Mariana Candido, “An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

04/17/15 • 60 min

Mariana Candido‘s book An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World. Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge University Press, 2013) is a powerful and moving exploration of the history and development of the port of Benguela. Founded by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century, Benguela, located on the central coast of present-day Angola, was the third largest port of slave embarkation on the coast of Africa. In discussing the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on African societies, Candido looks at the formation of new elites, the collapse of old states, and the emergence of new ones. Her book offers a new perspective on the importance of the South Atlantic as a space for the circulation of people, ideas, and crops. But what makes this book truly distinctive is how Candido digs beneath the surface of her evidence to give readers a sense of the lived experiences and feelings of all involved in the trade: the unfortunate victims and those who benefited from the violent capture and selling of human beings. As historian John Thornton observes, Candido’s book “will be a starting point for studies of the region for years to come.”

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Thom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014)

Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “...for anyone who...” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. “What is lost,” van Dooren asks, “when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” How does this loss mean, and what does it mean, within the particular multispecies community formed and shaped by that way of life? And how might storytelling, conceived as an act of witnessing, help draw us into new relationships and accountabilities within our multispecies communities? Flight Ways is deeply concerned with the ethical questions that emerge – and that must be sustained – in the course of thinking through these crucial questions, and it is committed to moving us away from a position of human exceptionalism as we work with and inside of that ethical troubling. Deeply interdisciplinary, van Dooren’s book brings together approaches in animal studies and the environmental humanities, but it speaks to and from many more fields.

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Andrew Cayton, “Love in the Time of Revolution” (UNC Press, 2013)

Andrew Cayton is a distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In his book Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) he has given us a lucid and beautifully written history of the transatlantic relationships among the circle of radical writers that included William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Gilbert Imlay. Caught in the fervor revolutionary change, these free thinkers believing in the goodness of humanity and reason rejected the need for authority, hierarchies, and tradition in preserving social cohesion and wellbeing. Rather, mutuality and open exchange were offered as a better foundation for society. At the intersection of public lives and private desire, they sought to extend their radical vision beyond politics and into their intimate lives through new a model of egalitarian and free relationships between men and women. Deconstructing marriage their writings reflected the protested against the constraints of conventional society. Cayton demonstrates how these radicals embodied a modern interpersonal ethic arising with the liberal free trade in goods and ideas in which the personal was political. How the sexes were to relate to each other changed forever. Differing gendered understanding of “social commerce,” between men and women, brought uneven consequences. Relationships founded on freedom, openness and devoid of binding ties beyond reasoned desire could also produce the fruits of a masculinist frame of mind – the tragedy of neglect, abuse, and abandonment experienced by women. Cayton’s portrait of Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Imlay changes how we read them and how we understand our modern selves.

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