New Books in Critical Theory

How did American elites change the meaning of Art? In Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts (Princeton University Press, 2019), Jennifer C. Lena, associate professor of arts administration at Colombia University, charts the history of American arts and cultural policy, interrogating the institutions, practices, and technologies underpinning the development of American Art. The book has rich case study material of over 100 years of American cultural policy and practice, as well as a detailed sociological understanding of institution building and cultural consumption patterns. It both celebrates and critiques key moments, organisations, and actors, as well as giving new insights into our own, contemporary, elites, their taste practices, and social inequalities. The book will be essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in the arts. 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 the future, and what is the past, of the African American Museum? In Diversity and Philanthropy at African American Museums: Black Renaissance(Routledge, 2019), Patricia Banks, an associate professor of sociology at Mount Holyoke College, explores the rise of the African American museum and its patrons and philanthropists. Combining sociology of culture with organisational and institutional analysis, the book offers both contemporary and historical analysis of some of the most important cultural institutions in America. Crucially, the book restates the importance of understanding race to sociology of culture, particularly in understanding elites. The book also reveals the changing nature of giving, with younger patrons expecting a different mode of engagement, as well as distinctive political and collecting practices. The book is essential reading across social science and humanities, as well as museum and arts professionals, and anyone interested in contemporary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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

Nazia Kazi’s Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) is a brilliant and powerful meditation on the intersection and interaction of Islamophobia, racism, and U.S. imperial state power. This book seeks to reorient our understanding of Islamophobia from a phenomenon centered on individual attitudes and perceptions of hate, to one which is indelibly entrenched to the structural logics of modern state sovereignty, and to the long-running history of racism in the U.S. Another distinctive feature of this book lies in its sustained and nuanced analysis of liberal Islamophobia in varied social and political domains, that tethers the promise of being categorized as “good Muslim” to the endorsement and celebration of American exceptionalism. Combining methods and perspectives from anthropology, visual studies, race studies, and political studies, this thoroughly interdisciplinary book is also eminently accessible and written beautifully, rendering it particularly suitable for courses on modern Islam, Race and Religion, Islam in America, among many other topics. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. 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 recent UNDP report makes the astonishing claim that India has halved its poverty between 2006 and 2016. Moving us past the rosy picture, Alpa Shah and her co-author's multi-authored, masterful Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st-Century India (Pluto Press, 2017) focuses on those left behind by, and indeed ground down by, India’s much touted growth. Based on intensive fieldwork in multiple locations across India, the book finds that in particular it is India’s ‘untouchables’ (Dalits) and ‘tribals’ (Adivasis) who toil at the bottom of the pyramid in thankless conditions and for little reward. Instead of eradicating inequalities of caste and tribe, the intensification of capitalism has in fact further entrenched them, transforming them into new mechanisms of oppression and accumulation. Analytical rigor paired with lucid prose makes this co-researched and co-authored book indispensable for scholars and citizens concerned with the Global South, inequality, capitalism, economic growth, and social difference. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student at Harvard University with interests in agrarian capitalism in rural Rajasthan. 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 women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries? In Women, Inequality and Media Work (Routledge, 2019), Dr Anne O’Brien, lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University, answers this question with a case study of the Irish media industry. Blending a critical engagement with feminist and media theory with a wealth of empirical material, the book looks at the barriers to women in media occupations. The book highlights the subjectivities within media industries that resist and are responsible for these inequalities, ultimately demanding change in both Irish and Global modes of media production. The book is an important and essential read across a range of academic readers, and for anyone interested in why we have the media we have, and how we can change it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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

The 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought the issues of police violence, racial discrimination, and misogyny to the fore. Jaime Alves’s book the Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows that, from the perspective of Black Brazilians, these forces have deep roots in the nation’s history. Alves makes a powerful contribution to urban anthropology, describing the spatial contours of “Brazilian Apartheid” in Sao Paulo, the role of police violence in the constitution of the city’s racial-spatial order, and the ways that national sovereignty is exercised on individual bodies. Richly ethnographic, The Anti-Black City explores these themes through an account of the lives and activism of black residents of Sao Paulo’s favelas. In this episode, Jaime Alves talks with Jacob Doherty about how his background shaped the research leading to the book, about the entanglement of neoliberal moral government through community and the deployment of police terror, and about his conceptual engagements with Afro-pessimist philosophy. Jaime Alves is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and a research affiliate at the Centro de Estudios Afrodiasporicos at Universidad Icesi, Colombia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin. His work has appeared in the Journal of Black Studies, Antipode, Journal of Latin American Studies, Identities, and Critical Sociology. Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History. 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 tightly argued social and intellectual history of the middle classes in Colombia makes a compelling case for the importance of both transnationalism and gender in the mid-century idea of middle-class-ness. A. Ricardo López-Pedreros' Makers of Democracy: A Transnational History of the Middle Classes in Colombia (Duke University Press, 2019) takes readers through the discursive and ideological creation of the middle classes as necessary to stave off both revolution and oligarchical tyranny in Colombia. As the second half of the book demonstrates, however, members of these middle classes did not always conform to those expectations. The results were tragic, and serve as a cautionary tale in this neoliberal age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall (University of Georgia Press, 2019) is the first full-length critical study of Rev. Dr. Prathia Laura Ann Hall (1940–2002), an undersung leader in both the civil rights movement and African American theology. Freedom faith was the central concept of Hall’s theology: the belief that God created humans to be free and assists and equips those who work for freedom. Hall rooted her work simultaneously in social justice, Christian practice, and womanist thought. Courtney Pace examines Hall’s life and philosophy, particularly through the lens of her civil rights activism, her teaching career, and her ministry as a womanist preacher. Moving along the trajectory of Hall’s life and civic service, Freedom Faith focuses on her intellectual and theological development and her radiating influence on such figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, and the early generations of womanist scholars. Hall was one of the first women ordained in the American Baptist Churches, USA, was the pastor of Mt. Sharon Baptist Church in Philadelphia, and in later life joined the faculty at the Boston University School of Theology as the Martin Luther King Chair in Social Ethics. In activism and ministry, Hall was a pioneer, fusing womanist thought with Christian ethics and visions of social justice. 