New Books in Critical Theory

In this episode we are joined by Thomas Hendriks, an anthropologist studying capitalism and resource extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hendriks' work is amongst the most innovative in the anthropological study of capitalism, drawing upon queer theory, feminist ethnography, and phenomenology to make sense of cutting down large trees in the tropical rainforest. Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession (Duke UP, 2021) Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction. Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott conducts fieldwork on Dakelh Territory in Northern British Columbia, on capitalism, forestry, and colonialism. Elliott is studies contestations over profit, property and territory on Indigenous land. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The first podcast in this series was inspired by a documentary film made in 2014 called “Black Analysts Speak” as well as some of the findings in the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis published in 2023. It also considered the reasons why racism has persisted so long in America including perspectives from a psychoanalytic vantage point. Mechanism of defense, particularly projective identification was discussed as one specific reason why change has been slow. The host and co-host also talked about the some of the reasons why it is important for white people to listen to the Black experience. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s book, Where do we go from here, Chaos or Community was also considered because of its relevance today. Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine. She is a podcast host for the New Books Network and chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Scholarship and Writing section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). She is a member of the AI Council of APsA (CAI). She has also written and edited six books. Her topics focus on applying psychoanalytic ideas to real-world issues we all face in our complex world. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is a child and adolescent supervising psychoanalyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston, Texas, where she also holds the position of President of Board of Directors. Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams is also a faculty member in the Child and Adult Training Programs. In addition, she provides clinical supervision for the State of Texas licensing board, as well as supervision as a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor with the Association for Play Therapy. She is also the chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education’s (DPE) Diversity section which is part of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The Violence of Recognition: Adivasi Indigeneity and Anti-Dalitness in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) offers an unprecedented firsthand account of the operations of Hindu nationalists and their role in sparking the largest incident of anti-Christian violence in India’s history. Through vivid ethnographic storytelling, Pinky Hota explores the roots of ethnonationalist conflict between two historically marginalized groups—the Kandha, who are Adivasi (tribal people considered indigenous in India), and the Pana, a community of Christian Dalits (previously referred to as “untouchables”). Hota documents how Hindutva mobilization led to large-scale violence, culminating in attacks against many thousands of Pana Dalits in the district of Kandhamal in 2008. Bringing indigenous studies as well as race and ethnic studies into conversation with Dalit studies, Hota shows that, despite attempts to frame these ethnonationalist tensions as an indigenous population’s resistance against disenfranchisement, Kandha hostility against the Pana must be understood as anti-Christian, anti-Dalit violence animated by racial capitalism. Hota’s analysis of caste in relation to race and religion details how Hindu nationalists exploit the singular and exclusionary legal recognition of Adivasis and the putatively liberatory, anti-capitalist discourse of indigeneity in order to justify continued oppression of Dalits—particularly those such as the Pana. Because the Pana lost their legal protection as recognized minorities (Scheduled Caste) upon conversion to Christianity, they struggle for recognition within the Indian state’s classificatory scheme. Within the framework of recognition, Hota shows, indigeneity works as a political technology that reproduces the political, economic, and cultural exclusion of landless marginalized groups such as Dalits. The Violence of Recognition reveals the violent implications of minority recognition in creating and maintaining hierarchies of racial capitalism. Yash Sharma is a PhD student in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Twitter. Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Marxism and psychoanalysis have a rich and complicated relationship to one another, with countless figures and books written on the possible intersection of the two. Our guest today, Adrian Johnston, returns to NBN to discuss his own latest entry into the genre, Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital (Columbia UP, 2024). While the book does retread some already-covered territory, Johnston’s book stands out as a unique entry in a crowded field by emphasizing the theoretical overlap of psychoanalytic concepts with the economic core of Marx’s thinking. Libidinal economics are turned into, well, economics and vice-versa in this detailed and rigorously written study that deserves to become one of the canonical texts in the Freudo-Marxist tradition. Adrian Johnston is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico and a faculty member of the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of numerous books, including three previously discussed on this podcast; A New German Idealism: Hegel, Zizek and Dialectical Materialism, and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism volumes one and two. He is also the coeditor, with Slavoj Zizek and Todd McGowan of the book series Diaeresis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How have women resisted sexism in TV? In Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation (U California Press, 2024), Jennifer S. Clark, an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, explores the people, organisations, TV shows and audiences who all shaped women in and on television during the 1970s. Drawing on a production studies perspective, the book ranges widely from organisational archives, through key programmes and personalities, to specific genres including sport on TV. The analysis also offers a challenge to both contemporary television’s approach to equity and diversity issues, as well as a significant contribution to the history of television too. The book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in television. The book is also available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

