New Books in Critical Theory

I was joined by Eli Cook from Israel to talk about his amazing new book The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (Harvard University Press, 2017). While economists and politicians are busy discussing alternative measures of progress, Eli Cook traces the long history that brought us to use the GDP as a measure of growth, success, power, wellbeing. This is not only the history of technical metrics, this is the history of ideas and of a dominant paradigm. According to the author the invention of GDP was the final step not only in the pricing of progress but also the capitalization of American life. How did Americans come to quantify their society’s progress and well-being in units of money? In today’s GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth.The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life. Eli Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities. The book is a beautiful and enjoyable account of how capitalism shaped our societies: not only introducing a new social order of production and consumption but also through a new way of measuring the value of our economies, of our societies and, eventually, of ourselves. 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

Why are you still single? This question is often asked of single women, especially those who are deemed by loved ones or friends to be too old to be single. In her newest book, A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time (Manchester University Press, 2017), Kinneret Lahad analyzes this undertheorized aspect of the gendered experience. Singlehood is inextricably linked to a post-structural analysis of time: not only are single women judged on their single status based on how old they are, but Lahad argues that being single often ages women at a faster rate in the eyes of others. This book offers a brilliant analysis of singlehood and how different aspects of popular culture depict this intersection of identity. From movies and television shows, popular stories, and online commentary, the ways that these aspects of our culture shapes the identity of a single woman is far-reaching and pervasive. This book is a great read for anyone interested in yet-to-be-fully-explored aspects of gender studies or anyone that has been bothered by the question “why are you still single?” 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 was joined by Pasquale Tridico, Professor of Political Economy at Roma Tre University in Italy. His latest book, Inequality in Financial Capitalism, was published by Routledge in 2017. The issue of inequality has regained attention in the economic and political debate. This is due to both an increase in income inequality, in particular among rich countries but not only, and an increasing interest in this topic by researchers, policy makers and political movements. In this book, the author presents figures and insights on several possible causes of inequality but focuses on the role of financial capitalism, characterised by the strong dependency of economies on the financial sector, by the intensification of international trade and capital mobility, and by the flexibilisation of labour markets, the reduction of wage shares and a declining welfare redistribution. A conversation on such a complex topic was also the opportunity to briefly mention collateral issues such as the financial crisis, the failure of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and Brexit. 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

In the twenty first century, violence at work is often described in the context of a lone employee “snapping” and harming coworkers or management. In his new book, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-1980 (University of Illinois Press/UBC Press, 2017), Jeremy Milloy argues that violence in the workplace has a much deeper and more complicated history, and that the stereotype of the quiet loner suddenly deciding to commit violence against their peers conceals much more than it reveals. In short, violence on the job has a history. The shift from violence committed by management against striking workers to individualized violence in the form of shootings and assaults among workers occurred as labor unions lost power and splintered into radical and more mainstream factions. By examining the often hyper-masculine heyday of the mid-twentieth-century auto industry, Milloy makes a strong case for a broader definition of what constitutes violence at work under capitalism. In the words of one attorney reflecting on a workplace shooting in a Detroit Chrysler factory, “Chrysler pulled the trigger.” The structure of auto manufacturing work itself bred a culture of violence on the factory floor. In both Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario, race, gender, and labor dynamics mediated the relationships between employees in the sprawling auto factories that straddled the Canadian-American border. Blood, Sweat, and Fear tells the stark story of life and death within those plants as the nature of work and labor changed in the late twentieth century. Jeremy Milloy earned his PhD at Simon Fraser University and is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Trent University. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. 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 the idea of ‘meritocracy’ serve to reinforce social inequality? In Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (Routledge, 2017) Dr Jo Littler, Reader in Culture and Creative Industries at City, University of London analyses the history of the term, the political project it has been associated with, and the cultural manifestations of its neo-liberal form. The book charts the early, critical and satirical, origins of the idea, mapping its co-option by right wing governments within a project of state transformation and the end of social democracy. Allied to the genealogy of the idea, and the politics of inequality to which it is attached, the book details various manifestations of meritocratic culture that serve to exclude and divide. Here there are rich case studies of inequality of class, gender and ethnicity, ranging from #Damonsplaining, through ‘mumpreneurs’ to normcore plutocrats. Ranging widely, but theoretically grounded, the book is essential reading for anyone wanting to know how our current discourses of fairness have ended up supporting growing social inequality. 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 Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics: Theorizing, Analyzing, and Transforming Capitalism (Routledge, 2017), a new handbook of economics has been published; it is a very special one. In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti, one of the three co-editors, discusses with us why a handbook of heterodox economics was needed. Contributions throughout the handbook explore different theoretical perspectives including: Marxian-radical political economics; Post Keynesian-Sraffian economics; institutionalist-evolutionary economics; feminist economics; social economics; Regulation theory; the Social Structure of Accumulation approach; and ecological economics. Several contributions explain the structural properties and dynamics of capitalism, as well as propose economic and social policies for the benefit of the majority of the population. This book aims, firstly, to provide realistic and coherent theoretical frameworks to understand the capitalist economy in a constructive and forward-looking manner. Secondly, it delineates the future directions, as well as the current state, of heterodox economics. Both graduate students and academics will enjoy reading it. The interview ends with Carlo D’Ippoliti arguing in favour of a more pluralist approach to economics in research, teaching and policymaking. 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

