So far this year we’ve published three new titles in the Antipode Book Series:

Other Geographies: The Influences of Michael Watts edited by Sharad Chari (University of California, Berkeley), Susanne Freidberg (Dartmouth College), Vinay Gidwani (University of Minnesota), Jesse Ribot (University of Illinois) and Wendy Wolford (Cornell University);

Money and Finance After the Crisis: Critical Thinking for Uncertain Times edited by Brett Christophers (Uppsala University), Andrew Leyshon (University of Nottingham) and Geoff Mann (Simon Fraser University); and

Frontier Road: Power, History, and the Everyday State in the Colombian Amazon by Simón Uribe (University of Antioquia).

In Other Geographies, an international group of distinguished scholars pay homage to and build on the work of one of the most influential thinkers of our time, Michael Watts. Together they show how Watts’ research, writings, teaching and mentoring have relentlessly pushed boundaries, transforming his chosen field of geography and beyond. The book spans an array of topics including the political economy and ecology of African societies, governmentality and territoriality in various Southern contexts, food security, cultural materialist expositions of capitalism, and modernity and development across the postcolonial world. It builds on Watts’ legacy, exploring its theoretical, analytical, and empirical implications, and proposing exciting new possibilities for further exploration in his tracks.

Money and Finance After the Crisis provides a critical multi-disciplinary perspective on the post-crisis financial world in all its complexity, dynamism, and unpredictability. Contributors illuminate the diversity of ways in which money and finance continue to shape global political economy and society. Exploring the geographies of money and finance that have unfolded in the wake of the financial crisis, they discuss a wide range of contemporary social formations, the complexities of modern debt-driven financial markets, and proliferating forms of financial power, from the realms of orthodox finance capital to biodiversity conservation, demonstrating the centrality of money and finance to contemporary capitalism and its political and cultural economies.

Finally, Frontier Road uses the history of one road in southern Colombia–known locally as “the trampoline of death”–to demonstrate how state-building processes and practices have depended on the production and maintenance of frontiers as inclusive-exclusive zones, often through violent means. The book considers the topic from multiple perspectives, including the ethnography of the state, the dynamics of frontiers, and the nature of postcolonial power, space, and violence, drawing attention to the political, environmental, and racial dynamics involved in the history and development of transport infrastructure in the Amazon region. Incorporating a broad range of engaging sources, such as missionary and government archives, travel writing, and oral histories, it examines the violence that has sustained the state through time and space, as well as the ways in which ordinary people have made sense of and contested that violence in everyday life.

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Since 2001 the Antipode Book Series has been exploring what it means to think radical geography, broadly considered, “antipodally” as in opposition and from various margins, limits or borderlands.

An Antipode book provides insight “from elsewhere”, across boundaries rarely transgressed, with internationalist ambition and located insight. We want manuscripts willing to step outside the comfort of regional, national and disciplinary boundaries to think across comparative and connected insights from elsewhere.

An Antipode book confronts and sharpens the stakes in a set of issues. This does not amount to polemics, or clear lines between enemy and friend. Rather, an Antipode book diagnoses the ways in which grounded critique emerges from particular instantiations of contradictory social relations in order to change them. We seek manuscripts driven by this practical socio-spatial imperative, rather than a purely ideological commitment to “radical geography”.

An Antipode book might look to revise larger and interdisciplinary scholarly debates by pushing at their boundaries, or by showing what happens to a problematic as it moves or changes. Equally, an Antipode book might think with binaries we instinctively dismiss, to think in complex ways about the ways in which such binaries are mobilized and boundaries maintained.

An Antipode book investigates the specific density of power and struggle in one or more sites, but with lessons that might travel internationally, to provide surprising echoes elsewhere. Indeed, we seek books written with this deliberative communicative intent, theoretically bold and empirically rich but also intended for critical renovation and re-use in other sites of critique.

Finally, an Antipode book will be written in lively, accessible prose that does not sacrifice clarity at the altar of sophistication. We seek books that are not necessarily from the discipline of geography, but which push the boundaries of geographical critique to understand our fractured world in order to change it. Authors or editors with ideas for Antipode books should contact the Book Series editors with an idea or full proposal which will be subject to review by the editors and two anonymous referees.

A proposal should consist of: an introduction that lays out the book’s theoretical and empirical stakes, in engagement with the foregoing manifesto for the series; an annotated chapter outline; a schedule to completion; and a clear sense of how the proposed book aligns with complementary titles.

Sharad Chari, Department of Geography, University of California Berkeley; [email protected]

Vinay Gidwani, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota; [email protected]