New Books In Critical Theory

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, socia

What are the rights and wrongs of toppling statues? Sometimes everyone agrees it’s a good idea. After the second world war, for example, the defeat of fascism meant that all over Europe Hitler statues were toppled and destroyed. After the collapse of communism some statues of Stalin actually survived. Just a couple of years ago Black Lives Matter protests led to the hauling down statues of slaveholders and imperialists – for example in the UK a statue of slaver – and philanthropist, Edward Colston was hurled into a harbour. Some argued Colston should be left alone because he was just a man of his time. So, when is it right to tear down a statue and do you need a democratically elected committee to make the decision? A discussion with screenwriter and historian Alex Von Tunzelmann, author of Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History. 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

In The Future of the Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy: After Trump (Routledge, 2022), Dr. Robert E. Gutsche Jr. examines the effects of Donald Trump’s presidency on journalistic practices, rhetoric, and discourses. Rooted in critical theory and cultural studies, it asks what life may be like without Trump, not only for journalism but also for American society more broadly. The book places perspectives and tensions around the Trump presidency in one spot, focusing on the underlying ideological forces in tensions around media trust, Trumpism, and the role of journalism in it all. It explores how journalists dealt with racist rhetoric from the White House, relationships between the Office of the President and social media companies, citizens, and journalists themselves, while questioning whether journalism has learned the right lessons for the future. More importantly, chapters on liberal media "bias," the First 100 Days of the Biden Presidency, gender, and race, and how journalists should adopt measures to

Marta Puxan-Oliva’s Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel (Routledge, 2021), engages with the intertwined relationship between narrative studies – centering on narrative reliability – racial conflicts and ideologies. Puxan-Oliva argues that the problem of narrative reliability in fiction, often mirrors and makes use of narrative reliability of historical discourse, and therefore urges literary critics to examine the historical context of a work of fiction to “comprehend technical modulations of narrative reliability.”  Her book offers a crucial contribution to narrative theory by insisting on a need to historicize the field itself to understand how historical discourses give rise to specific cultural and political discourses. In order to illustrate her methodology, Puxan-Oliva analyzes Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Albert Camus’s L’étranger, and Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de est

Saronik interviews Kim about intersectionality, a concept developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Kim references two essays by Crenshaw in the episode: one that she read, and one that our previous podcast guest, Chad Hegelmeyer taught. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991) https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039 (Kim read this one) “Demarginalizing the Intersections of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum Iss. 1 (1989) https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/ (Chad taught this one) Kim recommends that you read the latter. This week’s image is a painting by Alma Thomas, titled “Light Blue Nursery” (1968). The image is made available under a Creative Commons license by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a

The Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky exerted a powerful influence on the world, even if his historical and theoretical contributions have often been downplayed, and people who wish to be associated with him are few and far between today. There are a number of factors that have contributed to this marginalization, but correcting it will require revisiting his thought in a careful and contextualized manner in order to better understand his ideas, salvage the underlying core and adapt it for the 21st century.  One person attempting to do this is Juan Dal Maso in his new book Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Originally written and published in Spanish before being translated by the author for the series Marx, Engels and Marxism, the text spends the first two chapters revisiting Trotsky’s developing thoughts on hegemony, political leadership, party vanguards and bureaucracies, finding a highly dynamic figure whose thought reflected the changing times he was em

Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness (Duke University Press, 2022) by Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how it constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Demonstrating that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy, he also shows how it constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender. Dr. Marlon B. Ross is professor of English at the Unive

In Planetary Longings (Duke UP, 2022), eminent cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of thinking it has catalyzed. She turns to 1990s Latin American vernacular culture, literary fiction, and social movements, which simultaneously registered neoliberalism’s devastating effects and pursued alternate ways of knowing and living. Tracing the workings of colonialism alongside the history of anticolonial struggles and Indigenous mobilizations in the Americas, Pratt analyzes indigeneity both as a key index of coloniality, neoliberal extraction, and ecological destruction, and as a source for alternative modes of thou

Saronik talks to Kim about Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s seminal 2013 book Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of Labor, where they use the concept and ubiquity of border and border-thinking for political innovation. Other works touched upon are Biju Matthew’s Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, The Communist Manifesto, and Kenichi Omae’s The Borderless World. The image is from the cover of Taxis as Public Transport: A Bibliography, published in 1979 by the US Department of Transportation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Race is the subject of passionate and increasingly angry debate. But amidst all the talk of unconscious bias it’s an area into which many fear to tread. In this podcast Professor McWhorter of Colombia University outlines his sometimes controversial views on these issues and explains why he wants to debate them in public. His latest book is Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio, 2021). 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

Kim talks with Margaret Nash about settler colonialism. Margaret Nash is an Emeritus Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California Riverside. You can watch her explain her research on settler colonialism and land grant universities in her talk: “An Unacknowledged Legacy.“ Her recent article “Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession” Higher Education Quarterly 59 No. 4 (November 2019) examines the long reach of settler colonialism in US Higher Education. In the episode, Margaret references a book of political theory by Adam Dahl, titled Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought. The image is taken from the cover of a 1992 booklet on HIV Prevention in Native American Communities 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 last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in academic research in Marxism and related fields, and many researchers have been stepping up to the plate to offer rigorous analysis and critical reanimations of Marxist theory. One particularly exciting place where this is included is the Palgrave series Marx, Engels and Marxisms, which has been steadily putting new titles out for close to a decade. Including original monographs, edited collections and translated texts, the series covers a wide variety of topics for those interested in rediscovering and developing a Marxism ready to face the 21st century. This conversation with one of the editors is intended to serve as an overview of the series, with more traditional episodes to follow in the near 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

