Stanford University Press Blog

Our Top 10 Blog Posts from 2015

This year’s most-read articles from the Stanford University Press blog.

What did Mark Twain think of American imperialism? Why were Africans excluded from Gandhi’s moral compass and political ideals? Did Foucault believe in “rights”? How do our present debates about biopower change if we take plant life into account? What can a 60s-era leftist journal from the Maghreb teach us about #BlackLivesMatter and the Syrian refugee crisis? Over the course of the last year, our authors have tackled these and many other questions besides. Gathered below are this year’s most shared, most liked, and most read articles from the SUP blog.

 

Human Rights Without Humanism

Why does Foucault—an avowed anti-humanist—turn to “rights” in
his later works?

by BEN GOLDER

 

The Path to Publishing Your First Book

Want to get published? Want to make a strong debut? Know your audience.

by MICHELLE LIPINSKI

 

Plants Are the New Animals

In an era of humanist biopower it’s not animality that gets left behind, but plants.

by JEFFREY T. NEALON

6 New Giftable Books from SUP

For gift giving or pleasure reading on wintry nights.

Public domain via Pixabay.

Whether inspired by the giving season or in search of a companion for some well-deserved year end R&R, here are a few new books guaranteed to entertain, enlighten, and intrigue.

 

1

Hive Mind
How Your Nation’s IQ Matter So Much More Than Your Own

by GARETT JONES

RECOMMENDED READING FOR:
armchair economists and social scientists 

While widely respected as an index for measuring individual intelligence, IQ, surprisingly, turns out not to be a strong predictor of personal prosperity—but your nation’s average IQ does. In Hive Mind, Garett Jones—drawing on research that spans psychology, economics, management, and political science—reveals how higher IQs lift all boats, fostering higher savings rates, more productive teams, and more effective bureaucracies. Hailed by Forbes as an accessibly written window into economic thinking, Jones’ book concludes with a call to action: to devote more resources to credibly raise test scores with the aim of enhancing our collective success.

“So what’s the takeaway for the individual? According to Jones, it’s that ‘being around smart people is more important than you being smart yourself.’”

—Quartz

 

Separate and Unequal Justice

On Laquan McDonald and the racialized culture of the criminal court system.

by NICOLE GONZALEZ VAN CLEVE

Professor Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, discusses Laquan McDonald's case on The Rachel Maddow Show (video below).

The Gang Crimes Unit of the State’s Attorney’s Office in Cook County, Chicago was where the most bullish state’s attorneys worked. Many were nicknamed for their ferocity, sounding like their own gang of sorts­—“Dirty Dog” Richardson, “Beast-Man” Miller, William “Billy Club” McManus, to name a few. These were the types of men who comfortably put both feet up on their desk and welcomed you to their office with the soles of their shoes.

Nameless mug shots of a stream of black and Latino defendants acted as wallpaper for their office.

Nameless mug shots of a stream of black and Latino defendants acted as wallpaper for their office—a visual souvenir of convictions and conquests. This wallpaper provided a striking, racialized backdrop to the practice of criminal law and was my first introduction to the criminal courts and criminal justice. Nearly all the prosecutors who built and exhibited this showpiece were white; in contrast, nearly every mug shot in the mural was a person of color. I moved backward several steps so that I could see the entire wall, and then I paced reverently along it, as though I were scanning a memorial of the dead.

Decolonizing Culture

What a leftist Moroccan journal from the 60s can teach us about today’s cultural crises.

by OLIVIA C. HARRISON and TERESA VILLA-IGNACIO

Front cover of "Africa, a Single Struggle," special issue of Souffles (no. 19; Rabat, 1970).

Next March will mark the fifty-year anniversary of Souffles, a short-lived but incendiary publication founded in the wake of the brutally repressed March 1965 student protests that inaugurated the decades-long period known as “the years of lead” in Morocco. Initially a poetry and culture review, Souffles and later its Arabic-language twin Anfas became the unapologetic platforms for the disgruntled Moroccan youth that took to the streets in 1965. In 1971 the journal’s editor-in-chief, Abdellatif Laâbi, and dozens of fellow Souffles-Anfas activists were arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, effectively putting an end to this remarkable journal, if not to political dissidence, which continued unabated in the jails of Hassan II.

Moroccan writers and artists broke with stagnant French models and Arabic canons in order to forge new artistic forms.

A repository of seminal 1960s texts from across the colonized and postcolonial world, Souffles-Anfas provides a window onto the transnational cultural and political movements that mark the heyday of Third Worldism and anticolonial theory. The sentiments and political grievances expressed in Souffles-Anfas are precursors to contemporary progressive movements—from the pro-democracy revolts collectively termed the Arab Spring to struggles for racial justice in the West. The journal proved instrumental in establishing dialogues between writers, artists, and activists from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It published seminal works by tricontinental writers and political activists the likes of Haitian writer René Depestre, the Syrian poet Adonis, and Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the struggle for independence from Portugal in Guinea-Bissau, as well as key revolutionary and postcolonial texts, such as the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program or the Argentine manifesto for a Third Cinema.