While many live-action films portray disability as a spectacle, "crip animation" (a genre of animated films that celebrates disabled people's lived experiences) uses a variety of techniques like clay animation, puppets, pixilation, and computer-generated animation to represent the inner worlds of people with disabilities. Crip animation has the potential to challenge the ableist gaze and immerse viewers in an alternative bodily experience. In Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship (Indiana University Press, 2023), Dr. Slava Greenberg analyses over 30 animated works about disabilities, including Rocks in My Pockets, An Eyeful of Sound, and A Shift in Perception. He considers the ableism of live-action cinematography, the involvement of filmmakers with disabilities in the production process, and the evocation of the spectators' senses of sight and hearing, consequently subverting traditional spectatorship and listenership hierarchies. In addition, Dr. Greenberg explores physical and sensory accessibility in theatres and suggests new ways to accommodate cinematic screenings. Offering an introduction to disability studies and crip theory for film, media, and animation scholars, Animated Film and Disability demonstrates that crip animation has the power to breach the spectator's comfort, evoking awareness of their own bodies and, in certain cases, their social privileges. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Can capitalism be made ecologically sustainable? Can it be good for women? What theoretical approaches help us to grapple with these questions in ways that offer us strategies for how to proceed? Have we already become lost in some sort of gender essentialism to ask these questions together? In Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Johanna Oksala brings the resources of ecofeminism and Marxist feminism to these questions, arguing that capitalism cannot be made sustainable, nor can it do without the expropriation of bodies that produce new laborers and consumers. By attending to the rise of biocapitalism, Oksala further develops analytic resources for diagnosing the fundamental problems of an economic system predicated on profit, consumer choice, and endless growth. She also gives us theoretical tools for discerning strategies that will help us create a world beyond capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home. Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (U Chicago Press, 2024) also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights that Rana reconstructs to forward an ambitious and comprehensive vision for moving past the constitutional bind. Aziz Rana is a Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Boston College Law School and the incoming J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government (beginning 2024). Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. He is the editor of Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

An interview with Prof. Salman Sayyid on post-orientalism, what it means and its place in Critical Muslim Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Cosmopolitan Elites: Indian Diplomats and the Social Hierarchies of Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Kira Huju narrates the birth, everyday life, and fracturing of a Western-dominated global order from its margins. It offers a critical sociological examination of the elite Indian Foreign Service and its members, many of whom were present at the founding of this order. Dr. Huju explores how these diplomats set out to remake the service in the name of a radically anti-colonial global subaltern, but often ended up seeking status within its hierarchies through social mimicry of its most powerful actors. This is a book about the struggles of belonging: it revisits what it takes to be a recognized member of international society and asks what the experience of historically marginalised actors inside the diplomatic club can tell us about the evident woes of global order today. In interrogating how Indian diplomats learned to live under a Westernised world order, it also offers a sociologically grounded reading of what might happen in spaces like India as the world transitions past Western domination. An awkward balancing act animates the order-making of India's cosmopolitan diplomats: despite a genuine desire to strive toward a postcolonial world founded on diversity, difference, and the symbolic representation of a global subaltern, there is a strong sense of a lingering caricature-like notion of a white, European-dominated homogenous club, to which Indian diplomats feel a deep-rooted and colonially embedded desire to belong. Cosmopolitanism operates inside this balancing act not as an international ethic upholding an equal, tolerant, or liberal global order, but rather as an elite aesthetic which presumes cultural compliance, diplomatic accommodation, and social assimilation into Western mores. Based on 85 interviews with Indian diplomats, politicians, and foreign policy experts, as well as archival work in New Delhi, the book asks what the experience of historically marginalised actors inside the diplomatic club tells us about the social hierarchies of race, class, religion, gender, and caste under global order. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870–2008 (Cambridge UP, 2023) explores the rise of the professional middle class across the Anglophone world from c. 1870 to 2008. With a focus on British settler colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States - Hannah Forsyth argues that the British middle class structured old forms of virtue into rapidly expanding white-collar professional work, needed to drive both economic and civilizational expansion across their settler colonies. They invested that virtue to produce social and economic profit. This virtue became embedded in the networked Anglophone economy so that, by the mid twentieth century, the professional class ruled the world in alliance with managers whose resources enabled the implementation of virtuous strategies. Since morality and capital had become materially entangled, the 1970s economic crisis also presented a moral crisis for all professions, beginning a process whereby the interests of expert and managerial workers separated and began to actively compete. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

