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Some new books...
by v/a
We've fallen a little behind on our reading here, so we don't have detailed comments on any of these yet, other than that they all look totally fantastic and the first three things we're going to get to as soon as we make it through this weekend's Radical Bookfair Pavilion.....
First up is James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia. Now we were under the impression, what with their summary dismissal of our favorite anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber, that Yale University wasn't the best place to explore critiques of the state. So we were more than a little surprised to see this book coming out, from Yale professor James Scott, who specializes in the historical sociology of agriculture in Asia. The thesis of this new book, echoing Pierre Clastres claims about anarchy in the Amazon, is that we can point to significant populations of the world that have no interest in being governed by a state --- in this case, "Zomia", Scott's neologistic designation of Europe-sized chunk of uplands Southeast Asia, which Scott understands a two-thousand year old autonomou
s zone fighting off state formation and state encroachment.
Next is another impressive tome-sized book now gracing our shelves, from Werner Sollors and Greil Marcus (of Lipstick Traces fame), A New Literary History of America. We're honestly surprised that we've never seen a book like this before --- esentially it's a literary anthology that also serves as a kind of madcap American history text. With over 1110 pages of essays, stories, and other bits of literary ephemera, this is definitely on our list of things we want someone to buy for us as a gift.
And last up is another somewhat improbable title from the depths of academia --- what do you get when you cross Giorgio Agamben's primary translator and collaborator Daniel Heller-Roazen with the current (and entirely deserved) popular fascination with pirates? Answer: The new Zone books title The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, which is a fascinating exploration of the development of international law with an eye towards those people who are precisely and totally excluded from this law and its protections --- pirates, hostis humani generis (the enemy of all mankind) as Ancient Roman law put it.. Probably the most theory heavy book on pirates we've ever seen, and a nice complement to more straightforward "pirates are pretty awesome" titles like Marcus Rediker's similiarly named Villains of All Nations.
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