I’ve been passionate about wine since I was a teenager in New Zealand and I now teach and write about it, judge in wine competitions, and travel the world to visit wine regions. I teach European history and the history of food and drink at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. As a wine historian, I spend weeks each year in archives, studying everything from changes in vineyard area and the weather in specific years to the taxation of wine and patterns of wine drinking. Currently, I’m working in several French archives for a book on wine in the French Revolution. It will be my ninth wine book.
Owen White’s excellent book has given Algerian wine the place it deserves in the wine history of both Algeria and France. Wine production, introduced to Algeria by French settlers in the late 1800s, was an anomaly because the majority Muslim population of the colony did not drink. But it became essential to the French wine industry because it was commonly blended with the then-anemic wines of southern France to make wines with colour and strength. Even so, many French wine producers regarded Algeria as a rival and there was a constant tension between producers who needed Algerian wine and those who resented it. It was resolved when Algeria won independence from France and the wine industry there went into steep decline.
The surprising story of the wine industry's role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire.
"We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen," stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony's best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn't drink alcohol.
Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the…
I am an award-winning historian and philosopher of the human sciences. But I got here by means of an unusually varied path: working for a private investigator, practicing in a Buddhist monastery, being shot at, hiking a volcano off the coast of Africa, being jumped by a gang in Amsterdam, snowboarding in the Pyrenees, piloting a boat down the canals of Bourgogne, playing bass guitar in a punk band, and once I almost died from scarlet fever. Throughout my journey, I have lived and studied in five countries, acquired ten languages, and attended renowned universities (Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford), all while seeking ways to make the world a better place.
Chakrabarty’s monograph is a classic work of postcolonial theory.
Basically, it shows that despite their pretensions to universality, a lot of the humanities and social sciences have been founded on unexamined Eurocentric perspectives on world history. While modernity is often held up as a universal standard, Chakrabarty unmasks the widely held assumptions about “sovereignty,” “disenchanted space,” and “secular time,” as European constructs.
Famously, he also shows how the transition to capitalism was an act of translation that changed the way people saw the world and their relationship to each other. This book can be hard going, but it is very much crucial reading as it really undercuts some of the most widely held myths of modernity.
First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as…
I am a professor who holds a Ph.D. in American history. I researched several archives in the United States and Paris, France to write this book and I am very proud of it. I was inspired to write this story mainly from listening to the friends of my parents, when I was younger, who went to war in Vietnam and came back broken yet committed to making the world a better place. The kindness they showed me belied the stories they shared of their harrowing experiences and I wanted to understand how this divergence happened in men that rarely spoke of their past.
Rothberg is not a historian but I love what he accomplished with this scholarly book. He examines film, literature, and paintings to suggest that our memories are multidirectional: meaning they often move in different directions at the same time. This allows him to place the holocaust side-by-side the colonial/decolonial project and produce a devastating story of how each fed upon the other. For example, he looks at moments in 1960s Paris that places Jewish survivors of Auschwitz in conversation with Algerian survivors of French concentration camps during the Algerian war to suggest their memories could work together to produce an honest remembrance of the past. I try to do something similar in my own book by illustrating how the war dead could link domestic and foreign places together in building an American Empire.
Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a twofold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of decolonization. On the one hand, it demonstrates how the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time that it has been declared "unique" among human-perpetrated horrors. On the other, it uncovers the more surprising and seldom acknowledged fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in part thanks to postwar events that seem at…
As part of an international project comparing imperial retreat and the wars of decolonization (or national liberation), I had to do extensive reading in this growing field.
Although there have been some important works, including a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, Martin Thomas’s book was one of the first and remains one of the best. The book’s title summarizes the choice facing post-World War 2 British and French leaders: did they attempt to defend colonial rule or abandon their overseas empires?
In both countries, the overseas colonies were seen as essential both economically and for national prestige. With impressive research and even more impressive fairness, Thomas challenges long-held interpretations that emphasized British moderation and managed decolonization with alleged French repression.
