New Books In Critical Theory

Back on the podcast for the second time in two years is Alex Hertel-Fernandez. You might recall his last book Politics at Work which examined the way employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy. Alex is back with his latest, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States--and the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2019). He is assistant professor in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. In State Capture, Hertel-Fernandez focuses on the development and political power of  three inter-locking interest groups: the Koch Brothers-run Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the State Policy Network (SPN). Drawing from an array of sources of data, Hertel-Fernandez shows how, since the 1970s, conservative policy entrepreneurs, large financial contributors, and major corporations built a right-wing "troika" of overlapping and inf

Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand (Verso, 2016) and with an Introduction ‘The Doctor and the Saint’ by Arundhati Roy, is based on a speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedakar who took up the anti-caste struggles for the Untouchables in India. S. Anand’s work with thoroughly researched annotations alongside the speech and introduction by Arundhati Roy makes this a must-read book for anyone who wants to understand India, its society, politics and the caste system. This landmark speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedakar is the pinnacle of his scholarly work and cements his legacy alongside Mahatma Gandhi in Indian politics. In this speech, Dr. B.R. Ambedakar makes arguments against Hinduism, how reforming the Hinduism will not solve the issues of centuries of oppression of Untouchables - the depressed and oppressed castes in India. He argues that Indian society and culture that preaches the spirituality to the world cannot provide liberty, equality, and fraternity until she completely annihilates th

In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach to understand both the conceptual and actual issue of borders as spaces that separate and distinguish states and nations, and individuals and citizens. The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is not simply about the border because, as the book makes clear, borders are in no way simple, and what Longo has pursued in his work is the complexity that encompasses the theoretical idea of the border but also how and why borders are more diverse in understanding than we often ascribe to them. Longo interrogates what a border actually is, noting that the space itself is not quite the thin line between states that we often assume it to be, but a physical area that is co-administered by bordering nations, often collaboratively, thus blurring the line or spac

There’s lot of talk these days, at least in some circles on the left, of a Universal Basic Income. There’s also talk in many of the same circles of a jobs guarantee. Join us as we speak with Steven Attewell, author of People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). He tells us the history of direct job creation by government in the U.S. and the lessons to be learned from the successes and failures of such efforts throughout the 20th century. It's a fascinating, surprising, and essential history. 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 Peoples 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, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit meg

Who gets in to top professions? In The Class Ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged (Policy Press, 2019), Drs Sam Friedman, an associate professor of sociology at LSE, and Daniel Laurison, an assistant professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, explore the dominance of social elites in top professions. The book draws on theories of social mobility and the work of Pierre Bourdieu to explain how top professions are highly exclusive, with under representations of women, ethnic minorities, and those from working class backgrounds. Moreover, even when individuals from these demographics do enter top jobs such as law, medicine, and accountancy, along with media occupations and acting, they suffer gaps in pay because of their class, race, and gender. The intersection of these demographics is crucial to the analysis, and the book uses detailed qualitative research to explain this 'class ceiling', showing how economic, cultural, and social capital play out to account for how inequality is replicated in the workplace

The production and removal of garbage, as a key element of the daily infrastructure of urban life, is deeply embedded in social, moral, and political contexts. In her book Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal (Duke University Press, 2018) Dr. Rosalind Fredericks illuminates the history of state-citizen relations and economic and political restructuring in Dakar by focusing on the city’s complex history of garbage collection in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, from activist clean-up movements to NGO-led development projects to massive sanitation worker strikes. She pays particular attention to the themes of generation, gender, and religion in her analysis of the ways in which people become integrated into the infrastructural life of the city; in so doing, she invites us to expand our understanding of what constitutes infrastructure. This fascinating book will be useful not only for anthropologists, cultural geographers, and scholars of West Africa, but also for anyone in

With prison reform a topic of international conversation and debate, Marica Morgan’s Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race  offers an in-depth and unique analysis of a population largely lost in these debates and discussions: black women. By centering their experiences, Morgan offers and intersectional and psychodynamic examination of the prison worker and the organizational nature of the prison. This book offers added insight into not only the prison system as a place of employment, but also for any white-male-dominated organization. Taking the reader through the experiences of black women prison employees, Morgan highlights the importance of intersectional qualitative methodology when investigating institutional or organizational culture. Black Women Prison Employees is a necessary and timely read for policymakers and researchers interested in organizational structures and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a

How has the council estate been represented on stage? In Social Housing In Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage (Methuen Drama, 2018),  Dr. Katie Beswick, a lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter, explores this question using a mixture of dramatic and social theory, along with examples from a variety of theatre performances and forms. The book sets out the history of social housing and the council estate, along with a reading of the (mis)representations of the estate across contemporary media. The book shows the longstanding and complex relationship between theatre, class, and the estate, using examples including high profile state pieces, as well as site specific theatre. The book will be essential reading for theatre and performance scholars, along with anyone interested in issues of class and culture, as well as housing, space and place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supporting

Since the late 1990s Thai cinema has come to global attention with movies like the famous ghost film, Nang Nak, and more recently the evocative films of director Aphichatpong Weerasethakul, who won a Palme D’Or award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. A perennially popular theme in Thai cinema is that of haunting by a female ghost. In this unique, unusual book, Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016), Arnika Fuhrmann hones in on this ghostly theme in contemporary Thai cinema to explore the subjects of female desire and queer sexuality. In doing so she raises questions about a central concept in Queer Theory: the nature of desire. Fuhrmann identifies a tension between Western liberal and everyday Thai Buddhist understandings of desire. Arguably, Buddhist teaching about desire is one factor that has contributed to Thailand’s reputation for being a “queer-friendly” country. Indeed, it is even marketed as a “gay paradise”. But the reality i

In his most new book Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (NYU Press, 2018), Clarence Taylor, dean of the history of the civil rights movement in New York, looks at black resistance to police brutality in the city, and institutional efforts to hold the NYPD accountable, since the late 1930s and '40s. ​“Many people think that police brutality is a recent phenomenon,” says Taylor, professor emeritus at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of City University of New York. But, in fact, it has a long, sordid history, going back even further than the years covered in this new book. And long before the era of cellphones, black newspapers did their own investigations when men, women, and children were beaten or killed by the police. (Louis Lomax, the first African-American journalist to appear regularly on television news, commented in the early 1960s that, if not for police brutality, the black press would have "considerable blank space.") Taylor also looks a

What might Levi-Strauss and structuralism have to offer to psychoanalysis beyond the incest prohibition and the Oedipus complex? What happens if we understand Lacan’s notion of the symbolic as creative, rather than prohibitory? And what’s the difference between the psychoanalyst and the shaman? Shanna de la Torre’s Sex for Structuralists: The Non-Oedipal Logics of Femininity and Psychosis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) performs a careful reading of Freudian, Lacanian and structuralist texts in order to offer a new way of conceiving of the objects and aims of psychoanalysis today. Alongside it she introduces us to an alternative perspective on Lacan emerging from analysts associated with GIFRIC, a Lacanian school based in Quebec. Listen in as we work our way through some of the book’s major concerns and their implications for theory and practice. 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 detective fiction explain the social world? In Detecting the Social: Order and Disorder in Post-1970s Detective Fiction(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Mary Evans and Hazel Johnstone, both from the London School of Economics' Department of Gender Studies,  and Sarah Moore, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bath's Department of Social and Policy Sciences, set out a radical agenda for contemporary social theory grounded in an analysis of detective fiction since the 1970s. The book uses a range of examples from the genre, as well as comparative discussions with previous eras of detective fiction. In doing so, the book demonstrates how questions of modernity, globalisation, trust in institutions, blame and responsibility, gender and gender relations, along with the rise of neoliberalism and the transformation of the social state since the 1970s can be understood through key works such as Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. By showing an alternative to 'unpeopled' social theories, the book will be key reading ac

Robin Marie Averbeck is a writer, activist and teacher at California State University, Chico. Liberalism is not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought (The University of North Carolina Press, 2018) is a historical examination of postwar liberalism that powerfully shows how racist capitalism is at the heart of liberal thought. Through ideological laden invocation of pluralism, the “culture of poverty,” and faith in the workings of democratic institutions, liberals shared with conservatives support for an individualistic and racist social order. Demonstrating concern for poverty embodied in the vision of the Great Society, liberals attempted to effectively deny the issue of race for African Americans. Attention to poverty turned to finding an explanation in the pathological makeup of poor blacks and in the overarching “culture of poverty” that became identified with urban environments. After supporting Civil Rights legislation and Community Action Programs funded by the federal government, libera

Almost a decade in the making, Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland(Cambridge University Press, 2018) draws on collaboratively collected oral histories of two social movements in western Madhya Pradesh, the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS) and the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan (AMS). This longue-durée approach allows Alf Gunvald Nilsen to unravel the Indian state's everyday tyranny against its adivasi citizens. The deep tentacles of caste and class power embodied as the state reach into the Bhil everyday, not tethered to single issues of "development" induced displacement or the disappearing commons, but as an all-encompassing structural violence manifested in the realities of malnutrition, agricultural debt and seasonal migration. Alf Gunvald Nilsen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria. Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found

If you want to read just one book to properly understand capitalism, let it be Tania Li’s award-winning 2014 book Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014). This might seem like a strange choice: how can a study of a faraway and possibly exotic indigenous place shed light on “our” own global realities of jobless growth and rising inequality? But it can, and it does. The book is a masterpiece of social scientific scholarship and critical political praxis. Through a longitudinal ethnography conducted over twenty years, the book follows the consequences of Indonesian highlanders’ fateful decision to plant the booming cash crop of the 1990s, cacao. That decision, Li shows, was the reason that capitalism took root and developed apace in the highlands over the coming decades. All the telltale signs of capitalist relations emerged: land was privatized, commons eroded, classes differentiated, and wealth and poverty co-created. Instead of coming as an imposition from the

Today I spoke with Flavia di Mario, a young scholar of political economy and industrial relations. She coauthored a very provocative book with Andrea Micocci, The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2017). Flavia is doctoral student at London Middlesex University, Andrea Micocci was professor of Economics at Link University, Rome, Italy. In their words, they claim that capitalism is based on a false logic in which all facts and ideas are reduced to a consideration of their ‘feasibility’ within the capitalist system. Thus, all mainstream economic and political theories, including those such as Marxism which are supposed to offer an alternative vision, have been stunted and utopian ideas are completely side-lined. "In order to constantly work out the feasible, you have to hang on to pseudo-factual concepts: nationalism; a constant drive for efficiency; the idea of nation/state; corporatism; managed markets; business ethics; governance etc. Capitalism is reduced to the management of the economy by states

How has European culture changed since the 1960s? In Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010 (Routledge, 2018), Dr. Irmak Karademir Hazir and her co-authors, explore this important question by looking at newspaper coverage of culture across Europe over the last 50 years. The book has an incredibly rich and detailed dataset of newspaper articles from Spain, UK, France, Turkey, Sweden and Finland, and covers a range of cultural forms. The book grapples with the classic tensions in the study of culture, between aesthetics and commercialisation, hierarchies, and globalisation, along with changes in the format, style, and production conditions for cultural journalism. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in culture in Europe, and you can find out more about the project and read some of the papers here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://new

How does cultural taste regulate our lives? In Girls Like This, Boys Like That: Understanding the (Re)Production of Gender in Contemporary Youth Cultures (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Dr. Victoria Cann, a lecturer in humanities at the University of East Anglia, explores the regulatory role of taste in the reproduction of gender. The book draws on detailed fieldwork with schools in Norfolk, England, using a range of methods including digital approaches to understand young people's experiences of taste and gender. The rich and detailed narratives of the young people are placed into dialogue with broader social and media theories, with crucial contributions to how we understand youth, gender, and taste. By showing how particular forms of cultural consumption and knowledge are valued, how others are given subordinate status, and the difficulty of transgressing boundaries, the book will be of interest to both social science and humanities readers, as well as anyone interested in the role of culture in contemporary society.

None of the climate news that we’re getting is good right now, especially now that a number of governments are reversing or failing to meet commitments they made as part of the Paris Climate Accord. One of the challenges facing human societies and the planet is the issue of aridification. As freshwater is depleted and unsustainable agricultural practices place more stress on soil than can be supported, an increasing amount of land is being lost to erosion, a process that will only become worsen as the planet heats up in the coming decades. Despite plentiful information and awareness, most of the solutions that have been offered up have failed to meaningfully stop the damage being done to the planet. In Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2018), Hannah Holleman  looks at the Dust Bowl as one of the first manmade global environmental catastrophes. She begins by noting its manmade dimensions and the underlying forces that help

What is the relationship between popular misogyny and popular feminism? In Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny(Duke University Press, 2018), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Professor of Media and Communications and Head of Department at the LSE's Department of Media and Communications, explores these two interrelated ideas in order to analyse a range of examples including the body positivity movement, confidence, #gamergate, seduction communities, and women in tech. These examples, along with extensive discussion of media examples including advertising, and a theorisation of the 'economy of visibility', demonstrate the important work of popular feminism, its limits, and the misogynist backlash aimed at arresting feminism's progress. The book engages and explains our current politics, with important lessons for both sides of the Atlantic, as well as a media analysis with global implications. As a result the book is an important read across the social sciences, politics, and beyond. Learn more about your ad ch