New Books in Critical Theory

The image of the US as leading a good war to establish liberal democracy and move towards racial equality dominate the discourses of the Cold War. In her work, A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2020), Christine Hong attempts to debunk the idea of good war and warfare-welfare state that allowed women...

Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford University Press, 2020), edited by Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon, aims to decenter work on the history of capitalism by looking at the longue durée from the tenth century; at regions as diverse as Song China, South and South East Asia, Latin America and the Ottoman and Safavid Empires; and exploring the plurality of developments over this extended t...

What is an art school? In Art Schools and Place: Geographies of Emerging Artists and Art Scenes (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Dr Silvie Jacobi, a researcher and head of education at London School of Mosaic, thinks through the status of art schools and arts education in the contemporary world. The book draws on ethnographic research in Manchester and Leipzig, comparting and contrasting two nation...

In a world where black(ened) flesh, particularly feminine flesh, is considered the ontological zero of humanness, what interventions and complications are available from art and speculative fiction of the African diaspora? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Zakkiyah Imam Jackson about the imaginative interventions of African cultural production into the r...

What are the identity conflicts that define contemporary society? In Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics (Cambridge UP, 2020) Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, professors of politics at the University of Manchester, explore the long term, structural changes in British society that underpinned the 2016 referendum on EU membership, the 2017 and 2019 general election...

What are the possibilities and what are the inequalities of the digital world? In The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave, 2020), Francesca Sobande, a lecturer in Digital Media Studies at Cardiff University explores the experiences of Black women as producers and as consumers of digital media. The book offers a rich combination of archival and interview material, along with a theoret...

What is Badiou’s theory of emancipation? For whom is this emancipation possible? Does emancipation entail an indifference to difference? In Universal Emancipation: Race Beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) (Minnesota University Press, 2020), Elisabeth Paquette pursues these questions through a sustained conversation with decolonial theory, particularly the work of Sylvia Wynter. Thr...

In Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard University Press, 2020), Sianne Ngai continues her theoretical work of demystifying the vernacular aesthetic categories encountered in late capitalist daily life. In this witty and penetrating book-length treatment of the affective experience of the “gimmick,” Ngai draws upon formalist literary criticism, post-Kantian aesthe...

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s influence over the last several decades of philosophy is undeniable, but his place in the canon has been called into question in recent years in the wake of the publication of his private journals kept throughout his life, including during his involvement with the Nazi Party. This has led to a renewal of an intense series of debates about the relationship...

One of the central threads in the public discourse on Black womanhood is the idea of the “Jezebel.” This trope deems Black women and girls as dishonorable and sexually deviant and the stereotype is circulated from the big screen to the pulpit. Tamura Lomax, Associate Professor at Michigan State University, outlines a historical genealogy of the discursive “Jezebel” and reveals its contemporary leg...

It would be hard to overstate the importance of culture. It teaches us, heals us, rips us apart and puts us back together in new and surprising ways. Given its fundamental importance to the human experience, it would make sense that looking at the sort of people who produce it for us, thinking about who they are, what their experiences are, and what that may say about the cultural products they th...

Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals where they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 (Brill, 2019 and Haymarket Books, 2020 paperback) examin...

Kristin J. Jacobson In her new book, The American Adrenaline Narrative (University of Georgia Press), Kristin Jacobson considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously promote and hinder ecological sustainability. To explore these themes, Jacobson defines and compares adrenaline narratives by a range of American authors published after th...

Dr. Sophie Richter-Devroe’s book, Women’s Political Activism in Palestine: Peacebuilding, Resistance, and Survival (University of Illinois Press, 2018) offers an analysis of the forms assumed by women’s political resistance in Occupied Palestine and interrogates how an understanding of such activism might be expanded if one attends to the ‘everyday’. During the last twenty years, Palestinian women...

In After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018) Joshua Chambers-Letson invites you to a party featuring Eiko, Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Tseng Kwong Chi. Through this diverse cast of characters, Chambers-Letson highlights moments of immanent communism: collaborations, romantic relationships, and serendipitous collisions that p...

Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press, 2020) a brilliant but shocking account of the criminalization of all aspects of reproduction, pregnancy, abortion, birth, and motherhood in the United States. In her extensively researched monograph, Michele Goodwin recounts the horrific contemporary situation, which includes, for example, mothers...

Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from all sort of backgrounds will definitely want to hear more about. Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin Americans...

We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social and political destinies are shaped by the will of the people without realizing that ‘the people’ are always produced, both as individuals and as aggregates, by the media: we are all embedded in mediated p...

Karl Gerth’s new book, Unending Capitalism: How Consumerism Negated China's Communist Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020) details how the state created brands, promoted and advertised particular products, set up department stores, and facilitated the promotion of certain luxury consumer products (notably wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines)—all in the Mao era. Though not typicall...

In Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso Books, 2020), Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading public intellectual, and Robert Pollin, the renowned progressive economist, map out the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change—and present a realistic blueprint for change: the Green New Deal. Together, Chomsky and Pollin show how the for...

How does the music industry work in the modern world? In Selling Out: Culture, Commerce and Popular Music (Bloomsbury, 2020), Bethany Klein, a Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, explores the relationship between music and money, from the early years of the pop industry to contemporary society’s ‘promotional culture’. The book conceptualises ‘selling out’, and offers a...

Logic, the study of how certain arguments either succeed or fail to support their conclusions, is one of the most important topics in philosophy, its importance illustrated by the common assumption that if one is being logical, they are probably right. However, the importance of logic has led to a certain amount of misuse and abuse over the years, with questionable arguments being given a veneer o...

Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (Bloomsbury) is a book by Patrick Ffrench, Professor of French at Kings College. It is a comprehensively researched and finely argued book that traces Barthes engagement with questions of cinema from early research pre-dating the publication of Mythologies to his last work, Camera Lucida, along the way responding in depth to those who have expli...

In World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time (Palgrave Macmillan) Filippo Menozzi offers to look at literature and literary processes through the prism of non-synchronism. The book details the notion that Menozzi finds accurate and relevant not only for the analysis of current cultural and political developments, but also for the consideration of the past. Non-synchronism is sugg...

In her latest book, The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities (Yale University Press), Kathryn Sikkink puts forward a framework of rights and responsibilities; moving beyond the language of rights that has come to dominate scholarship and activism, she makes the case that human rights cannot be truly implemented unless we also recognise that there are corresponding obligatio...