New Books In Critical Theory

Doing Reflexivity: An Introduction (Policy Press, 2017) by Jon Dean, a senior lecturer in politics and sociology at Sheffield Hallam University, explores and explains reflexivity as one of the essential concepts in modern social research. The book draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu as its starting point, but broadens out the definition of reflexivity to include a range of critical perspectives, particularly those associated with feminist standpoint epistemologies. The book also engages with the practice of research, setting out examples from Dean’s own work, on culture and on non-profits, along with detailed case studies of different types of reflexivity in different social research settings. The book is essential reading for social researchers everywhere.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization by Michael Youngblood, a cultural anthropologist based in San Francisco, was published in November, 2016 by the South Asian Studies Association Press. The book is a winner of the Joseph W. Elder Book Prize (conferred by the American Institute of Indian Studies), and has been very well received by reviewers. Cultivating Community is based on the author’s two and a half years of field research in 1996-1999 with the Shetkari Sanghatana, a massive and influential anti-statist movement in India’s Maharashtra state. The book explores the creation of political meaning and the construction of collective identity in a mass social movement. In it, the author address fundamental questions in making sense of mass movements anywhere: Where do movement ideologies come from and what makes them compelling? What motivates diverse groups of ordinary people to rise together in common cause? How can we make sense of individual p

In Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle D. Commander examines the (im)possibility of literal and figurative returns to Africa of African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. Using analysis inspired by “the ways in which the enslaved and their descendants took and have continued to take back control over their bodies”, and focusing on cultural production, Commander traces the points of intersection and divergence between the two modes of return, rather than dealing with them as mutually exclusive. Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at mdjenno@indiana.edu.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can we address inequity and injustice in cultural and creative industries? In Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Mark Banks, a professor of culture and communication and director of CAMEo, the research institute for Cultural and Media Economies, at the University of Leicester, sets out a new approach to cultural and creative industries, focused on creative justice. Creative justice develops through the seven chapters of the book, which engage with a range of interdisciplinary concerns about cultural and creative work. The book restates the importance of cultural objects (which are often marginalised in sociological analysis) before moving to consider how justice might be done to the practices of creative work and the workers themselves. Later parts of the analysis think through questions of access, both historical and contemporary, to the cultural sector, with a new set of concepts for creative justice forming the conclusion of the book. It will be e

At once wonderfully clear and bursting with complexity, the title of Bruno Perreau‘s book, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford University Press, 2016) is one of my favorites of the past several years. An interrogation of the meanings of queer, theory, French, and response, the book is anchored around the anti-gay marriage demonstrations and activisms that proliferated in France during the lead-up to the passage of the 2013 Loi Taubira (a.k.a. “marriage pour tous”). The book focuses on a central claim of French opponents of gay marriage and adoption: the notion that (American) gender and queer theory is responsible for spreading homosexuality in France, and has thus contributed to the undoing of the French family and the nation as a whole. Throughout its four chapters, the book considers the French response to queer theory in terms of fantasy and echo. This is not a book about reception in a passive or uncomplicated sense. Rather it is the study of a set of reverberations back and for

From humble beginnings James Bronterre O’Brien became one of the leading figures in British radical politics in the first half of the 19th century, thanks in no small measure to his skills as a journalist and writer. In Radicalism and Reputation: The Career of Bronterre O’Brien (Michigan State University Press, 2017), Michael J. Turner examines O’Brien’s ideas and his place in the milieu of the politics of his day. Born in Ireland, the young James O’Brien was a fortunate beneficiary of a progressive education and studied for a career in the law. Yet O’Brien was soon drawn into a career as a journalist, where, adopting the pen name Bronterre, he advocated for the radical causes of his day. This culminated in O’Brien’s involvement in the pioneering Chartist movement, which failed to pressure Parliament to undertake reforms but paved the way for the modern democratic system that exists in Britain today.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016) is innovative and lyrical, challenging and beautiful. Ashon Crawley brings together black studies, queer theory, theology, and continental philosophy to theorize the ways in which what he calls “otherwise worlds of possibility” can serve as disruptions against marginalization and violence and also produce possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and tongue speaking of Black Pentecostalism, Crawley reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. In the process, he does much more: suggesting a hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture when people are under siege. Ashon Crawley is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. Hillary Kaell is associate professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone

Ralph Young is a professor of history at Temple University. His book Dissent: The History of an American Idea (New York University Press, 2015) provides a fast-paced four hundred years people’s history of dissenters in America and the role they played from early New England settlements to Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. From Shay’s rebellion in the late eighteenth century to contemporary gay rights and anti-globalist movements, dissenters built their politic on the nations founding as a project of dissent. As a group, they were committed to actualizing the lofty ideals embedded in the founding documents by extending equality and freedom to women, slaves, Indians, workers and other excluded groups. In times of crisis, dissenters called the nation back to its promise even as conservative forces resisted change. Some dissenters, celebrated as heroes, called the nation to its highest ideals; others remain lost to history or vilified. American history seen from the vantage point of those who stoo

Sharrona Pearl‘s new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) looks closely at facial allotransplantations (FAT), commonly known as face transplants, in order to offer a careful and fascinating study of the stakes for changing the face, and the changing stakes for the face. Troubling the indexical relationship between the face and character and reminding us that “[t]he self has always been a set of choices,” Pearl explores face transplantation as it relates to cosmetic surgery and whole-organ transplants, the cinema of the 1960s, television shows, and more. She carefully and sensitively takes us into the debates among surgeons, bioethicists, and journalists that circled the first partial face transplant of Isabelle Dinoire in 2005, and offers a way toward a philosophical approach that brings together Levinas with the kind of (Deleuzian) subjectivity that allows for individuality through constant change

Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002-2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering a raw and dramatically compelling vision of the teeming drug trade and the vitality of life in the abandoned spaces of the postindustrial United States. With a sprawling narrative that dramatizes the intersections of race, urban history, and the neoliberal moment, The Wire offers an intricate critique of a society ravaged by racism and inequality. In Connecting The Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore (University of Texas Press, 2017), The author presents the first comprehensive, season-by-season analysis of the entire series. Focusing on the show’s depictions of the built environment of the city of Baltimore and the geographic dimensions of race and class, he analyzes how The Wire’s creator and showrunner, David Simon, uses the show to develop a social vision of its historical moment, as well as a device for critiquing many soc

Almost 10 years after the great financial crisis, how has the finance industry regained its preeminent social position? In Trust, Power and Public Relations in Financial Markets (Routledge, 2017) Clea Bourne, a Lecturer in PR, Advertising and Marketing at Goldsmiths, University of London, explores the relationship between PR and different types of trust in finance. The book offers a nuanced understanding of trust, looking at both transparency and obfuscation for states, banks, stock markets and individuals. Alongside a critical theory of the function of PR, there are numerous detailed case studies, across every aspect of modern financial markets, making the book both an in depth assessment as well as a useful introduction to trust, PR and finance. The book is clearly written and accessible, making it essential reading for anyone interested in this most important part of economy and societyLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lizabeth Cohen‘s Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 was originally published in 1990, and recently re-published in 2014. In this book, Cohen explores how it was that Chicago workers, who could not overcome ethnic and racial divisions during a wave of failed strikes in 1919, came together in the mid to late-1930s across ethnic and racial lines “to make a New Deal” for themselves and their fellow laborers. They made that “New Deal” as members of national labor unions and a national Democratic Party. These successes were possible because of community and cultural changes that took place in the 1920s, Cohen argues. During that decade, ethnic and race-based community organizations, new institutions of mass culture like chain stores and movie theaters, and employers’ “welfare capitalist” programs all vied for workers attention and loyalty. Paradoxically, the very programs employers hoped would prevent the growth of unions actually helped break

Benjamin Fondane, a Franco-Romanian writer and contributor to the development of existential philosophy in the 1930s and 40s, is in the process of being rediscovered. His work has gained a new relevance in the contemporary period due in part to the way it anticipates some of the core themes and interests of critical theory, including the limits of rationality and subjectivity, and ideas about the ineffable and the impossible. Until recently, few of Fondane’s writings, aside from his poetry, had been translated into English, despite a long-standing recognition of their importance to philosophical debates in the period, including by Fondane’s contemporaries, such as Lev Shestov and Albert Camus. A new collection entitled Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays edited and translated by Bruce Baugh and published by the New York Review of Books in 2016, aims to rectify this. Professor Baugh, who teaches Philosophy at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, has written extensively on existentia

How did gender relations change in the computing industry? And how did the UK go from leading the world to having an all but extinct computer industry by the 1970s? In Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). Marie Hicks, an Assistant Professor of History at the Illinois Institute of Technology, offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of this radical social change. Based on rich and detailed archival and interview sources, packed with illustrations and individual narratives of the 1940s to the 1970s, the book demonstrates how the rigid class and gender hierarchies of British society were recreated and reproduced in attempts to modernise the state through technology. As the book’s conclusion notes, “all history of computing is gendered history,” meaning the book is essential reading for anyone interested in how we have the computing and technology industries we have today. The first chapter of the book can be read

Todd McGowan‘s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016) elegantly employs psychoanalytic thinking to unpack the lure of capitalism. He argues that we are drawn to capitalism because, under an overt promise to bring us what we want, it gives us what we need: lack. Every commodity disappoints. And that’s the point. Satisfaction, that moment when all is well and good, flutters rapidly, blessedly away. What is so great, so crucial, about lack? Though we pine for relief, nothing kills desire like abundance. (Spoiler alert: should there be an equitable redistribution of wealth, we would still suffer a hunger for the lost object which, according to McGowan, not employing Kleinian thinking, was never attainable in the first place.) If we did not experience ourselves as missing something we might never get out of bed–and, as clinicians know, why it can be purely ruinous to gratify a depressive patient. You buy those boots, the ones you had to have, and

In Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (University of California Press, 2016), Emily K. Hobson challenges conceptions of LGBTQ activism as single-issue analogous to but separate from other activist initiatives. Instead, Hobson uncovers the gay and lesbian left, whose activists saw sexual liberation as intertwined with challenging racism, militarism, and imperialism. She focuses on the gay and lesbian left in the San Francisco Bay Area, tracing the movement from 1968 through 1991. This community of struggle was separate from both separatist and liberal LGBTQ organizing. It grew out of late-1960s and early-1970s gay liberation, but solidified in the mid to late 1970s, usually seen as a period when gay activism turned to more reformist and single-issue frameworks. Geography, space and place are important to Hobson’s analysis. The Bay Area generated a lesbian and gay left partly because of newly politicized white queers proximity to Black liberationists, women of color fe

How can we challenge the way film and television represents the world around us? In Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2017) Nancy Wan Yuen, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Biola University, offers a comprehensive guide to the problem of racism in Hollywood, along with possible solutions for organisations, governments and audiences. The book draws on a wealth of interview data, along with almost 10 years of fieldwork in the Hollywood system, interviewing on- and off-screen talent, agents, and decision makers. The book shows the high levels of exclusion of people of colour from Hollywood, along with the malign impacts of this on contemporary culture. Moreover, the book shows how actors of colour face a ‘double bind’ in trying to get work and negotiate the expectations and biases of a white system. By exposing the problem, and offering practical guidance for change, the book represents an important intervention. The engaging style and clear, academically

Policing tactics have recently been the subject of lively political debates and the target of protest groups like the Black Lives Matter movement. Police reform is not new, of course. The 1950s and 1960s, in fact, saw one of the most active periods of change surrounding standard policing procedures and a moment of political reexamination of the role of police in a democracy. Christopher Lowen Agee, Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver, examines these changes in San Francisco in his recent book. The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes on a city where police notoriously clashed with leftist activists, but also a city run by liberals. The Streets of San Francisco examines the causes, consequences, and limits of reform from street-level interactions between police and residents to policing politics in city hall. In this episode of New Books in History, Agee discusses his new book.

Have you ever watched a futuristic movie and wondered if there will actually be any black people in the future? Have you ever been surprised, disappointed, or concerned with the lack of diversity demonstrated in many science fiction stories? In Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) the author analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan culture to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science reveals new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture and interrogates the meanings of race and genre through studies of science fiction, fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts. Author and professor Andre Carrington earned his bachelors degree

During a life that stretched from the Progressive era to the 1960s, A. J. Muste dedicated himself to fighting against war and the exploitation of working Americans. In American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Leilah Danielson describes the course of Muste’s career as a pacifist, labor organizer, and civil rights campaigner, explaining the development of his ideology within the context of his activism. An immigrant to America, Muste pursued a career as a Protestant minister until the pressures created by America’s entry into World War I forced him to resign from his pastorate. His work supporting striking textile workers in in Lawrence, Massachusetts heralded the start of a period of involvement in the labor movement, during which time he became a leading figure at Brookwood Labor College and attempted to establish a labor-based political party during the Great Depression. As another war approached in the late 1930