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Academic Inspiration: Deputy Director of LSE Stuart Corbridge
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Welcome to this special edition of the LSE Review of Books podcast. Building on the academic inspiration series on our website LSE reviewofbooks.com these special edition podcasts aim to showcase the more personal side of academia and represent a revealing look at the books which first inspired some of today's most prominent social science academics. Stuart Corbridge, professor of International Development and Provost and Deputy Director of the lse, focuses on the books that have inspired him throughout his academic career, from the Marxist theory that shaped his undergraduate study, to the many books on India and development studies that have inspired his passion for these areas, and finally through to the very special history of the Beatles.
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I think to understand books that are important to me, I need to say something about when I was socialised in the academy, and that was in the mid-70s at Cambridge as a student of geography. And at that time Marxism was beginning to rule the rooster amongst the younger faculty members. So I was socialized rather unusually, thinking that Marxism was the truth. Marxism was really the cutting edge in the academy, as in some respects I still think it was. As an undergraduate, I think in my first year by my guru Derek Gregory, who's now at the University of British Columbia, we were asked to read David Harvey's Social justice and the City. I found the book very, very difficult to understand to start with, and I read it many times with my great friend Jerry Kearns. I think the great book from David Harvey, in fact is his 1982 book the Limits to Capital, which I've read many times, I've reviewed it, I've argued for and against it on many different occasions. I think by the time I was a third year undergraduate, I was interested in India particularly, and imperialism and development. So I was reading Lenin, I was particularly reading the Latin American authors, the dependency authors, people like Furtado, Cardoso. And then I was very much affected, I think, in 1978 by reading Robert Brenner's famous article on Neo Smithian Marxism in the New Left Review. And that made me begin to think much more about what's become called Varieties of Capitalism. The book as a graduate student that really made me sit up and think was a fairly obscure book, I suppose, which was a book by Tony Cutler, Barry Hindis, Paul Hearst and Attar Hussain. Attar is now a colleague at LSE called Marx's Capital and Capitalism Today, Volumes one and two, of which I particularly like volume one, and it sort of made me rethink my own political positions at the time and was very much a precursor of this debate on Varieties of Capitalism. So that was one strand of work I was busy reading on India too. I was doing fieldwork around 1980 in eastern India. Book, I remember, strangely, was a Penguin book just after the Emergency by David Selborn called An Eye to India, which really sort of began to sort of look at the dark side of what Salman Rushdie would call, at about the same time, India's Midnight Children. But the book that made a huge impression on a lot of geographers and I got to know through my great friend Jim Duncan, was Edward Said's book Orientalism. Orientalism was just a formative book for anybody that had been thinking about the relationship between the west and the rest, as it was rather unkindly put. I think Eric Wolf had done a great book, Europe and the Peoples Without History. But Said's book was brilliant. It actually had the word geography, I think, in chapter one or chapter two's title. So it was very, very important for geographers. Made many people think about the way in which the Orient had been represented. Made me think about how astonishing it was that up the road we had soas, the School of Oriental and African Studies, something we would never set up today in those terms. Much as I admire SOAS and have loved going there and then because of many of the people that I was working with, I think Judith Butler's early, particularly gender trouble from around 1990 and again thinking through the way in which landscapes have been feminised and the way in which landscape has been sexualised. I've always loved books that are ethnographic, based on deep field work, long time commitment to place, but come out of a particular place to tell a story about bigger issues. I think the word for that is synechdocal. So amongst my favourites there, silent violence. Think 1983 by my friend Mike Watts, who's at Berkeley. An astonishing account of food famine in the peasantry in Nigeria. Also at Berkeley, Nancy Shepherd Hughes, I would say from around 1995, death without weeping, an extraordinary account of how people deal with tragedy and sorrow in the northeastern part of Brazil. And my absolute favorite from a friend and colleague at lse, Johnny Parry's book Death in Banaras, which I used many times in the late 1990s at Cambridge with students taking a course on South Asia. I mean, it's an extraordinary book. It's got maps showing people coming to die in Benares, seeking the perfect death with half of their body immersed in the Ganga at Benares, but it actually tells a story about life and death and the meanings of both that helped me to understand Hinduism, to understand the nature of Brahmanism, and more particularly, it says something very deep and very profound, I think, about not just contemporary India, but about life itself. I think most productive for me has been reading with and against the grain of the Subaltern Studies School. Spivak comes to mind. Ranijit Guha comes to mind. Not sure if I'd include him in the school, but Ramachandraguha, particularly the unquiet woods, comes to mind. But the person that I found most productive to read with and against is to me is one of the great public intellectuals of our time, Partha Chatterjee, who's at Columbia and also in Kolkata. I find it very difficult to go any length of time not to read the work of Partha Chatterji and the work that's coming out almost like a flood on colonial and post colonial India. And I do like to read that. Against the great novels that have come out of the subcontinent or about the subcontinent, three favorites would be Midnight's Children, of course, Vikram Seth's book A Suitable Boy, which is amazing and I was very lucky to meet him a couple of years ago. He's an absolute genius. And one that's less read, I think, which is an incredible book, Vikram Chandra's book, Sacred Games, which is about the relationships between a mafiosa figure and a policeman in contemporary Mumbai. It comes out into landscapes of geopolitics, India and Pakistan, all sorts of things, really. An incredible book. And finally, if I had a desert island book to take away with me, it would have to be Ian MacDonald's book Revolution in the Head, which takes you through every single Beatles song. It tells you how they recorded who wrote which bits. And it's done in a chronic, it's done chronologically. So that would be my non academic book, I think, but it's a very scholarly book nonetheless.
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That was Stuart Corbridge. To read more academic inspiration essays and the latest social science book reviews, and to hear more podcasts, visit lsereviewofbooks.com I'm Amy Marlett, thanks for listening.