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New Books in Critical Theory

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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55:00

Kevin Guyan, "Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives,...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/07/05

Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Kevin Guyan reveals how the fight for LGBTQ equalities in the UK is shaped – and constrained – by the classifications we encounter every day. Looking across six systems – the police and the recording of hate crimes; dating apps and digital desire; outness in the film and television industry; borders and LGBTQ asylum seekers; health and fitness activities; and DEI initiatives in the workplace – Rainbow

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53:29

Daanika Kamal, "Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/07/04

Pakistani women are increasingly pursuing legal avenues against acts of domestic violence. Their claims, however, are often dismissed through character allegations that label them as 'bad' women in need of control, or 'mad' women not to be trusted. Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Daanika Kamal explores why the subjectivities of women victims are constructed in particular ways, and how these subjectivities are

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55:04

Angela Katrina Lewis-Maddox ed., "Disrupting...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/07/03

Political Scientist Angela K. Lewis-Maddox has pulled together an important and useful edited volume focusing on black women political scientists and their experiences in the discipline itself and in studying topics that include race and gender. Political Science, as a discipline, is a bit more than 100 years old, and studies politics, power, institutions, policy, methodology, and theory. These are the over-arching umbrellas within the discipline and many of the specific areas within political

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26:33

153: What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/07/03

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent--not

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79:02

Michael Cook, "A History of the Muslim World: From...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/07/02

A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity (Princeton UP, 2024) by Michael A. CookThis book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity

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58:33

Timothy Stacey, "Saving Liberalism from Itself: The...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/07/02

Saving Liberalism from Itself: The Spirit of Political Participation Bristol UP, 2022) By Timothy Stacey In the wake of populism, Timothy Stacey’s book critically reflects on what is missing from the liberal project with the aim of saving liberalism. It explains that populists have harnessed myth, ritual, magic and tradition to advance their ambitions, and why opponents need to embrace rather than eschew them. Using examples of liberally oriented activists in Vancouver, it presents an accessible

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78:32

Cheryl Thompson, "Canada and the Blackface Atlantic:...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/07/01

Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) traces the origins of theatre, dance, and concert singing in Canada and their connection to British and American song and dance traditions.When theatrical acts first appeared in the late eighteenth century, chattel slavery had transformed into mass entertainment on minstrel stages across the Atlantic world. As railroads and theatres were built, local blackface troupes

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45:32

Sarah Bull, "Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/30

What is the relationship between medicine and commerce? In Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Sarah Bull, an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, explores the relationships between doctors, sexual reform campaigners, publishers and pornography in the Victorian era. The book charts the struggle to differentiate and define medicine from ‘quackery’, in the context of the rise

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43:44

Sarah Kenny, "Growing Up and Going Out: Youth...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/29

Sarah Kenny Growing up and going out: Youth culture, commerce and leisure space in post-war Britain Manchester University Press 2025 How did young people spend their time in the post-war era? In Growing up and going out: Youth culture, commerce and leisure space in post-war Britain Sarah Kenny, a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham, explores changing spaces and places of young people’s leisure. The book uses the case study of Sheffield, a city in the North of England that has

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34:47

Nubar Hovsepian, "Edward Said: The Politics of an...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/26

Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. A literary scholar with an aesthete’s temperament, he did not experience his political awakening until the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, which transformed his thinking and led him to forge ties with political groups and like-minded scholars. Said’s subsequent writings, which cast light on the interplay between cultural representation and the exercise of Western political power, caused a seismic shift in scholarly circles

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47:23

Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the Expansion...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/21

In this episode, we sit down with Shaina Potts, author of Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the Expansion of American Empire (Duke University Press, 2024)—a groundbreaking book that reveals how U.S. courts have quietly become instruments of global economic governance. Drawing on legal geography and a sharp understanding of finance and political economy, Shaina uncovers how American judicial authority has extended beyond borders to discipline postcolonial states, enforce the primacy of private

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44:47

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "Misbehaving at the...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/20

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads. Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary

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43:22

Dominik Zechner, "The Violence of Reading: Literature...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/20

The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) expounds the scene of reading as one that produces an overwhelmed body exposed to uncontainable forms of violence. The book argues that the act of reading induces a representational instability that causes the referential function of language to collapse. This breakdown releases a type of "linguistic pain" (Scarry; Butler; Hamacher) that indicates a constitutive wounding of the reading body. The

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52:12

Andrew Hartman, "Karl Marx in America" (U Chicago...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/15

Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew HartmanTo read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but

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71:26

J. McKenzie Alexander, "The Open Society as an Enemy:...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/14

The Open Society as an Enemy: A critique of how free societies turned against themselves by J. McKenzie Alexander Nearly 80 years ago, Karl Popper gave a spirited philosophical defence of the Open Society in his two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. In this book, J. McKenzie Alexander argues that a new defence is urgently needed because, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, many of the values of the Open Society have come under threat once again. Populist agendas on both the

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37:33

Jennifer Crane, "'Gifted Children' in Britain and the...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/13

Who are 'gifted' children? In ‘Gifted Children’ in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945 Jennifer Crane, a senior lecturer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the social and cultural history of this category of young people. The book charts the individuals, organisations, policymakers, and media activities that aimed to identify children as ‘gifted’, lobbying for their social status and the potential benefit they might bring to

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66:25

Alison Griffiths, "Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/11

From In Borneo, the Land of the Head-Hunters to The Epic of Everest to Camping Among the Indians, the early twentieth century was the heyday of expedition filmmaking. As new technologies transformed global transportation and opened new avenues for documentation, and as imperialism and capitalism expanded their reach, Western filmmakers embarked on journeys to places they saw as exotic, seeking to capture both the monumental and the mundane. Their films portrayed far-flung locales, the hardships of

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42:37

antonio c. cuyler, "Achieving Creative Justice in the...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/10

How can cultural organisations better support diversity? In Achieving Creative Justice in the U.S. Creative Sector antonio c. cuyler, Professor of Music in Entrepreneurship & Leadership and Faculty Associate in Voice & Opera in the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (SMTD), and Faculty Associate in the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan, explores a series of practical interventions that can shape creative institutions implementation of access, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI)

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64:22

Kevin B. Anderson, "The Late Marx's Revolutionary...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2025/06/09

Kevin Anderson’s The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso, 2025) encourages to look again at the intellectual and political work of a figure some may assume has been exhausted: Karl Marx. Following on from his earlier landmark study Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016), this volume turns specifically to the ‘late Marx’. In this period (1869-82), Marx spent much of his time

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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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