New Books In Critical Theory

Jeffrey joins the podcast to discuss the prevalence of English in the academic ecosystem and in research publishing. Jeffrey critiques the lackadaisical approach US institutions take towards Spanish language content and research and makes a strong argument to follow the Puerto-Rican model which sees greater opportunity, equality, and sophistication in multilingual academic research. About his book: Despite a pronounced shift away from Eurocentrism in Spanish and Hispanic studies departments in US universities, many implicit and explicit vestiges of coloniality remain firmly in place. While certain national and linguistic expressions are privileged, others are silenced with predictable racial and gendered results.  Decolonizing American Spanish: Eurocentrism and the Limits of Foreignness in the Imperial Ecosystem (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022) challenges not only the hegemony of Spain and its colonial pedagogies, but also the characterization of Spanish as a foreign language in the United States. By foregrounding

This highly original story reflects on how the carceral state shapes daily life for young Black people--and how Black Americans resist, find joy, and cultivate new visions for the future. Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums (University of California Press, 2022) is about a young man, Marley, and a particular place, the Southern California Library--an archive of radical and progressive movements and a community organization where the author meets Marley.  Taking music as its thematic undercurrent, the book is structured as a "record collection." Each of the five "albums" relates Marley's personal encounters with everyday aspects of the carceral state through an ethnographic A side and then offers deeper context through an anthropological and archival B side. In telling Marley's story, Damien M. Sojoyner depicts the overwhelming nature of Black precarity in the twenty-first century through the lenses of housing, education, health care, social services, and juvenile detention facili

In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America (U California Press, 2023) makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair. Anchored by interviews, data, and riveting firsthand narratives from three leading experts—an addiction psychiatrist, a policy advocate, and a drug historian—Whiteout reveals how a century of structural racism in drug policy, and in profit-oriented medical industries led to mass white overdose deaths. The authors implicate racially segregated health care systems, the racial assumptions of addiction scientists, and relaxed regulation of pharmaceutical marketing to white consumers. Whiteout is an unflinching account of how racial capita

How can the arts make the world a better place? In Global Perspectives on Youth Arts Programs: How and Why the Arts Can Make a Difference (Policy Press, 2022), Frances Howard, a Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Care and Community at Nottingham Trent University, analyses the opportunities for social change and social justice offered by youth arts programmes. The book combines a detailed ethnography of a youth arts programme in the UK, along with rich and detailed comparative case studies. Drawing on a wealth of cross- and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks, the book is both a critique and defence of the possibilities offered by engagement with the arts. The book will be essential reading across arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone with an interest in the arts. 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 our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetw

Black people and people with disabilities in the United States are distinctively disadvantaged in their encounters with the health care system. These groups also share harsh histories of medical experimentation, eugenic sterilizations, and health care discrimination. Yet the similarities in inequities experienced by Black people and disabled people and the harms endured by people who are both Black and disabled have been largely unexplored. To fill this gap, Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health (Cambridge UP, 2022) uses an interdisciplinary approach, weaving health research with social science, critical approaches, and personal stories to portray the devastating effects of health injustice in America. Author Mary Crossley takes stock of the sometimes-vexed relationship between racial justice and disability rights advocates and interrogates how higher disability prevalence among Black Americans reflects unjust social structures. By suggesting reforms to advance health equity for disabled people, Bl

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes. In Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023), Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology,

Does China show that capitalism works better without democracy? What can be done to secure the future of open societies in which there is wealth, tolerance and stability. Martin Wolf - associate editor of the Financial Times and its chief economist - has been thinking about these big questions for his book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Penguin, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones. 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

When the possibility of wiretapping first became known to Americans they were outraged. Now, in our post-9/11 world, it's accepted that corporations are vested with human rights, and government agencies and corporations use computers to monitor our private lives. In The American Surveillance State: How the US Spies on Dissent (Pluto Press, 2022), David H. Price pulls back the curtain to reveal how the FBI and other government agencies have always functioned as the secret police of American capitalism up to today, where they luxuriate in a near-limitless NSA surveillance of all. Price looks through a roster of campaigns by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and corporations to understand how we got here. Starting with J. Edgar Hoover and the early FBI's alignment with business, his access to 15,000 pages of never-before-seen FBI files shines a light on the surveillance of Edward Said, Andre Gunder Frank and Alexander Cockburn, Native American communists, and progressive factory owners. Price uncovers patt

Let’s talk about zombies! Scholars Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini have produced an engaging and important analysis of the idea of zombies, and how and why these particular monsters are omnipresent in American popular culture, especially these days. Zombies both represent and present ideas about the world in which we live, and Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies (Rutgers UP, 2022) examines these connections, helping us consider our relationship to this vision of the “undead” and why these monsters are indigenous to the Americas. Zombies reflect the colonial experience in the Americas, not only those who settled in both North and South America, but also in the approach taken to labor and those who labored. Saldarriaga and Manini examine the zombie as a representation of chattel slavery, which used the human body as a commodity like the other exploited resources in “the new world.” Those who were enslaved were essentially dead labor, according to Marxian conceptions, and the continued exploitation and di

Shannon Philip's book Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony (Cambridge UP, 2022) tells the gendered story of a changing India through the lives of its young middle class men. Through time spent ethnographically 'hanging-out' with young men in gyms, bars, clubs, trains and gay cruising grounds in India, this book critically reveals Indian men's violence towards women in various city spaces and also shows the many classed and masculine entitlements and challenges that they experience. The book lays bare the often secretive and hidden social worlds of young Indian men and critically analyses the impact young men's actions and identities have not just for themselves, but for the many women they encounter. In this way, it puts forward a critical queer-feminist perspective of men and masculinities in postcolonial India where the politics of class, gender, sexuality, violence and urban spaces come together. Dr. Shannon Philip is Lecturer in the Department o

