New Books In Critical Theory

In the last years of his life, Karl Marx expanded his research in new directions-studying recent anthropological discoveries, analyzing communal forms of ownership in precapitalist societies, supporting the populist movement in Russia, and expressing critiques of colonial oppression in India, Ireland, Algeria, and Egypt. Between 1881 and 1883, he also traveled beyond Europe for the first and only time. Focusing on these last years of Marx's life, this book dispels two key misrepresentations of his work: that Marx ceased to write late in life, and that he was a Eurocentric and economic thinker fixated on class conflict alone.  With The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (Stanford UP, 2020), Marcello Musto claims a renewed relevance for the late work of Marx, highlighting unpublished or previously neglected writings, many of which remain unavailable in English. Readers are invited to reconsider Marx's critique of European colonialism, his ideas on non-Western societies, and his theories on the p

What is the relationship between class and sexuality? In Working-Class Queers: Time, Place and Politics (Pluto Press, 2023), Yvette Taylor, Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde, explores the lives of working-class queers to tell the story of the past twenty years in the UK and beyond. Reflecting on her own biography as a researcher, the book brings in analysis of a range of research projects, giving insights into the impact of Brexit, austerity, and the pandemic on working-class queers. The book also deals with themes of migration and race, alongside offering a challenge to rethink our contemporary understandings of class. Attentive to the task of teaching, and building a canon of key texts, Taylor’s approach offers much for the classroom as well as for research. A hugely significant intervention on the study of both class and sexuality, the book will be essential reading across the social sciences and humanities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sh

Despite initiatives to 'diversify' the publishing sector, there has been almost no transformation to the historic racial inequality that defines the field. White Literary Taste Production in Contemporary Book Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023) argues that contemporary book culture is structured by practice that operates according to a White taste logic. By applying the notion of this logic to an analysis of both traditional and new media tastemaking practices, Alexandra Dane examines the influence of Whiteness on the cultural practice, and how the long-standing racial inequities that characterize Anglophone book publishing are supported by systems, institutions and platforms. These themes are explored through two distinct but interrelated case studies-women's literary prizes and anti-racist reading lists on Instagram-which demonstrate the dominance of Whiteness, and in particular White feminism, in the contemporary literary discourse. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New Yo

What is the future for cultural policy? In Cultural Policy Beyond the Economy: Work, Value, and the Social (Edward Elgar, 2023),  Deborah Stevenson, Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, analyses key trends on themes in contemporary cultural policy. The book covers the rise of wellbeing, the dominance of economics, sustainable development, cultural work, inequalities in cultural tastes, and cultural value. Introducing the concept of the art world complex as a frame for both understanding and defending cultural policy, the analysis sets a new agenda for the study of cultural policy. Theoretically rich and packed with empirical examples, the book will be essential reading across arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in culture today. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support ou

Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Duke UP, 2022) investigates the ways in which racial and class hierarchies shaped the monetary policy and banking systems in the Philippines. Combining historical research and normative arguments calling for unconditional decolonization, Allan E. S. Lumba advances a powerful account of how the logics and practices of racial capitalism advanced the United States’ ‘counter-decolonization’ efforts in the Philippines. In this podcast, Lumba shares the book’s back story, his theoretical inspirations that informed his core arguments, and the importance of understanding the global capitalist order from the perspective of postcolonial nations. Allan E. S. Lumba is a Global American Studies postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center and visiting faculty in the Department of History. He has also served as resident fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and University of Michigan's Bentley Library. His tea

As the American imperial project in the Pacific World grew at the end of the nineteenth century, so too did the American security and intelligence state, argues Dr. Moon-Ho Jung in Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State (U California Press, 2022). Jung, Harry Bridges Endowed Chair of Labor Studies and professor of history at the University of Washington, connects the American Pacific coast to Hawai'i, the Philippines, Japan, and Korea, as American officials perceived threats to American hegemony and white supremacy anywhere anticolonial activism could be found. Under the guise of "sedition," the United States grew its security apparatus in response to perceived threats of radicalism, not primarily from Europe, but from Pacific regions which were increasingly agitating against American empire building. Jung asks readers to shift their perspective when thinking about American anti-communism, and consider connections between the American West and the wid

Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City (Cornell UP, 2023) illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial

In this episode of High Theory, Jed Esty talks about the Rhetoric of Decline. Declinism names the contradictory political narrative that America will always be the greatest country in the world, yet is in constant danger of losing its place in the global pecking order. Studying this rhetorical log-jam reveals its prominence on both the left and the right, and its toxic effects on our national discourse. But comparing the end of America’s empire to Britain's imperial decline in the twentieth century can help us muddle out of this mess. The basis of our conversation is Jed’s recent book The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford UP, 2022). It’s a cool short book with an x-ray spaceman on the cover. You should read it, even if this isn’t usually your cup of tea. Jed Esty is the Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches and writes about Anglophone literature after 1850, with special interests in modernism, critical theory, history and theo

On an afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames engulfed the museum’s castle. Rare objects and valuable paintings were destroyed. The flames at the Smithsonian were not the first—and certainly would not be the last— disaster to upend a museum in the United States. Beset by challenges ranging from pandemic and war to fire and economic uncertainty, museums have sought ways to emerge from crisis periods stronger than before, occasionally carving important new paths forward in the process. The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience (NYU Press, 2022) explores the concepts of the multiple “crises” of the museums, and these historic institutions attempts to dealt with challenges ranging from depression and war to pandemic and philosophical uncertainty. Samuel J. Redman speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the fires, floods, wars, and existential crises that have redefined what museums do and how the

We live in times where theory is often understood as irrelevant in the real world. It appears to have no practical results. This has been further complicated in a post-fact world, where our ‘identities’ and ‘perception’ have become the final judges of truth. Sociology/social anthropology, in contrast, rests on a fundamental distinction between commonsense and theoretically informed knowledge. It teaches us to get rid of ‘perceptions’ and alerts us to go beyond taken-for-granted ideas. The paradox is that although theory is taught as a mandatory paper in sociology, it is either reduced to a topic in the syllabi or used as ceremonial citations. Emphasizing that theories emerge in specific historical contexts and are embedded in economic, political, social, cultural, institutional and intellectual processes, this edited volume Doing Theory: Locations, Hierarchies and Disjunctions (Orient Blackswan, 2018) by Maitrayee Chaudhuri and Manish Thakur takes a new approach by highlighting the sociological paths through

What are the latest developments in the sociology of the arts? In Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Arturo Rodríguez Morató, a Professor of Sociology and current Director of the CECUPS (Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Society) at the University of Barcelona, and Alvaro Santana-Acuña, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Whitman College, bring together 12 leading researchers to present new empirical and theoretical breakthroughs within the field. The book has a huge range of case studies and approaches, from architectural competitions and graffiti to The Beatles, opera, and football shirts. Drawing on Spanish-speaking scholarship, the book broadens the global basis for the sociology of art, and is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Objects generate time; time does not generate or change objects. That is the central thesis of this book by the philosopher Graham Harman and the archaeologist Christopher Witmore, who defend radical positions in their respective fields. Against a current and pervasive conviction that reality consists of an unceasing flux - a view associated in philosophy with New Materialism - object-oriented ontology asserts that objects of all varieties are the bedrock of reality from which time emerges. And against the narrative convictions of time as the course of historical events, the objects and encounters associated with archaeology push back against the very temporal delimitations which defined the field and its objects ever since its professionalization in the nineteenth century. In a study ranging from the ruins of ancient Corinth, Mycenae, and Troy to debates over time from Aristotle and al-Ash'ari through Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, the authors draw on alternative conceptions of time as retroactive

As capitalism’s popularity wanes and socialism’s popularity increases, there remains a massive shadow cast by the history of actually existing socialism, Stalin being the primary pillar. His violent rule in the form of secret police, staged trials, forced confessions and suppression of liberation for workers both in the USSR and internationally are regularly brought up as the inevitable endpoint of any political progress, socialist or otherwise. Environmental protections, affordable housing, universal healthcare or even a guarantee of a modest living wage and social safety net today; gulags tomorrow. This is the ‘dialectic of Saturn,’ a phrase that points back to Greek mythology in which Saturn devours his own children. This idea has been applied for over a century now to discuss and discredit revolutionary politics, whether from reactionaries seeking to protect private property, or even self-described socialists unable to imagine things playing out any other way. But was Stalinism the inevitable product of t

In Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication (U Michigan Press, 2022), Joshua St. Pierre flips the script on communication disability, positioning the unruly, disabled speaker at the center of analysis to challenge the belief that more communication is unquestionably good. Working with Gilles Deleuze's suggestion that "[w]e don't suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we've nothing much to say," St. Pierre brings together the unlikely trio of the dysfluent speaker, the talking head, and the troll to show how speech is made cheap--and produced and repaired within human bodies--to meet the inhuman needs of capital. The book explores how technologies, like social media and the field of speech-language pathology, create smooth sites of contact that are exclusionary for disabled speakers and looks to the political possibilities of disabled voices to "de-face" the power of speech now entwined with capital. Shu Wan is currently matri

The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country.  In Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Oxford UP, 2021), Mark R. Warren documents how Black and Brown parents, students, and low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built an intersectional movement that spread across the country. Examining organizing processes in Mississippi, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other localities, he shows how relatively small groups of community members built the power to win policy changes to reduce suspensions and expulsions by combining deep local organizing with resources from the national movement. As a result, over the course of twenty years, the movement to combat the school-to-prison pipeline resulted in falling suspension rates across the countr

In What's the Use of Philosophy? (Oxford UP, 2023), Philip Kitcher here grapples with an essential philosophical question: what the point of philosophy is, and what it should and can be. Kitcher's portrait of the discipline is not a familiar defense of the importance of philosophy or the humanities writ large. Rather, he is deeply critical of philosophy as it is practiced today, a practice focused on narrow technical questions that are far removed from the concerns of human life. He provides a penetrating diagnosis of why exactly contemporary philosophy has come to suffer this crisis, showing how it suffers from various syndromes that continue to push it further into irrelevance. Then, taking up ideas from William James and John Dewey, Kitcher provides a positive roadmap for the future of philosophy: first, as a discipline that can provide clarity to other kinds of human inquiry, such as religion or science; and second, bringing order to people's notions of the world, dispelling confusion in favor of clarity,

What is the future of education? In Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies (Routledge, 2022), Jen Ross, a senior lecturer in digital education at the University of Edinburgh, analyses the way ideas about the future are produced and become accepted in education (and in society). This analysis is the basis for offering radical alternatives. In the educational context, the book reflects on four research projects that demonstrate the power of particular approaches- speculative methods- to engaging with digital pedagogy and research. The book has a rich theoretical engagement with a range of social and educational theory, as well as giving detailed practical guidance for educators. The detailed guidance for researchers and teachers who want to make alternative digital futures make the book essential reading for anyone interested in the future of education. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi

As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costaguta balances intellectual and institutional history to illuminate the clash between two major points of view. On one side, some believed labor should accept and apply the ascendant tenets of scientific theories of race. But others stood with International Workingmen's Association leaders J. P. McDonnell and F. A. Sorge in rejecting the idea that racial and ethnic division influenced worker-employer relations, arguing instead that class played the preeminent role. In Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism (U Illinois Press, 2023), Costaguta charts the socialist movement's journey through the conflict and down a path that ultimately abandoned scientific racism in favor of an internationalist class-focused American socialism. As he shows, the shift had a paradoxical effect: while distancing American socialism from the most hideous fo

How common is financial malpractice in big, well known financial companies? Is it so common that it should really be seen as a business model more than an occasional aberration by rogue traders? These are questions posed by Ronen Palan and Anastasia Nesvetailova in their book Sabotage: The Business of Finance (PublicAffairs, 2020). Listen to Owen Bennett-Jones discuss the future of big finance with Anastasia Nesvetailova. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The fear of algorithmic decision-making and surveillance capitalism dominate today's tech policy discussions. But instead of simply criticizing big data and automation, we can harness technology to correct discrimination, historical exclusions, and subvert long-standing stereotypes. Orly Lobel is the author of The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future and Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law. Lobel is one of the nation's foremost legal experts on labor and employment law. She is also one of the nation's top-cited young legal scholars. Orly and Greg discuss how collecting more data and adding more inputs into decision algorithms may be beneficial to expose disparities in current frameworks in the real world, and help us to right past injustices and ongoing inequities. Gregory LaBlanc is a lifelong educator with degrees in History, PPE, Business, and Law, Greg currently teaches at Berkeley, Stanford, and HEC Paris. He