Eric Lee‘s The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 (Zed Books, 2017) is about the Georgian Social Democratic/ Menshevik Revolution that took place in 1918. As the world celebrates the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lee uses this book to explore what happened in Georgia, where the Social Democrats /Mensheviks, led by Noe Zhordania remained committed to a democratic and inclusive revolution as a counterpoint to the Bolshevik notions of a strict, disciplined party and a limited, undemocratic but participatory system of government. He notes that Zhordiania and the other Georgian Mensheviks had cut their teeth in 1902-1906 in the Gurian republic, a small breakaway region in Georgia, where peasant revolt had turned into democratic local government, until it was crushed by Tsarist forces. The lessons learned in Guria remained crucial for the Georgian Social Democrats, who learned to appreciate the peasants as a revolutionary class who demanded an equal seat at the table, as well as principles such as universal suffrage for men and women and the importance of involving local people in policymaking, particularly to solve Georgia’s pressing agrarian question. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1918, the Georgian Social Democrats reluctantly broke away from Russia and sought to navigate the charged political waters, trying to stave off invasion from Turkey and Denikin’s White forces with alliances with first Germany and then Britain. They also tried to apply classic Marxist principles, creating not socialism but a bourgeois industrial revolution and a corresponding democratic regime, which was elected by secret ballot and universal suffrage to run the new, tiny nation. This new democratically elected Menshevik government tried to solve issues of pressing concern, carrying out land reform and encouraging judicial reform and encouraging industrial development, while trying to maintain the sovereignty and territorial integrity of their new nation. Eventually, due to Georgia’s size and geopolitical location, this revolution failed, but Lee provides a fascinating account of what the country briefly looked like under Menshevik rule and how this compared to the regime established by Georgia’s most famous son, Stalin. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution is now available online. Her research can be viewed 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 From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (Columbia University Press, 2017), historian Joshua Clark Davis offers an unconventional history of the 1960s and 1970s by uncovering the work of activist entrepreneurs. These activists offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven corporate business models by opening up their own small businesses. It’s a fascinating account that challenges the mistaken idea that activism and political dissent are inherently antithetical to participation in the marketplace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Claudia Leeb’s new book, Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism: Toward a New Theory of the Political Subject (Oxford University Press, 2017), takes up pressing issues within contemporary political and feminist theory, especially as we consider the point of action and the instance of movement. This book marries together important questions within political theory, feminist theory, and economics with specific focus on the idea of subject and how an individual subject may be poised towards action, particularly in context of moving towards a more equitable political and economic system. Leeb’s book, which theorizes about the contested nature of the political subject, explores the concept of the political subject in outline as she has titled this theory. This reinterpretation of the political subject is as an incomplete political subject, given the contested interpretations of this concept in political theory, feminist theory, and psychological theory. The text goes on to examine key political and feminist theorists in framing the positioning of the political subject, putting Marx, Adorno, and Lacan and other Frankfurt School theorists into conversation with feminist theorists. Leeb, as a result of theorizing the capacity for action by the political subject in outline, explores the tension between theory and practice, noting this mediated relationship, and delving into why there is such tension between theory and practice, especially within the academe. The issue of transformative agency, especially a kind of intersectional transformative agency that integrates both feminist and economic impulses, is at the center of Leeb’s analysis and presses on some of the limits of theory as disconnected from the practice of 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

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been a widespread affirmation of economic ideologies that conceive the market as an autonomous sphere of human practice. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this idea has been countered by calls for reforms of financial markets and for the consideration of moral values in economic practice. Religion and the Morality of the Market: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2017) intervenes in these debates by showing how neoliberal market practices engender new forms of religiosity, and how religiosity shapes economic actions. Daromir Rudnyckyj, one of the volumes editors, is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, 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

How does a book come into being? In Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton University Press, 2017), Clayton Childress, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at The University of Toronto, accounts for the social processes behind the contemporary novel. The book uses a case study of Jarrettsville, a work of historical fiction, to explore the processes of creation, production, and reception for the book. Drawing on, but also extending and developing, field theory, the book challenges the usual perception of a lone authorial genius with a detailed sociological picture of how a novel is made. The book offers rich empirical material, from quantitative analysis of inequalities in publishing, through readers’ responses to the novel and insider knowledge from agents and editors, to ethnographic reflections on the social setting for authorial work. The book is a fascinating and accessible read for anyone interested in contemporary culture. The first chapter is available for as a preview 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

What are the working conditions and what are the possibilities for change in the contemporary economy? In Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centers (Pluto Press, 2017), Jamie Woodcock, a fellow at the London School of Economics, analyses perhaps the most important form of contemporary working institution, the call centre. Based on a detailed ethnography, the book describes the working conditions, labour processes, and affective effects of call centre work. The book offers theoretical reflections embedded in the empirical material, easily fusing key contemporary thinkers on work and labour with the lived reality of working the phones. It shows the practices of management, control, and crucially, resistance in the call centre. Moreover, by adopting the approach of a workers’ inquiry and reflecting on the limits of this mode of academic research, the book offers reflections on the need and the prospect for change. The book will be essential reading for management, sociology and cultural studies, as well as for anyone interested in current practices of working life. 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 Millennials and the Moments that Made Us: A Cultural History of the U.S. from 1982-Present (Zero Books, 2018), Shaun Scott critiques the America millennials inherited and using a pop culture lens to explore how they navigate it. Starting in 1982 as the birth of millennials, Scott examines how millennials have been impacted by the economic and social changes of the 1980s and neoliberalism. Scott takes readers through defining moments and experiences such as latchkey parents, changing representations of masculinity, pop culture feminism, September 11th, and Hurricane Katrina. He uses popular culture examples to define these moments comparing September 11th to Jay-Z’s The Blueprint and using the career of LeBron James to critique corporate relocation and its effects on economic livelihoods. Scott’s well-research book presents readers with a challenge to rethink how millennials are defined and critiqued as he challenges millennials to learn from the mistakes of the past and work for lasting change. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan 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

