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July’s MQUP Top 5 is from Sophie Harman, author of Seeing Politics: Film, Visual Method, and International Relations.
Engaging with a broad range of topics—the politics of everyday life, health, HIV/AIDS, Africa, post-colonialism, gender/feminist theory, visuality, film, and method—Seeing Politics looks at scholars who are pushing the boundaries of how they do research, how they communicate their research to a broader audience, and what counts as scholarship in world politics. Below, Harman shares five books that intersect with these themes and complement her innovative and compelling new book.
Roland Bleiker’s Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009) is the seminal text for anyone with even a passing interest in aesthetics and international relations. For me, it was both an entry guide to debates over the use of aesthetics in understanding the world and a reassuring presence that my work in film did have a place in the disciplines of politics and international relations. The scope of the book—poetry, music, art, terror, war, climate change, the sublime—is impressive but never overwhelms the generosity and insight Bleiker offers. Bleiker gives you permission to use new tools and ways of thinking about the world: this enriches the methods we use and frees up new ways of thinking about issues in contemporary international relations. His simple proposition that given the complexity of world politics, why would researchers not use a full range of thinking about the world endures and continues to inspire both old and new readers of the book.
In many ways, Seeing Politics and the project behind the book was a direct response to Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On (20th Anniversary Edition, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007). This is a phenomenal book that I recommend to everyone who wants to know more about the social history of HIV/AIDS, it is gripping and, ultimately, heart breaking. The book and its film adaptation were landmarks in narrative and visual representations of HIV/AIDS that laid the foundation for subsequent TV shows such as Pose and films from Philadelphia to We Were Here and 120 BPM. However, such visual representations show a very specific time and history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic; what is often missing are stories from people living with HIV in the contemporary period. Having spent 15 years working on the politics of HIV/AIDS, I consistently questioned where I could find the contemporary And the Band Played On and why this was not being written. These questions and the simple premise—where are the women?—inspired me to explore the wider politics of the stories we see.
Decolonial feminist work has been fundamental in exploring the problems of extraction, exploitation, and inequality in how scholarship is produced and conducted. When reading such work the challenges to conducting international research seem replete with so many red flags and problems of exploitation that it can be overwhelming and limiting. Refreshing and incisive in her analysis of these issues, Manisha Desai’s Gender and the Politics of Possibilities: Rethinking Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), has been a fundamental influence on my work. Desai does not shy away from the red flags and the need for people to stop and reflect on their feminist praxis, but her understanding is one of possibility or ‘the dual politics of possibilities.’ It is a hugely important cautionary tale for researchers, but a caution that seeks to enrich research and knowledge than limit. In writing sections of Seeing Politics I would imagine myself in conversation with Desai, as well as Chandra Talpade Mohanty on her seminal text Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (London: Duke University Press, 2003)—discussing their ideas of the messy nature of feminist research, the importance of genealogy, and how decolonising feminism not only informs feminist research praxis, but how we think about conducting international research. These two books are must-reads for anyone working with international research teams, vulnerable populations, or situations replete with inequality: given this covers a wide range of academic research, everyone should read these books!
There are many excellent scholars exploring the post-colonial African state (Bayart, Mbembe, Clapham, Mamdani) on which Seeing Politics draws. However Frederick Cooper’s Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and its depiction of gatekeeping is a theme that was vital to understanding elements of the Tanzanian state and society, and, perhaps somewhat unseen when Cooper was writing the book, the governance of the global film industry. Cooper’s work is not only instructive in the historical account of how colonialism and postcolonialism informed the politics and operations of the state, but how such findings resonate in our understanding of statehood beyond the African continent. Often books that focus on the Africa state are read by students and scholars of African and Area Studies; this is a major oversight as the theories and themes of books such as Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present have great insight and relevance to understanding contemporary statehood and the politics of gatekeeping around the world.
Sophie Harman is the author of Seeing Politics: Film, Visual Method, and International Relations.
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