By Sean Homer
Dušan I. Bjelić. Intoxication, Modernity & Colonialism: Freud’s Industrial Unconscious, Benjamin’s Hashish Mimesis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 307 pp.
In An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1986 [1940]), his last published work, Freud characterized the psychoanalytic intervention as a form of colonial conquest:
The ego is weakened by [an] internal conflict and we must go to its help.
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By Leisa Desmoulins
Amber Dean. Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance. University of Toronto Press, 2015. 188 pp.
What remembrances survive after death? For whom? In her 2015 book, Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler colonialism and the difficulty of inheritance Amber Dean asks what lives on after the violent deaths and disappearances of a group of women.
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By Jason Michelakos
Lindon Barrett. Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity. University of Illinois Press, 2014. 264 pp.
Lindon Barrett (1961-2008) was a Professor of English and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine from 1990 to 2007 before moving to the University of California, Riverside. He was a distinguished scholar and the author of Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (2009), published by Cambridge University Press.
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By Karl Jirgens
Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 287 pp.
Thomas King’s book was released shortly before the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings held in Edmonton (March, 2014) and more recently, in Ottawa (June, 2015), at which survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools recounted abuse, suffering and hardship (1).
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By Helen Kapstein
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa. Paradigm, 2012. 261 pp.
This volume opens with an amazing epigraph from South Africa’s Ministry of Higher Education and Training, part of which reads, “We should not only be consumers of theory from the developed world.
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By Mehita Iqani
A. Ricardo Lopez and Barbara Weinstein (eds.) The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History. Duke University Press, 2012. 446pp.
The Making of the Middle Class is an edited collection that spans an impressive—almost intimidating—amount of material. Featuring chapters and commentaries by 21 writers, it provides a collection of historical analyses of the formation of the middle class in a variety of historical moments and geographical contexts, offering the resources through which a detailed and global picture of its formation can emerge.
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