New Books In Critical Theory

What is the relationship between state power and self-destructive violence as a mode of political resistance? In her book Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2016), Banu Bargu (Politics, The New School) analyzes the Turkish death fast movement and explores self-inflicted death as a political practice. Amid a global intensification of the “weaponization of life,” Bargu argues for conceptualizing this self-destructive use of the body as a complex political and existential act. In doing so, she theorizes a reconfiguration of sovereignty into biosovereignty and of resistance into necroresistance. To accomplish this, the book innovatively weaves together political and critical theory with ethnography in a way that enables the self-understanding and self-narration of those in and around the death fast movement to speak to canonical thinkers and concepts. John McMahon is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Beloit College. He i

Sarah Jaffe has written Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (Nation Books, 2016). Jaffe is a Nation Institute fellow and an independent journalist. Over the last few years, several authors on the podcast have discussed the growth of the Tea Party, BlackLivesMatter, and Occupy Wall Street. Jaffe’s new book returns to the heart of these movements, explaining what has made ordinary Americans become activists. Jaffe argues that the financial crisis in 2008 sparked activism in many forms. In order to make this case, Jaffe travelled the country, interviewing people about what made them angry. She attended a people’s assembly in a church gymnasium in Ferguson, Missouri; walked a picket line at an Atlanta Burger King; rode a bus from New York to Ohio with student organizers; and went door-to-door in Queens days after Hurricane Sandy. Find her on twitter @sarahljaffe.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The BBC is often thought to be a great, impartial, defender of British values and society. In The BBC: Myth of a Public Service (Verso, 2016), Tom Mills, a lecturer in Sociology at Aston University, re-reads the history of the BBC to offer a more problematic status for the corporation, as an adjunct of British state power. The book uses examples from the General Strike in Britain, through war and economics reporting, to the vetting of left wing political attitudes within the Corporation, to tell the story of an institution that has been misunderstood by both left and right wing critics. Moreover, the book provides a critique of the management and organisation reforms to the BBC, coupled with a class analysis, demonstrating the need for transformation to this important part of British society. At a time when the media is under intense scrutiny for its perceived failures in reporting and representing politics and economics, Mills’ analysis and prescriptions for reform make for essential reading.Learn more

The value of the arts is a constant and vital question in contemporary culture. In Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (Intellect Books, 2016) Kirsty Sedgman, British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, approaches this question from the point of view of the audience. The book offers an introduction to the question of what an audience is, as well as thinking through the best methods to study the audience, before turning to the story of National Theatre Wales (NTW). The book discusses the tensions between aesthetics and participation, using places and performances from NTW to illustrate the range of responses, and the range of value, that different types of audience can derive from theatre. An engaging and accessible introduction to both the theoretical and practical questions surrounding cultural value, measurement, audiences, and theatre, the book will interest a range of humanities and social science scholars.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaph

Why is it controversial to cast light-skinned actress Zoe Saldana as the lead character in a film about the performer Nina Simone? How should we understand the coexisting desire and revulsion of the black body that traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson’s longstanding relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and extends to contemporary attitudes towards black hair? In Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), Paul C. Taylor examines primary themes in racialism from the perspective of aesthetic culture. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies and an Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and at Penn State University, considers such issues as black invisibility, expressive culture and politics, and the problem of authenticity and cultural appropriation. He also lays the foundation for analytic philosophical tools to be brought more widely to bear on scholarly discussion of issues related to race and racialism.Learn more about your ad choi

Widely known for his pioneering work in the field of settler colonial studies, Patrick Wolfe advanced the theory that settler colonialism was, “a structure, not an event.” In early 2016, Wolfe deepened this analysis through his most recent book, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (Verso Books, 2016) which takes a comparative approach to five cases in: Australia, Brazil, Europe, North America, and Palestine/Israel. Just as settler colonialism grew through institutionalized structures of Indigenous elimination, categorical notions of race grew through purpose-driven (and context-specific) exploitation, classification and separation. In Traces of History, the machinery and genealogy of race are as present in land relations as they are in legal precedents. Wolfe ties together a transnational pattern of labor substitution and slavery, Indigenous land dispossession, and the inception of racial categories which continue to normalize these historical processes into the present. While the Ind

