Many Disorder-ers recently enjoyed the 2020 Annual Conference of Millennium: Journal of International Studies, held online last month on the theme of ‘Entanglements and Detachments in Global Politics’. A welcome excuse to meet up, we put together a roundtable on Lisa Lowe’s widely celebrated book The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015) and recorded it for posterity in this podcast. Enjoy!
Disordering “The Intimacies of Four Continents”: A Reading Group
Chair: Meera Sabaratnam
Participants: Rahul Rao, Joe Hoover, Paul Kirby, Nivi Manchanda, Charmaine Chua, Srdjan Vucetic
This panel brings together members of the collective blog The Disorder of Things to read and comment on Lisa Lowe’s book The Intimacies of Four Continents. Centrally concerned with the nature of historical entanglements, Lowe’s work locates what has been understood as liberal humanism within the matrix of empire, racial hierarchies and interconnectedness that transformed the world in recent centuries. The contributors to this round table will read the book and discuss its general arguments plus the specific contributions of each chapter, as well as reflecting on how the methods, analysis and conclusions of Lowe’s book may contribute to shifting our understanding of the international and future directions for research.
The Disorder Of Things 
When I taught Lowe’s “Intimacies of Four Continents” a few semesters ago in a grad seminar, we were all really taken by the work. The fact that the seminar involved people who were themselves deeply impacted by precisely the sorts of things Lowe’s book deals with made is especially relevant. So, it was such a wonderful treat to listen to this thoughtful, intelligent and articulate conversation between all of you. Thank you! You’ve reminded me yet again of how lucky we (some of us, at any rate) are to do this for a living.
LikeLike
Pingback: Nightcap | Notes On Liberty