New Books In Critical Theory

In Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), author Jason W. Moore seeks to undermine popular understandings of the relationship among society, environment, and capitalism. Rather, than seeing society and environment as acting on an external, nonhuman nature, Moore wants us to recognize capitalism-in-nature. For Moore, seeing society and environment as separate has hampered clear thinking on the problems we face, such as climate change or the end of cheap nature, as well as political solutions to these issues. His book is an analysis of the interrelationship of capitalism and nature over the past few centuries as well as a critique of important environmental concepts such as the Anthropocene. Moore is assistant professor of sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network. This book is a product of over a decade of research and writings on world ecology and evidence of his wide-ranging scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices.

What are the alternatives to the current neo-liberal cultural settlement prevailing in much of the global north? In To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture: The Cultural Policy of The Cuban Revolution (PM Press, 2015), Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, from The Centre for Cultural Change, argues that this question can be addressed by learning from the cultural policy of the Cuban revolution. The book draws on a wealth of archival material, coupled with the theoretical framework of Marxist Humanism, to give a detailed picture of the revolutionary period on the island and chart the lessons from that era. The book introduces the key policy documents and events, along with examples from a variety of cultural forms, including a detailed engagement with the role of film and cinema in the revolutionary era. The book will be essential reading for cultural studies and cultural policy scholars, alongside anyone seeking an alternative vision of culture’s social role. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adch

So many of our social questions are now the subject of analysis from economics. In A Richer Life: How Economics can Change the Way We Think and Feel (Penguin, 2015), Phillip Roscoe, a reader at the University of St Andrew’s School of Management, offers a critique of the long march of economics into social life. The book covers a vast range of social examples, including dating, organ transplantation, and education, alongside accessible engagements with historical and contemporary economic theory. Using personal examples as well as academic expertise, Roscoe’s book offers a primer in the social cost of economics, as well as what we can do to resit and challenge economistic modes of thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Popular culture has been transformed in its attitudes towards disability, as representations across media forms continues to respond to the contemporary politics of disability. In Disability and Popular Culture: Focusing Passion, Creating Community and Expressing Defiance (Ashgate, 2015), Katie Ellis, a Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University, uses critical perspectives from disability studies to both challenge and celebrate the place of disability in popular culture. The book thinks through ideas of beauty, the role of children’s toys, representations in television and music, as well as science fiction and sport. Alongside the range of sites of disability and popular culture, the book closes with a case study of social media and the limits of inspirational images. The book is essential reading for cultural studies scholars, but raises important questions for a general readership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbook

The French philosopher Alain Badiou is not best known for his engagement with ecological matters per se. Badiou’s insights regarding being, truth, and political militancy are, however, highly relevant for the consideration of “the ecological question.” Based on a doctoral thesis written under Badiou’s supervision, Am Johal‘s new book, Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene(Atropos Press, 2015) is a thinking through and with Badiou’s work while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of our time: the relationship between human beings, technology, and nature; the meaning of change; and the possibilities of democratic politics and resistance. This, during an era that many now refer to as the “Anthropocene,” a period in which the impact of human beings on geological conditions and change has become unmistakable. Ecological Metapolitics is a work of engaged philosophy that will illuminate readers’ understanding of Badiou’s oeuvre. The book also makes an important contribution to our understand

Did you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship between female characters and violence in narrative cinema, and was attuned to function of violence in film and television. This was around the time the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked to the public. Over the next 10 years, torture porn appeared in the Saw and Hostel films, and it seemed that torture quickly became a routine element of thriller plots in movies and TV, such as the series 24. In The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press, 2015), Neroni makes a compelling case that, prior to 9/11, the stage had already been set for the dehumanizing fantasy of torture to appear in mass culture – via biopolitics. With this book, Neroni takes on the task of defining and understanding torture through a psychoanalytic lens, using films and television as ca