How did the preeminent theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault experience and observe the Iranian revolution? How did he find the revolution disruptive of a teleological notion of history? And how did the Iranian revolution impact and shape Foucault’s thought? These are among the questions addressed by Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi in his exciting new book Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). This book presents an intimate portrait of the events and conditions that led to the revolution, coupled with a fascinating account of Foucault’s engagement with that moment. Historically rich and theoretically nuanced, Foucault in Iran advances a scathing critique of previous works on this subject that charged Foucault with having endorsed Islamist violence by supporting the revolution. This book offers a more complicated reading of Foucault’s views on the revolution that disrupts binaries like secular/Islamist while also providing a riveting an

What is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey, assembles a new collection of essays to explore this question. The book develops the concept of a “sea narrative,” thinking through the connection between this and a variety of forms of cultural production. The essays are eclectic, but unified, reflecting the emerging interest in both the subject and the approach the book uses. The book travels across the globe as well as across the centuries since 1600, taking in French accounts of the Atlantic crossing; prisoners of war; newspaper articles; Soviet technology and propaganda; Irishness and Ireland’s sense of itself; Du Maurier’s understanding of the coast; A S Byatt’s work; the idea of the Anthropocene; and “coastal exceptionalism.” Each essay is fascinating in its own right, but the collection builds t

Was Hegel a medieval thinker? In The Birth of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Andrew Cole puts forward a reexamination of Hegelian dialectics that embeds Hegel in a long tradition of medieval dialectical thinking and suggests that it is precisely Hegel’s engagement with medieval modes of thought that make his work a productive source for Marx and the later thinkers who develop dialectical thinking into theory as we know it today. The Birth of Theory challenges readers with insights won from strenuous contests with the writing of history, philosophy, religion, literature, and political economy. As he makes the case for rereading Hegelian dialectics based on the essentially feudal social and economic organization of Germany in Hegel’s moment, Cole drives at the arbitrary distinctions between medieval and modern but also those between dialectical and anti-dialectical thinking, writing a long arc of intellectual history that renegotiates theory’s relationship to Plato, Aristotle, Plo

NB: Because Amherst College Press is open-access, this book is available free for download here. Just when I thought I had a pretty good handle on the ways and means of American politics, Donald Trump “happened.” I watched with amazement as he insulted just about every establishment figure in the US–including the untouchable war-hero and senator John McCain!–and alienated large swathes of the American electorate–hispanics, women, people who think it’s important to be polite. And yet he rose; millions of right-thinking Americans continued to vote for him through the primaries and support him after he won them. Every time I said, “Well, that’s it, his run is over,” he trundled on, accompanied by a devoted, Trump-loving “base.” I don’t think I’m alone in my confusion about the Trump phenomenon, and I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to know how Trump did what he did. Happily, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams prov

McKenzie Wark’s new book begins and ends with a playful call: “Workings of the world untie! You have a win to world!” Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso, 2015) creates a conversation between work from two very different Soviet and American contexts. After guiding readers through the work and theories of Alexander Bogdanov, whose focus on the importance of labor in organizing knowledge forms a central thread through the book as a whole, Wark traces some of those notions in the writing of novelist and utopian Andrey Platonov. The second half of the book extends the conversation into science studies, beginning in a chapter that considers the work of Feyerabend, Haraway, Barad, and Edwards in light of Bogdanov and Platonov’s approaches to labor and knowledge, and continuing into a chapter devoted to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. The result is a fascinating treatment of the centrality of labor and the importance of the not-necessarily-human to understanding and t

How is the notion of the avant-garde in art relevant today? What can contemporary social movements learn from the Situationists? What is the meaning of artistic value to forms of resistance? These, and many other, questions associated with the role of art in modern society are at the heart of The Composition of Movements to Come (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Stevphen Shukaitis, a senior lecturer in work and organisation at the University of Essex, approaches these issues from an Autonomist Marxist perspective, thinking through a diverse range of issues, for example cultural labour, and practices, for example the art strike. The book also uses a range of artistic examples, including a detailed engagement with Neue Slowenische Kunst to think through the composition of movements to come. The podcast discusses a forthcoming exhibition of the work of Gee Vaucher at Firstsite in Essex, UK. The book will be of interest to critical theorists, as well as scholars from art, politics and social movement studies.Learn

