New Books In Critical Theory

What is the future, and what is the past, of the African American Museum? In Diversity and Philanthropy at African American Museums: Black Renaissance(Routledge, 2019), Patricia Banks, an associate professor of sociology at Mount Holyoke College, explores the rise of the African American museum and its patrons and philanthropists. Combining sociology of culture with organisational and institutional analysis, the book offers both contemporary and historical analysis of some of the most important cultural institutions in America. Crucially, the book restates the importance of understanding race to sociology of culture, particularly in understanding elites. The book also reveals the changing nature of giving, with younger patrons expecting a different mode of engagement, as well as distinctive political and collecting practices. The book is essential reading across social science and humanities, as well as museum and arts professionals, and anyone interested in contemporary culture.Learn more about your ad choic

How does thinking about gender and work help to rethink cultural hierarchies? In Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work in American Film and Literature(Routledge, 2019), Polina Kroik, who teaches at Fordham University and Baruch College, CUNY, explores the relationship between work and gender in American culture. The book offers a wide-ranging discussion, from early twentieth century literature to the Hollywood studio system of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as mid-century literary publishing and contemporary television. The book analyses a wealth of well-known authors and examples, including Sylvia Plath and Mad Men, as well as figures, such as Nella Larsen, who have seen less public attention. The book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in gender, race, and culture.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nazia Kazi’s Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) is a brilliant and powerful meditation on the intersection and interaction of Islamophobia, racism, and U.S. imperial state power. This book seeks to reorient our understanding of Islamophobia from a phenomenon centered on individual attitudes and perceptions of hate, to one which is indelibly entrenched to the structural logics of modern state sovereignty, and to the long-running history of racism in the U.S. Another distinctive feature of this book lies in its sustained and nuanced analysis of liberal Islamophobia in varied social and political domains, that tethers the promise of being categorized as “good Muslim” to the endorsement and celebration of American exceptionalism. Combining methods and perspectives from anthropology, visual studies, race studies, and political studies, this thoroughly interdisciplinary book is also eminently accessible and written beautifully, rendering it particularly suitable for courses on mode

A recent UNDP report makes the astonishing claim that India has halved its poverty between 2006 and 2016. Moving us past the rosy picture, Alpa Shah and her co-author's  multi-authored, masterful Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st-Century India (Pluto Press, 2017) focuses on those left behind by, and indeed ground down by, India’s much touted growth. Based on intensive fieldwork in multiple locations across India, the book finds that in particular it is India’s ‘untouchables’ (Dalits) and ‘tribals’ (Adivasis) who toil at the bottom of the pyramid in thankless conditions and for little reward. Instead of eradicating inequalities of caste and tribe, the intensification of capitalism has in fact further entrenched them, transforming them into new mechanisms of oppression and accumulation. Analytical rigor paired with lucid prose makes this co-researched and co-authored book indispensable for scholars and citizens concerned with the Global South, inequality, capitalism, economi

The 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought the issues of police violence, racial discrimination, and misogyny to the fore. Jaime Alves’s book the Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows that, from the perspective of Black Brazilians, these forces have deep roots in the nation’s history. Alves makes a powerful contribution to urban anthropology, describing the spatial contours of “Brazilian Apartheid” in Sao Paulo, the role of police violence in the constitution of the city’s racial-spatial order, and the ways that national sovereignty is exercised on individual bodies. Richly ethnographic, The Anti-Black City explores these themes through an account of the lives and activism of black residents of Sao Paulo’s favelas. In this episode, Jaime Alves talks with Jacob Doherty about how his background shaped the research leading to the book, about the entanglement of neoliberal moral government through community and

In Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke UP, 2018), Aimee Bahng traces the cultural production of futurity by juxtaposing the practices of speculative finance against those of speculative fiction. While financial speculation creates a future based on predicting and mitigating risk for wealthy elites, the wide range of speculative novels, comics, films, and narratives Bahng examines imagines alternative futures that envision the multiple possibilities that exist beyond capital’s reach. Whether presenting new spatial futures of the US-Mexico borderlands or inventing forms of kinship in Singapore in order to survive in an economy designed for the few, the varied texts Bahng analyzes illuminate how the futurity of speculative finance is experienced by those who find themselves mired in it. At the same time these displaced, undocumented, unbanked, and disavowed characters imagine alternative visions of the future that offer ways to bring forth new political economies, social structures