People before Markets:: An Alternative Casebook (Cambridge UP, 2022) presents twenty comparative case studies of important global questions, such as 'Where should our food come from?' 'What should we do about climate change?' and 'Where should innovation come from?' A variety of solutions are proposed and compared, including market-based, economic, and neoliberal approaches, as well as those determined by humane values and ethical and socially responsible perspectives. Drawing on original research, its chapters show that more responsible solutions are very often both more effective and better aligned with human values. Providing an important counterpoint to the standard capitalist thinking propounded in business school education, People Before Markets reveals the problematic assumptions of incumbent frameworks for solving global problems and inspires the next generation of business and social science students to pursue more effective and human-centered solutions. Robin Steiner is an economic anthropologist based in Miami, FL. His published work explores economic development, labor, and citizenship in Oman and the Arab Gulf. He teaches in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Robin can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The unintended consequences of youth empowerment programs for Latino boys Educational research has long documented the politics of punishment for boys and young men of color in schools—but what about the politics of empowerment and inclusion? In Good Boys, Bad Hombres: The Racial Politics of Mentoring Latino Boys in Schools (U Minnesota Press, 2024), Michael V. Singh focuses on this aspect of youth control in schools, asking on whose terms a positive Latino manhood gets to be envisioned. Based on two years of ethnographic research in an urban school district in California, Good Boys, Bad Hombres examines Latino Male Success, a school-based mentorship program for Latino boys. Instead of attempting to shape these boys’ lives through the threat of punishment, the program aims to provide an “invitation to a respectable and productive masculinity” framed as being rooted in traditional Latinx signifiers of manhood. Singh argues, however, that the promotion of this aspirational form of Latino masculinity is rooted in neoliberal multiculturalism, heteropatriarchy, and anti-Blackness, and that even such empowerment programs can unintentionally reproduce attitudes that paint Latino boys as problematic and in need of control and containment. An insightful gender analysis, Good Boys, Bad Hombres sheds light on how mentorship is a reaction to the alleged crisis of Latino boys and is governed by the perceived remedies of the neoliberal state. Documenting the ways Latino men and boys resist the politics of neoliberal empowerment for new visions of justice, Singh works to deconstruct male empowerment, arguing that new narratives and practices—beyond patriarchal redemption—are necessary for a reimagining of Latino manhood in schools and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Pivoting from studies that emphasize the dominance of progressivism on American college campuses during the late sixties and early seventies, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd positions conservative critiques of, and agendas in, American colleges and universities as an essential dimension of a broader conversation of conservative backlash against liberal education. This book explores the story of how stakeholders in American higher education organized and reacted to challenges to their power from the New Left and Black Power student resistance movements of the late 1960s. By examining the range of conservative student organizations and coalition building, Shepherd shows how wealthy donors and conservative intellectuals trained future GOP leaders such as Karl Rove, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, Pat Buchanan, and others in conservative politics, providing them with tactics to consciously drive American politics and culture further to the authoritarian right and to "reclaim" American higher education. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is instructor of higher education at the University of New Orleans. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How do unequal societies function? In Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net (Portfolio, 2024), Jesscia Calarco, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examines how America’s DIY society depends on the labour of mothers and excludes the sorts of social supports present in other countries. This dependence has hugely negative social and individual consequences, as demonstrated by the rich qualitiative and quantitative data examined in the book. Alongside the analysis of the problems and consequences of women’s role in the US, the book also thinks through solutions, demonstrating how much political discourse is far from the collective action that is likely to be effective for social change. An outstanding contribution to social science and contemporary politics, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary social inequalities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Dr. Lydia Walker's deeply researched and carefully narrated debut monograph, States-in-Waiting: A Counter Narrative of Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2024) traces “the un-endings of decolonization” – the messy and improvised ways in which the 20th-century state-centric international order replaced empire as the default mode of political organization. States-in-Waiting zooms in on the postwar Naga national liberation movement which failed to achieve independence from India at a time when dozens of European colonial possessions secured statehood. The work illuminates the complicated issue of self-determination for minority peoples within new postcolonial states and highlights transcontinental networks of Asian, African, American, and European activists and insurgents who pushed against legal-political constraints of an emergent postimperial world order. Finally, the author recovers riveting “hidden dramas” of decolonization by amplifying the voices of marginalized historical actors, lost non-state archives, and understudied regions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Dr. Lydia Walker is the Assistant Professor and Myers Chair in Global Military History at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Henry George’s Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement’s contributions to American liberalism. In surveying George’s devotees and their impacts at the municipal and national levels, England demonstrates that George’s ideas were pivotal in reconciling liberalism to a democratic welfare state. In this episode, we discuss George’s land value tax, domestic and international Georgist movements, and the influence of Progress and Poverty on American and British liberalism. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) is an MPhil student in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode, we speak to Nivedita Menon about her new book, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South (Duke University Press, 2024; Permanent Black, 2023). Secularism as Misdirection is an ambitious and wide-ranging work, unravelling a term that is perhaps as contentious as it is ubiquitous in discourses of the Global South. Working across political theory, legal history, and religious thought, Menon reveals the dangers of secularism's false promise—likening it to a magic trick that draws "attention from where the trick is happening ... to objects that are made to appear more fascinating." Nivedita Menon is Professor at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Her previous books include Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and the landmark work, Seeing like a Feminist (Penguin/Zubaan, 2012). She has co-authored and edited several volumes, including Power and Contestation: India Since 1989 (2nd edition: Bloomsbury, 2013). In addition to her award-winning work as a scholar and translator, Menon is a prominent public intellectual, whose writing on issues such as academic freedom and feminist politics in India can be read at kafila.online, a vital independent blog that she helped found. Arnav Adhikari is a doctoral candidate in English at Brown University, where he works on the aesthetics and politics of Cold War South Asia. His writing has appeared in Postcolonial Text and Global South Studies, amongst other venues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