Why did Michel Foucault radically recast the project of The History of Sexuality? How did he work collaboratively? What was the influence of Antiquity on his thought? In Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity Press, 2016) Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick explores these, and many more, questions about the final years in a rich intellectual life. The book combines detailed studies of Foucault’s recently collected lecture series with archival material and his publications, to give an in depth engagement with the changes and continuities in his thought during the last decade. Addressing questions associated with key terms, such as governmentality, as well as confession, the self, power, truth telling, and many other core ideas and themes, the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in this most important of Western thinkers.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can we explain the “occlusion of embodied power” and “lack of attention to race, gender, and sexuality” in the discipline of political science, a field “that claims power as a central analytical concept” (17)? In her new book, Embodied Power: Demystifying Disembodied Politics (Routledge, 2016), Mary Hawkesworth (Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University) brings intersectionality, feminist theory, and post- and de-colonial theory to bear on the mainstream study of politics. She argues for the need to move away from customary concepts of “power” and “the political” that mask state practices that construct various forms of hierarchy. These concepts and the methodologies and epistemologies they give rise to, she argues, lead the discipline unable to grapple with issues such as the carceral state or the violence of nation-building. At the same they cover over the ways that “racialization and gendering have been c

Darian M. Parker joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling (Lexington Books, 2015). Through an ethnographic lens, Parker provides an anthropological glimpse into a New York City public school that is considered to be failing. Despite being rooted in a strong theoretical framework, the book should be accessible to anyone interested in education or policy making because of the familiar narrative laid out in a relatable manner. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can social theory offer to visions of an alternative society? In his new book, Social Theory for Alternative Societies (Palgrave, 2016), Dr Matt Dawson, a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow, explores how classical and contemporary social theory has grappled with this question. The book proposes three starting points for a vision of the good society, beginning with the identification of a social problem, through the suggestion of an alternative, to the justification for the alternative’s way of solving the social problem. Drawing on classical social theory from Du Bois, Durkheim and Marx, through to more recent ideas from Feminism, Cosmopolitanism, Neo-Marxism and Public Sociology, the book provides a new take on social theory as well as thinking through the meaning of what a good society might be. Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books in Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College,

Ibram X. Kendi is an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books, 2016) offers a fast moving narrative of racist ideas beginning with the Puritan theologian and preacher Cotton Mather to the post-racial color-blind arguments in the age of Barack Obama. Through American history, racism has been justified by appeals to God’s word, science, nature, or common sense. He demonstrates how good intentioned efforts to overcome racism have often helped to cement racist ideas. The ideas of segregation and assimilation have rationalized racism and have reproduced and spread in the face of challenge by antiracist arguments. Americans have unsuccessfully attempted to root out racism through notions of self-sacrifice, “uplift suasion,” and educational persuasion. Kendi argues that overcoming racism, which hides classism and sexism, will require intelligent self-interest, not altruis

John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco’s new book, Cuba, the United States, and the Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930-1975 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), reaches across the Atlantic ocean and connects journalists, musicians, activists and poets as they moved between Cuba and the United States in the turbulent eras of revolution. Covering 1933 as well as 1959 allows Gronbeck Tedesco to make fresh observations about the intellectual and political climates of those moments as well as to point to important continuities. The ambitions and disillusionment that permeated the novels, plays, poetry and leftist politics frame this book, making it required reading for anyone interested in the fraught and conflictual intimacies between the two nations and those who journeyed back and forth.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Television had been transformed by the rise of the format. In The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution Jean Chalaby, Professor of International Communication at City University London, charts the beginnings of the format for TV shows, through the globalization of the trade in TV formats, to conclude with reflections on the future of local and global TV markets. The book uses an eclectic set of theoretical frames, including Global Value Chains, World Systems Theory and work of the Annales School, to chart the political economy of the TV format. Using a wide range of examples, detailed case studies of local markets and local production systems (including the UK), the book shows how the format is now crucial to the modern television industry encompassing everything from the game show to the long form drama. The book will be of interest to all media and communications scholars, as well as anyone keen to know why we have the sorts of television programmes we have on our screens.Learn more about

In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Peter Trawny, professor of philosophy and founder and director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal, explores the place of anti-Semitism in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Using Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks, Trawny explains that the philosopher’s anti-Semitism was not just a few stray remarks, but was deeply incorporated into his philosophical and political thinking.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices