One of the many very exciting titles that has been indexed by Southwest Humanities this year is Franck Billé’s important and wide-ranging Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity, published by Duke University Press in April 2025. In this book, which investigates how bodies and territories have been connected to questions of state and imperial sovereignty, “Billé charts the evolution of cartographic practices and the role that political maps have played in transforming notions of territorial sovereignty,” demonstrating lucidly “how states routinely and effectively mobilize corporeal narratives, such as framing territorial loss through metaphors of dismemberment and mutilation. Despite the current complexity of geopolitics and neoliberalism, Billé demonstrates that corporeality and bodily metaphors remain viscerally powerful because they offer a seemingly simple way to apprehend the abstract nature of the nation-state.” For more information about this excellent work, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 