New Books In Critical Theory

How have we used twentieth- and twenty-first-century sound technologies to carve out sonic space out of the hustle and bustle of contemporary life? In search for an answer, in this episode I speak with Mack Hagood, Blayney Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Miami University, writer, and podcaster about his book, Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control (Duke University Press, 2011). In Hush, Hagood examines a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies of sonic self-control that includes nature recordings, clinical audiometric tools, and “sound conditioners” through to top-selling white noise apps and the noise-canceling headphones offered under the commercially succesfull Bose and Beats brands. What this assortment of tools and technologies have in common, Hagood argues, is that they are all “orphic media”: kinds of media that carry or generate content that is designed to efface itself as such. Orphic media can be understood as tactics and technologies that offer us respite from po

In Disordered Violence: How Gender, Race and Heteronormativity Structure Terrorism (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Caron Gentry looks at how gender, race, and heteronormative expectations of public life shape Western understandings of terrorism as irrational, immoral and illegitimate. Gentry examines the profiles of 8 well-known terrorist actors. Gentry identifies the gendered, racial, and sexualized assumptions in how their stories are told. Additionally, she interrogates how the current counterterrorism focus upon radicalization is another way of constructing terrorists outside of the Western ideal. Finally, the book argues that mainstream Terrorism Studies must contend with the growing misogynist and racialized violence against women. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke University Press, 2020) move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate t

What do medieval knights, suicide bombers and "victimhood culture" have in common? Betraying Dignity: The Toxic Seduction of Social Media, Shaming, and Radicalization (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) argues that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, individuals, political parties and nations around the world are abandoning the dignity-based culture we established in the aftermath of two world wars, less than a century ago. Disappointed or intimidated, many turn their backs on the humanitarian, universalistic culture that presumes our inherent human dignity and celebrates it as the basis of every individual's equal human rights. Instead, people and nations are returning to a much older, honor-based cultural structure. Because its ancient logic and mentality take new forms (such as social network shaming and certain aspects of "victimhood culture") -- we fail to recognize them, and overlook the pitfalls of the old honor-based structure. Narrating the history of honor-based societies, this book

How are algorithms shaping our experience of the internet? In Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press), Tanya Kant, a lecturer in Media And Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex interrogates the rise of algorithmic personalization, in the context of an internet dominated by platform providers and corporate interests. Using detailed empirical case studies, along with a rich and deep theoretical framework, the book shows the negative impact of algorithmic personalization, the nuances and ambivalences in user behaviours, and their modes of resistance. As we increasingly live our lives online, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how algorithms regulate our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A few short years ago, Michael Rectenwald was a Marxist professor at NYU, pursuing his career and contemplating becoming a Trotskyist, when the political climate on campus - victimology, cancel-culture, no-platforming, and political correctness run-amok - began to bother him. He responded by creating a Twitter handle, @AntiPCNYUProf (now @TheAntiPCProf), and began bashing campus excesses with humor and biting satire. Predictably, he was soon discovered and pushed out of his job. Rectenwald struck back by publishing Springtime for Snowflakes, a memoir of his experiences in academia, which included criticism and analyses of the leftism now dominating campus culture. He followed that book with Google Archipelago, which delves into the seeming enigma of why big business embraces far-left politics - hint: self-interest is involved - and the rapid growth of consumer/citizen surveillance. The foundation for a robust leftist totalitarianism is being carefully laid. With this new volume, Rectenwald returns with his ch

Delighting in Khurram Hussain’s consistently sparkling prose is reason enough to read his new book Islam as Critique: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Challenge of Modernity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). But there is much more to this splendid book, framed around the profoundly consequential conceptual and political question of can Muslims serve not as friends or foes but as critics of Western modernity. Hussain addresses this question through a close and energetic reading of key selections from the scholarly oeuvre of the hugely influential yet often misunderstood modern South Asian Muslim scholar Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898). By putting Khan in contrapuntal conversation with a range of Western philosophers including Reinhold Niebuhr (d.1971), Hannah Arendt (d.1975), and Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-), Hussain explores ways in which Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s thought on profound questions of moral obligations, knowledge, Jihad, and time disrupts a politics of “either/or” whereby Muslim actors are invariably pulverized by the sl