Recent popular and scholarly interest has highlighted the complex and brutal system of mass incarceration in the United States. Much of this interest has focused on recent developments while other scholars have revealed the connections between the development of the prison system after Reconstruction and the legacies of slavery. In her new book, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Sarah Haley points to an often under recognized part of this history. Haley, an associate professor of gender studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, focuses on the Southern criminal justice system’s treatment and exploitation of black women during the Jim Crow era. Though black women were caught up in the criminal justice system in smaller numbers than men were, Haley shows their treatment was very important to the development of Jim Crow modernity. The brutal and violent treatment, the ideological narratives surrounding black women, and the exploitation of their labor were all key in creating the ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy. Haley also discusses the ways black women resisted this treatment and contented the related ideologies. In this episode of New Books in History, Haley discusses No Mercy Here and this history of gender, criminal justice, and race. She tells listeners about some of experiences of black women in this criminal justice system, explaining the development of the system from convict leasing to chain gangs with an the exploitative parole system. Haley also clearly explains the ideological role this system played in the development of the Jim Crow system. Finally, Haley also discusses some of her research and the challenges of accurately and thoroughly portraying the experiences of women whose voices were mediated by the criminal justice system. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. Shes currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She 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

In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the British economy evolved from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by service industries, most notably finance. As Aled Davies explains in his book The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain (Oxford University Press, 2017), this shift posed a challenge to the prevailing concept of social democracy in Britain, one to which politicians, particularly those on the left, struggled to respond. With British industry facing growing competition abroad, successive governments in the 1960s and 1970s sought investment capital in order to maintain that sector’s viability. Efforts were made to encourage institutional investors such as pension and insurance funds to devote more of their industrial investment to long-term development rather than short-term profit, while many on the left of the Labour Party in the 1970s advocated nationalizing the banks as a means of channeling resources into the sector. Such proposals, however, were countered with calls to liberalize and deregulate the financial sector, many of which were advanced by trade associations and other bodies within the financial sector whose growing influence reflected the increasing importance of the City both as a part of the economy and within national politics. Their success in resisting intervention, Davies concludes, presaged the market-driven approach pursued by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government after 1979, one which continues to define British policy down to the present day. 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 and participate in Metal? This question forms the core of Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), the new book from Rosemary Lucy Hill, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Leeds. Hill’s book is both empirically detailed, drawing on analysis of Metal media, and theoretically rich, engaging with a range of work on music and gender. The book outlines the imagined community of Metal, thinking through the myths underpinning that community. By exploring myths of equality and authenticity, along with the problematic tropes of “warriors” and “groupies,” the analysis makes clear the gendered tensions of Metal fandom.The book concludes with some thoughts on how to build a new cultural vision for Metal, which will realize the promise of egalitarianism offered in much of the community and in the music. It will be essential reading across sociology, music, and media studies, as well as for all Metalheads 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

What is life like in the aspirational economy? In (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017) Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, explores the working life of bloggers, social media stars, and online influencers (not) making a living in and around the fashion industry. The core of the book is the idea of aspirational labour, which captures the demands of trying to get in and get on in this precarious form of work. Aspirational labour is theorised in conjunction with gender and the broader inequalities of production and consumption in consumer culture. The book then uses this frame to explore the big winners of the social media economy, alongside detailing the hidden costs to being authentic and effortless online, as well as reflecting on the impact of aspirational labour on many other areas of economy and society. The book is packed with rich and detailed interview data, and is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary consumer 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

Is Marx still relevant? Any social scientist will answer with a resounding yes! In what he refers to as a thought experiment, Ivan Ascher uses Marx to understand the financial market. In Portfolio Society: A Capitalist Mode of Prediction (Zone Books, 2016), Ascher focuses on the arc and narratives found in Capital, using them to analyze risk, credit, and the financial market downfall of 2008. Ascher encourages the reader to explore how we might be able to understand what is going on today by looking back at Marx’s understanding of capitalism. The reader will come across familiar characters, like moneybags and vampires, and familiar concepts from Marx, like fetishism and co-dependence within the market. The nice thing about this book is that you do not need prior knowledge of Marx or financial markets, though those who have knowledge of either or both will still find great pleasure in this thought experiment. This book would be enjoyed by sociologists or political scientists in general, alongside those interested in financial markets. It would be especially useful in a theory course where students could make connections between Marx and Ascher’s narratives. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can follow and tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Labor markets are not what they used to be, as Ilana Gershon argues in Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Job seekers are increasingly being taught that they need to sell themselves as if they were their own business, and what will set them apart from other applicants is not their skills or their experience, but the distinctiveness of their brand. Join us for a provocative discussion about how workers are being taught to position themselves to employers, and how modern labor markets, as a consequence, differ from those in the past — and why that matters. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 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

How do metrics rule the social world? In Metric Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) David Beer, Reader in Sociology at the University of York, outlines the rise of the metric and the role of metrics in shaping everyday life. The book outlines the core theoretical concepts, such as neo-liberalism, bio-power, and bio-politics, alongside the characteristics themes of metric power, including practices of making (in)visible, the social life of methods and data, and questions of agency. These theoretical discussions are set against the broad backdrop of the rise of big data, corporate power, social media, and algorithm based decision making. Metric Power is located within the study of broader social inequalities, meaning the book makes important reading for anyone concerned with how our daily experiences of technologies, organisations, and social institutions, are shaped, unequally, by the power of metrics. 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 Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press, 2017) is a book-length justification for the burgeoning field of Black Male Studies. The author posits that we should conceptualize the black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, therefore, is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of Black males that could challenge the existing accounts of black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated throughout academic research across disciplines. The Man-Not argues that black men struggle with death and suicide, as well as abuse and rape, and their genred existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism (including black feminism) does not yet fully understand the role that homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the deaths and lives of black males. Author Tommy J. Curry‘s work spans across the various fields of philosophy, jurisprudence, Africana Studies, and Gender Studies. He received his BA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, his masters from DePaul, and he returned to SIUC to earn his Ph.D. Though trained in American and Continental philosophical traditions, Curry’s primary research interests are in Critical Race Theory and Africana Philosophy. In addition to his work as Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University, Dr. Curry is also the executive director of Philosophy Born of Struggle, a multimedia project billed as a community a conference, and a textbook. His next major research project will be a book-length follow up to The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, tentatively titled The Mismeasurement of Man: Phallicism and the Paradox of the Racially Subjugated Male. James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or 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

In Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic phenomena. Drawing particular attention to the texts that emerge under the influence of burgeoning Soviet ideology, Jacob Emery discusses aesthetic developments and repercussions caused and initiated by the programs aimed at the redefinition of economy and society. The spheres of family and economy appear to not only absorb changes and transformations instigated by the strengthening of communist rhetoric, but also to exercise influences on the formation and on the development of Soviet literature, reshaping the aesthetic continuum and revealing the collision of paradigms and epistemes. While focusing on the texts that illuminate the peculiarities of Russian Modernism (Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Yuri Olesha’s Envy), Alternative Kinships also includes a detailed discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Miroslav Krleza’s The Return of Filip Latinovicz, and Isak Dinesen’s stories. This comparative attempt discloses intricate interconnections not only between literatures and cultures but between ideologies and political programs as well. Jacob Emery points out, “Like the authors of Russian modernism, Hawthorne, Krlea, and Dinesen are concerned with alternative kinships that take shape at a moment of crisis in the history of hereditary castes: the rise of Jeffersonian democracy, the fall of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, and, in Dinesen’s historical fiction, a preoccupation with inheritance mechanisms in the period just before and after the French Revolution “(10-11). Literature appears to respond to political developments, which bring forth crucial shifts, redefining the areas of the familiar and of the conventional. As Alternative Kinships demonstrates, Soviet literature offers an array of intriguing possibilities for reshaping family relationships. In addition, these experiments are inextricably connected with the Soviet economic endeavors. One of the fascinating family experiments that Jacob Emery extensively comments on is “milk kinship,” which, under the Soviet regime,” aimed to replac[e] traditional ideas of kinship” (113). State-run milk banks, Emery argues, is “the metaphor of a transcendental mother supplying a universal family” (115). Russian modernism generates a number of scenarios, portraying not only the redefinition of social and economic relations but also the transformation of the individual: alternative kinships call for New Men and Women. Alongside family relationships, which respond to economic, political, ideological modifications, Alternative Kinships also touches upon hereditary memory: family is inseparable from the memory that reveals itself in multiple ways. Aesthetic and literary interconnections that Jacob Emery outlines through the analysis of gothic and modernist texts initiate a conversation about cultural memory: literary texts demonstrate the interconnectedness of the aesthetics, history, society, and the individual. Literature as a complex construct that incorporates a number of components and fragments, which establish a variety of relationships, can be illustrated with the image of mirror, which is closely analyzed in Alternative Kinships. Mirror is actively employed to show family relationships and to reveal the potential of a literary text to absorb and to respond to the environment. Revealing the dynamics of family and economy relationships across times and cultures, Alternative Kinships contributes to the discussion of international modernism(s), 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 should we understand markets? In Markets and the Arts of Attachment (Routledge, 2017) Franck Cochoy, Liz McFall, and Joe Deville (from University Toulouse- Jean Jaures,Open University and Lancaster University respectively) bring together essays engaging with the contemporary economic sociology to better explain how markets function. The book is published as part of the Culture, Economy, and the Social (CRESC) book series, and contains a wide range of examples and case studies on how people become ‘attached’ to, and in, markets, and how markets are deeply intertwined with sentiments and emotions. Brands, consumer finance, classic cars, call centres, advertising, dating, watches, and social media are amongst the varied, yet complimentary, set of subjects for this important new collection. The book is essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand the sociology of markets, in particular seeking to move beyond both one dimensional critiques of consumerism and purely economic narratives of market attachments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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

Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization by Michael Youngblood, a cultural anthropologist based in San Francisco, was published in November, 2016 by the South Asian Studies Association Press. The book is a winner of the Joseph W. Elder Book Prize (conferred by the American Institute of Indian Studies), and has been very well received by reviewers. Cultivating Community is based on the author’s two and a half years of field research in 1996-1999 with the Shetkari Sanghatana, a massive and influential anti-statist movement in India’s Maharashtra state. The book explores the creation of political meaning and the construction of collective identity in a mass social movement. In it, the author address fundamental questions in making sense of mass movements anywhere: Where do movement ideologies come from and what makes them compelling? What motivates diverse groups of ordinary people to rise together in common cause? How can we make sense of individual participants in a movement when their participation sometimes appears irrational and against their own interests? The book argues for a participant-centric view of the Shetkari Sanghatana, digging beneath the movement’s fantastical mythological idiom and the overarching demands that we hear articulated by leadership to see how the Sanghatana is experienced and constructed by individual participants on the ground. An important part of the analysis focuses on ways that participants and leaders together deploy a pool of shared but highly ambiguous spiritual and political symbols in an ongoing competition to define what the movement stands for, whose interests it represents, and what the future should look like. This is an anthropological ethnography that delves into history, political science, economics, cultural geography, folklore, and religion. Mike Youngblood received his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at the School for International Training, the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley, the Masters in Social Design program at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. Mike’s interests in social innovation, collaborative change, design thinking, and ethnographic methodology are central to his work both inside and outside of academe. His work has received a number of recognitions, including the Sardar Patel Award for Best American Dissertation on Modern India, the Percy H. Buchannan Prize for Writing on Asian Affairs, the Robert Miller Prize for Innovation in Anthropological Research, and the Joseph W. Elder Book Prize. He has been a Fulbright fellow, a Watson fellow, and an American Institute of Indian Studies fellow. 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 Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle D. Commander examines the (im)possibility of literal and figurative returns to Africa of African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. Using analysis inspired by “the ways in which the enslaved and their descendants took and have continued to take back control over their bodies”, and focusing on cultural production, Commander traces the points of intersection and divergence between the two modes of return, rather than dealing with them as mutually exclusive. Mireille Djenno is the African Studies Librarian at Indiana University. She can be reached at [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

