Portrait of Jacques Nayral 1911 (by Albert Gleizes, 1881-1953) Purchased 1979

Over the last couple of months we’ve already introduced two new suites of features: the first being a series of periodic digests from academic journals, around the web (which we call DragNet) and in the news that we’re collectively calling “Round Ups” and the second being the collection of original contributions from researchers From the Field, which we’ve further broken down into impressionistic Dispatches and more fully-developed Dossiers.

Now the editors of Anthropoliteia are happy to announce the first in a third “suite” of features which we’re collectively calling “Bibliographemes”.  The neologism is a a play on Roland Barthes’ term “biographeme,” of which Richard Elliott, drawing on Seán Burke, writes:

These details – Fourier’s cats and flowers, Sade’s dislike of the sea – are crystalline moments in lives whose motion and totality are necessarily irrecoverable. While the conventional biographer will seek to mimic the impetus of a life, to register it according to certain representative proportions, the biographeme breaks with the teleology implicit in this lambent narrative movement. Events are not connected to imply any destiny or purpose in the course of a life, rather the biographemes are the shards of any such forward movement, those velleities that are passed over in the more frenetic, directed movement of the footprint-following biographer (Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 38-9.) via The Witness | The Place of Longing.

Similarly, the suite of features that we’re grouping under the term “bibliographemes” will attempt to do more than just review or report on the latest scholarly literature on crime, policing and security.  We hope that the various contributions to these features will call attention to aspects of scholarship not often reflected in traditional reviews–the things that are excess to and reshape our notion of traditional scholarship and reading practices.

With that said, we are delighted to introduce the first of these features, which we’re calling simply “Book Reviews.”  The first entry in this series will be a review of Gilberto Rosas’ El Barrio Libre written by Vino Avanesi.  This feature with be directed by Paul Mutsaers, of whom you can find out more here.  Should you have any suggestions for potential books, current or classic, or would yourself like to author a review, please send an email to anthropoliteia@gmail.com with the phrase “Book Review” in the subject line.