New Books In Critical Theory

Sewing, knitting, quilting, the crafts related to fabric making, are usually not what we think about when we consider our digital communications devices. Yet, many of the activities that we find ourselves doing with our devices touching the screen, scrolling, swiping, etc. and some of the language that we use to describe our actions, draw from textile culture. In his book The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender (MIT Press, 2017), Stephen Montiero, at Concordia University, explores the connection between the fabric arts and computing. In it he investigates the relationship between gender and the construction of media technologies. A particular focus of his is an examination of how, as in former years sewing was dismissed as women’s work, social aspects of digital technologies are gendered and dismissed as inconsequential. Montiero also details the eraser of the contributions of many women to the evolution of the technology that is now ubiquitous.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m

In April 1923 Sigmund Freud detected a lesion in his mouth that turned out to be cancerous. From diagnosis to his death, he endured 33 surgeries and 10 prostheses. In 1932 alone, Freud consulted with his surgeon Hans Pichler 92 times. Freud’s smoking motivated much of the fussiness with his prosthetic jaw: it had to be right at the palate edge, with optimal occlusion so as to get the most out of his cigars. For Freud, smoking facilitated writing and intellectual creativity; it provided exquisite enjoyment. An inanimate object thus served as a conduit of both vitality and grave illness—a testament to the entanglement, indeed, the indistinguishability of the life and death drives. In 1977, after a biopsy of a tumor in her right breast, Audre Lorde fantasized about lopping off the agent of her destruction like “a she-wolf chewing off a paw caught in a trap.” (56) In the manner of a Kleinian infant, she directed her rage at the persecutory breast that betrayed her (once again) and ceased b

In Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Oregon State University Press, 2017), Natchee Blu Barnd examines how Indigenous populations create space and geographies through naming, signage, cultural practices, and artistic expression within the confines of settler colonialism in the United States. Native Space explores these acts as everyday cultural practices, and also examines how settler societies deploy the concept of Indian-ness to create colonial geographies. Barnd takes an interdisciplinary approach toward these subjects, and examines these concepts through the use of demographic and cartographic data, stories, and imagery, each of which underscores the different methods Native peoples use to unsettle settler society and reclaim Indigenous spaces. Samantha M. Williams is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently writing her dissertation, which examines the history of the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada through the

Today I was joined by Martijn Konings from Australia where he is Associate Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. We had a conversation on his most recent book Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason (Stanford University Press, 2018). Its main contribution is to offer an original point of view on the issue of speculation. Critics of capitalist finance tend to focus on its speculative character. Our financial markets, they lament, encourage irresponsible bets on the future that reflect no real underlying value. Why is it, then, that opportunities for speculative investment continue to proliferate in the wake of major economic crises? To make sense of this, Capital and Time offers an understanding of economy as a process whereby patterns of order emerge out of the interaction of speculative investments. Speculation, he argues, is an essential intrinsic feature of capitalism and not just a negative spillover or a collateral behavior. The book also provides an original view

Christopher B. Patterson‘s book Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018) reads English-language literary production from Southeast Asia and its diasporas in North America to recognize and reveal discourses of pluralist governance. Building upon established arguments that state-sponsored multiculturalism at home justifies imperialism abroad and that state-assigned ethnic identities in Southeast Asia are vestiges of colonial pluralism, Patterson studies minor literatures of the Transpacific as a mode of creative response to pluralist govermentality. In examining these cultural communities, he finds an alternative politics of identity in their literature that express a motif of “transition.” Engaging in these ceaseless processes of transition, which Patterson dubs “Transitive Cultures,” enables individuals to maintain mobility in hyper-controlled spaces. Instead of using a national paradigm, such as “Asian-American litera

Did Abraham Maslow actually ever draw a pyramid of hierarchy of needs? Did Kurt Lewin devote substantial work on the development of a change management theory? Why do we omit or misrepresent important features of the work of Adam Smith, Max Weber or Frederick Winslow Taylor? What is the forgotten origin of Harvard Business School case method? I was joined by two of the authors—Stephen Cummings and Todd Bridgman— ofA New History of Management (Cambridge University Press, 2016), a great new book that answers those and many more questions. The book is a very important contribution to critical management studies that uncovers the inaccuracies and simplifications (if not actual inventions) that populate management and organization textbooks. A New History of Management is not a conspiracy theory, but rather it is the result of rigorous historical research on how the field of management studies was constructed in the past century. The authors argue that the existing narratives about how we should organi