How can we understand the legacy of colonialism within contemporary society? In Bordering Britain Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2020), Nadine El-Enany, a senior lecturer in law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law, historicises immigration law and ideas of citizenship in Britain, connecting the project of building a nation after the end of empire to whiteness, colonial violence, and racism. The book analyses legislation and case law, along with the social and historical context of immigration in Britain, to demonstrate the continued, systemic, violence at the heart of the British state. The book is essential reading across law, history, and the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christian theology has a long and at times contradictory history, riddled with tensions that make it difficult (if not impossible) to develop a single systematic account of what Christianity is. However, rather than see this as a shortcoming, one can instead try and see this as a productive philosophical and spiritual starting point. This is the animating idea of ​A Theology of Failure: Žižek Against Christian Innocence (Fordham University Press, 2019), which argues that failure should be welcomed as a core element of Christian identity. To make sense of this, her book works its way through the Neo-Platonic philosophy of the mystical theologian Dionysius the Areopagite, the Radical Orthodoxy movement, postmodern theology, and finally finds its way to the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek, who has put failure at the center of his own theoretical work. The result is a book that takes a number of twists and turns, wrestling with the shortcomings of various thinkers while still maintaining fidelity in spite of, and perh

In Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), Sasha Costanza-Chock, an associate professor of Civic Media at MIT, builds the case for designers and researchers to make the communities they impact co-equal partners in the products, services, and organizations they create. This requires more than eliciting participation from community members, particularly if the goal is extraction. On the contrary, design justice demands a deep understanding of the community and its needs, engagement with community members, and a recognition of their expertise, along with reciprocation of value. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Andrew Kettler charts the impact that smell had on the making of race and justifications for enslavement in the Atlantic world. Western European defined the African subject as a scented object, appropriated as filthy to create levels of ownership through discourse that marked African peoples as unable to access spaces of Western modernity. So powerful was this process of embodied cultural knowledge and racial othering that the very European biological function of smell altered in the early modern period. While the first half of the book details this dialectical materialism from a European perspective, the second half speaks to the real consciousness and function that the sense of smell had in communities of African descent. Smell became a powerful tool for many enslaved peoples and racialized “others” to assert their agency, individualism, power, and perform everyday acts of resistance. Deepl

In Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Ari Linden analyzes Karl Kraus’s oeuvre while engaging in the conversation about modernism and modernity, which is shaped and conditioned by the already post-postmodern condition. This perspective opens up the exploration of modernist projects and allows a discussion that goes beyond a specific time-period and invites us to locate the conversation about Kraus, as well as about the modernist discourse, in the context of the present moment. In his book, Linden outlines the most salient features of Kraus’s writing and establishes an ethic and aesthetic matrix to explore the variations and renditions that the modernist projects may promote and welcome. The book specifies Kraus’s aesthetic engagement with satire, as well as with the exploration of the language limitations (if any) and with intellectual conversations, which serve as responses to political and historical events. The latter makes Linden’s project particularly relevant

Justin Gomer is the author of White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. White Balance explores the connection between politics and film from the 1970s to the 1990s. Gomer illustrates the myriad of ways that Hollywood relied on and helped solidify an emerging ideology of colorblindness in the wake of the civil rights movement. From films like Dirty Harry to Rocky, Gomer is able to show just how much politics and film are intertwined during this period and held to reinforce each other in order to gradually chip away at the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement. Justin Gomer is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the California State University-Long Beach. Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) formulates a theory of collective trauma, drawing on the work of Sándor Ferenczi. Dr. Soreanu takes Ferenczi into the public square to answer a series of questions. What does it mean to understand the operation of the confusions of tongues at the social level? What are the consequences of imagining the social as an encounter between different registers? And how did we come to postulate the importance, among all social registers, of the tension between the register of recognition and the register of redistribution? Applying Ferenczian theory to these “interrogations” Soreanu utilizes psychosocial vignettes to make a series of arguments. “Akin to clinical vignettes, their aim is to capture a movement of the libido, or the expression of a symptom, or the resolution of a symptom, or a particular kind of regression, or a kind of dreaming-up that puts some symbols in relation to others.” In addition t