An interview with Salman Sayyid about decoloniality and its place in Critical Muslim Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Latinos have long influenced everything from electoral politics to popular culture, yet many people instinctively regard them as recent immigrants rather than a longstanding racial group. In Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism (The New Press, 2020), Laura Gómez, a leading expert on race, law, and society, illuminates the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making of Latino identity that has spanned centuries, leaving a permanent imprint on how race operates in the United States today. Pulling back the lens as the country approaches an unprecedented demographic shift (Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in a matter of decades), Gómez also reveals the nefarious roles the United States has played in Latin America—from military interventions and economic exploitation to political interference—that, taken together, have destabilized national economies to send migrants northward over the course of more than a century. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of Latinos migrate from the places most impacted by this nation’s dirty deeds, leading Gómez to a bold call for reparations. In this audacious effort to reframe the often-confused and misrepresented discourse over the Latinx generation, Gómez provides essential context for today’s most pressing political and public debates—representation, voice, interpretation, and power—giving all of us a brilliant framework to engage cultural controversies, elections, current events, and more. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Kids are at the center of today's "culture wars"--pundits, politicians, and parents alike are debating which books they should be allowed to read, which version of history they should learn in school, and what decisions they can make about their own bodies. And yet, no one asks kids what they think about these issues. In Children of a Troubled Time: Growing Up with Racism in Trump's America (NYU Press, 2024), award-winning sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman amplifies the voices of children who grew up during Trump's presidency and explores how they learn about race in America today. Hagerman interviewed nearly fifty children between the ages of ten to thirteen in two dramatically different political landscapes: Mississippi and Massachusetts. Hagerman interviewed kids who identified as conservative and liberal in both places as well as kids from different racial groups. She discovered remarkably similar patterns in the ideas expressed by these children. Racism, she asserts, is not just a local or regional phenomenon: it is a broad American project affecting childhoods across the country. In Hagerman's emotionally compelling interviews, children describe what it is like to come of age during years of deep political and racial divide, and how being a kid during the Trump era shaped their views on racism, democracy, and America as a whole. Children's racialized emotions are also central to this book: disgust and discomfort, fear and solidarity, dominance and apathy. As administrators, teachers, and parents struggle to help children make sense of our racially and politically polarized nation, Hagerman offers concrete examples of the kinds of interventions necessary to help kids learn how to become members of a multi-racial democracy and to avoid the development of far-right thinking in the white youth of today. Children of a Troubled Time expands our understanding of how the rising generation grapples with the complexities of racism and raises critical questions about the future of American society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Profit ― getting more out of something than you put into it ― is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization developed, we found more and more ways of extracting surplus value from the earth, often deploying brutally effective methods to discipline people to do the work needed. In Profit: An Environmental History (Polity Press, 2022), Historian Mark Stoll explains how capitalism supercharged this process and traces its many environmental consequences. The financial innovations of medieval Italy created trade networks that, with the European discovery of the Americas, made possible vast profits and sweeping cultural changes, to the detriment of millions of slaves and indigenous Americans; the industrial age united the world in trade and led to an energy revolution that changed lives everywhere. But when efficient production left society awash in goods, a new sort of capitalism, predicated on endless individual consumption, took its place. This story of incredible ingenuity and villainy begins in the Doge’s palace in medieval Venice and ends with Jeff Bezos aboard his own spacecraft. Mark Stoll’s revolutionary account places environmental factors at the heart of capitalism’s progress and reveals the long shadow of its terrible consequences. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Even as the rewards of work decline and its demands on us increase, many people double-down on their commitment to wage slavery – working harder, doing overtime, and learning to hustle. People take pride in having a strong work ethic and demonstrate their passionate commitment to optimizing their time and resources on social media platforms like LinkedIn. But why do people fight to be exploited as if it were liberation? My guest today, Jason Read, turns to the intersection of Marx and Spinoza to examine contemporary ideologies and the modern phenomena of work. His new book, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work (Verso, 2024), argues for the transformation of our collective imagination and attachment to work. Jason Read is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Production of Subjectivity, The Politics of Transindividuality, and The Micro-Politics of Capital. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press, 2020) a brilliant but shocking account of the criminalization of all aspects of reproduction, pregnancy, abortion, birth, and motherhood in the United States. In her extensively researched monograph, Michele Goodwin recounts the horrific contemporary situation, which includes, for example, mothers giving birth shackled in leg irons, in solitary confinement, even in prison toilets, and in some states, women being coerced by the State into sterilization, in exchange for reduced sentences. She contextualises the modern day situation in America’s history of slavery and oppression, and also in relation to its place in the world. Goodwin shows how prosecutors abuse laws, and medical professionals are complicit in a system that disproportionally impacts the poor and women of color. However, Goodwin warns that these women are just the canaries in the coalmine. Not only is the United States the deadliest country in the developed world for pregnant women, but the severe lack of protections for reproductive rights and motherhood is compounding racial and indigent disparities. Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality, criminal law and civil disobedience. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong’s protests and its politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Patriarchy and Its Discontents: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Routledge, 2022) joins luminaries in contemporary psychoanalysis with pioneers of feminism to provide a timely analysis of the crushing effects of patriarchy and the role that psychoanalysis can play in moving us into a future defined by mutuality and respect. Departing from the contemporary psychoanalytic view that the socio-political and intrapsychic are inextricably linked, contributors use psychoanalysis as a tool to demystify and even dismantle patriarchy, while also examining how our theories, practices, and institutions have been implicated in it. The issues under examination here include important and often under-theorized topics such as institutional responses to boundary violations, the search for a black-feminist psychoanalytic theory, patriarchal enactments within the trans community, the persistence of patriarchy within contemporary psychoanalysis, and the impacts of patriarchy on diverse patient populations and ways to address this clinically. This book represents the first anthology comprised of voices from both within and outside the psychoanalytic realm, outlining a contemporary feminist psychoanalysis for both an analytic and non-analytic audience. It is invaluable for both psychoanalysts and for those in gender studies wishing to draw on psychoanalytic thinking. About the editors: Jean Petrucelli is a training and supervising analyst, director and co-founder of the Eating Disorders, Compulsions and Addictions Service (EDCAS), a one-year certificate program, and founder and chair of the Conference Advisory Board (CAB) at the William Alanson White Institute. Sarah Schoen is a training and supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, faculty and supervisor at the Eating Disorders, Compulsions and Addictions Program at the William Alanson White Institute, and clinical professor of Psychology at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Naomi Snider is a psychoanalyst in New York City and a graduate of the William Alanson White Institute’s Certificate Program in Psychoanalysis. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Alan McGowan delves into Franz Boas’s dual identity as both a scientist and a political activist, shedding light on how his work transcended academic boundaries to make a profound impact on society. In The Political Activism of Anthropologist Franz Boas, Citizen Scientist (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2024), McGowan provides a comprehensive overview of Boas’s career, from his groundbreaking research on cultural relativism to his advocacy for social justice and racial equality. By drawing on a wealth of primary sources and historical documents, he paints a vivid portrait of Boas as a multifaceted figure whose work was deeply intertwined with his political beliefs. Uncovering the intricate connection between his scientific endeavors and political beliefs, McGowan illuminates how Boas used his platform as an anthropologist to challenge societal norms and advocate for those on the fringes. Furthermore, the book offers valuable insights into the broader implications of Boas’s legacy. By emphasizing Boas’s commitment to antiracism, cultural relativism, and social justice, the author underscores the enduring relevance of Boas’s ideas in contemporary discussions on race, identity, and inequality. McGowan’s insightful analysis and engaging narrative style make this book a valuable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the intersection of science, politics, and social change. Alan H. McGowan is Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at The New School. Prior to coming to The New School, he founded and was president of the Gene Media Forum, an arm of the Newhouse School of Journalism at Syracuse University. Previously, he was for twenty years the president of the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information, a major bridge between the scientific community and the media. His research interests focus on the intersection between science and technology and social issues, including ethics, politics, and the economy. Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

