Tony Crawford is reviewed by Peter E. Gordon at The Boston Review.
Compiled by Michael Glawson
BONUS: Meanwhile in a nearby possible world…
The post Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update first appeared on Daily Nous.
Experiences of Menstruation from the Global South and North – review
In Experiences of Menstruation from the Global South and North, Kay Standing, Sara Parker and Stefanie Lotter compile multidisciplinary perspectives examining experiences of and education around menstruation in different parts of the world. Spanning academic research, activism and poetry, this thought-provoking volume advocates for inclusive approaches that encompass the diverse geographical, social, cultural, gender- and age-related subjectivities of menstruators worldwide, writes Udita Bose.
As Bobel writes in the foreword to Experiences of Menstruation from the Global South and North, “Menstruation is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere” (xvii). The book attempts to create dialogues between the Global North and Global South, recognising that menstrual experiences are a global issue, but the stigma, shame, and secrecy surrounding menstruation, make it difficult to address the various problems associated with menstruation.
The book criticises how discourse about menstruation in the Global South is characterised by the development approach produced by the Global North.
The book criticises how discourse about menstruation in the Global South is characterised by the development approach produced by the Global North. In the introduction, Lotter et al argue that development approaches adopted in the Global South focusing on “alleviating poverty and working towards gender equality and improvement of living conditions” (10) have reinforced stigma associated with menstruation. This occurs because such development approaches centre the supply and demand of menstrual products, which, according to Garikipati in Chapter Seven, promotes the concealment of menstruation through the use of menstrual products (105). Lotter et a argue that a decolonial approach will help to acknowledge that countries in the Global South have made “trailblazing developments” (11) in destigmatising menstruation and tackling period poverty: Kenya ended the taxation of menstrual products long before Canada, in 2004 (11). The editors thus call for the Global North to learn from the Global South and promote a collaborative global approach when discussing menstrual experiences.
The book identifies how a lack of scientific knowledge and information about menstruation exacerbates the stigmatising of sociocultural experiences associated with it
The collaborative approach is evident in how the chapters in the collection have been organised and linked. For instance, the book identifies how a lack of scientific knowledge and information about menstruation exacerbates the stigmatising of sociocultural experiences associated with it, in the Global North and the Global South. King (Chapter Three) discusses at length how “physiology textbooks” recommended for medical students in the UK do not explain that even though menstruation is a prerequisite for conception and pregnancy, they do not inevitably follow from menstruation (24). Such emphasis on the alleged “purpose” of the menstruating body obscures the reality of the experience for women and girls. The pain, discomfort and blood loss that regularly accompany menstruation is minimised, hindering girls’ and women’s ability to respond to and understand their own bodies. This resonates with Amini’s research in Iran (Chapter 12). Amini demonstrates how most girls in Iran respond to menarche thinking that they have either lost their virginity or have a bad illness (165). These chapters show how the experience of the biological process of menstruation is conditioned by the cultural meaning it gains in a context.
Research [in Nepal] found that intersecting factors like caste, religious ideologies and ethnicity determine whether a teacher can discuss menstruation in school.
Amini’s research connects to that of Parker et al (Chapter Four) which, based in Nepal, reiterates the importance of imparting knowledge about menstruation and placing it in its sociocultural context. Their research found that intersecting factors like caste, religious ideologies and ethnicity determine whether a teacher can discuss menstruation in school. In this chapter and in the research project Dignity Without Danger – a research project launched in 2021 by Subedi and Parker developing and gathering educational resources on menstruation in Nepal (2021) – research participants noted that they were left to study the topic of menstruation on their own (38). The contextualisation of menstrual knowledge also frames the work by Garikipati (Chapter Seven) who focuses her research on menstrual products in the Indian context (103). Along with criticising the profit-driven global market, she emphasises the need to focus on sustainable development. Garikipati advocates for solutions that are tailored appropriately to the individual context (105).
The discussions on contextualising knowledge production about menstruation by researchers in diverse sociocultural and physical contexts underline the need for inclusivity. Inclusion is discussed in relation to several dimensions of menstrual knowledge production. Various researchers have captured menstrual experiences in the everyday context of the workplace (Fry et al, Chapter Eight), the school (Parker et al, Chapter Four; King, Chapter Three), the community (Garikipati, chapter Seven; Quint, Chapter Five; Macleod, Chapter 13) and the home (Amini, Chapter 12). In every setting, it is the menstruating body whose agency takes centre stage. This is enabled through the diverse and creative research methods employed by the researchers to explore menstrual experiences. For instance, Macleod (Chapter 13) had menstruating girls shoot films to narrate their menstrual experiences and held informal sessions in the schools in Gombe and Buwenge in Uganda to watch the films (190). This resonates with Lessie’s (Chapter Two) multi-sectoral approach to addressing menstruation and menstrual health. As Letsie underscores, the right to information and the right to health are basic human rights. Menstrual health is therefore a human rights issue, and its inclusion in health and development policies and programmes should be prioritised.
The book encompasses menstruating bodies at different stages of life, be it menarche or menopause
The book encompasses menstruating bodies at different stages of life, be it menarche or menopause (Weiss et al, Chapter 10), and menstruating bodies that are disabled (Basnet et al, Chapter Nine). The concluding pages of the book discuss the future prospects of research on menstruation. In doing so, Standing et al highlight the need for more research on “menstruators at margins” (230), for example, menstruators in prisons and detention centres, in humanitarian settings, sex workers, and those with disabilities. Thomson’s (Chapter 11) poem calls for normalising menstruation irrespective of gender and menopause irrespective of age, describing voluntary menopause at a young age to convert from being a female to a male (“because when I was a little girl, I knew I wasn’t…I just thank God that me and my Mother’s menopause didn’t align” 156-157). The poem echoes Lotter et al’s observation in the introduction that “not all women have periods and not all people who menstruate are women” (7). More than seeing menstruation through a lens of gender, it needs to be seen as “an issue of equity and justice” (7).
In this way, the book thus comes full circle in attempting to locate the menstruating body at the epicentre of the school and integrate all other sectors of society (family, community, policy development) into the production of knowledge on menstruation. The amplification of the need for inclusivity is particularly valuable, recognising the differences between menstrual experiences in the Global North and the Global South and challenging the gender binary, as captured in Thomson’s poetry. It is a thought-provoking volume which exposes the reader to the geographical, social, cultural, gender- and age-related subjectivities in which menstruation is experienced, examined through a variety of epistemological approaches. The book thus sets the ball rolling for further advancement of knowledge production around menstrual experiences in all their diversity.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: PINGO’s Forum on Flickr.