Undocumented youth activists are at the forefront of the present-day immigrant rights movement. This is especially true surrounding the activism of the recent SCOTUS decision on DACA issued on June 18, 2020. Professor Kevin Escudero’s book, Organizing While Undocumented: Immigrant Youth’s Political Activism Under the Law (New York University Press, 2020), depicts just how undocumented immigrant youth have utilized their identities for political action between 2010-2019. By developing what he calls the “Identity Mobilization Model,” Escudero studies the intersectional collective identity formation of undocumented immigrant communities by focusing on how micro-level processes interact with macro-level legal structures.   Escudero uses intimate narrative accounts of individual experiences, community gatherings, and organizer meetings to show how undocumented immigrant youth activists emphasized the heterogeneity of the movement while also forming coalitions with other movements. Escudero drew on ethnographic par

In Hacking Diversity: The Politics of inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2020), Christina-Dunbar Hester, an associate professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, explores the world of open technology – communities centered on knowledge sharing. In particular, she investigates how these communities are considering the question of diversity and inclusion. Using ethnographic methods – interviews, participant observation, and deep readings of texts – Dunbar-Hester shows how the problem-solving ethos of open tech does not quite meet the challenge of structural social problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The courageous and inspiring personal narratives and empirical studies in Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia (Utah State University Press, 2019) name formidable obstacles and systemic biases that all women faculty—from diverse intersectional and transnational identities and from tenure track, terminal contract, and administrative positions—encounter in their higher education careers. Edited by Yolanda Flores Niemann, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. González, the book provides practical, specific, and insightful guidance to fight back, prevail, and thrive in challenging work environments. This new volume comes at a crucial historical moment as the United States grapples with a resurgence of white supremacy and misogyny at the forefront of our social and political dialogues that continue to permeate the academic world. Today I talked to two of the editors: Yolanda Flores Niemann (PhD, Psychology, University of Houston, 1992), a professor of psychology at t

Although successive generations of the Frankfurt School have attempted to adapt Critical Theory to new circumstances, the work done by its founding members continues in the twenty-first century to unsettle conventional wisdom about culture, society and politics. Exploring unexamined episodes in the school’s history and reading its work in unexpected ways, Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (Verso, 2020) provides ample evidence of the abiding relevance of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Kracauer in our troubled times. Without forcing a unified argument, these collected essays by Martin Jay range over a wide variety of topics, from the uncertain founding of the School to its mixed reception of psychoanalysis, from Benjamin’s ruminations on stamp collecting to the ironies in the reception of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, from Löwenthal’s role in Weimar’s Jewish Renaissance to Horkheimer’s involvement in the writing of the first history of the Frankfurt School. Of special

"Although small, this book goes against the grain of the current trend for brief soundbites that allow us to pass swiftly over painful information. It will go into the details of some extremely dark occurrences, not to glorify cruelties, but in order to understand them, as well to give thought to the individuals who suffered them. In turn, this will provide the reader with greater access to things residing in the unconscious." In Dark Times: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Politics, History and Mourning (Phoenix Publishing House, 2018), Dr Jonathan Sklar presents us with a book of unsettling stories about the heinous crimes of Nazi Germany, the brutal attacks perpetrated by ISIS and the continued racist structure of the very fabric of US politics and discourse, just to name a few. Some of these stories are difficult to take in: The visceral descriptions can only be read in a psychosomatic sense. The strength of psychoanalytic thinking about political and historical violence lies in how close we get to the obje

Engaging with almost any Western philosopher of the last couple centuries means you are usually, whether you realize it or not, working in the shadow of Hegel, his work proving stubbornly resistant to attempts to remove from contemporary thought. This has itself proven to be a source of much debate and conflict, as Hegel is notoriously difficult to decipher, leaving room for a huge variety of opinions on a variety of topics. Diving right into this is my guest today, Adrian Johnston, who is back to discuss the second volume of his trilogy, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism Volume II: A Weak Nature Alone (Northwestern University Press, 2019). Where the first volume (which we discussed in a previous episode) was concerned with some major turns in French continental philosophy, this volume takes Hegel as its key point of reference. However, rather than simply functioning as a commentary on Hegel, the book acts as a sort of historical survey of various Hegelianisms that have been developed over the last couple