Owning property. Being property. Becoming propertyless. These are three themes of white possession that structure Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s brilliant new inquiry into the dynamics of race and Indigeneity in “postcolonizing” societies like Australia.The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) collects and expands over a decade of work that speaks to key dynamics both at the heart, and sometimes obscured, within critical Indigenous studies. A Goenpul scholar from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, Australia, Aileen Moreton-Robinson is the author of numerous previous books and articles in the fields of law and sovereignty, whiteness, race and feminism, and is a Council Member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. 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 has American cultural and artistic policy changed over the last 25 years? Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programmes Redefined US Artists for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2014) explains the process of policy-making, funding models, NGOs and specific places that have shaped the current cultural settlement in the USA. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s book uses examples of policy reports, theatre and cross-arts organisations, as well as drawing on debates about creative platemaking. The multi-disciplinary approach allows Performing Policy to speak directly to the history of arts funding, in the context of the U.S.’s culture wars, as well as to the contemporary question of the role and purpose of the artist in society, along with how those artists might be educated. The book will be important reading for cultural policy and arts management students, as well as those in cultural studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium

Literary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahl‘s Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2014) challenges these assumptions by showing the varieties of literary practice in Rotherham, England. The book engages with the locally particular to draw out a variety of general findings, relevant to methodological reflection and material culture debates. The book draws on a wealth of projects from the AHRC funded Connected Communities programme, including Fishing as Wisdom, The Imagine Project, and Language as Talisman. The book represents an important intervention into how we understand community, literacy and identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Eugene Thacker‘s wonderful Horror of Philosophy series includes three books – In the Dust of this Planet (Zero Books, 2011), Starry Speculative Corpse (Zero Books, 2015), and Tentacles Longer than Night (Zero Books, 2015) – that collectively explore the relationship between philosophy (especially as it overlaps with demonology, occultism, and mysticism) and horror (especially of the supernatural sort). Each book takes on a particular problematic using a particular form from the history of philosophy, from the quaestio, lectio, and disputatio of medieval scholarship, to shorter aphoristic prose, to productive “mis-readings” of works of horror as philosophical texts and vice versa. Taken together, the books thoughtfully model the possibilities born of a comparative scholarly approach that creates conversations among works that might not ordinarily be juxtaposed in the same work: like Nishitani, Kant, Yohji Yamamoto, and Fludd; or Argento, Dante, and Lautramont. Though they explore topics like darkness, pessimis

Valuation is a central question in contemporary social science. Indeed the question of value has a range of academic projects associated with it, whether in terms of specific questions or in terms of emerging fora for academic publications. In Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2015), Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee bring together a range of authors to outline a new research programme. Alongside individual essays that range from the allocation of transplant organs, questions of plagiarism in science, the ownership of generically modified organisms though to desire and neuroscience, the book points to a new way to think through questions of valuation. As a result its importance moves beyond an STS audience to establish value practices as a vital framework for understanding contemporary life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/c

What does non-religion mean? In a new book Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular (Oxford University Press, 2015), Lois Lee, one of the editors of Secularism and Non-Religion, interrogates the role of non-religion in society, to better understand how a seemingly neutral category tells us much about the contemporary world. Positioning the research against narratives that claim society as secularized, or as increasingly post-secular, Lee’s work, along with other scholars in the Non-Religion and Secularity Research Network, shows how there are varieties of secularism and non-religion prevailing today. The book is programatic, setting out a framework for engaging with non-religion as a bodily practice, as sociality, as media and as the everyday. Moreover it offers a methodological challenge to traditions of survey research in this area. In the final chapter the book also sketches the concept of existential cultures, showing the points of intersection in the practices of the secular and non-religio

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically assess the legacies of Subaltern Studies through research into political movements in India today. The case studies range from students at elite higher education institutes shoring up their privilege, to queer activism in Kolkata, to Dalit villagers fighting land grabs, and the studies’ richness allows for a really nuanced relational understanding of subalternity, hegemony and the state that make the book a truly conceptually and ethnographically innovative collection. 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 role of financial services in individuals’ and communities’ everyday lives is more important than ever. In Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending (Routledge, 2014), Liz McFall charts the rise of one particular element of financial services, door-to-door sales, to understand the role of insurance and credit in society. In doing so McFall aims to ‘ventriloquise the lives and consumption practices of the silent poor’, as well as charting a the history of a very neglected element of the story of finance’s role in contemporary life. The book contains a wealth of historical data, alongside a theoretical engagement with the meaning of ‘the device’ within current social theoretical literature. Moreover the book offers reflections on the role and workings of markets and states, both with regard to finance and more broadly to the government of social life. The combination of these perspectives offers an important new lens through which to understand the sociology of consumption a

