NBN Newsletter #9
Featuring a curated playlist about our oceans and an interview with Professor Nomi Claire Lazar
Oceans
More than half a billion years ago, our common ancestor emerged from the depths of the ocean and onto land. Over 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by the ocean, so it seems fitting that we landlubbers have origins in the great bodies of saltwater that encircle the planet. With the threat of climate change and melting ice caps, we live in danger of returning to the ocean that birthed us. In this week’s playlist, we feature episodes on all aspects of oceans including the great voyages we have taken to cross them, their natural history, the animals that live below their surfaces, and much more.
Playlist
Samantha Muka, Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea (University of Chicago Press, 2022)
Helen Rozwadowski, Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans (Reaktion Books, 2018)
Ann Elias, Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Duke UP, 2019)
Ryan Poll, Aquaman and the War against Oceans (University of Nebraska Press, 2022)
David Abulafia, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (Penguin, 2019)
Juli Berwald, Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs (Riverhead Books, 2022)
Benjamin de Carvalho and Halvard Leira, The Sea and International Relations (Manchester University Press, 2022)
Jeremy Black, A Brief History of the Atlantic (Robinson, 2022)
Lauren Benton and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, A World at Sea: Maritime Practices and Global History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
Scholarly Sources
Nomi Claire Lazar is Full Professor of Politics in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: Parliamentary Committee transcripts! But books-wise, I just finished Luca Manucci’s new collection, The Populism Interviews which has just come out with Routledge. The book consists of 30 short interviews with populism scholars across a range of disciplines. I found it a useful primer on the current state of research on this important topic.
Q: What is your favorite book or essay to assign to give to people and why?
A: COVID homeschooling (a full 28 weeks of it, here in Ontario) prompted me to take Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own down from the shelf and re-read it, as an adult, for the first time. Like all great books, it hits the adolescent and the mid-life adult distinctly. The book still excites and engages, even enrages. But now: how strikingly Woolf conveys the experience of interrupted thought. The idea buds, builds, and then builds again, rolling wave-like through the brain. Then comes the interruption. An admonition. A request. A child’s call for assistance. CRASH. Lost. It was so immediately, poignantly, resonant that this is now my go-to post-COVID recommendation, especially for other scholar-parents.
Q: Is there a book you read as a student that had a particularly profound impact on your trajectory as a scholar?
A: There is not one book. As a student, I was so interested in everything. But reading Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger alongside Hobbes’ Leviathan was an important intellectual event for me as an undergraduate. In these texts, and in their contexts, for both Galileo and Hobbes, knowledge (and who may claim it) is the fundamental political problem. And conversely, politics is the fundamental problem both faced in the practice of epistemology. Basically: who decides what counts as knowledge? And also: what grounds of authority make us believe those who claim knowledge? If these problems seem abstract, take a moment to think about how our democracies are threatened by misinformation and disinformation. False prophets everywhere! Same as it ever was, and I’ve never stopped thinking about this Janus-faced puzzle.
A little anecdote for book lovers: the problem of prophets and false prophets – people who claim special access to the truth - was arguably at the center of Hobbes’ thought. But our own 20th-century epistemological situation was, for a while, quite politically stable: there was something approaching a consensus around what counted as knowledge in the public sphere. So perhaps for that reason, folks nearly forgot about Hobbes’ false prophets (and people rarely even read the second half of Leviathan). In fact, when I purchased my 1909 copy in a secondhand shop back in 1996, the pages of Books 3 & 4, where Hobbes addresses these issues had not been cut. How many people had owned that copy before me, without anyone deeming his full politics of knowledge worth attention? Even today, Galileo’s moon drawings echo these themes for me— the dark side and the light side, the revealed side, and the concealed side, and how they shift about.
Q: Which deceased writer would you most like to meet and why?
A: Let sleeping scribes lie.
Q: What's the best book you've read in the past year?
A: Probably Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer. What a sharp observer of humans humaning.
Q: Have you seen any films, documentaries, or museum exhibitions that left an impression on you recently?
A: Everything leaves an impression on me. My brain is mottled and cratered, like Galileo’s moons.
Q: What do you plan on reading next?
A: I’m currently writing about the nexus of climate change, apocalyptic rhetoric, and states of emergency. For this project, I’m setting out on two books: Paul Tucker’s mammoth Unelected Power, and Jocelyn Stacey’s The Constitution of the Environmental Emergency. Both promise to touch on some of my favorite themes: crisis, legitimacy, democracy, and technocracy. The dark side of the moon is always there, even when we can’t see it.
New Books, Links, & Other Things
“Course Credits: A sampling of classes taught by notable figures”
Margaret Chowning, Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750–1940 (Princeton UP, 2023)
Noah Heringman, Deep Time: A Literary History (Princeton UP, 2023)
Christian O. Paiz, The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement (UNC Press, 2023)
Keorapetse Kgositsile, Collected Poems, 1969–2018 (U of Nebraska Press, 2023)
Roderick P. Hart, American Eloquence: Language and Leadership in the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP, 2023)
(If you’ve just finished an exceptionally engrossing book, listened to a great NBN episode, discovered a new podcast, or stumbled across an interesting website, please email caleb@newbooksnetwork.com)