He also covers the anticolonial movements in both empires, emphasizing both their local roots, their shared international connections, and how the liberation movements played such an important role in Cold War…
Although shattered by war, in 1945 Britain and France still controlled the world's two largest colonial empires, with imperial territories stretched over four continents. And they appeared determined to keep them: the roll-call of British and French politicians, soldiers, settlers and writers who promised in word and print at this time to defend their colonial possessions at all costs is a long one. Yet, within twenty years both empires had almost completely disappeared.
The collapse was cataclysmic. Peaceable 'transfers of power' were eclipsed by episodes of territorial partition and mass violence whose bitter aftermath still lingers. Hundreds of millions across…
As a Jew growing up in the United States, I’ve spent a long time reflecting on how genocide, culturecide, and assimilation operate across majority-minority relations. My focus on Indigenous politics in my career as a political scientist stems from a devotion to pluricultural democracy as a way that people can live together well. I want to be part of a world where we can bring our whole selves to our societies and don’t have to cut out certain parts of our identities to be accepted. And I like to read well-researched, compellingly written books that offer insight into how communities do that.
Ka’m-t’em both describes how communities can heal from colonization, and is itself a product of that healing. This book brings up so many emotions: shame around White violence, hope to build a community of support for Indigenous peoples, and longing for a decolonized future. The chapters featuring youth voices at the end of the book are particularly moving, as we hear from teenagers in their own words as to why they are willing to fight for their identities, and what everyone can do to help.
Many generations ago, along the Klamath River, there lived a wise woman who wove the most beautiful baskets known to humankind. Her baskets were woven so tightly that water could not penetrate them. She was aging and had many experiences to share. Through prayer, she began to weave a basket for the people. The wise woman worked day after day, weaving, praying, and singing. As her strong hands moved gracefully over her materials, she shared a story to be retold, a song to be sung again, and a lesson to be learned. When she finished, she had created a large…
I have loved Algeria since I lived there for 3 years from 2007. The experiences of the 20th century, particularly the War of Independence, make Algeria such an important country. The anti-colonial War overturned an entrenched colonialism, not only in Algeria, but set in train a movement for freedom across an entire continent. I have written extensively on the growth of civil society associations and how these helped people recover from tragedies; and more recently, the developments that sprung from the Algerian Hirak of 2019. This saw millions of protesters march peacefully, for over a year, to bring about significant changes and new understandings of citizenship in the 21st century.
Our Fighting Sistersis a wonderful, inspiring, and stylishly written book, drawing on in-depth interviews with celebrated women fighters from the liberation struggle in Algeria.
It is one of the first books to fully engage with the experiences of women who lived through the struggles of the Independence War. It documents the roles women played, both as intellectuals and combatants, in overturning the brutal colonial rule, thus liberating Algeria and in many ways, the African continent.
It still has implications for the future of resistance movements in Algeria and beyond.
Between 1954 and 1962, Algerian women played a major role in the struggle to end French rule in one of the twentieth century's most violent wars of decolonisation. This is the first in-depth exploration of what happened to these women after independence in 1962. Based on new oral history interviews with women who participated in the war in a wide range of roles, from urban bombers to members of the rural guerrilla support network, it explores how female veterans viewed the post-independence state and its multiple discourses on 'the Algerian woman' in the fifty years following 1962. It also examines…
I loved this novel about a young woman growing up in what was then Rhodesia. I’m a total sucker for coming-of-age stories.
Tambu, the narrator, is a village girl who is chosen by her uncle, the headmaster of the missionary school in the larger town, to become a scholar and hope of the family. I love how we get Tambu's experience and determination, of course, but also her careful analysis of how to change yet stay true to her roots.
The author doesn’t explain a lot for those of us who don't know the region, but we get what we need to know about a world where relationships are everything, and responsibilities go in many directions.
FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THIS MOURNABLE BODY, ONE OF THE BBC'S 100 WOMEN FOR 2020
'UNFORGETTABLE' Alice Walker 'THIS IS THE BOOK WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR' Doris Lessing 'A UNIQUE AND VALUABLE BOOK.' Booklist 'AN ABSORBING PAGE-TURNER' Bloomsbury Review 'A MASTERPIECE' Madeleine Thien 'ARRESTING' Kwame Anthony Appiah
Two decades before Zimbabwe would win independence and ended white minority rule, thirteen-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education. On her shoulders rest the economic hopes of her parents, siblings, and extended family, and within her burns the desire for independence. A timeless coming-of-age tale, and a powerful exploration of…
Extensive research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry has given me a comprehensive understanding of the development of Transpacific studies. For the last decade, my research has focused, for the most part, on South-South intercultural exchanges and cultural production by and about Latin American authors of Asian descent. I have written five books dealing with these topics: 2008 Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (2009), The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru (2013), Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Writing Tusán in Peru (2014), Japanese Brazilian Saudades: Diasporic Identities and Cultural Production (2019), and The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance (forthcoming).
This book uses a transpacific, decolonial, and interdisciplinary approach to study the connections between Latin America and East Asia, concentrating on contemporary commodity extraction and exchanges. The book explores South-South exchanges without Global North metropolitan mediations, thus recentering East Asia-Latin America as an epistemological lens through which to consider these sophisticated networks and produce new knowledge. In my view, the originality of this book resides first in the interdisciplinary connection it makes between the decolonial project and transpacific studies, and secondly, in the two-pronged approach from two unfortunately often disconnected academic perspectives: Latin American and East Asian Studies.
In this collective work, researchers from different disciplines reflect upon the challenges and opportunities of decolonizing transpacific studies through the lens of a few paradigmatic case-studies that deal with connections between East Asia and Latin America. The present book offers a productive problematization of the idea of the transpacific as a concept and a space that is not restricted to a single definition. We defend that the transpacific can instead promote an understanding of agents and experiences that share many common traits that have been generally overlooked by a hegemonic interpretation of knowledge and the relationship between regions.By fostering an…
Not
so much the book that I have read but most, if not all, of the essays that will
be contained therein. These are true classics written by one of the greatest
minds of the 20th century: Anibal Quijano.
The words of caution
expressed by this world-famous Peruvian intellectual resonate with me today,
precisely because they presaged the age of “untruth” that we are living in.
Quijano
was something that we rarely find these days: A true humanist who coined pivotal
concepts such as “coloniality of power” and “coloniality of knowledge” that are
celebrating a much-deserved global revival as a part of the “decolonization”
movement that has merged with several other global movements for social and
political emancipation.
Duke University Press will publish the best and the
brightest essays of Quijano in the next year under the poignant title: Aníbal
Quijano: Foundational Essays on the Coloniality of Power –…
To me, political and moral questions have always seemed intertwined. My career as a political theorist is dedicated to using philosophical argument to untangle the moral questions surrounding real-world politics. I am especially interested in ethics and international affairs, including the ethics of intervention, what a just world order would look like, and how our understandings of familiar ideals—like justice, democracy, and equality—would change if we thought they were not only meant to be pursued within each nation-state, but also globally, by humanity as a whole. As faculty in Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University, I explore these issues with colleagues and students alike.
In this book, Getachew reconstructs and analyzes the political thought of several anticolonial thinkers and leaders, including Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Julius Nyerere. She takes readers on a fascinating journey through their political lives, filled with rich historical detail and careful attention to the content of their ideals and aspirations.
In so doing, Getachew recovers a vision of decolonization that does not pit commitments to national liberation against cosmopolitan concern for realizing justice around the world, but rather shows how national liberation can depend on reimagining—and remaking—the international order.
Not only did Getachew’s book give me an excellent introduction to the thinkers she analyzes, it presented a thought-provoking account of collective self-determination and freedom from domination that anyone interested in global justice should be acquainted with.
Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations-a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building-obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world.
