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PODCAST

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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All Episodes

59:04

John Drabinski, "So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/18

What happens if we turn to James Baldwin, not just for the amazing quotations and excellent photos, but as a critical theorist? What if we read his nonfiction philosophically? What can Baldwin help us understand and do now? In So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2025), John Drabinski takes up this project to give a sustained philosophical reading of Baldwin’s nonfiction. Drabinski does so to understand the event of Baldwin’s contributions in the context of the

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34:19

Agustín Santella and Adrián Piva, "Marxism, Social...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/16

Marxists have an obvious interest in understanding social movements. Less obvious, even with the voluminous theoretical archives at hand, is how to pull their various forms together into a cohesive theory of collective action. While one can see images on the news of strikes, riots, protests, coups, and uprisings, and draw occasional connections between them, turning this vast array of phenomena into a cohesive theory that can be built upon remains a challenge, but it's one my guests today, Augustin

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61:13

Feminism and Critical Hindu Studies with Shreena...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/16

This episode features a conversation with the founding members of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective, also known as the Auntylectuals. We began with each of them reflecting on their pathway into Hindu Studies and how the questions of caste and gender shaped their approaches to this field. We then discussed their motivations for starting the collective and what interventions they hoped to make through it. This took us deeper into some thorny topics: caste as a form of embodied knowledge

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62:15

Carl Death, "African Climate Futures" (Oxford UP, 2025)

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/16

This episode is brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group.African Climate Futures (Oxford UP, 2025) shows how climate-changed futures are imagined in Africa and by Africans, and how these future visions shape political debates and struggles in the present. Scientific climate scenarios forecast bleak futures, with increased droughts, floods, lethal heatwaves, sea level rises, declining crop yields, and greater exposure to vector-borne diseases. Yet, African climate

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58:24

Sourit Bhattacharya, "Postcolonialism Now:...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/13

Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising (Orient BlackSwan, 2024) by Sourit Bhattacharya introduces a new method of decolonial reading and criticism. It critically examines the history and ongoing influence of colonialism and imperialism in postcolonial cultures and texts. The volume seeks to address the crucial question of how to read postcolonial literatures closely and comparatively, particularly through the lenses of decolonisation and anticolonialism. Through rubrics such as

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43:15

Laura K. Field, "Furious Minds: The Making of the...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/12

Political Theorist Laura Field has written an insightful and detailed exploration of the people and the ideas that have shaped the second Trump Administration (and some contributed, as well, to the first Trump Administration.) While Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton UP, 2025) is about quite a few scholars and academics, it is written like a propulsive page-turner of a book. And Field takes us through all the of the ins and outs of the individuals who have pursued a path to

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57:55

Olivier Esteves et al., "France, You Love It but...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/06

Their names are Mohamed, Samira, sometimes Matthieu or Sophie. They were born and bred in France and are highly qualified, but they have decided to go and live in London or New York, Montreal or Brussels, Geneva or Dubai. Many were discriminated against on the French job market, or stigmatized simply because of their religion or the sound of their names. Whether devout or not, they felt unloved and unwanted in France, but abroad they have found a sense of peace and fulfilment that their native

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77:43

Kevin Hart, "Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/05

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the

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67:04

Patricia Daley and Ian Klinke, "Human Geography: A...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/05

Human geography offers answers to some of the most important challenges of our time. To understand contemporary struggles over global economic inequality, forced migration, racial injustice, gender justice, and the climate crisis, we must grasp the ways in which these are fought over and through space.Human Geography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Patricia Daley and Ian Klinke explains how the subject can aid a better knowledge of the modern world. It examines the

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85:24

Lisa Min et al. eds., "Redacted: Writing in the...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/04

When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy?Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State (punctum books, 2024) brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes—a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and

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45:52

Samuel Holley-Kline, "In the Shadow of El Tajín: The...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/04

Located in the Papantla municipality of the Mexican state of Veracruz, El Tajín is a UNESCO World Heritage site but a lesser-known tourist destination and national symbol. The Indigenous Totonac residents of the region know well that the site’s relative absence from discussions of global archaeology and heritage belies a century of wide-ranging labor, extractive industries, and commodity exchange.In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico (U Nebraska Press,

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79:36

Itohan I. Osayimwese, "Africa's Buildings:...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/03

Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States. Most of these artifacts were cataloged as ornamental art objects, which erased their intended functions, and the removal of these objects often had catastrophic consequences for the original structures. Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage (Princeton UP, 2025) traces the

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77:31

Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women,...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/03

Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It collectively fosters new transoceanic modes of thinking to reframe postcolonial debates and reveal the interconnected dialogues led by women from former French colonies and post-contact island territories. Thus, the volume unsettles the male agenda (captains, missionaries, mariners, ethnographers), and pays

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61:48

Gina Schouten, "The Anatomy of Justice" (Oxford UP,...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/02/01

“Liberal egalitarianism” refers to a family of political views that are “liberal” in taking individual rights to be of premier importance and “egalitarian” in holding that justice requires that political, social, and economic inequalities be minimized as much as possible. The standard approach to liberal egalitarian theorizing, influenced greatly by John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), is to specify a set of normative principles to guide the design and functioning of society’s primary

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45:01

Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/31

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community. In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Black

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44:18

Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/29

Despite reform efforts that have grown in scope and intensity over the last two decades, the machine of American mass incarceration continues to flourish. In Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future, formerly incarcerated activist and organizer Emile Suotonye DeWeaver argues that the root of the problem is white supremacy.During twenty-one years in prison, DeWeaver covertly organized to pass legislation impacting juveniles in California’s

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105:56

Justin L. Mann, "Breaking the World: Black...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/29

Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculation (Duke UP, 2026) takes Black speculative fiction as a central archive for understanding global security culture from the Reagan administration to the present. Drawing on black feminist, critical race, and queer of color theoretical traditions, Justin L. Mann posits that world-breaking is an ethical and aesthetic orientation to the dangerous, worldmaking process of securitization--the process by which state and parastate agents

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50:01

Brahim El Guabli, "Desert Imaginations: A History of...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/28

Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (U California Press, 2025) traces the cultural and intellectual histories that have informed the prevalent ideas of deserts across the globe. The book argues that Saharanism—a globalizing imaginary that perceives desert spaces as empty, exploitable, and dangerous—has been at the center of all desert-focused enterprises. Encompassing spiritual practices, military thinking, sexual fantasies, experiential quests, extractive

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38:19

Duy Lap Nguyen, "Walter Benjamin and the Critique of...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/27

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin’s work as fragmented, disjointed, esoteric and dispersed, with no clear narrative or cohesive philosophy. Duy Lap Nguyen, Associate Professor in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, paints a different picture of Benjamin’s

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32:03

Nick Romeo, "The Alternative: How to Build a Just...

New Books in Critical Theory ·

2026/01/24

Winners Take All meets Nickel and Dimed: a provocative debunking of accepted wisdom, providing the pathway to a sustainable, survivable economy.Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century - widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers around the world - many economists and business leaders still preach dogmas that lack evidence and create political catastrophe: Private markets are always more efficient than public ones;

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