{"id":77550,"date":"2022-04-07T10:47:36","date_gmt":"2022-04-07T14:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=77550"},"modified":"2022-04-08T10:19:41","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T14:19:41","slug":"brock-profs-new-book-a-parting-gift-to-colleague-mentor-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2022\/04\/brock-profs-new-book-a-parting-gift-to-colleague-mentor-friend\/","title":{"rendered":"Brock prof\u2019s new book a parting gift to colleague, mentor, friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Phil Mackintosh\u2019s newest book, B.H. Roberts, Moral Geography, and the Making of a Modern Racist<\/em>, is born of the pandemic in more ways than one.<\/p>\n

The book was completed during lockdown and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing last week<\/a> \u2014 just over a year after the death of co-author Clyde Forsberg.<\/p>\n

Mackintosh, a Professor in Brock\u2019s Department of Geography and Tourism Studies, originally planned to write the book\u2019s foreword for longtime friend and colleague Forsberg, a Professor at the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan.<\/p>\n

But Forsberg contracted COVID-19 early in the pandemic, and when his \u2018long COVID\u2019 condition quickly deteriorated after a heart attack, plans changed fast.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s opening pages share the history of the lifelong connection between Mackintosh and Forsberg, who were childhood acquaintances, graduate school friends at Queen\u2019s, jazz trio bandmates and, ultimately, writing partners. It also explains how the transdisciplinary collaboration between Forsberg, a historian of religion, and Mackintosh, a historical geographer, took shape.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve never met anybody as intellectually and artistically gifted as Clyde Forsberg,\u201d says Mackintosh.<\/p>\n

He was faced with a dilemma when Forsberg died very shortly after completing the first draft, however. Mackintosh could finish the book, layering in the critical geography that Forsberg wanted him to contribute, and he could even see the book through to publication on behalf of his collaborator. But the peer review process, which would require both authors to be available to respond from their respective fields of expertise, was no longer an option.<\/p>\n

Mackintosh crystallizes the risks of transdisciplinary research in a time of pandemic with one anecdote.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s one important citation where Clyde talks about Mormon dissenters in the 1960s who were excommunicated as Mormon fundamentalism solidified under the influence of Joseph Fielding Smith Jr.,\u201d says Mackintosh. \u201cClyde cited many authors without reference, and I could track only one when copyediting. So I added a footnote to explain that I\u2019d had to cut this raft of citations, but nevertheless included them for anybody curious to chase them down.\u201d<\/p>\n

The transdisciplinary monograph deconstructs the deep racial prejudices baked into the writing of modern American Mormonism\u2019s principal theologian, B. H. Roberts, in the late 1920s. Mackintosh and Forsberg use source criticism and close reading to show the origins of \u2014 and social and cultural harm in \u2014 his thinking.<\/p>\n

\u201cScrutinizing Roberts\u2019 sources \u2014 many of which argue against him \u2014 reveals that he was a careless and guileful researcher who cherry-picked information and engaged in plagiarism,\u201d says Mackintosh. \u201cCrucially, we explain how he succumbed to Victorian understandings of imperialism and white superiority, and believed these to be divinely inspired. So he becomes an ideal of the \u2018modern racist\u2019 through his use of spurious race science and white creationism to affirm his religious beliefs.\u201d<\/p>\n

In their introduction, Mackintosh and Forsberg declare their project to be \u201ca work of anti-racist geography\u201d that views Roberts and his racialized creation science through the lens of the Black Lives Matter era.<\/p>\n

They uncover the white supremacy and quasi-fascist Christian imperialism of Roberts\u2019 manuscript, The Truth, The Way, The Life<\/em>, in which he selectively used ideas from leading intellectuals in the fields of philosophy, psychology, paleoanthropology, physics and evolution to devise an interstellar origin story for a white Adam and Eve in order to separate them from the scientific evidence showing that humans evolved in and migrated out of Africa.<\/p>\n

Roberts\u2019 moral geography, or moral judgments imposed on real and imagined geographies, as referenced in the book\u2019s title provides an example of the lengths to which white supremacy will go to \u201creinvent even the geography of creation to coddle its virulently moralized idea of \u2018white place,\u2019\u201d as Mackintosh describes it.<\/p>\n

The authors also show that although Roberts\u2019 manuscript was rejected by Mormon leaders of the time, including Joseph Fielding Smith Jr., and remained unpublished for 60 years, Smith later repurposed Roberts\u2019 arguments in his own writing without crediting him, a previously undiscovered connection.<\/p>\n

The book, a passion project for Forsberg and a labour of love for Mackintosh, raises several key questions, from why Smith would plagiarize a racist manuscript he initially recognized as dangerous to his faith to how structural racism impacts Christian theology overall.<\/p>\n

Its surviving author has a few residual worries, as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m desperate for Clyde\u2019s opinion \u2014 and reassurance,\u201d says Mackintosh. \u201cI think I can sense the latter. But I need to hear him say, \u2018this works\u2019 or \u2018you\u2019re overreaching here\u2019 or \u2018I think you\u2019ve understated that.\u2019 Who anticipated this wrinkle in transdisciplinarity?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Phil Mackintosh\u2019s newest book, B.H. Roberts, Moral Geography, and the Making of a Modern Racist, is born of the pandemic in more ways than one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":77551,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,1,38],"tags":[5014,522,11426],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77550"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77550"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77561,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77550\/revisions\/77561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}