An interview with Prof. Salman Sayyid on one of the theoretical constructs that underpins Critical Muslim Studies: Post-Positivism. Interviewer: Hizer Mir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Amrita Ghosh's book Kashmir's Necropolis: Literary, Cultural, and Visual Texts (Lexington Books, 2023) is an interdisciplinary book that studies literary texts, film, photography, and art to understand the different forms of violence represented in the cultural productions from and on Kashmir. The author argues that selected texts present how the long conflict in the postcolonial nation-state transforms the Kashmiri body, the space, setting, the relationship between the subject and its natural world under different forms of violence. Each chapter showcases a form of representational and textual violence that emphasizes the shifts from biopolitical to necropolitical violence and also includes specific forms of violence such as epicolonialism, horrorism, and hauntings in Kashmir’s landscape. The book also delves into how the concepts of agency, resistance, and resilience in these different texts necessitate new poetics of looking at Kashmir. The conflicted space of Kashmir has always been located within the politics of representation and this book investigates a problem in taxonomy within postcolonial discourses to articulate unique forms of violence in such a conflicted space. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

It is widely acknowledged that the United States is in the grip of an enduring housing crisis. It is less frequently recognized that this crisis amounts to more than there being an insufficient supply of adequate shelter. It rather is tied to a range of other forms of social and economic vulnerability – and many of these forms of vulnerability impede a citizen’s capacity to function as a full member of society. What’s more, the familiar terms we deploy in discussing the housing crisis – gentrification, integration, segregation, and so on – stand in need of philosophical clarification. In Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2024), Ronald R. Sundstrom draws upon tools derived from moral philosophy, political theory, and urban studies to provide the beginning of a comprehensive analysis of justice in “social-spatial arrangements.” He proposes a liberal-egalitarian and reconstructive, yet pragmatic, approach to addressing the challenges posed by our country’s legacy of unjust housing policies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

This field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology. Consisting of fourteen original essays by both distinguished and new voices, Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures (Duke UP, 2024) advances a vision of queer anthropology grounded in decolonial, abolitionist, Black feminist, transnational, postcolonial, Indigenous, and queer of color approaches. Critically assessing both anthropology’s queer innovations and its colonialist legacies, contributors highlight decades of work in queer anthropology; challenge the boundaries of anthropology’s traditional methodologies, forms, and objects of study; and forge a critical, queer of color, decolonizing queer anthropology that unsettles anthropology’s normative epistemologies. At a moment of revitalized calls to reckon with the white supremacist and settler colonial logics that continue to shape anthropology, this volume advances an anthropology accountable to the vitality of queer and trans life. Contributors. Jafari Sinclair Allen, Tom Boellstorff, Erin L. Durban, Elijah Adiv Edelman, Lyndon K. Gill, K. Marshall Green, Brian A. Horton, Nikki Lane, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Shaka McGlotten, Scott L. Morgensen, Kwame Otu, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Lucinda Ramberg, Sima Shakhsari, Savannah Shange, Anne Spice, Margot Weiss, Ara Wilson Margot Weiss is Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she directs the cluster in Queer Studies. Her research, teaching, and writing move between queer theory and anthropology. She is the author of the award-winning Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality and editor of Queer Then and Now and Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures. Past president of the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA), she serves on the board of CLAGS: The Center for LGBT/Queer Studies and the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA). She is a founding member of the Wesleyan University Chapter of the AAUP. Clayton Jarrard is an incoming graduate student at NYU's XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program and a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Clayton is also a host for the Un/Livable Cultures podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What is social mobility? In Social Mobility (Polity Press, 2023), Anthony Heath, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Yaojun Li, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, explore and explain this concept, setting out why the idea matters for both social scientists and the general reader. The book draws on a huge range of research, outlining the history of social mobility research, discussing central theories and approaches in sociology and economics, and detailing international comparisons and trends. The book highlights how social mobility is shaped by gender and ethnicity, along with the role of social class. Ultimately the book helps to explain who gets ahead in society and why; as a result the book will be essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in how society works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Poverty is big business in America. The federal government spends about $900 billion a year on programs that directly or disproportionately impact poor Americans, including antipoverty programs such as the earned income tax credit, Medicaid, and affordable housing vouchers and subsidies. States and local governments spend tens of billions more. Ironically, these enormous sums fuel the “corporate poverty complex,” a vast web of hidden industries and entrenched private-sector interests that profit from the bureaucracies regulating the lives of the poor. From bail bondsmen to dialysis providers to towing companies, their business models depend on exploiting low-income Americans, and their political influence ensures a thriving set of industries where everyone profits except the poor, while U.S. taxpayers foot the bill. In Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich off America’s Poor (The New Press, 2024), veteran journalist Anne Kim investigates the multiple industries that infiltrate almost every aspect of the lives of the poor—health care, housing, criminal justice, and nutrition. She explains how these businesses are aided by public policies such as the wholesale privatization of government services and the political influence these industries wield over lawmakers and regulators. Supported by original investigative reporting on the lesser-known players profiting from the antipoverty industry, Poverty for Profit adds a crucial dimension to our understanding of how structural inequality and structural racism function today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020) anthropologist and activist Sa’ed Atshan explores the Palestinian LGBTQ movement and offers a window into the diverse community living both in historic Palestine and in diaspora. His timely and urgent account contends that the movement has been subjected to an “empire of critique,” which has inhibited its growth and undermines the fight against homophobia in the region and beyond. On the one hand, explains Atshan, queer Palestinians must contend with the harsh realities of patriarchal nationalism, homophobia and heteronormativity, Israeli occupation, dehumanizing discourses such as ‘pinkwashing,’ and the legacies of western imperialism. At the same time, Atshan argues that critiques against such issues – leveled by academics, journalists, and even queer activists – have contributed to a stifling ideological purism that has put activists on the defensive and alienates some queer Palestinians. Along with a succinct presentation of the immense challenges faced by the LGBTQ-identifying Palestinians, Atshan highlights Palestinian agency, ingenuity, and resilience. He considers how progressive social movements around the world can navigate the often fraught and complex dynamics of intersectional activism, and leaves his readers with a vision of a diverse queer Palestinian movement capable of “radically reimagining possible futures.” Sa’ed Atshan is an assistant professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. Joshua Donovan is a History PhD candidate and Core Preceptor at Columbia University. His dissertation examines competing conceptions of identity and subjectivity within the Antiochian Greek Orthodox Christian community in Syria, Lebanon, and the diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

On this episode of International Horizons, Francesco Duina, Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Bates College and Luca Storti, Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Turin in Italy and a Research Fellow of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, discuss the rise of inequalities around the globe and the divergent attitudes towards them since 1970. How can those inequalities be broken down? In this week’s episode, Duina and Storti preview their book-in-progress on The Social Acceptance of Inequality, and they examine four types of logic leading us to accept inequalities in today’s world. Not surprisingly, the concept of meritocracy plays a major role in our thinking about contemporary inequality, although perhaps more so in the United States than in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh (U Minnesota Press, 2022) examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh. Bringing a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not only as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Focusing on relations among work, gender, and global capital's targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women's aspirations for the "good life" not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love and sexual fulfillment that help them momentarily forget the precarity of their existence under the shadow of capital. Through richly detailed ethnographic studies, this innovative and beautifully written book examines the making and unmaking of these women's wants and desires, loves and tribulations, hopes and despairs, and triumphs and struggles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green-washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. Tad DeLay's Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change (Verso, 2024) draws on the latest climatology, the first shoots of an energy transition, critical theory, Earth’s paleoclimate history, and trends in border violence to answer the most pressing question of our age: Why do we continue to squander the short time we have left? The symptoms suggest society’s inability to adjust is profound. Near Portland, militias incapable of accepting that the world is warming respond to a wildfire by hunting for imaginary left-wing arsonists. Europe erects nets in the Aegean Sea to capture migrants fleeing drought and war. An airline claims to be carbon neutral thanks to bogus cheap offsets. Drone strikes hit people living along the aridity line. Yes, Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide warming the Earth was already understood before the American Civil War. Will capitalists ever voluntarily walk away from hundreds of trillions of dollars in fossil fuels unless they are forced to do so? And, if not, who will apply the necessary pressure? Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

An Introduction to Language and Social Justice: What Is, What Has Been, and What Could Be (Routledge, 2023) is designed to provide the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the intersections of language, inequality, and social justice in North America, using the applied linguistic anthropology (ALA) framework. Written in accessible language and at a level equally legible for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, this text connects theory and practice by sketching out relevant historical background, introducing theoretical and conceptual underpinnings, illustrating with case studies, discussing a wide range of key issues, and explaining research methodologies. Using a general-to-specialized content structure, the expert authors then show readers how to apply these principles and lessons in communities in the real world, to become advocates and change agents in the realm of language and social justice. With an array of useful pedagogical resources and practical tools including discussion questions and activities, reflections and vignettes, further reading and a glossary, along with additional online resources for instructors, this is the essential text for students from multiple perspectives across linguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

During the COVID pandemic, billions of dollars in relief aid was sent out to help us ride out the storm, although many people who struggled through it might scratch their heads at such a number, having seen little of it make any concrete impact in their own lives. This discrepancy is indicative of the underlying problem with the contemporary care economy, a series of federal and state programs, healthcare facilities and NGO’s, all trying to bend the needs of those under their care to the mechanisms and incentives laid out by capitalism. The result is a massive apparatus that regularly fails to fulfill its supposed intentions, leaving workers and those in need of help in precarious and often dangerous situations. This apparatus is untangled and explained in clear detail by Premilla Nadasen in her book Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2023). Informed by both her work as a historian and as a political activist, she manages to untangle and explain why the massive apparatus regularly fails to fulfill its purpose. She also outlines offramps, forms of resistance that workers and activists have taken to develop alternative anticapitalist forms of care that might someday allow us to truly flourish together. Premilla Nadasen is a professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the co-director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is also the author of Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

