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PODCAST

New Books in Critical Theory

Interviews with Scholars of Critical Theory about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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All Episodes

53:18

Sladja Blažan, "Ghosts and Their Hosts: The...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/08

In Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America (University of Virginia Press, 2025), Dr. Sladja Blažan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a medium for framing political ideologies, philosophical thought, racial anxieties, and social concerns. Ghosts and Their Hosts analyzes American ghost stories, considering their role as a settler colonial tool that emerged to help justify land appropriation and human

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67:22

Kevin Potter, "Poetics of the Migrant: Migrant...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/06

Since the 1980s, readers and scholars alike have celebrated migrant literature for not only depicting migration, but for inspiring reflections on class, race, gender, nations, and mobility. But, beyond depicting migration, is it possible for migrant literature to be a force of movement itself? Poetics of the Migrant: Migrant Literature and the Politics of Motion calls upon the philosophy of movement and a counter-history of migration to invent a theory and method for analysing migrant

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63:52

Quinn Slobodian and Philip J. Stern on Political Economy

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/05

• Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated. The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2023), by.• Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Penguin, 2023). Adam Smith wrote that, “Political economy belongs to no nation; it is of no country: it is the science of the rules for the production, the accumulation, the distribution, and the consumption of wealth.” However Adam Smith regarded the

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51:33

Christoph Schuringa, "Karl Marx and the Actualization...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/04

It is indisputable that Marx began his intellectual trajectory as a philosopher, but it is often thought that he subsequently turned away from philosophy. In Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Christoph Schuringa proposes a radically different reading of Marx's intellectual project and demonstrates that from his earliest writings his aim was the 'actualization' of philosophy. Marx, he argues, should be understood not as turning away from philosophy, but

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66:47

Anthony C. Infanti, "The Human Toll: Taxation and...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/03

The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America (NYU Press, 2025) by Anthony C. Infanti documents how the American colonies used tax law to dehumanize enslaved persons, taxing them alongside valuable commodities upon their forced arrival and then as wealth-generating assets in the hands of slaveholders. Dr. Infanti examines how taxation also proved to be an important component for subjugating and controlling enslaved persons, both through its shaping of the composition of new arrivals to

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43:20

Katie Beswick, "Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/31

How are working class women represented in contemporary culture? In Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture (Routledge, 2025), Katie Beswick, a Senior Lecturer in Arts Management at Goldsmiths, University of London, examines this question by analysing the figure of the ‘slag’ across a range of cultural forms, including theatre and television. Alongside a history of the idea of the ‘slag’, the book draws on deep case studies of key artists, including Tracey Emin, Cash Carraway

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62:32

Nneka D. Dennie, "Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/30

In 1849, the Mary Ann Shadd Cary had not yet become one of the first Black woman newspaper editors in North America. She was decades away from being admitted to Howard University’s Law School and becoming the first Black woman to so enroll in the United States. She had not yet begun to lobby for women’s right to vote, and she had not yet emigrated to Canada, where she would rise to prominence as a formidable abolitionist and emigrationist. Though many years would pass before she made a name for

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38:53

Peter Allen, "How to Think about Politics: A Guide in...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/28

What part should politics play in our everyday lives? In How to Think About Politics: A Guide in Five Parts (Oxford University Press, 2025) Peter Allen, a professor of Politics and Co-Director of the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath, explores this question across a range of practical and philosophical examples. The book directly challenges the conventional academic understanding of politics, showing how politics is much more than election polls or parliamentary behaviours

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83:13

Jaleh Mansoor, "Universal Prostitution and Modernist...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/22

Join me for conversation with Dr. Jaleh Mansoor (Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, University of British Columbia) about her book Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory (Duke University Press, 2025). Our discussion brought us to topics like the artists’ muse, the modern laborer, and other figures precariously suspended between the object/subject dialectic.In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, Dr

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66:09

Tamara Lea Spira, "Queering Families: Reproductive...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/19

Envisioning queer futures where we lovingly wager everything for the world's children, the planet, and all living beings against all odds, and in increasingly precarious times. Tamara Lea Spira's Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times (U California Press, 2025) traces the shifting dominant meanings of queer family from the late twentieth century to today. With this book, Spira highlights the growing embrace of normative family structures by LGBTQ+ movements--calling into

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58:11

Rasheedah Phillips, "Dismantling the Master's Clock:...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/18

Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.Phillips unfolds the history of

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55:21

Lucia Soriano, "Embodying Normalcy: Women's Work in...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/17

Embodying Normalcy: Women’s Work in Neoliberal Times (Lexington Books, 2024) calls attention to how women in the United States do a type of unpaid work to embody the latest trends for the purpose of achieving success in neoliberal culture. Using TLC reality shows, lifestyle and beauty influencers, Brazilian butt lift TikToks, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian as her archive, Lucia Soriano delivers four case studies that draw on gender studies, media studies, disability studies, and American

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74:54

Eric Heinze, "Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/16

What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its “wokeness.” In Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left ( MIT Press, 2025), Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke

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59:54

Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/15

The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed. Yet, new road novels appear every year, tackling unexpected questions and spanning new geographies, from Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia. Why did the road novel emerge and why does it persist? What does it do and why has it traveled so widely?In Cartographies of Empire:

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51:56

Robert F. Darden and Stephen M. Newby, "Soon and Very...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/14

Gospel singer and seven-time Grammy winner Andraé Crouch (1942-2015) hardly needs introduction. His compositions--"The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power," "Through It All," "My Tribute (To God be the Glory)," "Jesus is the Answer," "Soon and Very Soon," and others--remain staples in modern hymnals, and he is often spoken of in the same "genius" pantheon as Mahalia Jackson, Thomas Dorsey and the Rev. James Cleveland. As the definitive biography of Crouch published to date, Soon and Very Soon: The

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49:46

Maron E. Greenleaf, "Forest Lost: Producing Green...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/10

Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon (2024) is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Situated in the state of Acre, which continuously had to grapple with a complex positionality between frontier and periphery, Maron E. Greenleaf explores forest carbon offset to understand green capitalism. Commodifying forest carbon offset requires keeping carbon in place through forest protection and

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42:33

Seulghee Lee, "Other Lovings: An Afroasian American...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/09

Join me for a conversation with Dr. Seulghee Lee (Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, University of South Carolina) about his recently published book, Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life (Ohio State UP, 2025). Some topics of our discussion include Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings (2007), Gayl Jones' novella Corregidora (1975), and the cultural phenomenon of "Linsanity" and the lasting impact of NBA player Jeremy Lin's rise to fame.In Other

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64:21

Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/08

Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the urgency of this topic. Today we welcome philosopher Jake Monaghan to discuss his book, Just Policing (Oxford UP, 2023), which applies interdisciplinary insights to examine the morality of policing.Though the injustices of our world seemingly require some kind of policing, the police are often sources of injustice themselves. But this is not always

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45:25

Maïa Pal, "Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/07

With rigorous attention to history and empire, Maïa Pal's Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a unique analysis of imperial expansion. Through an analysis of ambassadors and consuls in the Mediterranean—and attention to Castilian, French, Dutch, and British empires—Pal's multifaceted conceptualization of jurisdictional analysis gathers together law and capital in the early modern period. A compelling application of political

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39:03

Eunji Kim, "The American Mirage: How Reality TV...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/05/06

In an age of growing wealth disparities, politicians on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm about the fading American Dream. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many still view the United States as the land of opportunity. The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy (Princeton University Press, 2025) addresses this puzzle by exposing the stark reality of today’s media landscape, revealing how popular entertainment media shapes politics and public opinion in

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528 results

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