How can we address inequity and injustice in cultural and creative industries? In Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Mark Banks, a professor of culture and communication and director of CAMEo, the research institute for Cultural and Media Economies, at the University of Leicester, sets out a new approach to cultural and creative industries, focused on creative justice. Creative justice develops through the seven chapters of the book, which engage with a range of interdisciplinary concerns about cultural and creative work. The book restates the importance of cultural objects (which are often marginalised in sociological analysis) before moving to consider how justice might be done to the practices of creative work and the workers themselves. Later parts of the analysis think through questions of access, both historical and contemporary, to the cultural sector, with a new set of concepts for creative justice forming the conclusion of the book. It will be essential reading across both academic, policy and practitioner communities in cultural and creative industries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

At once wonderfully clear and bursting with complexity, the title of Bruno Perreau‘s book, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford University Press, 2016) is one of my favorites of the past several years. An interrogation of the meanings of queer, theory, French, and response, the book is anchored around the anti-gay marriage demonstrations and activisms that proliferated in France during the lead-up to the passage of the 2013 Loi Taubira (a.k.a. “marriage pour tous”). The book focuses on a central claim of French opponents of gay marriage and adoption: the notion that (American) gender and queer theory is responsible for spreading homosexuality in France, and has thus contributed to the undoing of the French family and the nation as a whole. Throughout its four chapters, the book considers the French response to queer theory in terms of fantasy and echo. This is not a book about reception in a passive or uncomplicated sense. Rather it is the study of a set of reverberations back and forth across the Atlantic that is always already a matter of translation and interpretation. Indeed, the so-called American theory that anti-gay activists have presented as a foreign menace finds much of its own inspiration in the work of French thinkers and writers. Drawing in part on a series of interviews with French feminist and queer intellectuals and activists, the book also offers critical insight regarding the meanings and anxieties surrounding minority identities and communities in contemporary France. Queer Theory will be compelling reading to anyone interested in the history and politics of sexuality, and in the possibilities of thinking and enacting change into the future, in France, in the U.S., and beyond. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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

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

Ralph Young is a professor of history at Temple University. His book Dissent: The History of an American Idea (New York University Press, 2015) provides a fast-paced four hundred years people’s history of dissenters in America and the role they played from early New England settlements to Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. From Shay’s rebellion in the late eighteenth century to contemporary gay rights and anti-globalist movements, dissenters built their politic on the nations founding as a project of dissent. As a group, they were committed to actualizing the lofty ideals embedded in the founding documents by extending equality and freedom to women, slaves, Indians, workers and other excluded groups. In times of crisis, dissenters called the nation back to its promise even as conservative forces resisted change. Some dissenters, celebrated as heroes, called the nation to its highest ideals; others remain lost to history or vilified. American history seen from the vantage point of those who stood against the status quo illuminates the important role dissent has played in the nation’s political and social development. Young offers an abundance of examples of how political, religious, economic and social protest shape the nation and possibilities of further change. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Sharrona Pearl‘s new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) looks closely at facial allotransplantations (FAT), commonly known as face transplants, in order to offer a careful and fascinating study of the stakes for changing the face, and the changing stakes for the face. Troubling the indexical relationship between the face and character and reminding us that “[t]he self has always been a set of choices,” Pearl explores face transplantation as it relates to cosmetic surgery and whole-organ transplants, the cinema of the 1960s, television shows, and more. She carefully and sensitively takes us into the debates among surgeons, bioethicists, and journalists that circled the first partial face transplant of Isabelle Dinoire in 2005, and offers a way toward a philosophical approach that brings together Levinas with the kind of (Deleuzian) subjectivity that allows for individuality through constant change and understands the self to be constantly in a process of becoming. The final chapter of the book also situates the analysis within larger contexts of online subjectivities and work with facial and bodily manipulation by artists and performers. It’s sparklingly written and well worth a read! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002-2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering a raw and dramatically compelling vision of the teeming drug trade and the vitality of life in the abandoned spaces of the postindustrial United States. With a sprawling narrative that dramatizes the intersections of race, urban history, and the neoliberal moment, The Wire offers an intricate critique of a society ravaged by racism and inequality. In Connecting The Wire: Race, Space, and Postindustrial Baltimore (University of Texas Press, 2017), The author presents the first comprehensive, season-by-season analysis of the entire series. Focusing on the show’s depictions of the built environment of the city of Baltimore and the geographic dimensions of race and class, he analyzes how The Wire’s creator and showrunner, David Simon, uses the show to develop a social vision of its historical moment, as well as a device for critiquing many social givens. In The Wire’s gritty portrayals of drug dealers, cops, longshoremen, school officials and students, and members of the judicial system, Stanley Corkin maps a web of relationships and forces that define urban social life and the lives of the urban underclass in particular, in the early twenty-first century. He makes a compelling case that, with its embedded history of race and race relations in the United States, The Wire is perhaps the most sustained and articulate exploration of urban life in contemporary popular culture. Author Stanley Corkin is Charles Phelps Taft Professor and Niehoff Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Departments of History and English at the University of Cincinnati. His research and pedagogical interests include history and urban geography, cinema and the city, and the intersections of literature, film, and history in American Studies. His previous book-length projects include Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s, Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History, and Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States: Cinema, Literature, and Culture. He is currently working on a research project relating to race and space in the city of Boston. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. 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 10 years after the great financial crisis, how has the finance industry regained its preeminent social position? In Trust, Power and Public Relations in Financial Markets (Routledge, 2017) Clea Bourne, a Lecturer in PR, Advertising and Marketing at Goldsmiths, University of London, explores the relationship between PR and different types of trust in finance. The book offers a nuanced understanding of trust, looking at both transparency and obfuscation for states, banks, stock markets and individuals. Alongside a critical theory of the function of PR, there are numerous detailed case studies, across every aspect of modern financial markets, making the book both an in depth assessment as well as a useful introduction to trust, PR and finance. The book is clearly written and accessible, making it essential reading for anyone interested in this most important part of economy and 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

