BOOK REVIEWS – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Global Giants: American Empire and Transnational Capital

Review of Giants: The Global Power Elite by Peter Phillips (Introduction by William I. Robinson). New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018. LCCN 2018017493; ISBN 9781609808716 (pbk.); ISBN 9781609808723 (ebook); 353 pps. Giants: The Global Power Elite, by Peter M. Phillips, Professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University, opens with a stated intention of following […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

American Exceptionalism, American Innocence

Review of American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror. By Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong. Foreword by Ajamu Baraka. Afterword by Glen Ford. 256 pages. Published: April 2, 2019. New York: Skyhorse Publishing Inc. ISBN: 9781510742369. Hardcover, $24.99 US; e-Book, $16.99 US. We […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Book Review: Afghanistan Post–2014—Misreading Afghanistan’s Crypto-coloniality

Review of: Afghanistan Post-2014: Power Configurations and Evolving Tragectories. Edited by Rajen Harshe’ and Dhananjay Tripathi. (New Delhi: Routledge), 2016, pp. xix+248. The colonial and postcolonial writings about of Afghanistan are marked by the absence of a systematic and critical awareness about the country as an offspring and dependency of Western colonialism. The ethnographic, historic […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Book Review: Patriots, Traitors and Empires—The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, by Stephen Gowans

Review of: Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, by Stephen Gowans. Published by Baraka Books, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 6 x 9 inches. 280 pages. ISBN No 9781771861359. Paper, $24.95 CDN; PDF/EPUB, $19.99 CDN. “It is easy to lose a country, but difficult to win it back”. —Kim Il-sung (quoted in […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Book Review: Washington’s Long War on Syria, by Stephen Gowans

Review of: Washington’s Long War on Syria, by Stephen Gowans. Published by Baraka Books, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 6 x 9 inches. 280 pages. ISBN No 9781771861083. Paper, $24.95 CDN; PDF/EPUB, $19.99 CDN. Why does Syria matter? What “threat” does Syria represent to the US? Is Syria a democracy? Is the Syrian government a legitimate one? […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Humanitarian Imperialism in Libya: Another Review of Slouching Towards Sirte

Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa Maximilian Forte Montreal, Baraka Books, 2012 341 pp, $17.95 (paper), ISBN 978 -1 -926824-52 -9 The post-WW II anti-colonialism is now reversed with a neocolonial thrust to Middle-East and Africa. The case of recent attack on Libya by NATO powers in support of the rebels against […]

by Donnchadh Mac an Ghoill

Book Review: The Tribal Imagination—Civilization and the Savage Mind, by Robin Fox

The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind. Robin Fox. Harvard University Press. Hardcover. ISBN 9780674059016. Publication: March 2011. 432 pages, 28 line illustrations, 3 maps. Professor Robin Fox is one of those mildly conservative, somewhat eccentric, Englishmen that even we Irish Revolutionaries cannot help but find likeable. I had read his The Red Lamp of Incest some years ago, and […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

New Book: Emergency as Security–Liberal Empire at Home and Abroad

Kyle McLoughlin and Maximilian Forte “Just as our vision of homeland security has evolved as we have made progress in the War on Terror, we also have learned from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina….We have applied the lessons of Katrina to this Strategy to make sure that America is safer, stronger, and better prepared. To […]

by Donnchadh Mac an Ghoill

Book Review: Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya – Lessons for Africa in the Forging of African Unity, by Horace Campbell

In October 2011, days after the brutal murder of the Libyan Leader, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, NATO General Secretary, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, declared that the NATO mission in Libya had been one of the most successful in NATO’s history. In his new book, Professor Horace Campbell sets out to analyse that claim, and to analyse the […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Who Is An Indian? Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas

“A significant addition to research, Who Is an Indian? provides an extended examination and a clear picture of Indigenous identity issues in the Americas. Among the book’s important contributions are its examination of the site of interface between the modern state and Indigenous peoples, as well as its analysis of how state discourses of identities […]

by M. Jamil Hanifi

Vending Distorted Afghanistan Through Patriotic ‘Anthropology’

First published in Critique of Anthropology, 2011, 31(3) 256–270 Review Essay: Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, xi + 389 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-14568-6. $29.95 (hbk) The destabilization and military occupation of Afghanistan by the United States over the past three decades has triggered the hasty production of […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Review of Johannes Fabian’s Ethnography as Commentary

The Three Bloggers…and Tweeting versus Telepathy I am writing about an event that I advertised earlier here, Johannes Fabian’s address to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, co-organized with the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. The event lasted from 5:00 to 7:00pm and was heavily attended, with at least […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Book Review: Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform

There is so much of relevance in the book discussed below, and in the review, to the range of issues discussed on this blog that it seemed best to simply post the full book review here, with some salient elements highlighted. H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-AmIndian@h-net.msu.edu (April 2008)Lucy Maddox. Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, […]