When the army brutally dispersed Red Shirts protestors in Bangkok’s busy commercial district in May 2010, motorcycle taxi drivers emerged as a key force, capable of playing cat-and-mouse with security forces, evading military checkpoints, and rescuing protestors and their leaders once the army attacked them. Motorcycle taxis are ubiquitous across the developing world. Dexterously weaving in and out of dense urban conurbations, they transport people, commodities and news through peak traffic with an unparalleled knowledge of the city. They are owners of the map. In his vividly etched monograph, Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility and Politics in Bangkok (University of California Press, 2017), Claudio Sopranzetti moves across the city and between city and country to examine how migrant laborers driven off the factory floor following structural adjustment reforms in the late-1990s turned to motorcycle taxi driving as a form of flexible and yet unfree means of livelihood. Owners of the Map

In his book Reality TV (Routledge, 2017), author Jon Kraszewski explores reality television’s relationship to the American cityscape. Starting with show such as Candid Camera and An American Family, Kraszewski positions reality television in cities where individuals were able to thrive regardless of social class. In this space, early reality television created a laboratory for individuals. Moving to the early 1990s and beyond, Kraszewski challenges the ways in which reality television persisted in this relationship with the city although most viewers do not have the means to live in cities. Using case studies of how the Bravo network exploits the urban servant, the examination of “Boston” Rob Marino and Tiffany “New York” Pollard as reality show representative of major global American cities, and how shows such as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Alaska: The Last Frontier, and Swamp People, Krasweski present the complex and often problematic relationships between American urban space an

What is the history of a “history book”? In How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History Of History (Zero Books, 2018), Marshall Poe, founder and Editor-In-Chief of the New Books Network, tells the story of why and how we have the “history books” we have. The book uses the literary device of “Elizabeth Ranke,” an ideal type of the modern academic historian, to show how academic disciplines, the structure of college and careers, the tensions between popular and academic publishing, and the morality and ethics of history, shape the “history book.” Whilst each chapter critically relates a stage in Elizabeth’s life and career to the form “history books” take, the overall message of the book is a positive defense of history in the current social and political juncture. A short and accessible text, the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the artifact called “a history book.”Learn more about your ad choices. Visit meg

My father has this personality quirk that drives me crazy. Whenever and wherever he travels, no matter how far, he refuses to reset his watch to the local time. For him, it’s always whatever time it is in Cincinnati, Ohio, even if all the clocks around him flash the fact that it isn’t, even if he’s taking my mother, for example, on their once-in-a-lifetime dream vacation to Hawaii and the sun is setting in perfect postcard colors. “No wonder I’m sleepy,” he’ll say, glancing at his watch. “It’s two in the morning.” I don’t know quite why it drives me so crazy. Maybe it’s his small refusal to accept where he is at that moment or maybe its his small insistence that, at any moment, he’s always home. I just know that, with a wristwatch and a strong will, my father has decided to ignore the laws of time. It turns out that he’s not so different from most of us who fly frequently from one time zone to another. In his new book, Jet Lag

How can reading change the world? In Reading as Collective Action: Texts as Tactics (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Nicholas Hengen Fox, who teaches literature, writing and social justice courses at Portland Community College, explores how literature can make a public impact. A timely book that speaks directly to our current political moment, Reading as Collective Action calls for a move beyond the text in itself to understand how texts are used to imagine and create another world. The potential of a world transformed is seen in the analysis of poetry’s importance after September 11th; The Grapes of Wrath, practical organizing, and the politics of redistribution in response to the great recession; along with how efforts to make texts public might transform academic institutions. The book closes by contextualizing the analysis with Habermas’ theories, offering a note of optimism. At present the book is an essential read for anyone thinking through how best to make a social, political, and aesthet

In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti and Andrea Bernardi interview Franklin Obeng-Odoom who teaches urban economics and political economy in the School of Built Environment at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2016, Dr Obeng-Odoom won the Patrick Welch Prize awarded by the Association for Social Economics. He also won the EAEPE-Kapp Prize 2017 for “Marketising the commons in Africa: the case of Ghana” Review of Social Economy 74 (4), 390-419. He has recently published Reconstructing Urban Economics: Towards a Political Economy of the Built Environment (Zed Books, 2016) The shift of world populations into cities and the increasing concentration of activities in urban areas have generated new debates about cities as well as rejuvenating old debates, turning them into global concerns. The economics of cities and regions has, therefore, attained a particularly important status in the twenty-first century. Yet many writers on urban economic issues have never formally studied the subject. Ma