An excerpt from Kim’s conversation with Elaine Freedgood on commodity fetishism that didn’t make it into the original episode. Elaine references Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek on ideology; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP: 1981; and Claude Levi Strauss’s work on Caduveo body painting (which seems to have been published in the surrealist magazine VVV in 1942 and is very hard to find on the internet — see Luciana Martins ‘Resemblances to archaeological finds’: Guido Boggiani, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Caduveo body painting” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2014. DOI:10.1080/13569325.2017.1309317.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021), Gavin Mueller provides a bracing and wide-ranging study of the fractious relationship between workers and technology under capitalism. Mueller traces the thought and actions of ordinary people past and present – including hackers, dockers, musicians and the titular textile workers - who have recognised that technological ‘progress’ too often comes at the expense of their autonomy and dignity. The book pushes back against visions of machine-driven utopia that have continually re-emerged on both the right and the left, arguing instead that resistance to technology is a key site of struggle throughout modernity, and that a Marxist neo-Luddism is crucial to understanding, and changing, the world today. Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooks

Media Hot and Cold (Duke UP, 2021) attunes the reader to temperature as a crucial but often overlooked terrain of control, communication and contestation. The book skilfully unpacks the complex technical operations of a vast array of heat-based communication technologies in parallel with a close analysis of the cultural and political resonances of these media, taking in early experiments in heat ray technologies, the development of the thermostat, undersea fibre optic cables and torture sweatboxes from the US plantation. Today’s thermal media are framed as politically neutral and scientifically objective technologies of personalised comfort and climate mitigation. However, Starosielski pushes back against this reading, arguing that the manipulation of temperature as a means of coercion and domination has been integral to the construction, normalization and maintenance of unequal relations of power. The book is a timely and significant call for an unflinching analysis of the sociocultural function of temperatu

In today's program, we speak to Nandita Sharma, activist scholar and Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. We talk about Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020). In Home Rule, Sharma brilliantly traces the "historical formation and political separation of Natives and Migrants from the nineteenth century to the present to theorize the portrayal of Migrants as 'colonial invaders.'" She theorizes the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states wherein the category of the Native (initially referred to as such to demarcate colonized status) has been revitalized and claims to autochthony have become the basis of "true national belonging." In consequence, migrants have been facing exclusion, expulsion, and even extermination. The hardening of nationalisms in the Postcolonial New World Order has contained demands for decolonization, leaving their potential unfulfilled. Sharma forcefully and convincingly shows that the only way

Why do corporations fund cultural organisations and events? In Black Culture, Inc: How ethnic community support pays for corporate America Patricia Banks, Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College, explores the role of corporate funding in shaping cultural life, from historical examples of tobacco advertising and media, through to contemporary social media businesses’ presence at music festivals. The book draws on a wealth of examples and scholarship on Black culture in America, alongside analysis of diversity policy and practices. Most crucially, the book introduces the idea of ‘diversity capital’, showing the costs of corporate influence on culture, as well as the ambivalence and enthusiasm of cultural producers and audiences. Moving beyond simple explanations and analysis of race, corporate funding, and culture, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the arts today. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industri

Kim talks with Elaine Freedgood about Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. The concept comes from: Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels, 1887, available on marxists.org Other texts mentioned: -Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, edited by Patricia Spyer, Routledge, 1998. -Rosalind Morris and Daniel Leonard, The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea. University of Chicago Press, 2017. In the longer version of our conversation we talked about: -Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. University of Michigan Press, 2011. -Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Translated by ---Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1852. Internet Archive. -And Elaine’s book, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. University of

The events of January 6th 2021 are contested in the US. For some supporters of Donald Trump it was, and remains, a case of a legitimate protest against a rigged election. For opponents of Mr. Trump, it was an attempt to bully Congress through physical intimidation into refusing to validate the correct election result. That so many Americans believe the election was rigged raises questions about the nature of right wing politics in the US. This podcast covers these issues with Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. 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

In this episode of the New Books in Latin America Podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Maria Elena García about her wonderful new book Gastropolitics and the Spectre of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru published in 2021 by the University of California Press. In recent years, Peru has transformed from a war-torn country to a global high-end culinary destination. Connecting chefs, state agencies, global capital, and Indigenous producers, this “gastronomic revolution” makes powerful claims: food unites Peruvians, dissolves racial antagonisms, and fuels development. Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race critically evaluates these claims and tracks the emergence of Peruvian gastropolitics, a biopolitical and aesthetic set of practices that reinscribe dominant racial and gendered orders. Through critical readings of high-end menus and ethnographic analysis of culinary festivals, guinea pig production, and national-branding campaigns, this work explores the intersections of race, species, a