Lizabeth Cohen‘s Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 was originally published in 1990, and recently re-published in 2014. In this book, Cohen explores how it was that Chicago workers, who could not overcome ethnic and racial divisions during a wave of failed strikes in 1919, came together in the mid to late-1930s across ethnic and racial lines “to make a New Deal” for themselves and their fellow laborers. They made that “New Deal” as members of national labor unions and a national Democratic Party. These successes were possible because of community and cultural changes that took place in the 1920s, Cohen argues. During that decade, ethnic and race-based community organizations, new institutions of mass culture like chain stores and movie theaters, and employers’ “welfare capitalist” programs all vied for workers attention and loyalty. Paradoxically, the very programs employers hoped would prevent the growth of unions actually helped break down ethnic and racial barriers, building upon new experiences of shared consumerism. As the Great Depression unfolded, workers managed to form the cross-race and cross-ethnic alliances that had alluded them in 1919 and the early 1920s. Union organizers succeeded in building a new culture of unity and achieving new levels of organization and worker power. Industrial laborers and their unions challenged their employers to live up to the “welfare capitalism” they had promised in the years before the financial crisis. As their level of organization grew, Chicago workers also became New Deal Democrats invested in national politics. The new edition includes an updated preface by the author. Lizabeth Cohen serves as the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies at Harvard University, as well as the Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Isabell Moore is a PhD Student in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social movements in the 20th century and she is involved in activism for racial, gender, economic and queer 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

Benjamin Fondane, a Franco-Romanian writer and contributor to the development of existential philosophy in the 1930s and 40s, is in the process of being rediscovered. His work has gained a new relevance in the contemporary period due in part to the way it anticipates some of the core themes and interests of critical theory, including the limits of rationality and subjectivity, and ideas about the ineffable and the impossible. Until recently, few of Fondane’s writings, aside from his poetry, had been translated into English, despite a long-standing recognition of their importance to philosophical debates in the period, including by Fondane’s contemporaries, such as Lev Shestov and Albert Camus. A new collection entitled Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays edited and translated by Bruce Baugh and published by the New York Review of Books in 2016, aims to rectify this. Professor Baugh, who teaches Philosophy at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia, has written extensively on existential thought and continental philosophy, and is the author of French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (Routledge, 2003). Professor Baugh’s work on Fondane will be of interest to a wide variety of readers seeking a better understanding of a thinker whose work invites consideration alongside his better known contemporaries Walter Benjamin and the early Levinas, among others. 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 did gender relations change in the computing industry? And how did the UK go from leading the world to having an all but extinct computer industry by the 1970s? In Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). Marie Hicks, an Assistant Professor of History at the Illinois Institute of Technology, offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of this radical social change. Based on rich and detailed archival and interview sources, packed with illustrations and individual narratives of the 1940s to the 1970s, the book demonstrates how the rigid class and gender hierarchies of British society were recreated and reproduced in attempts to modernise the state through technology. As the book’s conclusion notes, “all history of computing is gendered history,” meaning the book is essential reading for anyone interested in how we have the computing and technology industries we have today. The first chapter of the book can be read here, and you can learn more about the book and Dr. Hick’s work on her twitter and on the book’s twitter feed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Todd McGowan‘s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016) elegantly employs psychoanalytic thinking to unpack the lure of capitalism. He argues that we are drawn to capitalism because, under an overt promise to bring us what we want, it gives us what we need: lack. Every commodity disappoints. And that’s the point. Satisfaction, that moment when all is well and good, flutters rapidly, blessedly away. What is so great, so crucial, about lack? Though we pine for relief, nothing kills desire like abundance. (Spoiler alert: should there be an equitable redistribution of wealth, we would still suffer a hunger for the lost object which, according to McGowan, not employing Kleinian thinking, was never attainable in the first place.) If we did not experience ourselves as missing something we might never get out of bed–and, as clinicians know, why it can be purely ruinous to gratify a depressive patient. You buy those boots, the ones you had to have, and within moments of wearing them, your heart sinks. That car you finally got your hands on? Driving it out of the lot you wonder, “should I have just leased it?” Desire is an engine best run on less than half a tank. The paradox of capitalism, the way it lets us down, gets a full treatment here. Capitalism reclines on McGowan’s couch and he offers it a few interpretations that shake loose its obsessional and hysterical tendencies. He works with capitalism effectively, not arousing its defenses, because he understands it as caught in a trap of its own making. Embracing Beyond The Pleasure Principle and Lacanian thinking, he asks capitalism how come the ends are more important than the means, and doesn’t it miss the sublime? He also treats the reader, reminding us that we need to not have what we want in order to get what we need. The interview sails along, if I say so myself, and, given the political surround, offers a good conversation to get into. The author would love to hear from us and has asked that I post his email right here, [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

In Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (University of California Press, 2016), Emily K. Hobson challenges conceptions of LGBTQ activism as single-issue analogous to but separate from other activist initiatives. Instead, Hobson uncovers the gay and lesbian left, whose activists saw sexual liberation as intertwined with challenging racism, militarism, and imperialism. She focuses on the gay and lesbian left in the San Francisco Bay Area, tracing the movement from 1968 through 1991. This community of struggle was separate from both separatist and liberal LGBTQ organizing. It grew out of late-1960s and early-1970s gay liberation, but solidified in the mid to late 1970s, usually seen as a period when gay activism turned to more reformist and single-issue frameworks. Geography, space and place are important to Hobson’s analysis. The Bay Area generated a lesbian and gay left partly because of newly politicized white queers proximity to Black liberationists, women of color feminists, socialist feminists, and Central American anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist refugees. These activists encountered each other in neighborhoods, activist offices, and at marches and rallies, where they learned form and sharpened each others politics as well as changed the trajectory of each others actions. As the New Right gained ascendancy, lesbian and gay activists found common cause with others under attack within and outside the Unites States. Over the decades, gay and lesbian leftists supported the Black Panther Party and political prisoners, challenged U.S. intervention in Central America, built links with lesbian and gay Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and brought their direct action skills to bear on the AIDS epidemic. Their coalitions were not without tensions, particularly ones of race; many gay and lesbian left groups were primarily white, and gay and lesbians of color challenged these gaps to create their own left-leaning formations and solidarities with other oppressed groups. Hobson analyzes these tensions and recovers varying forms of political critique, strategy, and community. Through drawing on oral histories and archival documents, including striking photographs, flyers, and political artwork, Lavender and Red lifts up a strain of gay and lesbian activism that had been all but lost to memory for most activists and scholars of today. Emily Hobson serves as Assistant Professor of History and Gender, Race and Identity at University of Nevada, Reno. Isabell Moore is a PhD Student in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social movements in the 20th century and she is involved in activism for racial, gender, economic and queer 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 can we challenge the way film and television represents the world around us? In Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2017) Nancy Wan Yuen, and Associate Professor of Sociology at Biola University, offers a comprehensive guide to the problem of racism in Hollywood, along with possible solutions for organisations, governments and audiences. The book draws on a wealth of interview data, along with almost 10 years of fieldwork in the Hollywood system, interviewing on- and off-screen talent, agents, and decision makers. The book shows the high levels of exclusion of people of colour from Hollywood, along with the malign impacts of this on contemporary culture. Moreover, the book shows how actors of colour face a ‘double bind’ in trying to get work and negotiate the expectations and biases of a white system. By exposing the problem, and offering practical guidance for change, the book represents an important intervention. The engaging style and clear, academically rigorous, prose should be read by anyone interested in Hollywood, and thus more global, culture. The book also has a twitter feed and website. 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 tactics have recently been the subject of lively political debates and the target of protest groups like the Black Lives Matter movement. Police reform is not new, of course. The 1950s and 1960s, in fact, saw one of the most active periods of change surrounding standard policing procedures and a moment of political reexamination of the role of police in a democracy. Christopher Lowen Agee, Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver, examines these changes in San Francisco in his recent book. The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes on a city where police notoriously clashed with leftist activists, but also a city run by liberals. The Streets of San Francisco examines the causes, consequences, and limits of reform from street-level interactions between police and residents to policing politics in city hall. In this episode of New Books in History, Agee discusses his new book. He tells listeners about reform in the San Francisco Police Department in the 1950s and 1960s. He talks about some of the unusual alliances formed among reformers and a few of the several controversies that his book examines, explaining to listeners how those controversies changed police procedures. He discusses the role of police discretion and force, of activists responding to police tactics, and also the limits of reform, particularly those surrounding race. The legacies of these reforms continue to influence policing today. Finally, Agee talks about conducting oral histories for this book and more generally about researching policing during the era. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected]. To download this interview file directly, right click here and select “Save Link (or ‘Target’) As…” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Have you ever watched a futuristic movie and wondered if there will actually be any black people in the future? Have you ever been surprised, disappointed, or concerned with the lack of diversity demonstrated in many science fiction stories? In Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) the author analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan culture to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science reveals new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture and interrogates the meanings of race and genre through studies of science fiction, fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts. Author and professor Andre Carrington earned his bachelors degree in African American Studies from Macalester College and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University. He is now an assistant professor of English at Drexel University, where he teaches courses on African American Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, LGBT Literature and Culture, Global Black Literature and Literary Theory. His research focuses on the cultural politics of race, gender, and genre in 20th century Black and American literature and the arts. Carrington has devoted particular attention to considerations of cultural production and identity, especially those articulated in feminist criticism, critical race theory, performance studies and Marxism. In addition to his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, Dr. Carringtons writings have appeared in the journals Present Tense, Sounding Out!, Callaloo, and African & Black Diaspora. In 2015, he organized the first international Queers & Comics conference through CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies in New York. His current research project, “Audiofuturism,” explores literary adaptation and sound studies through the analysis of science fiction radio plays based on the work of black authors. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. 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 a life that stretched from the Progressive era to the 1960s, A. J. Muste dedicated himself to fighting against war and the exploitation of working Americans. In American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Leilah Danielson describes the course of Muste’s career as a pacifist, labor organizer, and civil rights campaigner, explaining the development of his ideology within the context of his activism. An immigrant to America, Muste pursued a career as a Protestant minister until the pressures created by America’s entry into World War I forced him to resign from his pastorate. His work supporting striking textile workers in in Lawrence, Massachusetts heralded the start of a period of involvement in the labor movement, during which time he became a leading figure at Brookwood Labor College and attempted to establish a labor-based political party during the Great Depression. As another war approached in the late 1930s Muste returned to his roots as a Christian pacifist and spent the next three decades working on behalf of the civil rights and anti-nuclear movements before ending his years as a staunch opponent of America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. As Danielson demonstrates, Muste’s ideas and example inspired generations of activists throughout the world, both in his time and in ours 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

How did the idea of time change during the nineteenth century? In Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the British World (Oxford University Press, 2015) Ryan Vieira, a sessional lecturer at McMaster University, explores Parliament in the nineteenth century to understand both the bureaucratic structures and the individual parliamentarians’ experiences of time. The understanding of time was shaped by changes in the ideas of industriousness, efficiency and respectability, as well as new communications and technologies.The book challenges current understandings of constitutional change and parliamentary reform, offering a new story of the Victorian age. Moreover, the book considers the context of the British Empire, thinking through the impact of these changes on parliamentary systems across the globe. The book will be essential reading for historians and students of politics, as well as a fascinating text for the general reader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