Is making art a job? This question is central to The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers (Stanford University Press, 2017), the new book by Alison Gerber, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at Lund University. The book explores the working lives of artists by thinking through the idea of value in their work. At the heart of this exploration are four accounts of being an artist; four accounts of value; and four accounts of the occupation. These four accounts—pecuniary, credentialising, vocational, and relational—connect and conflict with each other to explain the place of both art and the artist in contemporary society. Using rich and detailed interview and ethnographic data, the book is essential reading for its contribution to contemporary sociology of culture and its insights into the art world.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spanning several decades, the work of Ella Shohat, a Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Israel, Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017) gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material. Shohat’s transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author’s intellectual journey. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Every young generation inspires a host of comparisons—usually negative ones—with older generations. Whether preceding a criticism or punctuating one, “kids these days” is a common utterance. Perhaps because of the ubiquity of the internet and their heavy presence on it, Millennials have been the most parsed and monitored generation as its members are still in the process of coming of age in history. Stereotypes abound in the media and popular culture: Millennials are lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and immature. Synthesizing an array of social science research that has been conducted not just on this cohort but on the society they find themselves struggling to navigate, writer Malcolm Harris in Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (Little, Brown and Company, 2017) aims to get readers to question these stereotypes and myths and instead think about how Millennials are trying to survive within today’s shifting social structures and conditions. More than any oth

How can Lacan help us to understand the subversive potential of video games? In The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Alfie Bown, Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong, explores this and many other questions of the modern condition. The book offers an accessible overview of key psychoanalytic theories to understand the video game, in particular the video game experience and its impact on the social world. The book uses a plethora of gaming examples, drawing out the ambivalences and potentials in even the most seemingly un-revolutionary games. These range from the transformation of space and urban experience in Pokemon Go, through the more corporate or reactionary experiences of Uncharted, through to the subversive elements of Papers Please. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how we live, through video games, now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Antisemitism and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Jack Jacobs, Professor of Political Science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has assembled a hugely impressive selection of scholars to delve into varied topics related to Jews and Leftists politics. The volume is characterised by judicious appraisals made by respected authorities and sheds considerable light on contentious themes. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington Sareeta Amrute has written Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2016), a study of contemporary capitalism, new forms of work, and the racialized underpinnings of immaterial labor regimes. Amrute conducted research among Indian IT workers —“coders”—who were in Berlin for the short-term under Germany’s Green Card program. Instead of tech workers unmarked by race, class or gender, she introduces readers to their “double location”: as unwanted racialized immigrant and simultaneously as part of India’s globalized technoelite. Focusing equally on spaces of work and leisure, jokes circulated over email, gift sharing practices, political cartoons and advertisements, Amrute depicts a world that is constrained but not circumscribed by neoliberal logics. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New

In his new book, The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (SUNY Press, 2017) , Lars Rensmann, Professor of European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen, argues that even scholars of the Frankfurt school have often treated the theme of antisemitism with scant attention. However, as Rensmann argues, the problem of antisemitism had been a central motivating dynamic for their interdisciplinary research, from the very early years of the Institute. In this episode, we begin by discussing the general silence surrounding the Holocaust that presided in Germany into the 1990s, and how this can be understood as part of a phenomenon that Critical Theory called “secondary antisemitism.” We then circle back to explore how the Critical Theorists explained the “primary” phenomenon of antisemitism as an interplay of psychological, social-historical, and economic dynamics. As we learn from this book’s rich analyses, the insights develope

I was joined by Eli Cook from Israel to talk about his amazing new book The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (Harvard University Press, 2017). While economists and politicians are busy discussing alternative measures of progress, Eli Cook traces the long history that brought us to use the GDP as a measure of growth, success, power, wellbeing. This is not only the history of technical metrics, this is the history of ideas and of a dominant paradigm. According to the author the invention of GDP was the final step not only in the pricing of progress but also the capitalization of American life. How did Americans come to quantify their society’s progress and well-being in units of money? In today’s GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth.The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values a