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 are markets made? In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an assistant professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores the history of the finance industry to understand the role of markets and technologies in contemporary capitalism. The book offers a detailed theoretical engagement with the personalities and technological changes underpinning the modern system of automated finance. It uses the case study of the development of the London Stock Exchange, looking at the social relations embedded in financial markets, before moving to look at the global, American system. Charting the move from trading floors to trading screens, the book considers individuals and broader social systems shaping enabling and constraining behaviour in the world of finance. Overall the book offers a rethinking of the meaning of markets, and is essential reading across social science, history, and management 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

Lacan published his Écrits in 1966, a compilation of his written work up to that middle period in his teaching. Notoriously difficult to read, the editors of the book we’re discussing today describe the Écrits as “an unwieldy, conglomerate ‘urtext’ … not a book at all … but ‘the waste’ of his teaching: elements he didn’t discuss in public … and sensitive points to which his audience would have reacted with reluctance.” It wasn’t until 2007 that, thanks to work of translator Bruce Fink, the complete edition of the Écrits were finally published in English. Now, Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook and Calum Neill have brought us the three volume work, Reading Lacan’s Écrits (Routledge, 2018), which features world renowned Lacanian scholars and clinicians explicating in detailed paragraph-by-paragraph commentary each of the essays in the Écrits. Thanks to this publication, coming to grips with the Écrits in all its complexity has suddenly become possible. Lacan’s cryptic pronouncements are miraculously, lucidly reformulated, revealing them in their original and enlightening contributions to the practice and theory of psychoanalysis. What was involved in putting together this monumental and challenging work of exegesis? What does it say about the Lacanian tradition today — in all its differing styles, emphases and factions? Join us in conversation with Derek, Calum and Stijn as we explore this and more. Jordan Osserman grew up in South Florida and currently calls London home. He received his PhD in gender studies and psychoanalysis from University College London, his MA in psychosocial studies from Birkbeck College, and his BA in womens and gender studies from Dartmouth College. His published work 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

In Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2019), Jinah Kim explores questions of loss, memory, and redress in post WWII Asian diasporic decolonial politics. Through a close analysis of seminal cultural works that range from theory, short stories, film noir, documentaries, plays, and novels, Kim makes legible how Korean and Japanese diasporic communities have experienced U.S. militarism and Japanese colonialism. The concept of melancholia, defined as an unending state of mourning, along with the notion of “dread forwarding,” in which a new trauma can trigger an older one, inducing both a flashback but also a flash forward, is crucial to her reading. This concise yet rich work addresses the question of collective pain brought on by postcolonial loss and trauma. Kim puts geographical, cultural, and temporal spaces in conversation with one another, illuminating the ways in which Asian diasporic communities have negotiated their colonial histories. Laura Ha Reizman is a PhD candidate in Asian Languages & Cultures at UCLA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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

Now Peru is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Duke University Press, 2016), tells the remarkable story of a campesino and indigenous political activist whose career spanned much of Peru’s twentieth century and whose achievements at the local and national level transformed Peruvian peasant politics. Structured as a testimonial biography co-authored by the activist Manuel Llamojha Mitma himself and framed by historian Jaymie Patricia Heilman, this book is a valuable document of both pre-Shining Path indigenous activism and the history of Cold War Peru. Born into a poor Quechua family in a small community in Ayacucho, Llamojha became one of the most powerful peasant activists in the country, responsible for the expansion of the Confederación Campesina del Perú to the national stage in the 1960s and integral to the debates that shaped Peru’s left before the rise of the Shining Path. Although he was a contemporary of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzmán and a participant in Maoist peasant movements, Llamojha was never a member of the party and rejected Shining Path tactics. Nonetheless, like so many on the Peruvian left, Llamojha and his children were caught up in the repression waged against the party, resulting both Llamojha’s disappearance from political life and the death of his youngest son. Llamojha was a consummate storyteller whose lifelong commitment to protecting his community was only matched by the ambitious scope of his political vision. Throughout his life, Llamojha articulated an indigenous identity and a politics of liberation that was expressed through class but not subsumed to it. His life story and political writings alike reflect thoughtful negotiation between the intimate demands of family and community and the national and international struggles for revolution that Peru and Llamojha helped lead. Heilman’s deft organizational choices and thoughtful framing help render Llamojha’s stories intelligible to specialists as well as readers without a strong background in Peruvian history or the history of indigenous activism. This book should be read by anyone interested in Peruvian or Latin American history, the Shining Path, the Cold War, and indigenous activism. Elena McGrath is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Carleton College. She is a historian of race, revolution, and natural resources in the Andes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Bhakti Shringarpure has written a fascinating, multidimensional analysis of the Cold War and decolonization and the often-under-explored connections between these events. In her book, Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (Routledge, 2019), she integrates a variety of disciplinary perspectives while also weaving together the encounters and reverberations between the Cold War and decolonization and the post-colonial experience. This study takes on the political understandings of what transpired during the Cold War period in terms of the bipolar framework and what transpired in the Global South as the formerly occupying powers were leaving countries and areas they had colonized, only to be replaced by many a proxy war or occupation in these same spaces and nations. Shringarpure also makes the connection between the hard power, and hot and cold aspects of the Cold War, with the use of soft power by the western powers, especially the British and United States, to infiltrate aspects of the Anglophone world in ways that are still with us. The second part of the book examines the cultural, literary, and artistic aspects of the Cold War, especially as pursued by western intelligence services. This is an important and engaging study that will interest scholars and students across a host of disciplines. Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-author of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury 2015). She can be found on Twitter @gorenlj. 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 the social role of data? In The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception (Sage, 2019), David Beer, a professor of sociology at the University of York, considers this question by introducing the concept of the data gaze. The book is the third in Beer’s loose trilogy of work on data. It draws on Foucault’s work in The Birth of the Clinic to think through various theoretical and empirical examples of how the data gaze functions. The book considers theories of temporality and acceleration, along with the practices of analysts, engineers, and organisations in data capitalism, with the aim of questioning the objectivity assumed to be inherent in ‘data’. It will be essential reading to anyone seeking to understand contemporary, data, society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Almost 30 years ago, following the lead of scholars and thinkers of color and from the global South, anthropologist Faye Harrison and some of her colleagues published Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation. Harrison asked her readers: "How can anthropological knowledge advance the interests of the world’s majority during this period of ongoing crisis and uncertainty?" The lives of many have become even more precarious in the ensuing decades, among them people who have emigrated to the United States in search of greater economic stability. Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Duke University Press, 2019) responds directly to Harrison's call. The book explores ways in which ethnography, as practiced by people who have historically been objects of ethnographic study, can yield transformative and liberatory results. During former President Obama's second term, immigrant activists Lucía López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García conducted ethnographic research on the effects of the securitization of immigration on the undocumented people of a New Jersey community, in collaboration with Professors Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein of Rutgers University. The work of these four people on the project is captured in their coauthorship of the book. During their work on the study, Lucía and Mirian frequently were able to educate and exhort those they interviewed to exercise their rights under state and federal law. And the four authors collaborated on and performed in a play based on Mirian's work injury and successful court case. The entire play is available to the reader in the book in both English and Spanish and it is the authors' hope that it will be performed for the education and inspiration of other undocumented people. The book features illustrations by Peter Quach. Amy E. Brown, who is a cohost of the Critical Theory channel, is a writer and liberal arts enthusiast. Her professional and academic background includes technical communication, law, and history. She tweets occasionally at @AmyEBrown3 and you can also find her on LinkedIn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Daniel Nemser’s Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico(University of Texas Press, 2017) examines the long history of how Spanish imperial rule depended upon spatial concentration – the gathering of people and things into centralized spaces – to control populations and consolidate power. Through four case studies spanning nearly 300 years of Spanish rule in colonial Mexico, Nemser illustrates how different modes of concentration -- centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections – reflected the prerogatives and imperatives of domination and expropriation. Compellingly, Infrastructures of Race argues that these spatial infrastructures and strategies were central and instrumental in the creation of racial identities and their inscription upon colonial subjects. Through designed and engineered spaces, racial identities were lived, sensed, and experienced, and as the built environment faded into barely noticeable infrastructure, race as well became naturalized. Infrastructures of Race provides essential historical background for present-day interrogations of how infrastructures – from aged water pipes to search engine algorithms – reinforce persistent racial inequalities. The challenges of de-racializing these often unnoticed foundations require a deep understanding of how race became so imbricated with technological environments. Through Nemser’s case studies, we can better apprehend the hundreds of years of oppression that have been built into our material lives. Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

I am a child of the so-called transition in Bulgaria and growing-up I could never understand why my parents and grandparents would spend our family gatherings talking about the socialist past. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much socialism and its end are imprinted on my grandparents’, my parents’ and my generation and that such dramatic changes cannot just be bygones. Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent many years digging into the layers of East European socialist and post-socialist experience trying to give voice to more nuanced narratives about this time, and I was very happy to once again have the chance to talk with her, this time about her book Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism (Duke University Press, 2017). In this very personal book with essays and short stories, Ghodsee describes the post-socialist realities of the victims of the greedy neoliberalism that has dismantled their social safety nets and expresses her frustration about the continuing tendency to reduce the twentieth-century East European state socialisms to Stalinism and the Gulags. While acknowledging the many crimes committed in the name of the communist ideal by these regimes, she insists that there were some good aspects and policies from which our present governments could learn, if they would be willing to leave aside the oversimplified and blackwashed tale they cherish so much. “After thirty of years of nursing this terrible hangover from the experience of twentieth century state socialism in Eastern Europe maybe it’s time that we take a little sip and start to clear our heads and figure out where we go from here” Ghodsee says. I invite you to listen and read what she has to say about our need for the proverbial hair of a dog* to sober us up after the heavy drinking of socialism in the twentieth century. Maybe a little bit more of the same could paradoxically help? Check out my previous interview with Kristen Ghodsee about her most recent book Second World, Second Sex and Ghodsee’s blog - https://kristenghodsee.com/blog *Note for ESL listeners: the proverb “a hair of the dog” is a shortening of “a hair of the dog that bit you” and it is when you drink a little bit of alcohol to cure a hangover. It comes from an old belief that when you are bitten by a rabid dog, you need to take a medicine containing a hair of the dog that bit you to be cured of rabies. Marina Kadriu is an international MA student in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Canada 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 happens when scholars approach the category of “indigenous” without presupposing its otherness? Edited by