For 40 years, this classic text has taken the issue of economic inequality seriously and asked: Why are our prisons filled with the poor? Why aren't the tools of the criminal justice system being used to protect Americans from predatory business practices and to punish well-off people who cause widespread harm? This new edition continues to engage readers in important exercises of critical thinking: Why has the U.S. relied so heavily on tough crime policies despite evidence of their limited effectiveness, and how much of the decline in crime rates can be attributed to them? Why does the U.S. have such a high crime rate compared to other developed nations, and what could we do about it? Are the morally blameworthy harms of the rich and poor equally translated into criminal laws that protect the public from harms on the streets and harms from the suites? How much class bias is present in the criminal justice system-both when the rich and poor engage in the same act, and when the rich use their leadership of corporations to perpetrate mass victimization? The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (Routledge, 2023) shows readers that much of what goes on in the criminal justice system violates citizens' sense of basic fairness. It presents extensive evidence from mainstream data that the criminal justice system does not function in the way it says it does nor in the way that readers believe it should. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke UP, 2023), Anjali Arondekar refuses the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality, and that the deficit of our minoritized pasts can be redeemed through acquisitions of lost pasts. Instead, Arondekar theorizes the radical abundance of sexuality through the archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj—a caste-oppressed devadasi collective in South Asia—that are plentiful and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary. For Arondekar, abundance is inextricably linked to the histories of subordinated groups in ways that challenge narratives of their constant devaluation. Summoning abundance over loss upends settled genealogies of historical recuperation and representation and works against the imperative to fix sexuality within wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and precarity. Multigeneric and multilingual, transregional and historically supple, Abundance centers sexuality within area, post/colonial, and anti/caste histories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

A powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance. Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (U California Press, 2024) tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Sunaura Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires. A full transcript of the interview is available for accessibility. Sunaura Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Society and Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor is a scholar and artist who works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental humanities, animal studies, environmental justice, feminist science studies, and art practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In his latest book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (W. W. Norton, 2024), Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz rethinks the nature of freedom and its relationship to capitalism. While many agree that freedom is good and we want more of it, we don’t agree about what it is, whose freedom we’re talking about, or what outcomes we desire. Stiglitz asks the question: whose freedom are we talking about, and what happens when one person’s freedom means a loss of freedom for someone else? Narratives of neoliberalism have been accepted as gospel despite decades of research showing that less regulation and more trust in the 'hidden hand' of free market economics do not produce greater prosperity or freedom for most individuals. Stiglitz examines how unregulated markets reduce economic opportunities for majorities by prioritizing the freedom of corporations and wealthy individuals over that of individuals, resulting in the siphoning wealth from the many to ensure the freedom of the few, from property and intellectual rights to education and opportunity. The Road to Freedom re-evaluates of what constitutes a good society and provides a roadmap to achieve it. Recommended reading: The Groves of Academe by Mary McCarthy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

We have increasingly sophisticated ways of acquiring and communicating knowledge, but efforts to spread this knowledge often encounter resistance to evidence. The phenomenon of resistance to evidence, while subject to thorough investigation in social psychology, is acutely under-theorised in the philosophical literature. Mona Simion's Resistance to Evidence (Cambridge UP, 2024) is concerned with positive epistemology: it argues that we have epistemic obligations to update and form beliefs on available and undefeated evidence. In turn, our resistance to easily available evidence is unpacked as an instance of epistemic malfunctioning. Simion develops a full positive, integrated epistemological picture in conjunction with novel accounts of evidence, defeat, norms of inquiry, permissible suspension, and disinformation. Her book is relevant for anyone with an interest in the nature of evidence and justified belief and in the best ways to avoid the high-stakes practical consequences of evidence resistance in policy and practice. Mona Simion is a philosopher. She is professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow where she is also deputy director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre. Simion's work focuses on issues in epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of language, and feminist philosophy. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age (U California Press, 2024)​ explores the creative range of Black digital users and their responses to varying forms of oppression, utilizing cultural, communicative, political, and technological threads both on and offline. Raven Maragh-Lloyd demonstrates how Black users strategically rearticulate their responses to oppression in ways that highlight Black publics’ historically rich traditions and reveal the shifting nature of both dominance and resistance, particularly in the digital age. Through case studies and interviews, Maragh-Lloyd reveals the malleable ways resistance can take shape and the ways Black users artfully demonstrate such modifications of resistance through strategies of survival, reprieve, and community online. Each chapter grounds itself in a resistance strategy, such as Black humor, care, or archiving, to show the ways that Black publics reshape strategies of resistance over time and across media platforms. Linking singular digital resistance movements while arguing for Black publics as strategic content creators who connect resistance strategies from our past to suit our present needs, Black Networked Resistance encourages readers to create and cultivate lasting communities necessary for social and political change by imagining a future of joy, community, and agency through their digital media practices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The left views alienation as something to be resisted or overcome, but could it actually form the basis of our emancipation? We often think of our existential and political projects as attempts to overcome or eradicate alienation: therapists imagine that they help patients to attain self-identity; political revolutionaries strive for a society in which they can live in harmony with others; ecological activists work toward a future form of existence in touch with the rest of the natural world. In Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves (Repeater, 2024), Todd McGowan offers a completely different take on alienation, claiming that the effort to overcome it is not a radical response to the current state of things but a failure to see the constitutive power of alienation for all of us. Instead of trying to overcome alienation and accede to an unalienated existence, it argues, we should instead redeem alienation as an existential and political program. Engaging with Shakespeare’s great tragedies, contemporary films such as Don’t Worry Darling, and even what occurs on a public bus, as well as thinkers such as Descartes, Hegel, and Marx, McGowan provides a concrete elaboration of how alienation frees people from their situation. Relying on the tradition of dialectical thought and psychoanalytic theory, Embracing Alienation reveals a new way of conceiving how we measure progress — or even if progress should be the aim at all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In his latest book At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor, and Critical Ecology in Modern China (Duke UP, 2022), Ban Wang uses an ecocritical lens to examine anthropocentrism, technoscientific hubris, and ecologically destructive modes of production in modern China. Analyzing modern discourse, literature, film, and science fiction, Wang asserts that the domination of nature and labor under capitalism and technocrats is the culprit of ecological crises and human alienation. Alternatively, Wang argues, utopianisms of nonalienated labor keep alive the ideals of resonance between humans and Earth. Ban Wang is the William Haas Endowed Chair Professor in Chinese Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His major publications include China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision (Duke UP, 2022), Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford UP, 2004), History and Memory: A Critique of Global Modernity (Oxford UP, 2004), Narrative Perspective and Irony in Chinese and American Fiction (Edwin Mellen, 2002), and The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century (Stanford UP, 1997). Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines (Duke UP, 2023), Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability that marked Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as lacking in civilization and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. In this way, mestizaje allowed for supposedly superior mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism. By bringing disability studies together with studies of colonialism and queer-of-color critique, Coráñez Bolton extends theorizations of mestizaje beyond the United States and Latin America while considering how Filipinx and Filipinx American thought fundamentally enhances understandings of the colonial body and the racial histories of disability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