How do women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries? In Women, Inequality and Media Work (Routledge, 2019), Dr Anne O’Brien, lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University, answers this question with a case study of the Irish media industry. Blending a critical engagement with feminist and media theory with a wealth of empirical material, the book looks at the barriers to women in media occupations. The book highlights the subjectivities within media industries that resist and are responsible for these inequalities, ultimately demanding change in both Irish and Global modes of media production. The book is an important and essential read across a range of academic readers, and for anyone interested in why we have the media we have, and how we can change it.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This tightly argued social and intellectual history of the middle classes in Colombia makes a compelling case for the importance of both transnationalism and gender in the mid-century idea of middle-class-ness. A. Ricardo López-Pedreros' Makers of Democracy: A Transnational History of the Middle Classes in Colombia (Duke University Press, 2019) takes readers through the discursive and ideological creation of the middle classes as necessary to stave off both revolution and oligarchical tyranny in Colombia. As the second half of the book demonstrates, however, members of these middle classes did not always conform to those expectations. The results were tragic, and serve as a cautionary tale in this neoliberal age.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall (University of Georgia Press, 2019) is the first full-length critical study of Rev. Dr. Prathia Laura Ann Hall (1940–2002), an undersung leader in both the civil rights movement and African American theology. Freedom faith was the central concept of Hall’s theology: the belief that God created humans to be free and assists and equips those who work for freedom. Hall rooted her work simultaneously in social justice, Christian practice, and womanist thought. Courtney Pace examines Hall’s life and philosophy, particularly through the lens of her civil rights activism, her teaching career, and her ministry as a womanist preacher. Moving along the trajectory of Hall’s life and civic service, Freedom Faith focuses on her intellectual and theological development and her radiating influence on such figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, and the early generations of womanist scholars. Hall was one of the first women ordained in the American Bapt

How are markets made? In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an assistant professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores the history of the finance industry to understand the role of markets and technologies in contemporary capitalism. The book offers a detailed theoretical engagement with the personalities and technological changes underpinning the modern system of automated finance. It uses the case study of the development of the London Stock Exchange, looking at the social relations embedded in financial markets, before moving to look at the global, American system. Charting the move from trading floors to trading screens, the book considers individuals and broader social systems shaping enabling and constraining behaviour in the world of finance. Overall the book offers a rethinking of the meaning of markets, and is essential reading across social science, history, an

Lacan published his Écrits in 1966, a compilation of his written work up to that middle period in his teaching. Notoriously difficult to read, the editors of the book we’re discussing today describe the Écrits as “an unwieldy, conglomerate ‘urtext’ … not a book at all … but ‘the waste’ of his teaching: elements he didn’t discuss in public … and sensitive points to which his audience would have reacted with reluctance.” It wasn’t until 2007 that, thanks to work of translator Bruce Fink, the complete edition of the Écrits were finally published in English. Now, Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook and Calum Neill have brought us the three volume work, Reading Lacan’s Écrits (Routledge, 2018), which features world renowned Lacanian scholars and clinicians explicating in detailed paragraph-by-paragraph commentary each of the essays in the Écrits. Thanks to this publication, coming to grips with the Écrits in all its complexity has suddenly become possible. Lacan’s cryptic pronouncements are miraculously, lucidly reformulat

In Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019), Jinah Kim explores questions of loss, memory, and redress in post WWII Asian diasporic decolonial politics. Through a close analysis of seminal cultural works that range from theory, short stories, film noir, documentaries, plays, and novels, Kim makes legible how Korean and Japanese diasporic communities have experienced U.S. militarism and Japanese colonialism. The concept of melancholia, defined as an unending state of mourning, along with the notion of “dread forwarding,” in which a new trauma can trigger an older one, inducing both a flashback but also a flash forward, is crucial to her reading. This concise yet rich work addresses the question of collective pain brought on by postcolonial loss and trauma. Kim puts geographical, cultural, and temporal spaces in conversation with one another, illuminating the ways in which Asian diasporic communities have negotiated their colonial histories.Laura Ha Re