Paula López Caballero and Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo, Beyond Alterity: Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2018) is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that take such an approach to studying indigenous communities and the concept of indigeneity. As the editors explain in the podcast, the indigenous subject has been often assumed to be defined by difference, so scholars tend to overlook the existence of practices, ideas, and politics that do not align with preconceived, essentialized ideas about indigenous alterity. This book examines, on the one hand, the range of lived experiences within indigenous communities, and on the other, the ongoing construction of the category of “indigenous.” Its first section uncovers ways in which indigenous communities’ practices and politics were more similar to than distinct from those of their nonindigenous counterparts. In the podcast, Acevedo-Rodrigo discusses her chapter on the role of Spanish-language schools in indigenous towns during the Porfiriato. The second section explores the changing, debated meanings of “the indigenous” in Mexico in various fields of scientific inquiry. López Caballero synthesizes her findings on anthropological debates on what constituted the indigenous in the 1940s. The editors also make reference to the other contributions to this edited volume on topics from property rights to genomic research. Rachel Grace Newman is joining Smith College in July 2019 as Lecturer in the History of the Global South. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Why does Korean cultural policy matter? In Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State (Routledge, 2018), Hye-Kyung Lee, a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings College, London, demonstrates the importance of South Korea is both an example in comparative cultural policy, and as a fascinating case study in its own right. The book offers historical analysis, as well as a major theoretical contribution in the form of the ‘new patron state’. The book charts the development and changes in cultural policy, from the project of national ‘modernisation’ to the Korean Wave. Thinking through questions of state theory and neoliberalism, as well as the role of culture in democracy, the book will be essential reading across the arts and social sciences. 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 Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Duke University Press 2018), Dorinne Kondo brings together critical race studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis and her critically keen awareness of the politics and potential of theatre production and reception to ask how theatre ‘makes, unmakes and remakes’ race. Building on over 20 years of experience as an ethnographer, dramaturg and playwriter, Kondo exposes the racial structures that are mutually constitutive of the theatre specifically, and the arts more generally. So doing, she attends to the economic forces and representational practices that have not only enabled the affective violence through which the theatre so often operates; she also draws attention to how these forces and practices can produce the grounds for theatre’s restorative and transformative potential. Dorinne Kondo is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on cultural theory, performance, aesthetics and politics, cross-racial identification/ multiracial collaboration, modes of embodiment, ethnography and genre, the integration of "creative" and "critical" writing. She is also the author of About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, and Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these relate to formations of nation, gender, sexuality and religion. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology form Oxford University, and is the author of Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017). 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 historian Nick Estes traces two centuries of Indigenous-led resistance and anti-colonial struggle. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019) moves from settler colonialism and Indian Wars to the front lines of indigenous climate activism today. He places the #NoDAPL movement, to block Dakota Access oil pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota in 2016, squarely within the tradition of indigenous resistance to settler erasure. The book weaves historical analysis into intergenerational stories and demonstrates that Standing Rock’s demands for native sovereignty and liberation are as much the outcome of history as they a harbinger of things to come. Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He teaches courses on modern United States history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. He is completing a book on energy development in the American West. @rydriskelltate 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, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an almost revolutionary work of theory and critique: Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019). Ornamentalism offers arguably the first sustained theory of the yellow woman and, beyond that, a nuanced reflection on the way in which women of color are subjects-turned-into-things but that not every woman of color becomes-thing in the same way. Cheng insists on the term ornamentalism as both a lever of critique and of emancipation, resisting the easy distinction between person/thing and skin/substance to investigate how a theory of radical style offers ontological possibilities for thriving among injury. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) such as in vitro fertilization and surrogacy have been critically examined within philosophy, particularly by feminists and bioethicists, but the role of race—both in how the technologies are used and in the effects that they are having—has received less attention. In The Assisted Reproduction of Race (Indiana University Press, 2018), Camisha Russell undertakes this critical analysis. While there is a robust scientific consensus that there is no meaningful genetic basis for race, Russell’s analysis of the role of race in ARTs reveals that when it comes to producing kinship, race is still doing a great deal of work. Further, by arguing that race itself is a technology, Russell shows how race is both produced and productive, historically, as well as in everyday practices, techniques, and choices. While this analysis focuses on what race does in the contemporary realm of ARTS, it illuminates the role of race, in the past and now, in constructing social reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

More than 70 years after its founding, with Narendra Modi's authoritarian Hindu nationalists in government, is the dream of Indian democracy still alive and well? Indian Democracy: Origins, Trajectories, Contestations (Pluto Press, 2019), a prescient collection of essays, dialogues and commentary from scholars, activists and journalists, tries to come up with answers. India's pluralism has always posed a formidable challenge to its democracy, with many believing that a clash of identities based on region, language, caste, religion, ethnicity and tribe would bring about its demise. With the meteoric rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party, its solidity is once again called into question: is Modi's Hindu majoritarianism an anti-democratic attempt to transform India into a monolithic Hindu nation from which minorities and dissidents are forcibly excluded? With examinations of the way that class and caste power shaped the making of India's postcolonial democracy, the role of feminism, the media, and the public sphere in sustaining and challenging democracy, this book interrogates the contradictions at the heart of the Indian democratic project, examining its origins, trajectories and contestations. Alf Gunvald Nilsen is Professor of Sociology at University of Pretoria. He is the author of Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (Routledge, 2010), We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Pluto Press, 2014), and Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland(Cambridge University Press, 2018). Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo. He is the author of Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India (Anthem Press, 2018), and the co-editor of several books on Indian society and politics. Anand Vaidya is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Reed College. Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work 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

In her book Solidarity in Practice: Moral Protest and the US Security State (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Chandra Russo explores how solidarity activists contest the practices of the US security state both within its borders and abroad. Russo follows three social movement organizations (The School of the Americas Watch, the Migrant Trail Walk, and Witness Against Torture) that combine high-risk tactics with the practice of solidarity witnessing. She explores how, through their involvement, solidarity activists put into question Human Rights violations perpetrated by the United States government while going themselves through a process of self-transformation. This book should be of interest for those wanting to know more about how some Americans question the atrocities that their government does, as well as scholars interested in the complexities of solidarity mobilization. Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. 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, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Bryan McCann (he/his)--Associate Professor of Communication at Louisiana State University--on a dope new work of cultural criticism The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (University of Alabama Press, 2017). The Mark of Criminality positions the work of key gangsta rap artists--Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur--as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable. McCann argues that, among other well-circulated meanings, the mark of criminality was a source of power, credibility, and revenue. By understanding gangsta rap as a potent, if deeply imperfect, enactment of the mark of criminality, we can better understand how crime is always a site of struggle over meaning. 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, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Clare Daniel (she/hers)--Administrative Assistant Professor of Women’s Leadership at Tulane University--on her judicious new book Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era from University of Massachusetts Press (2017). Mediating Morality is a contemporary exploration of the construction of teen pregnancy in legal events, activism, media campaigns, television, film, and across many domains of popular-political culture since the dismantling of the welfare state, which Daniel definitively places in the year 1996. Daniel argues that these domains of public thought have merged to reconstruct teen pregnancy as a privatized and deeply personal issue of moral failure--what Daniel, following Lauren Berlant, describes as intimate citizenship--rather than symptomatic of ineffective policies that reproduce racist, classist, and sexist structures of inequality. In addition to engaging readings of popular culture texts such as the movie The Pregnancy Pact and pregnancy prevention campaigns, Mediating Morality is also closely attuned to the legal and political events since 1996 that have authorized and capitalized upon an approach to teen pregnancy that absolves the state of responsibility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Dan HoSang and Joe Lowndes’ new book,Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) documents the changing politics of race and class in the age of Trump across a broad range of phenomena, showing how new forms of racialization work to alter the economic protections of whiteness while promoting some conservatives of color as models of the neoliberal regime. Through careful analyses of diverse political sites and conflicts—racially charged elections, attacks on public-sector unions, new forms of white precarity, the rise of black and brown political elites, militia uprisings, multiculturalism on the far right—they highlight new, interwoven deployments of race in the ascendant age of inequality. Using the concept of “racial transposition,” the authors demonstrate how racial meanings and signification can be transferred from one group to another to shore up both neoliberalism and racial hierarchy. This podcast was hosted by Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. You can follow her on Twitter @gorenlj 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 the new book #Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (University of Michigan Press, 2019), Abigail De Kosnik and Keith Feldman bring together a broad array of chapters that dive into multiple perspectives on social media engagement, especially around hashtag activism and the ways that individuals think about and interact with others via Twitter in regard to social movements and political involvement. As the authors note, “#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world.” This text came out of The Color of New Media working group at the University of California at Berkeley and the contributors come from a variety of academic backgrounds and disciplines, making this a particularly interdisciplinary approach to considering and understanding a wide variety of social movements, social engagement, political discourse, and active use of hashtagging and Twitter. The chapters include examinations of the global use of Twitter in India and Africa; the rise of and then subsequent response/backlash to black Twitter; and the way that Twitter has been used to target minoritarian groups who have established connections and communities via Twitter and social media. This is a fascinating and diverse book, bringing together different voices, studies, and analysis, all examining how Twitter and #hashtagging has grown up, evolved, and essentially provided a platform for political rhetoric, engagement, and also silencing. #identity will appeal to scholars in many different disciplines including sociology, political science, media studies, gender and women’s studies, Queer studies, postcolonial studies, African-American Studies, American Studies, global studies, and more. This book is available open access here. Lilly J. Goren is Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. 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 does anti-imperialism look like from the vantage point of North America? In Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad(University of California Press, 2019), Manu Karuka (Barnard College) answers this question by reinterpreting the significance of the transcontinental railroad from the perspectives of Chinese workers and Indigenous peoples—in particular the Paiute, Lakota, Pawnee, and Cheyenne. Karuka proposes three new concepts—counter-sovereignty, continental imperialism, and modes of relationship— for our understanding of this history. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Empire’s Tracks engages with writers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Frederick Jackson Turner to Ella Deloria, and draws also from legal, legislative, military, and business records. Ultimately, Karuka gives the lie to exceptionalist narratives of the United States by showing how its transportation infrastructure, like those around the world, emerged violently at the nexus of war and finance. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. 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 options for resistance are left to the author of fiction in a nation structured by totalizing political and economic violence? This is the question at the heart of Niall Geraghty’s eloquent and engaging book, The Polyphonic Machine: Capitalism, Political Violence, and Resistance in Contemporary Argentine Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). It is also the historically situated problem (in Piglia’s phrase) that unites this particular generation of contemporary Argentine writers. Literary critic/detective Geraghty follows the works of César Aira, Marcelo Cohen, and Ricardo Piglia in their preoccupations with theory and history to reflect on the ways violence and capitalism have created and sustained modern Argentine life. The Polyphonic Machine also mimics the preoccupations of its subjects by embracing polyphony as a stylistic choice, foregrounding the multiplicity of voices used by the authors and their interlocutors within the text itself. In so doing, Geraghty highlights both the particularity of the Argentine Dirty War from 1976-1983 and the global vision of its writers. Latin Americanists of many disciplines will find this book interesting, in particular scholars of literature, philosophy, and history. Elena McGrath is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Carleton College. She is a historian of race, revolution, and natural resources in the Andes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

John Pat Leary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2019) chronicles the rise of a new vocabulary in the twenty-first century. From Silicon Valley to the White House, from kindergarten to college, and from the factory floor to the church pulpit, we are all called to be innovators and entrepreneurs, to be curators of an ever-expanding roster of competencies, and to become resilient and flexible in the face of the insults and injuries we confront at work. In the midst of increasing inequality, these keywords teach us to thrive by applying the lessons of a competitive marketplace to every sphere of life. What’s more, by celebrating the values of grit, creativity, and passion at school and at work, they assure us that economic success is nothing less than a moral virtue. Organized alphabetically as a lexicon, Keywords explores the history and common usage of major terms in the everyday language of capitalism. Because the words in this book have successfully infiltrated everyday life in the English-speaking world, their meanings often seem self-evident, even benign. Who could be against empowerment, after all? Keywords uncovers the unexpected histories of words like innovation, which was once synonymous with “false prophecy” before it became the prevailing faith of Silicon Valley. Other words, like best practices and human capital, are relatively new coinages that promise us a kind of freedom within a marketplace extending its reach across the public sector and into our private lives. The new language of capitalism burnishes hierarchy, competition, and exploitation as leadership, collaboration, and sharing, modeling for us the habits of the economically successful person: be visionary, be self-reliant, and never, ever stop working. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Outsiders: Why Difference is the Future of Civil Rights(Oxford University Press, 2019) by Zachary Kramer (Oxford University Press, 2019) sets forth an imaginative critique of the way that civil rights law currently fulfills its mission. Using stories that lucidly illustrate the gap between the aspiration of civil rights law and the lived reality, Professor Kramer proposes a new approach. Drawing on existing protections for disability and for religious practice, Professor Kramer outlines the way that a right to personality, combined with an accommodation-focused inquiry, could update and refresh our approach to civil rights. Zachary Kramer is Associate Dean of Faculty, Professor of Law, and Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. Künga Tenje is an independent librarian in Virginia. 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 world where heritage, culture, creativity, and the capacity to imagine are themselves commodified and sold under the banner of neoliberal freedom, (how) can art be harnessed for anti-capitalist agendas? At a time when scholars along all points of the political spectrum seem to agree that expressing their creativity is good for oppressed groups, whether because creativity makes them entrepreneurial or because creativity is an inherent challenge to capitalism, Dia Da Costa offers a refreshingly nuanced perspective on the dangers that creative economy discourses pose for radical activism. In Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger Called Theater (U Illinois Press, 2016)--her multisited ethnography focusing on two activist theater troupes in the Indian cities of Delhi and Ahmedabad--Da Costa shows how these ‘theaters of the oppressed’ exist alongside, fall prey to, re-appropriate, and jostle with capitalist discourses and definitions of ‘creative economy’ which seek to contain and tame the cultural production of oppressed groups. The first troupe Da Costa discusses is the Jan Natya Manch, a Communist-affiliated theater group consisting mainly of middle-class activists who valorize Delhi’s (factory) working-class albeit in a rapidly deindustrializing city, and offer a disenchanted, secular critique of Hindu nationalism albeit in a deeply religious milieu. The second troupe featured is Ahmedabad’s Budhan Theater, run by the lowly and criminalized Chhara caste who hope that through theater they can craft respectable livelihoods and achieve inclusion as citizens while at the same time critiquing the violences of the Indian capitalist state. By analyzing the possibilities and shortcomings inherent in both troupes’ practices and political approaches, Da Costa shows how carefully and critically studying the diversity of left politics is an important part of building solidarities which can ultimately resist fascist neoliberalism. Da Costa also shows how attending to the politics of affect and emotion can help create successful social mobilization; rather than simply lamenting how oppressed people don’t rise up, attention to affective politics helps us shape forms of activism which actually speak to people’s lives, hopes, and hungers. This book will be of interest to activists, radical educators, and scholars in fields ranging from feminist affect theory to development studies. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how managing surplus populations and tapping into fortunes at the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” are twin-logics that undergird poverty alleviation projects in rural Rajasthan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Although not all that well known to English-speaking audiences, cultural critic and Peking University professor Jinhua Dai’s incisive commentaries and critiques of contemporary Chinese life have elevated her to something akin to ‘rock star’ status in China itself. As Lisa Rofel discusses in this podcast, and in her introduction to After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (Duke University Press, 2018), Dai interrogates the truly historic events unfolding in today’s China to ask what these mean for history itself. Vital analyses of the politics of memory and gender also pervade this collection of expertly translated essays. In particular Dai is interested in the post-Cold War entry of China into a Euro-American neoliberal world order and what this means for how the country sees its historical course. How are recent and more distant pasts invoked or ignored in conversations about this? What do erasures of past experience mean for the possibility of imagining alternative futures, as seemed possible in the twentieth century? In a searing analysis of recent Chinese films in their wider socio-political context, Dai critiques present-day historical myopias and the consequent marginalisation of those most buffeted by the storms of neoliberal capital: active female protagonists and the erstwhile socialist ‘masses’. Especially urgent in this year of key anniversaries for China, this work has much wider implications for understanding our entire global present, and for perceiving the ominous reality that “China must be a China of the future, or there will be no future” (p. 22). Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. 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 her original and thought-provoking book Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anne A. Cheng illustrates the longstanding relationship between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. So doing, she moves beyond a simple analysis of objectification to reveal the powerful role Ornamentalism plays in constituting modern ideas of personhood, racialized femininity and the figure of the Asian woman. Drawing on examples from the realms of law, popular culture and art from the 19th and 20th centuries, Cheng deepens our understanding of racial formation by demonstrating how race and gender are conceived not only in relation to the body, but inorganic ornamentation as well. Anne A. Cheng is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Princeton University. Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these relate to formations of nation, gender, sexuality and religion. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Oxford University, and is the author of Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017). 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 do management consultants do, and how do they do it? These two deceptively simple questions are at the centre of Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China (Duke University Press, 2018), the new book by Kimberly Chong, a lecturer in anthropology at University College London. The book uses an in depth and immersive ethnography of a global management consulting firm to explore the rise of management consultancy in China, engaging with key issues- financialization and commensuration- that are at the heart of understanding contemporary global capitalism. The book is rich with fascinating, and at times hilarious, examples of the contradictions and ambivalences, along with successes, of management consulting systems adapted to and applied in China. It will be essential reading across the social sciences and area studies, as well as for anyone interested in our globalised economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Does publishing have a diversity problem? In Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, an associate professor at UCL’s Centre for Publishing lays bare the crisis of underrepresentation for British authors of colour. Focusing on the high profile, but also marginalised, Young Adult Fiction genre, Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2019) explores the experiences of authors navigating the ‘diversity status quo’ of the publishing industry marked by significant inequalities. These inequalities, in turn, shape what is published and what is represented, to the exclusion of a wide range of individuals and communities. Along with companion work on children’s books, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary culture. Dave O’Brien is Chancellor’s Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh. 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 are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Courtwright about the global nature of pleasure, vice, and capitalism. His new book is called The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (Harvard University Press, 2019). During our discussion, Courtwright walks us through the emergence of the worldwide commodification of vice and shares his views on "limbic capitalism," the network of competitive businesses targeting the brain pathways responsible for feeling, motivation, and long-term memory. The book is equally interesting and disturbing. And Courtwright offers timely recommendations about how we can understand and address the Age of Addiction. Coming from one of the world's leading experts on the history of drugs and addiction, this important work raises stimulating and sobering questions about consumption and free will. Courtwright is the author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2001) as well as Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Harvard University Press, 1982). Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. 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 book I’m bringing you today, The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019) is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of the art of contemporary feminist thought. This is a collection of thirty-four chapters written by world-leading scholars representing a diverse range of voices from academia, exploring the latest thinking on key topics in current feminist discourse. Rather than talking about feminism in terms of its “waves,” it traces feminist history’s time through its constitutive vocabulary and, in looking toward the future, considers feminism as a theory that is vital and living. The first part explores the notion of feminist subjectivity, inquiring into identity, difference, and intersectionality, as well as topics like birth, body, and affect. The second examines feminist texts, covering writing, reading, genre, and critique. The third section looks at feminism and the world: from power, trauma, and value to technology, migration, and community. Including insights from literary and cultural studies, philosophy, political science and sociology, The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory has been called an essential overview of current feminist thinking and future directions for scholarship, debate and activism. The book is edited by Robin Truth Goodman. She is a professor of English at Florida State University, with an MA and Phd in Comparative Literature from New York University and currently examines feminist theory as a critique of neoliberal ideologies, looking at how literature and critical theory help us understand and oppose the power of institutions and the social oppressions of the new economy. Besides her many authored and edited books, articles, and book chapters, Dr. Goodman received FSU’s Developing Scholar award in 2009 and was a Global Fellow at University of California, Los Angeles in 2003-2004. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. 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 her new book, American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019), Ann Gleig makes a major contribution to scholarship on American Buddhism. Gleig focuses on meditation-based convert Buddhist lineages in North America, and in particular she is interested in the generational changes underway in these groups. The first generations of convert Buddhist teachers often modernized the tradition in distinctly American ways, and now Gen X and millennial Buddhists are re-engaging with the tradition but bringing to their Buddhist practice and teaching new questions. The issues that they—and Gleig, in her study—tackle include mindfulness as a secular and commercialized practice, sex scandals, and new technologies. These Buddhists ask how their communities should address racism and social injustice, and what the goal of practice should be. Gleig sets her fine-grained ethnographic research within a larger discussion of Buddhist modernism, arguing that the convert Buddhism is better understood through the lens of post-modernity. Natasha Heller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. You can find her on Twitter @nheller or email her 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

Who is excluded from science? What is the role of museums in this exclusion? In Equity, Exclusion and Everyday Science Learning: The Experiences of Minoritised Groups (Routledge, 2019), Dr Emily Dawson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London, introduces the idea of everyday science learning to critically engage with our understandings of science and the role of institutions in that understanding. The book challenges science centres and museums to move from participation policies and schemes, which have failed to significantly change the institution and its audience, to offer recognition and respect to diverse social groups. The need for change is grounded in detailed empirical work across a range of communities and organisations in London, with lessons that go well beyond science education and debates over the role of the museum. The book is essential reading for all social science and humanities scholars, as well as offering important insights for scientists too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Jamila Lee-Johnson and Ashley Gaskew, doctoral students in education at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, join us in this episode to discuss their recently published co-edited volume entitled, Critical Theory and Qualitative Data Analysis in Education. In addition to talking about their own journey to becoming critical scholars, Jamila and Ashley talk to us about the importance of centering voices and perspectives that have been traditionally marginalized in the academy. Their work builds a pathway forward for rigorous data analysis that will shape future generations of critical scholars. After an overview of the book and its contribution, Ashley and Jamila each summarize their chapters. Ashley’s chapter applies Habermas’ theory of colonization of the lifeworld to the analysis of for-profit television advertisements. She talks about why it is important to study the for-profit sector in higher education, how she transcribed and coded the advertisement, and what this technique allows us to understand about how for-profit sectors are shaping the higher education system. Jamila’s chapter uses tweets from Black Twitter and the #BlackWomenAtWork hashtag. She tells us the inspiration for her inquiry, how she applies Critical Discourse Analysis and W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness to code and interpret tweets, and what this analysis contributes. These are just two examples of the range of data sources and theories that authors use in the book, with other chapters analyzing syllabi, photos, interviews, and political campaign speeches. The book came together as a result of a graduate-level seminar taught by Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, and Jamila and Ashley talk about what it was like to be involved as both editors and writers in the project. They describe how they worked with authors, provided feedback, and humanized the writing and editing process, demonstrating yet another level of their scholarship. Julie Kallio is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her research interests include educational change, innovation and improvement networks, and participatory design. You can find more about her work on her website, follow her on twitter, or email her 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

On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, five activists were detained by the police in China for their plans to distribute anti-sexual harassment stickers. Although such detainments usually last 24 hours, these women were detained 37 days, the legal limit for detention without bringing charges. Dubbed the Feminist Five, news of the women spread rapidly through social media. The author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, Leta Hong Fincher, uses the stories of these women to explore a much larger issue—that the subjugation of women is a key component of the authoritarian state. Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (Verso, 2018) examines censorship and social media; the trauma of detention and its aftermath; the history of feminism in China; the feminist fight against sexual assault, sexual harassment, and domestic violence; and, ultimately, the remarkable ways that feminist thinking spreads under the circumstances. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter (@LDickmeyer). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Mickey and Dick Flacks' new book Making History/Making Blintzes: How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America (Rutgers UP, 2018) is a chronicle of the political and personal lives of progressive activists Richard (Dick) and Miriam (Mickey) Flacks, two of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As active members of the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s, and leaders in today’s social movements, their stories are a first-hand account of progressive American activism from the 1960s to the present. Throughout this memoir, the couple demonstrates that their lifelong commitment to making history through social activism cannot be understood without returning to the deeply personal context of their family history—of growing up “Red Diaper babies” in 1950s New York City, using folk music as self-expression as adolescents in the 1960s, and of making blintzes for their own family through the 1970s and 1980s. As the children of immigrants and first generation Jews, Dick and Mickey crafted their own religious identity as secular Jews, created a critical space for American progressive activism through SDS, and ultimately, found themselves raising an “American” family. 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 book Why Social Movements Matter: An Introduction (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), Senior Lecturer Laurence Cox, from Maynooth University, highlights how social movements have shaped the world we live in and their importance for today’s social struggles. He also explores the complex relationship between progressive social movements and political parties, as well as the interactions between movements and intellectuals. The book is written in an engaging way and will also trigger the interest of the general publics interested in social movements and progressive politics. Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

I met with John Komlos, an American economic historian of Hungarian descent and former holder of the Chair of Economic History at the University of Munich. We spoke about his latest book, Foundations of Real-World Economics: What Every Economics Student Needs to Know (Routledge, 2019). This is a very original textbook, a good answer to the call from the Rethinking Economics movement to revise our economics textbooks and programmes. Komlos argues that the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Trumpism and the other populist movements which have followed in their wake ‘have grown out of the frustrations of those hurt by the economic policies advocated by conventional economists for generations. Despite this, textbooks continue to praise conventional policies such as deregulation and hyperglobalization.’ His book demonstrates how misleading it can be to apply oversimplified models of perfect competition to the real world. ‘The math works well on college blackboards but not so well on the Main Streets of America. This volume explores the realities of oligopolies, the real impact of the minimum wage, the double-edged sword of free trade, and other ways in which powerful institutions cause distortions in the mainstream models. Bringing together the work of key scholars, such as Kahneman, Minsky, and Schumpeter, this book demonstrates how we should take into account the inefficiencies that arise due to asymmetric information, mental biases, unequal distribution of wealth and power, and the manipulation of demand.’ This book offers students a valuable introductory text with insights into the workings of real markets not just imaginary ones formulated by blackboard economists. A must-have for students studying the principles of economics as well as micro- and macroeconomics. It is a very original book, in the ambition, in the way it is written, even in its evocative chapter titles and in the unusual tables, carts, diagrams and pictures. I hope you will enjoy the podcast and the book itself. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management 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