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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Shiben Banerji, "Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy" (U Texas Press, 2025)
Description: War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal humanity's fundamental unity and common fate.
Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (U Texas Press, 2025) by Dr. Shiben Banerji recounts a...