So much of what we know of clean water, clean air, and now a stable climate rests on how fossil fuels first disrupted them. Negative Ecologies: Fossil Fuels and the Discovery of the Environment (U California Press, 2022) is a bold reappraisal of the outsized role fossil fuels have played in making the environment visible, factual, and politically operable in North America. Following stories of hydrocarbon harm that lay the groundwork for environmental science and policy, this book brings into clear focus the dialectic between the negative ecologies of fossil fuels and the ongoing discovery of the environment. Exploring iconic sites of the oil economy, ranging from leaky Caribbean refineries to deepwater oil spills, from the petrochemical fallout of plastics manufacturing to the extractive frontiers of Canada, Negative Ecologies documents the upheavals, injuries, and disasters that have long accompanied fossil fuels and the manner in which our solutions have often been less about confronting the cause than man

Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event of world-historical importance. The former slaves' victory over their French masters and the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804 is being newly heralded not only as a seminal moment in the transnational formation of the 'black Atlantic' but as the most far-reaching manifestation of 'Radical Enlightenment'.  The best known Haitian writer to emerge in the years after the revolution is Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), who authored over ten books and pamphlets between 1814 and his murder in 1820. His first and most incendiary work, Le système colonial dévoilé (1814), provides a moving invocation of the horrors of slavery in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Its trailblazing critique of colonialism anticipates by over a hundred years the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre. Translated here for the first time by Chris Bongie,

From the author of How to See the World comes a new history of white supremacist ways of seeing—and a strategy for dismantling them. White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing.  Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that it was not always a common practice, we can devise better ways to dismantle it. Spanning centuries across this wide-ranging text, Mirzoeff connects Renaissance innovations—from the invention of perspective and the erection of Apollo statues as monuments to (white) beauty and power to the rise of racial capitalism dependent on slave labor—with the ever-expanding surveillance technologies of the twenty-first century to show that white sight creates an oppressively racializing world, in which subjects who do not appear as white are under constant threat of violence. Analyzing recent events like the George Floyd protests and the Central Park birdwatching incident, Mirzoeff

In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced the start of a crisis that decimated its economy. Helen Yaffe examines the astonishing developments that took place during and beyond this period. Drawing on archival research and interviews with Cuban leaders, thinkers, and activists, We Are Cuba!: How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World (Yale UP, 2020) tells for the first time the remarkable story of how Cuba survived while the rest of the Soviet bloc crumbled. Yaffe shows how Cuba has been gradually introducing select market reforms. While the government claims that these are necessary to sustain its socialist system, many others believe they herald a return to capitalism. Examining key domestic initiatives including the creation of one of the world’s leading biotechnological industries, its energy revolution, and medical internationalism alongside recent economic reforms, Yaffe shows why the revolution will continue post-Castro. This is a fresh, compelling account of Cuba

Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines (U California Press, 2023) takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weaving historical research with insights from political economy and science and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued. Roy’s account moves between public and private labs, Wall Street and corporate board rooms, and public health meetings and health centers to trace the ways in which curative medicines became financial assets dominated by strategies of speculation and extraction at the expense of access and care. Provocative and sobering, this book illuminates the harmful impact of allowing fi

The vast range of choices we can make about our lives is one of the great blessings of modernity. But that very freedom makes it hard to know what to believe or where we belong. Even more difficult is that capitalism is constantly shaping our values and perceptions towards its own ethos. Perhaps there is a way out through making our worlds smaller. Guest:  Paul Froese is a Professor of Sociology at Baylor University and the Director of the Baylor Religion Surveys. He is the author of three books, his most recent is On Purpose: How We Create the Meaning of Life. Making Meaning is a limited series from Ministry of Ideas that explores how life can be lived more meaningfully. Featuring meditations by some of the world’s most sensitive and insightful thinkers, Making Meaning will give you fresh perspective and encouragement to live with greater intention and fullness. Making Meaning is produced by Jack Pombriant and Zachary Davis. Artwork by Dan Pecci. Learn more at ministryofideas.org and find us on Twitter @mini

For many, the COVID-19 pandemic has awakened them to the dangers attendant to a lot of the working conditions in society today—for others, it has made what they already knew to be the dangers of their workplaces and of a tattered social safety net all the more perilous. In Canadian Labour Policy and Politics (UBC Press, 2022) co-editors John Peters and Don Wells bring together a number of field-leading scholars in Canadian Labour Studies to situate the social abandonment of workers in both its longue durée and in its most acute contemporary manifestations. Most importantly, though, they also highlight the growing capacities of community unionism, as a strategy for building worker power across the multiple intersections of race, gender, nationality, (dis)ability, in order to challenge corporate power and build democratic alternatives. I sit down with co-editor Don Wells to discuss this rich and deeply accessible text. Phil Henderson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Carleton University’s Institute of

Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of Western rationality.  Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, Marnia Lazreg's Foucault's Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan (Berghahn Books, 2020) examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault’s experience with non-Western cultures. Beyond tracing Foucault’s journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan. I asked Marnia how young philosophers should read Foucault's texts and also how she has integrated his concepts into her excellent sociological research that focuses on the world outside the "West." Her insightful advice should

Has the liberal order been taken for granted? The post war consensus and the impact of the cold war may have helped establish a way of doing politics that in fact was on less secure foundations that it seemed. That’s the view of Professor James E Cronin of Boston College who has written Fragile Victory: The Making and Unmaking of the Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2023)  – listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. 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

Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people. Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (Oxford UP, 2017) presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy-and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research yet written with a lively, crackling touch, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and