There has been much talk in the news recently about funding for public education, the emergence of charter schools, and the potential of school vouchers. How much does competition for financing in urban public schools depend on marketing and perpetuating poverty in order to thrive? Are the actors in this drama deliberately playing up stereotypes of race and class? A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) offers a firsthand look behind the scenes of the philanthropic approach to funding public education a process in which social change in education policy and practice is aligned with social entrepreneurship. The appearance of success, equity, or justice in education, the author argues, might actually serve to maintain stark inequalities and inhibit democracy. A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School shows that models of corporate or philanthropic charity in education may in fact reinforce the race and class hierarchies that they purport to alleviate. As their voices reveal, the teachers and students on the receiving end of such a system can be critically conscious and ambivalent participants in a school’s racialized marketing and image management. Timely and provocative, this nuanced work exposes the unintended consequences of an education marketplace where charity masquerades as justice. Amy Brown is an educational anthropologist and a faculty member in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. In her research she often explores how the increasing privatization of public education affects teaching and learning practices. Another area of focus for Brown is how “philanthrocapitalism” and reliance on private sector funding influence constructions of gender, class and race as well as distribution of power and resources. A Good Investment? Philanthropy and the Marketing of Race in an Urban Public School is her first book. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

As Raphael Dalleo demonstrates in his wide-ranging and compelling American Imperialism Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anti-colonialism (University of Virginia Press, 2016), the US occupation of Haiti reverberated throughout the Caribbean, as intellectuals and activists shaped their anti-colonial views in its shadow. Dalleo’s work recovers the important links between the reality of US military and economic power and critiques of imperialism in the work of writers including George Padmore, C.L.R. James, and Amy Jacques Garvey. In highlighting the ways the occupation of Haiti haunted Caribbean literature and politics, this book offers fresh readings of these well-known critical voices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) is a provocative reflection on environmental ethics, politics, and forms of knowledge. Through a range of examples as broad as the theoretical scope of the book, Alaimo analyzes political responses to climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, and plastic pollution, as well as the epistemologies that have shaped our understanding of these crises. Simultaneously, this series of essays also explores the intimacies and entanglements of human and non-human subjectivities in the Anthropocene, arguing for a new materialist engagement with the world. Despite the gravity of her subject matter, Alaimo’s examples and writing are often playful. This not only echoes the complexity and occasional contradictions of environmental politics but also makes Exposed a very enjoyable read. Drawing on examples from film, fiction, poetry, scientific writing, art, and activism, Alaimo considers the role pleasure has played and could play in various environmentalisms and environmental engagements. Though it bridges and contributes to scholarly work in the fields of environmental studies, feminism, materialism, and posthumanism, this book is much more than a theoretical exploration; it calls on us to rethink what it means to be human and act accordingly. Alaimo demonstrates interconnections between queer animals, naked protesters, melting glaciers, and interested scholars while providing thoughtful guidance on how to understand and respond to the environmental predicaments to which we are all, to varying degrees, exposed. 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 role has gender played in government institutions? In Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council 1900-1955, Helen Glew, a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Westminster uses detailed case studies of the Post Office, London County Council, and the British Civil Service to explain this crucial question. The book explores the social, economic and cultural setting for the idea of ‘women’s work’ in British state bureaucracy, looking at the barriers confronting women and their resistance to these constraints. The book uses rich historical evidence to analyse campaigns for equal pay, along with the eventual end of the bar to married women in the Civil Service. The book offers a new gendered perspective on organisations that are crucial to understanding British society at the start of the twentieth century. Clear, engaging and well written, the book will be of interest to a general audience, as well as to academics and historians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.” When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, they saw contributions from political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and engineers, but found that “the distinctive and necessary contribution of the humanities as such to this conversation” had “largely gone unarticulated” (5). The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale University Press, 2013) is a wide ranging, deeply researched, and compellingly argued corrective to that lacuna that places humanistic thought, and in particular literary history, in complex and satisfying conversation with the disciplines working to theorize surveillance for our moment. Arguing that “the ultimate target of all surveillance activity: the individual self” is best approached as a knot of questions rather than a stable given, Rosen and Santesso offer an account of “the ways that conceptions of selfhood have changed over time” (8). Working across modes and genres, their argument spans from the early modern period to the present day, along the way challenging current discussions of the role of literature in culture and the myth of interpretive competence that lies behind much thinking about surveillance. Through careful examination of diverse texts, from Locke’s Essay on Toleration through Orwell’s oeuvre and Tolkien’s novels to Enemy of the State and other films from our own era, Rosen and Santesso demonstrate that the “hermeneutic problems of surveillance are also literary problems” (13). Engaging thinkers who have attempted to grapple with the power of narrative to shape our lives–Swift, Bentham, Mill, Weber, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, Baudrillard, and others–Rosen and Santesso essentially set out to rethink modernity, exploring “the effects that fiction has on reality,” and finally offering us a new way of understanding how and why we watch and read our neighbors (9). Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. 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 we do sociology in the digital era? In Digital Sociologies (Policy Press, 2016) Jessie Daniels, Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, Karen Gregory a Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, have brought together a wealth of scholarship to explore the challenge of digital. The book engages with a range of theoretical questions, including challenging the digital/traditional sociology binary, the role of institutions, digital’s impact on eduction, the racialized practices of Twitch, the meaning of motherhood, the quantified self, the question of the body, and the digital sociological imagination. The eclectic range of scholars, offering perspectives from across the academic life course and deploying examples from across the world, create an important intervention into our understanding of this emerging, and perhaps as a result of this book, established, field of study. Ultimately the book is a call for a new community of scholars to engage with this most important element of contemporary life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory