New Books in Critical Theory

How can the history of women’s work in film and TV help address inequality today? In Women’s Activism Behind the Screens: Trade Unions and Gender Inequality in the British Film and Television Industries (University of Bristol Press, 2020), Frances Galt, a Teaching Associate in history at Newcastle University, looks at the history of women’s struggles for equality within unions in the screen indust...

Morton Schoolman, Professor in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the State University of New York at Albany, has published a new book that explores the idea of democratic enlightenment in the United States, and the way that we may want to consider both how to achieve this enlightenment and how we can be guided by our literary and philosophical traditions. Schoolman explains t...

It’s often said that the time in our lives can often pass without us noticing. Old age can come before we realize it, and it brings with it new elements to our own daily lives that we couldn’t have anticipated before. Observed from a distance and growing old can seem like a universal experience, but observed up close, it becomes clear that the different ways people age are as varied and unique as...

The medium of cinema emerged during the height of Victorian-era European empires, and as a result, settler colonial imperialism has thematically suffused film for well over a century. In Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World on Film (Routledge, 2020), Drs. Janne Lahti (Academy of Finland Fellow in history, University of Helsinki) and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (Professor of English, Virgini...

Why do books and publishing matter to the contemporary history of Britain? In Penguin Books and Political Change: Britain's Meritocratic Moment, 1937–1988 (Manchester UP, 2020), Dean Blackburn, aLecturer in Modern British History at the University of Nottingham, explores Britain in the twentieth century through the story of Penguin’s ‘Specials’. The book charts the shifting social, political, and...

Is intersectionality a critical social theory? What must intersectionality do to be both critical and a social theory? Must social justice be a guiding normative principle? And what does or should social justice mean in intersectional theory? Patricia Hills Collins explores these questions, and many more, in Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (Duke University Press, 2019). Engaging a wide...

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez pens towards decolonial freedom. Her recently published book, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020), uses peripheralized (5) novels, visual/sonic works, poetry, essays, and short stories by diasporic and exiled Afro-Atlantic Hispanophone writers and artists towards “render[ing] legible what these texts...

In today’s episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, Sneha Annavarapu talks with Dr. Caterina Fugazzola, Earl S Johnson Instructor in Sociology at the University of Chicago, about her research on the contemporary tongzhi (LGBT) movement in the People’s Republic of China. Dr. Fugazzola briefly discusses her current book project (under contract with Temple University Press) in which she explains how grass...

As right-wing nationalism and authoritarian populism gain momentum across the world, liberals, and even some conservatives, worry that democratic principles are under threat. In The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton UP, 2018), Michael Hanchard argues that the current rise in xenophobia and racist rhetoric is nothing new and that exclusionary policies have alwa...

In this episode, I interview Cassandra Falke, professor of English Literature ad UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, about her book The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016). In the text, Falke situates herself within the current revival of the interest in ethics in literary criticism, which coincides with a rise in neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotio...

Philosophers have long approached the concept of rhythm as a significant tool for understanding the human experience, metaphysics, language, and the arts. In her new study Rhythm: A Theological Category (Oxford University Press, 2018), Lexi Eikelboom argues that theologians have much to gain from rhythm as a conceptual tool. In an interdisciplinary study bringing together prosody, continental phil...

In this conversation, Sara Salem, author of Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (Cambridge University Press, 2020), talks to host Yi Ning Chang about temporality, capitalism, and hegemony in her history of Egypt’s two revolutions. From Gamal Abdel Nasser to Gramsci and Fanon, from revolution to the coronavirus pandemic, Sara reflects on the unfinished project of Nasserism, w...

George Orwell once said that “the word ‘fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. The word ‘neoliberalism’ knows exactly how it feels. How did a term coined by a group of anti-authoritarian German economists in the 1930s to label a philosophy that stressed the role of the state in ensuring efficient competition turn into more of an insult than a descr...

How to understand propaganda art in the post-truth era—and how to create a new kind of emancipatory propaganda art. Propaganda art — whether a depiction of joyous workers in the style of socialist realism or a film directed by Steve Bannon — delivers a message. In Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (MIT Press, 2019), Jonas Staal argues that propaganda does not merely make a political point; it aim...

In his book, Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (Baylor UP, 2016), Sheldon George treats an old idea--that African Americans must transform their relationship to the history of slavery and to their identification with race—in an entirely new way. What follows is a quite truncated encapsulation of the book’s central argument which I will attempt if only because it...

Being a great power almost seems to invite discussion of decline: whether you are declining, what can be done to prevent or arrest it, and what the consequences of decline might ultimately be. The United States has not managed to escape from any of this analysis, but understanding how imperial and hegemonic decline has played out historically often does not inform these discussions. Is the United...

How can we create a more equal media industry? In Access All Areas: The Diversity Manifesto for TV and Beyond, Marcus Ryder and Sir Lenny Henry, both founder members of the The Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity at Birmingham City University, tell the story of their work to transform British television and set out an eight point manifesto for change. The book lays out the diversity crisis...

How should we understand the theme park in our globalised world? In A Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks: Middle Class Kingdoms (Intellect, 2020), Dr. Sabrina Mittermeier, a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in American cultural history at the University of Kassel, Germany, presents a detailed and engaging cultural history of Disneyland’s theme parks to tell the story of this now gl...

The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality.  Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (Duke UP, 2019), speaks with Pierre d'Alancaisez about what she calls decommodifie...

A beautifully written exploration of religion's role in a secular, modern politics, by an accomplished scholar of critical theory, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (Yale University Press, 2020) takes its title from an intriguing remark by Theodor W. Adorno, in which he summarized the meaning of Walter Benjamin's image of a celebrated mechanical chess-play...

The tradition of political liberalism has a long and complicated history, filled with twists, turns, critiques and responses that have filled books, essays and lectures for several centuries now. Questions of the importance and limitations of individual rights and how to balance different interests have produced no shortage of theoretical conflict as different figures have attempted to make sense...

Christoph Menke, who is professor of philosophy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt Germany and considered the most important representative of the third generation of the "Frankfurt School of Critical Theory", presents in Critique of Rights (Polity Press 2020) a critical reflection on modern normativity in the so-called "Western world". More specifically: He analyzes “subjective rights”. To hav...

What is the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect? Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics (Sternberg Press, 2020) delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on notions such as “research” and “knowledge production.” Tom Holert, author of Knowledge Besid...

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Barbara Dennis of Indiana University on her new ethnography, Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise, published in 2020 by Peter Lang Press. Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise features the IU-Unityville Outreach Project and tells the story of a 4-year-long participatory, critical ethnography in a local...

Jemma Deer’s Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020) invites the reader to take a moment and to ponder on the way of reading. In her book, the author challenges the narcissistic position of the human being: a status that has been established for some time and which has already been challenged before but does not seem to be changing quickly. The Anthropoc...