New Books in Critical Theory

In Nonbinary Jane Austen, Chris Washington theorizes how Jane Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Arguing that her writing works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether, Washington shows how she establishes a politics that ushers in a future built on plurality and possibility. Chris Washi...

Globalization is over. With US president Donald Trump pursuing an 'America First' agenda in trade and foreign policy, everyone now recognises the urgency of defending their own country's national interest. But what is the national interest and why did it disappear from the political agenda? Will Trump restore American national interests, or will he betray them? How might we know the difference? Th...

Why does critical theory matter today? In Critical Theory: The Basics (Routledge, 2024), Martin Shuster, a Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, explores the history, thought and legacy of the Frankfurt School to demonstrate the urgency of critical theory for explaining the world. Beginning with the...

Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton University Press, 2025) shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black life and asks whether a different kind of classicism—one of insurgence, fugitivity, and emancipation—is possible. Engaging with the work of Sylvia Wynter and other trailblazers in Black studies while drawing on his own experiences as a Blac...

Marx’s Capital looms large today, a century and a half after first publication, a massive tome that attempts to document and map out the dynamics of a society consumed by capital accumulation. The complexity and scope, as well as its voluminous incompleteness upon his death, have left many readers perplexed, looking for a ‘royal road’ to comprehension. However, this has led to a number of misreadi...

The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise of Black political control in the 1970s. Wildcat of the Streets documents how the “community policing” approach of Mayor Coleman Young (1974–1993)—including neighborhood police stations, affirmative action hiring policies, and public participation in...

Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability. Honing a "cranky" approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own exper...

In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of the symptoms and results of that inequality. Racial, social, and class inequities and the public health crises in the United States are deeply intertwined, their roots and manifestations continually pressuring each other. This has been both illuminat...

What are dominant narratives of mixed race identity? What are those narratives doing, in everyday life and within philosophical discourse? How can attending to the narratives and actions of people who identify as mixed race not just interrupt these dominant narratives, but change our understandings of ancestry, race, sexuality, and much more? In Critical Mixed Race Philosophy: Rethinking Kinship a...

The Revolution Will Be Spotified: Music As a Rhetorical Mode of Resistance (Lexington Books, 2024) investigates the rhetorical strategies present in mainstream popular music and how those strategies are implemented to empower resistance. Case studies across the genres of popular music in the West are surveyed throughout the book to consider the power of music as a rhetorical tool during cultural f...

Ordinary items take on new meanings when you cast them in different light. The origins of tea, coffee and sugar are well known, but when you discover that gym treadmills were pioneered on plantations or that denim jeans were once clothing for enslaved people, you can't help but ask where else the legacy of slavery hides in plain sight. Through the stories of thirty-nine everyday places and objects...

For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What happened to bold political vision on the left, and what shrunk the very horizons of possibility? In Thinking like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman tells the story of how a distinctive way of thinking—an “economic style of reasoning”—becam...

Today we’re continuing our series on philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work, On Bullshit. Our guest is Michael Patrick Lynch, Provost Professor of the Humanities and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Michael is the author of the recently published book, On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It (Princeton University Press, 2025). The...

Billionaires are an ultra-elite social class whose numbers are growing alongside their obscene wealth while others struggle, suffer or even die. They represent a scourge of economic inequality, but how do they get away with it? A set of dangerous and deceptive inter-connected myths portrays them as a ‘force for good’: -the ‘heroic billionaire’ asserts they are gallant protagonists of the American...

In his classic essay on the fear of breakdown, Donald Winnicott famously conveys to a patient that the disaster powerfully feared has, in fact, already happened. Taking her cue from Winnicott, Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Psychoanalysis and Politics (Columbia University Press, 2019), explores the implications of breakdown fears for the practice of democracy. Democracy, as you may dimly recal...

Between 1450 and 1550, a remarkable century of intellectual exchange developed across the Eastern Mediterranean. As Renaissance Europe depended on knowledge from the Ottoman Empire, and the courts of Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II greatly benefitted from knowledge coming out of Europe, merchants of knowledge—multilingual and transregional Jewish scholars—became an important bridge among the p...

My guest today is Jyotsna Singh, Professor Emerita of English at Michigan State University. She has written numerous books including Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discovery” of India in the Language of Colonialism (Routledge), and The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (Blackwell), which is co-authored with Dympna Callaghan and Lorraine Helms. She has also edited A Compa...

In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism (Duke University Pres...

Reading Prester John: Cultural Fantasy and its Manuscript Contexts by John Eldevik During the Middle Ages, many Europeans imagined that there existed a powerful and marvel-filled Christian realm beyond the lands of Islam ruled by a devout emperor they called “Priest John,” or “Prester John.” Spurred by a forged letter that mysteriously appeared around 1165 and quickly “went viral” in hundreds of m...

Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Kevin Guyan reveals how the fight for LGBTQ equalities in the UK is shaped – and constrained – by the classifications we encounter every day. Looking across six systems – the police and the recording of hate crimes; dating apps and digital desire; outness in the film and television industry; borders a...

Pakistani women are increasingly pursuing legal avenues against acts of domestic violence. Their claims, however, are often dismissed through character allegations that label them as 'bad' women in need of control, or 'mad' women not to be trusted. Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Daanika Kamal explores why the su...

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on...

Political Scientist Angela K. Lewis-Maddox has pulled together an important and useful edited volume focusing on black women political scientists and their experiences in the discipline itself and in studying topics that include race and gender. Political Science, as a discipline, is a bit more than 100 years old, and studies politics, power, institutions, policy, methodology, and theory. These ar...

Saving Liberalism from Itself: The Spirit of Political Participation Bristol UP, 2022) By Timothy Stacey In the wake of populism, Timothy Stacey’s book critically reflects on what is missing from the liberal project with the aim of saving liberalism. It explains that populists have harnessed myth, ritual, magic and tradition to advance their ambitions, and why opponents need to embrace rather th...

A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (Princeton UP, 2024) by Michael A. Cook This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the p...