America's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don't advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their White counterparts, hitting a "Black ceiling." Sociologist and law professor Kevin Woodson knows firsthand what life at a top law firm feels like as a Black man. Examining the experiences of more than one hundred Black professionals at prestigious firms, Woodson discovers that their biggest obstacle in the workplace isn't explicit bias but racial discomfort, or the unease Black employees feel in workplaces that are steeped in Whiteness. He identifies two types of racial discomfort: social alienation, the isolation stemming from the cultural exclusion Black professionals experience in White spaces, and stigma anxiety, the trepidation they feel over the risk of discriminatory treatment. While racial discomfort is caused by America's segregated social structures, it can exist even in the absence of racial discrimination, which highlights the inadequacy of the unconscious bias training now prevalent in corporate workplaces. Firms must do more than prevent discrimination, Woodson explains, outlining the steps that firms and Black professionals can take to ease racial discomfort. Offering a new perspective on a pressing social issue, The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a vital resource for leaders at preeminent firms, Black professionals and students, managers within mostly White organizations, and anyone committed to cultivating diverse workplaces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Amy Schiller's The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It (Melville House, 2023) makes an attempt to rescue philanthropy from its progressive decline into vanity projects that drive wealth inequality, so that it may support human flourishing as originally intended. The word “philanthropy” today makes people think big money—Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, and Andrew Carnegie come to mind. The scope of suffering in the world seems to demand an industry of giving, and yet for all the billions that are dispensed, the wealthy never seem to lose any of their money and nothing seems to change. Journalist, academic and consultant Schiller shows how we get out of this stalemate by evaluating the history of philanthropy from the ideas of St. Augustine to the work of Lebron James. She argues philanthropy’s contemporary tendency to maintain obscene inequality and reduce every cause to dehumanizing technocratic terms is unacceptable, while maintaining an optimism about the soul and potential of philanthropy in principle. For philanthropy to get back to its literal roots—the love of humanity—Schiller argues that philanthropy can no longer be premised around basic survival. Public institutions must assume that burden so that philanthropy can shift its focus to initiatives that allow us to flourish into happier, more fulfilled human beings. Philanthropy has to get out of the business of saving lives if we are to save humanity. Amy Schiller is a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College in the Society of Fellows. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Anna Dyjach is a senior at Deerfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023) by Dr. Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming carefully examines the profound transformations happening in both public and private arenas of gender relations. It also draws critical attention to the simultaneous and potent challenges that have risen in response. The authors look to large-scale phenomena in this contemporary study and address how electoral politics and the #MeToo movement are reshaping everyday life. This gender revolution has led to a culture in which women, and increasing numbers of men, refuse to accept traditional gender norms and gender inequalities. People of all genders no longer tolerate abuses of power in politics or in their interpersonal relationships. Despite vigorous resistance, women are seizing power and refusing to back down, in ways both large and small. The authors note on the one hand that people of all genders in support of these transformations are voting for progressive candidates, engaging on social media, and making their interpersonal relationships more equal. On the other hand, they document considerable backlash and contestation, as some people are resisting these changes and creating adversarial gender divisions. Probing across these issues, the book develops an analysis of gendered social and cultural change that reveals how movement ideas diffuse into broader culture. Gender Revolution presents a vibrant and essential study for a moment marked by significant changes to attitudes, beliefs, and views surrounding gender and gender relations and will appeal to readers interested in the scholarly study of gender, society, politics, media, law, and culture. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory