New Books In Critical Theory

It’s often said that the time in our lives can often pass without us noticing. Old age can come before we realize it, and it brings with it new elements to our own daily lives that we couldn’t have anticipated before. Observed from a distance and growing old can seem like a universal experience, but observed up close, it becomes clear that the different ways people age are as varied and unique as the people themselves, and these differences can come from within and without. Whether you get to live out your twilight years in a comfortable retirement home in the country, or an understaffed inner-city hospital, these experiences will be profoundly different, and likely had different paths that led to them. Viewed in this way, aging is seen not as some eternal experience that is the same for all people, but as a fundamental part of our politics and economic dynamics, for better and for worse. The COVID-crisis of the last year has brought to light how vulnerable our elderly are, how understaffed our care-facilitie

Why do books and publishing matter to the contemporary history of Britain? In Penguin Books and Political Change: Britain's Meritocratic Moment, 1937–1988 (Manchester UP, 2020), Dean Blackburn, aLecturer in Modern British History at the University of Nottingham, explores Britain in the twentieth century through the story of Penguin’s ‘Specials’. The book charts the shifting social, political, and intellectual context for the publication of the books, looking at key texts as well as offering a broader framework for understanding the social changes that the books shaped, and were shaped by. In addition, the book adds a fresh perspective on the idea of meritocracy, engaging with directly with the current moment’s critical interrogation of that term. Packed with rich and detailed case studies of 50 years of Penguin books, the book will be essential reading across arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the history of the UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm

The medium of cinema emerged during the height of Victorian-era European empires, and as a result, settler colonial imperialism has thematically suffused film for well over a century. In Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World on Film (Routledge, 2020), Drs. Janne Lahti (Academy of Finland Fellow in history, University of Helsinki) and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (Professor of English, Virginia Tech University) bring together a collection of scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine how film has been used to both justify and, in some cases, push against global systems of settler colonial conquest. The essays in the collection are truly global, stretching from Australia to central Asia to Hawaii, the American West, and beyond, and cover film history from the early twentieth century up to the “final frontier” of early twenty first century science fiction films. Together, Lahti and Weaver-Hightower make a strong case for further settler colonial cultural studies as a means of understanding how entert

Is intersectionality a critical social theory? What must intersectionality do to be both critical and a social theory? Must social justice be a guiding normative principle? And what does or should social justice mean in intersectional theory? Patricia Hills Collins explores these questions, and many more, in Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Duke University Press, 2019). Engaging a wide range of thinkers, activists, and traditions, including Classical American Pragmatism, the Frankfurt School, and Ida B. Well-Barnett, Collins helps us to reconsider how we think of intersectionality’s history in order to shape its future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez pens towards decolonial freedom. Her recently published book, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020), uses peripheralized (5) novels, visual/sonic works, poetry, essays, and short stories by diasporic and exiled Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone writers and artists towards “render[ing] legible what these texts offer to subjects who resist ongoing forms of colonialism…” (1). By centering the relationality of Equatorial Guinea, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic from the foundations of Ethnic Studies and Women of Color Feminist methodologies, Figueroa-Vásquez holds space for the different ways Afro-descendant peoples are racialized across the Atlantic while simultaneously attending to the anti-Blackness seemingly endemic to the modern world. But what does it mean to decolonize? For Figueroa-Vásquez, “In the contexts of the literature outlined in the texts, I pose that the lifeblood of these worlds takes the shape

In today’s episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, Sneha Annavarapu talks with Dr. Caterina Fugazzola, Earl S Johnson Instructor in Sociology at the University of Chicago, about her research on the contemporary tongzhi (LGBT) movement in the People’s Republic of China. Dr. Fugazzola briefly discusses her current book project (under contract with Temple University Press) in which she explains how grassroots groups organizing around sexual identity have achieved significant social change—in terms of visibility, social acceptance, and participation—in virtual absence of public protest, and under conditions of tightening governmental control over civil society groups. But, more pertinently to our special series, our guest tells us about what drew her to the project, and the kinds of dilemmas, issues, and opportunities that marked her fieldwork in the region. For instance, she walks us through what it is like to do ethnographic fieldwork on a cruise ship! We also chat about what it means to do ethnographic observation

