100 books like Border and Rule

To be honest, I could’ve picked any book by David Harvey–he writes about capitalism and how it affects people and the places we inhabit in a really accessible way. This brief introduction is a great way to get into his writing (a gateway book!). It is also a useful guide to thinking about contemporary issues with hope rather than despair.

Like the book by Ahmed, this one offers ideas for a socially just society, giving the reader solutions and not just problems. I think it is important when critiquing society to come up with tangible ways that we can move away from unequal systems to more equitable ones. This book makes change feel possible.

Danticat offers a gorgeously written memoir tracing her father’s life as US migrant, her uncle’s life as community leader who stayed in Haiti, and her relationship to both across both countries. The book was motivated by her Uncle Joseph’s horrifying, tragic death in the Krome Detention Center (originally built to detain Haitian refugees and notorious for abuses) after he fled home to claim asylum. But it is much more than a recounting of his death. It is a chronicle of a deeply connected family whose love exceeded borders. I cannot get this book out of my head. It helps my students understand that the violence of US borders is not abstract and cannot be captured in statistics or political rhetoric. It is about real people who navigate seemingly overwhelming obstacles put before them—sometimes building new lives from nothing, sometimes succumbing to the violence of US regimes. 

Yes, history is important. This is a recurring theme in my courses, because if we don’t know how we got here, then our efforts to address the urgent problems we face will be hampered by our inability to understand the root causes of those problems. 

Public intellectual Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz once again does us a great service with her latest book in revealing the deep roots of racist oppression against citizens and noncitizens. She explodes the foundational myth of the United States as nation of immigrants, showing how this country is instead defined by settler colonialism—the efforts to destroy Indigenous civilizations to build a new, permanent society with the exploited labor of enslaved Black people, and migrant workers of all kinds. Her book crucially helps us understand how Native people and immigrants are not opposed to each other, but are instead subjugated by the same forces and thus share struggles for… show more.

This book has hugely influenced my thinking on US racism, imprisonment, and immigration, especially my second book. By studying a long history of incarceration in Los Angeles, Lytle Hernandez demonstrates how “mass incarceration is mass elimination.” This argument was a revelation that opened new ways for me to see the connections among different people swept away into cages. Like Dunbar-Ortiz, she reveals how settler colonialism connects working-class white, Black, Indigenous, Chinese, and Mexican people targeted for arrest, imprisonment, and removal. Crucially, she reads “rebel archives” of those people who resisted their subjugation and fought for justice, showing how they never relinquished themselves to racist incarceration. 

This recently published collection brings together writings by the abolitionist organizer and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who has worked against the prison industrial complex with organizations and communities for decades. On its surface, it is not a book about immigration, and yet Gilmore offers crucial insights for understanding the shifting forces in the state and capitalism that have decimated communities both within and beyond the US. Those forces have abandoned working-class communities (largely of color; see Detroit), uprooted migrants, and criminalized both, targeting them for removal—to prisons, detention centers, and deportations to other countries. Her work also gives us concrete examples of the solidarity organizing that connects different groups, whose interests might not seem to align and whose locations might be spread across distances. If the previous books clarify the roots of the problems, Gilmore not only digs even deeper, but she also shows us examples of the work needed… show more.

Corey Robin takes the long view on the history of modern conservatism in this book. Outlining conservatism has constantly adapted in reaction to social progress since its inception in the wake of the French Revolution in the late-18th century, Robin identifies the goal of conservative politics as salvaging whatever it can of the old social order.

I found this book particularly useful in identifying how seemingly contradictory trends—such as a focus on reducing government spending while ramping up militarism abroad—can co-exist in conservative thought. This inherent flexibility reveals Donald Trump to be less an aberration than the next evolutionary phase for conservative politics.  

In this book, Pankaj Mishraj describes how the failures of secular modernity led to the rise of revanchist movements seeking to provide those left behind with a common sense of purpose.

I greatly appreciated the international scope of Mishraj’s analysis, with which he reveals how the growth of reactionary, theocratic, and xenophobic populist politics across the globe are manifestations of the same sense of malaise.

He convincingly argues that these tensions are as old as modernity itself. Rather than engaging strictly with the same old historical and sociological sources to make his case, the author refreshingly engages the poets and novelists of the era he describes.

I regard Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the embodiment of an empty progressive politics that is far more concerned with style over substance.

Martin Lukacs does a great job in The Trudeau Formula of outlining how Trudeau’s combination of soaring rhetoric and tepid reform on issues like economic inequality, Indigenous reconciliation, and the climate crisis works to stave off the more systemic changes needed to address these concerns in a substantive way.

Lukacs aptly demonstrates how Trudeau serves to uphold the status quo while presenting himself as an agent of transformative change. 

My friend and hero search-and-rescue worker Brendan met Doro during a rescue mission in the Mediterranean Sea. He promised to help Doro share his story with the world, and together they wrote this book.

Brendan’s writing really touches me as someone who has had a similar experience and journey into working in refugee response, and this, along with Doro’s incredible story, makes for a very profound book.

I couldn’t stop listening to this book. This autobiographical tale of a girl who flees Iran, grows up in the United States, and migrates to Europe is powerful and poignant in a way only a really good story can be. It perfectly captures the sense of being from multiple places but never truly at home. Nayeri has also written excellent nonfiction on the topic of migration and refuge, but this book has stayed with me and remains one of my favorite novels.