Eric Blanc is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics(Verso, 2019). Blanc is a former teacher, journalist, and doctoral student in sociology at New York University. He has written for The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin magazine.Red State Revolt explains the emergence and development of the historic wave of teacher strikes in Arizona, West Virginia, and Oklahoma. Blanc embedded himself into the organizations that helped plan the walkouts, gaining access to internal planning meetings and secret Facebook groups. The result is a rich portrait of the labor movement and contemporary political organizing.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Now Peru is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Duke University Press, 2016), tells the remarkable story of a campesino and indigenous political activist whose career spanned much of Peru’s twentieth century and whose achievements at the local and national level transformed Peruvian peasant politics. Structured as a testimonial biography co-authored by the activist Manuel Llamojha Mitma himself and framed by historian Jaymie Patricia Heilman, this book is a valuable document of both pre-Shining Path indigenous activism and the history of Cold War Peru. Born into a poor Quechua family in a small community in Ayacucho, Llamojha became one of the most powerful peasant activists in the country, responsible for the expansion of the Confederación Campesina del Perú to the national stage in the 1960s and integral to the debates that shaped Peru’s left before the rise of the Shining Path. Although he was a contemporary of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzmán and a participant in Maoist peasant movements,

Bhakti Shringarpure has written a fascinating, multidimensional analysis of the Cold War and decolonization and the often-under-explored connections between these events. In her book, Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (Routledge, 2019), she integrates a variety of disciplinary perspectives while also weaving together the encounters and reverberations between the Cold War and decolonization and the post-colonial experience. This study takes on the political understandings of what transpired during the Cold War period in terms of the bipolar framework and what transpired in the Global South as the formerly occupying powers were leaving countries and areas they had colonized, only to be replaced by many a proxy war or occupation in these same spaces and nations. Shringarpure also makes the connection between the hard power, and hot and cold aspects of the Cold War, with the use of soft power by the western powers, especially the British and United States, to infiltrate aspects of the Anglophone wor

What is the social role of data? In The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception (Sage, 2019), David Beer, a professor of sociology at the University of York, considers this question by introducing the concept of the data gaze. The book is the third in Beer’s loose trilogy of work on data. It draws on Foucault’s work in The Birth of the Clinic to think through various theoretical and empirical examples of how the data gaze functions. The book considers theories of temporality and acceleration, along with the practices of analysts, engineers, and organisations in data capitalism, with the aim of questioning the objectivity assumed to be inherent in ‘data’. It will be essential reading to anyone seeking to understand contemporary, data, society.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Almost 30 years ago, following the lead of scholars and thinkers of color and from the global South, anthropologist Faye Harrison and some of her colleagues published Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation. Harrison asked her readers: "How can anthropological knowledge advance the interests of the world’s majority during this period of ongoing crisis and uncertainty?" The lives of many have become even more precarious in the ensuing decades, among them people who have emigrated to the United States in search of greater economic stability.Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Duke University Press, 2019) responds directly to Harrison's call. The book explores ways in which ethnography, as practiced by people who have historically been objects of ethnographic study, can yield transformative and liberatory results. During former President Obama's second term, immigrant activists Lucía López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos Gar

Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power. Through four case studies spanning nearly 300 years of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico, Nemser illustrates how different modes of concentration -- centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – reflected the prerogatives and imperatives of domination and expropriation. Compellingly, Infrastructures of Race argues that these spatial infrastructures and strategies were central and instrumental in the creation of racial identities and their inscription upon colonial subjects. Through designed and engineered spaces, racial identities were lived, sensed, and experienced, and as the built environment faded into barely noticeable infrastructure, rac

What happens when scholars approach the category of “indigenous” without presupposing its otherness? Edited by Paula López Caballero and Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo, Beyond Alterity: Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2018) is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that take such an approach to studying indigenous communities and the concept of indigeneity. As the editors explain in the podcast, the indigenous subject has been often assumed to be defined by difference, so scholars tend to overlook the existence of practices, ideas, and politics that do not align with preconceived, essentialized ideas about indigenous alterity. This book examines, on the one hand, the range of lived experiences within indigenous communities, and on the other, the ongoing construction of the category of “indigenous.” Its first section uncovers ways in which indigenous communities’ practices and politics were more similar to than distinct from those of their nonindigenous counterparts. In t

I am a child of the so-called transition in Bulgaria and growing-up I could never understand why my parents and grandparents would spend our family gatherings talking about the socialist past. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much socialism and its end are imprinted on my grandparents’, my parents’ and my generation and that such dramatic changes cannot just be bygones. Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent many years digging into the layers of East European socialist and post-socialist experience trying to give voice to more nuanced narratives about this time, and I was very happy to once again have the chance to talk with her, this time about her book Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism (Duke University Press, 2017). In this very personal book with essays and short stories, Ghodsee describes the post-socialist realities of the victims of the greedy neoliberalism that has dismantled thei