As right-wing nationalism and authoritarian populism gain momentum across the world, liberals, and even some conservatives, worry that democratic principles are under threat. In The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton UP, 2018), Michael Hanchard argues that the current rise in xenophobia and racist rhetoric is nothing new and that exclusionary policies have always been central to democratic practices since their beginnings in classical times. Contending that democracy has never been for all people, Hanchard discusses how marginalization is reinforced in modern politics, and why these contradictions need to be fully examined if the dynamics of democracy are to be truly understood. Hanchard identifies continuities of discriminatory citizenship from classical Athens to the present and looks at how democratic institutions have promoted undemocratic ideas and practices. The longest-standing modern democracies —France, Britain, and the United States—profited from slave labor, emp

In this episode, I interview Cassandra Falke, professor of English Literature ad UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, about her book The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016). In the text, Falke situates herself within the current revival of the interest in ethics in literary criticism, which coincides with a rise in neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion that similarly have been incorporated into literary studies. Aware of these recent developments, Falke argues that literary study must ground itself philosophically—rather than just scientifically—in order to speak convincingly about literature’s relationship(s) to our ethical lives. To do this, The Phenomenology of Love and Reading recasts French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s articulations of a phenomenology of love onto the event of reading. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything—more than cognition and more than being itself. F

Philosophers have long approached the concept of rhythm as a significant tool for understanding the human experience, metaphysics, language, and the arts. In her new study Rhythm: A Theological Category (Oxford University Press, 2018), Lexi Eikelboom argues that theologians have much to gain from rhythm as a conceptual tool. In an interdisciplinary study bringing together prosody, continental philosophy, and Christian theology, Eikelboom maps out a terrain of approaches to rhythm from the synchronic whole or diachronic experience in time. Rhythm, therefore, affords an important lens to understand an oscillation between the harmonious and the interruptions that comprise any human attempts to articulate an encounter with the divine. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.

In this conversation, Sara Salem, author of Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (Cambridge University Press, 2020), talks to host Yi Ning Chang about temporality, capitalism, and hegemony in her history of Egypt’s two revolutions. From Gamal Abdel Nasser to Gramsci and Fanon, from revolution to the coronavirus pandemic, Sara reflects on the unfinished project of Nasserism, what it has come to mean for Egypt, and what its coming apart tells us about our own moment in history. Sara Salem’s Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. This book builds its analysis of the afterlives of Egypt’s moment of decolonisation through an imagined conversation between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon around questions of anticolonialism, resistance, revolution and liberation. Anticolonial Afterlives argues that the Nasserist project – created by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers in 1952 – remains the only instance of hegemony in

George Orwell once said that “the word ‘fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. The word ‘neoliberalism’ knows exactly how it feels. How did a term coined by a group of anti-authoritarian German economists in the 1930s to label a philosophy that stressed the role of the state in ensuring efficient competition turn into more of an insult than a description 50 years later? Has the nationalist tide that swept through Washington, London, Rome, Brasília, and Budapest brought the neoliberal era to end or helped relaunch its “third wave”? What differentiates neo- from ordo- from classical liberalism? In this second edition of Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021), Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy seek to answer these questions, and retell the history of an idea, its mutations and its future. Manfred Steger is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Ravi Roy is Associate Professor of Political Science and W. Edwards D

How to understand propaganda art in the post-truth era—and how to create a new kind of emancipatory propaganda art. Propaganda art — whether a depiction of joyous workers in the style of socialist realism or a film directed by Steve Bannon — delivers a message. In Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2019), Jonas Staal argues that propaganda does not merely make a political point; it aims to construct reality itself. Political regimes have shaped our world according to their interests and ideology; today, popular mass movements push back by constructing other worlds with their own propaganda. Jonas Staal speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about his proposal for a new model of emancipatory propaganda art — one that acknowledges the relationship between art and power and takes both an aesthetic and a political position in the practice of world-making. Jonas Staal is a scholar of propaganda and a self-described propaganda artist. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit

In his book, Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (Baylor UP, 2016), Sheldon George treats an old idea--that African Americans must transform their relationship to the history of slavery and to their identification with race—in an entirely new way. What follows is a quite truncated encapsulation of the book’s central argument which I will attempt if only because it struck me as a very original use of Lacanian thought. It also produced something I value very much: the development of fresh ideas for this psychoanalyst to ponder. George argues that owning human property, slaves, offered a surplus of "jouissance" to slave owners. Meanwhile the enslaved, denuded of family, of history and claims to nationality, were often valued solely for muscle mass and fecundity. Psychically emptied--seen only for their capacity to serve the master's needs, and I want to add, also emptying preemptively, and defensively their psychic lives, enslaved people were forbidden access to being, from whic

