Following the publication of my article on ‘The Urban Revolution in Victor Serge’, in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, my thinking has returned to collating a series of posts I had previously written on the novelist. These will now be collected on Progress in [...]
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Economics and science fiction have various overlaps. Science fiction is a genre that has long toyed with alternative economic institutions, imagining different types of production, property or money, and seeing where such changes might lead. Economics, as Jens Beckert’s recent work has [...]
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Recent conversations about authoritarian neoliberalism and literary geographies reconsider how foundational concepts in political economy stymie contemporary debates. Whether re-negotiating the idea of homo economicus or radically expanding the methodological tools used to critique [...]
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When Richard Sheets advises his victim, Eric Packer, protagonist of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), that he should have listened to his prostate, he not only diagnoses the asymmetry of economic information that has thwarted Packer’s speculative activities, but also points inwards and more [...]
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Shakespeare has long been seen as a writer with something to say about the economic. Karl Marx famously uses Timon of Athens to discuss the “power of money” in his 1844 Manuscripts and Capital Volume I. There are crucial economic questions in The Merchant of Venice, not only in the character [...]
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Delivering searing criticism on the psychosis of absolute power, Victor Serge’s second novel to be featured in my new article in Annals of the American Association of Geographers is a masterly work. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was written in 1942 and is situated [...]
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An early scene in Rosario Castellanos’ semi-autobiographical novel Balún Canán (1957), set in the late 1930s in Chiapas, Mexico, evokes a cozy scene of provincial childhood: a group of ladina or European-identified schoolgirls, the daughters of local landowners, sip posol, an indigenous [...]
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One of the most striking features of Victor Serge’s writings has to be the way he captures spatial arbiters that shape the practices of empowerment and containment within the territorial form of the city. As argued in my latest journal article published here in [...]
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