Summer Break + Summer Reading

Break time.

The Public Archive is taking the rest of the summer off to catch up on some reading — to consider those daunting, guilt-inducing, impossible to finish accumulations of never-read classics, recently-published near-sensations, and occasionally-frustrating volumes you feel you should read if only to say you’ve read them.

Hudson’s list includes W.E.B. Dubois’ Dark Water: Voices from Within the Veil (Harcourt, 1920), Jonathan Derrick’s Africa’s ‘agitators’: militant anti-colonialism in africa and the west, 1918-1939 (Hurst, 2009), Leah Gordon’s Kanaval: vodou, politics and revolution on the streets of Haiti (Soul Jazz Records, 2010), Matthew J. Smith’s Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 (UNC Press, 2009), CLR James’ and David Austin’s, You Don’t Play with Revolution: the Montreal lectures of CLR James (AK Press, 2009), and C.S. Giscombe’s Prairie Style (Dalkey, 2008).

On Sheikh’s desk are Finbarr B. Flood’s Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton, 2009), Aamir R. Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, 2007), Janet Kamphorst’s In Praise of Death: History and Poetry in Medieval Marwar (South Asia) (Leiden University Press, 2008), Robert P.W. Hymes’ Way and Byway: Taoism,  Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern China (California, 2002) and David Sneath’s The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (Columbia, 2007).

Look for new posts on The Public Archive website come September. In the meantime, you can still follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Enjoy the summer.

Peter James Hudson and Samira Sheikh