Being a great power almost seems to invite discussion of decline: whether you are declining, what can be done to prevent or arrest it, and what the consequences of decline might ultimately be. The United States has not managed to escape from any of this analysis, but understanding how imperial and hegemonic decline has played out historically often does not inform these discussions. Is the United States an empire, or it better described as a hegemon? What’s the meaningful difference, especially in the current content of the United States’ global position? Richard Lachmann’s First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (Verso, 2020) explores these questions. Lachmann examines prior explanations of great power decline and finds them wanting for a variety of different reasons. Lachmann instead focuses on a series of factors that first of all enable hegemony, but also the factors that ultimately cause its collapse. Lachmann examines the cause of the Netherlands and the

How should we understand the theme park in our globalised world? In A Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks: Middle Class Kingdoms (Intellect, 2020), Dr. Sabrina Mittermeier, a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in American cultural history at the University of Kassel, Germany, presents a detailed and engaging cultural history of Disneyland’s theme parks to tell the story of this now global phenomenon. The book has detailed case studies of each of the theme parks, from the original Disneyland as a cultural product of the 1950s, through the transcultural space of Tokyo Disneyland, to the authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese theme park in Shanghai. The story of EuroDisney, and DisneyWorld in Florida further develop the book’s argument for the need to understand wealth and class as key drivers for the audience these parks seek to attract. The book will be essential reading across humanities and social science, and for anyone interested in contemporary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis

How can we create a more equal media industry? In Access All Areas: The Diversity Manifesto for TV and Beyond, Marcus Ryder and Sir Lenny Henry, both founder members of the The Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity at Birmingham City University, tell the story of their work to transform British television and set out an eight point manifesto for change. The book lays out the diversity crisis in the media industry, setting out the numerous barriers confronting those who are labelled as minorities (despite being the majority of the population!) and showing why previous efforts to address the problems have failed. By doing so, the book sets up its alternatives that will create a more just, and thus more diverse, television industry. The book, along with Marcus’ blog, is essential reading for academics and the public, both in the UK and beyond. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap

The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality.  Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Duke UP, 2019), speaks with Pierre d'Alancaisez about what she calls decommodified labor — the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which artists relate to work, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own precarity and why the increasing presence of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor. Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She's the author of Scandals and Abstraction (about which she spoke on an earlier episode), and co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism. She's c

A beautifully written exploration of religion's role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theory, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (Yale University Press, 2020) takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W. Adorno, in which he summarized the meaning of Walter Benjamin's image of a celebrated mechanical chess-playing Turk and its hidden religious animus: "Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating in the realm of the secular, the profane." In this masterful book, Peter Gordon reflects on Adorno's statement and asks an urgent question: Can religion offer any normative resources for modern political life, or does the appeal to religious concepts stand in conflict with the idea of modern politics as a domain free from religion's influence? In answering this question, he explores the work of three of the Frankfurt School's most esteemed thi

The tradition of political liberalism has a long and complicated history, filled with twists, turns, critiques and responses that have filled books, essays and lectures for several centuries now. Questions of the importance and limitations of individual rights and how to balance different interests have produced no shortage of theoretical conflict as different figures have attempted to make sense of the importance and limits of individuals and their rights.  Diving right into this debate is Matt McManus, returning again to the New Books Network to discuss his recent book A Critical Legal Examination of Liberalism and Liberal Rights (Palgrave, 2020). Going back as far as Burke, Hobbes, Kant and Locke, and then through critiques of liberalism from both radically progressive and reactionary orientations, the book traces the various ideas of liberalism up to the present in figures such as Habermas, Rawls and MacIntyre. It also posits it’s own understanding of liberalism, which emphasizes every individual's right

Christoph Menke, who is professor of philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt Germany and considered the most important representative of the third generation of the "Frankfurt School of Critical Theory", presents in Critique of Rights (Polity Press 2020) a critical reflection on modern normativity in the so-called "Western world". More specifically: He analyzes “subjective rights”. To have a right means to have a justified and binding claim. Now Menke exposes in his book – which is both a genealogy and an ontology of law – that these “subjective rights”, which mark the birth of bourgeois society, have ambivalent properties. They are not only expressions of individuality and freedom everybody of us enjoys today as the most important achievement that Enlightenment has transferred to us. They also create what Karl Marx called "the entitlement of the egoistic human being, set apart from his fellow human being and from the community”. Private interests become the new natural basis for politics. Contrary t