The Nation, the Global Game and the Weight of it All

July 14, 2014 By Mandy Izadi in Commentary Tags: Argentina, Brazil, football, forced removal, Germany, human rights, nation, National Identity, Netherlands, public policy, World Cup 2014 2 Comments

For the past month, our eyes have been on the ball. Perfectly round, it flies and falls, across stadium skies through fields of grass, past fast, neon shoes and into goals, from Brazil to where we are. Our eyes follow. From Manaus and Fortaleza in the northern regions, traveling southward through Recife, Brasilia, Belo Horizonte, and Rio de Janeiro, near the Tropic of Capricorn, downwards to Porto Alegre. The World Cup has been a feast of the sensory and the dramatic, from the Amazon basin, where bugs abound with sweat, where sometimes torrential rain soaks shoes; and where, last night, near the busied streets of Rio and the ecstatic fun of the Copacabana, the sun set before the Christ the Redeemer Statue, and over the final game. For a month, we have seen the omnipresent national flags worn on people’s clothes and faces, and the victory runs, leaps, and hugs; as well as the tears that give you a sort of palpable agony, in the post-goal and final moments of every match. Continue reading →

Walter Johnson’s “River of Dark Dreams”

June 3, 2013 By Mandy Izadi in Book Review, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: bare-life processes, capitalism, cotton, global economy, imperialism, policing, River of Dark Dreams, Roundtable, Slavery, space, torture, Walter Johnson, white supremacy 5 Comments

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Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams is a meditation on the making of the Cotton Kingdom in the nineteenth century American South. The book is rich with the intimacies and delicacies of detail—details that describe the fundamental material circumstances in which enslaved men, women, and children forcibly transformed Native America into cultivated grids of mono-crop culture at the behest of “Manifest Destiny”; details that are gut-wrenching in their vivid depictions of the social relations of white supremacy—the torture, the hunger, the bleeding, and the raping of the enslaved—the malignant, violent underbelly that made and forcibly maintained the Cotton Kingdom; details that connect the smallest common denominators of plantation life, whether measured in lashes (upon flesh), or pounds (of cotton), or any other metric of rule—to the global economy, which itself connected slaveholders and merchant capitalists from the fields and riverbanks of New Orleans to the factories of Manchester and Liverpool. Continue reading →

A View from Albion

February 20, 2013 By Mandy Izadi in Academia Tags: Atlantic History, British Association of American Studies, British Group of Early American Historians, Harmsworth, Historians, transatlantic Leave a comment

Readers of The Junto may not be familiar with the early American history scene in the UK. Hailing one from each side of the Atlantic but both working in Britain, Tom Cutterham and I have had to grapple with the problems and positives of working on the history of one continent while living on another. Here is a brief sketch of how the land lies on the other side. Continue reading →