Are you happy? In his new book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015), William Davies, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, critically investigates this question. The book offers skepticism towardsthe demand that economy and society be happy, skepticism founded in an interrogation of the practices of contemporary government and businesses. A whole range of our everyday experiences, including ‘nudges’ for citizens and staff, the perverse incentives of metrics, through tothe consequences of how psychiatry classifies depression, are subject to critical scrutiny.Moreover, the book acts as a primer on economics, psychology and organizational theory, clearly articulating the roots and the consequences of our current economic and social settlement. The book concludes with the possibility of a more democratic way of organizing the world, in contrast to our impersonal, oppressive, and data driven present. Dr Davies is a co-director of Gol

Networks seem to be the dominant metaphor for contemporary society. In Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age (Zero Books, 2014), Christopher Vitale sets out a manifesto for understanding and using networks as the basis of a new philosophy. The book draws on continental philosophy, complex systems theory and a range of other elements to both introduce and contextualise, as well as present, the networkology manifesto. The book explores what networks are, how they emerge, how they change and how they are resilient (or not). The book intervenes in the contemporary interest in networks and will thus be of interest beyond just the critical theoretical disciplines. The text is also part of a much broader networkological project, including an original iteration of the manifesto and several papers. You can find out more about the project here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.

Whether you need help being more focused at work, are having a spiritual crisis, or want to understand how you can change your inner self for the better, the popular self-help and spiritual well-being market has got you covered. In Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie (Bloomsbury, 2014), Craig Martin, Associate Professor of Religious Studies St. Thomas Aquinas College, examines the rhetoric of individualism at root in these works and popular conceptions of ‘spirituality’ or individual religion. He demonstrates that individual religion has been placed within sets of dichotomies, communal vs. individual, tradition vs. choice, organized religion vs. spirituality, that establish the continuing conversations about contemporary spirituality. Overall, he argues that many spirituality and related self-help discourses recommend quietism, consumerism, and worker productivity, which reproduce the status quo within neoliberal capitalism. In our conversation we discuss the relationship between

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is unsymbolized and melancholia is contained within the self, mourning is often an address to the other.Mourning might entail attempts to remember, creatively work through, and make manifest losses in poetry, memorials, histories, painting, and other art forms.Without access to the unconscious, cultural historians can only engage what has already been represented and written — that which has materiality and symbolic richness.Individual and mutigenerational testaments and rituals of mourning — warped, haunted, and incomplete — are all that scholars have available. Warped Mourning is about how three generations spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods have mourned the milli

Credit, debt and default are embedded into everyday life, whether as a constant part of people’s daily routines or as a constantly discussed topic in news media. Joe Deville‘s new book, Lived Economies of Default: Consumer Credit, Debt Collection and the Capture of Affect, helps to make sense of this by asking how this core part of the social world functions.The book draws on science and technology studies and theories of affect, to lay bare the practices of attaching the debtor to debt, and to getting debts to be repaid. The book has case studies of credit cards, collections agencies, telephone calls and letters, revealing the reality of default and debt in contemporary society. The book will appeal widely, not only to sociology, organization studies and anthropology, but also to politics, psychology, and the wider humanities. 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 is “the public sphere” best conceptualized on a transnational scale? Nancy Fraser (The New School for Social Research) explores this pressing question in her book Transnationalizing the Public Sphere (Polity, 2014). Opening with Fraser’s foundational essay, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World,” the book then contains critiques of the essay from a range of scholars working in different fields and concludes with Fraser’s reply, “Publicity, Subjection, Critique.” The interview covers the history and formation of public sphere theory, the currents and forces in the “postnational constellation” that demands its rethinking, critical theory, what normative legitimacy and political efficacy look like on the transnational scale, and more. The book is of interest to democratic theorists, scholars of globalization, critical and postcolonial theorists, media studies scholars, and other fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap