New Books in Politics and Polemics

Today, journalists, legal professionals, activists, and artists challenge the state's monopoly on investigation and the production of narratives of truth. They probe corruption, human rights violations, environmental crimes, and technological domination. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, Bellingcat, or Forensic Architecture pore over open-source videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what Fuller and Weizman call 'investigative aesthetics': the mobilisation of sensibilities associated with art, architecture, and other such practices in order to challenge power.Investigative Aesthetics draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology; evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art. These new practices take place in the studio and the laboratory, the courtroom and the gallery, online and in the streets, as they strive towards the construction of a new common sense.Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman speak to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the logics behind Forensic Architecture and the evidentiary turn: the aesthetics of distributed sensing, the investigative commons, and the condition of hyperaesthesia.Matthew Fuller is a Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Media Ecologies, and with Andrew Goffey, Evil Media.Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Hollow Land, The Least of All Possible Evils, and Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Forensic Architecture investigation archive. Investigation: The Bombing of Rafah, 2015 Investigation: The Killing of Mark Duggan, 2020 ICA London exhibiiton. Investigation: Triple-Chaser, 2019 Protests surrounding the Whitney Museum's trustee Warren Kanders' involvement with Safariland. Kanders divests from his arms production holdings. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

It's time to rethink how we create and allocate moneyIn Outgrowing Capitalism: Rethinking Money to Reshape Society and Pursue Purpose (Fast Company Press, 2021), Marco Dondi sheds light on the fact that most people do not have the economic security to focus on purpose and life fulfillment. He proposes that this is not the way things have to be; there is an alternative. In a quest to change our economic system to cater for everyone, he identifies deep issues in how money is created and allocated and connects these to capitalism. He shows that the assumptions and circumstances that made capitalism a success are no longer true today and then describes a new socio-economic model, Monetism. Dondi's solution is to provide a pragmatic roadmap to institutionalize Monetism and solve societal issues that seemed as permanent as time.Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

One of the fifty most influential living philosophers, a “self-promoting charlatan” (Brian Leiter), and the orchestrator of an “online orgy of stupidity” (Ray Brassier). In Skirmishes: With Friends, Enemies, and Neutrals (Punctum Books, 2020), Graham Harman responds with flair and wit to some of his best-known critics and fellow travelers. Pulling no punches, Harman gives a masterclass in philosophical argumentation by dissecting, analyzing, and countering their criticism, be it from the Husserlian, Heideggerian, or Derridean corner. At the same time, Skirmishes provides an excellent introduction to the hottest debates in Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology, a speculative style of philosophy long foreclosed by the biases of mainstream continental thought, but which has turned in recent years into one of the most encompassing philosophies of our time, with a major impact on the arts, humanities, and architecture.Part One considers four prominent books on speculative realism. In dialogue with Tom Sparrow’s The End of Phenomenology, Harman expresses agreement with Sparrow’s critique while taking issue with Lee Braver’s “transgressive realism” as not realist enough. Turning to Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things, Harman defends his own object-oriented model against Shaviro’s brand of process philosophy, while also engaging in side-debate with Levi R. Bryant’s distinction between virtual proper being and local manifestations. In the third chapter, on Peter Gratton’s Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects, Harman opposes the author’s attempt to use Derridean notions of time and difference against Speculative Realism, in what amounts to his most extensive engagement with Derrida to date. Chapter Four gives us Harman’s response to Peter Wolfendale’s massive polemic in Object-Oriented Philosophy, which he shows is based on a failed criticism of Harman’s reading of Heidegger and a grumpy commitment to rationalist kitsch.Part Two responds to a series of briefer criticisms of object-oriented ontology. When Alberto Toscano accuses Harman and Bruno Latour of “neo-monadological” and anti-scientific thinking, Harman responds that the philosophical factors pushing Leibniz into monadology are still valid today. When Christopher Norris mocks Harman for seeing merit in the occasionalist school, he shows why Norris’s middle-of-the-road scientific realism misses the point. In response to Dan Zahavi’s contention that phenomenology has little to learn from speculative realism, Harman exposes the holes in Zahavi’s reasoning. In a final response, Harman gives a point-by-point answer to Stephen Mulhall’s critical foray in the London Review of Books. Amidst these lively debates, Harman sheds new light on what he regards as the central bias of philosophical modernism, which he terms the taxonomical standpoint. It is a book sure to provoke lively controversy among both friends and foes of object-oriented thought.Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

With Imperial Nostalgia: How the British Conquered Themselves (Manchester UP, 2020) Peter Mitchell offers a “history of the present”. That is to say, it is not a narrative of how we got to where we are, but rather a sustained reflection on how history shapes and interacts with our current world. Mitchell also engages the uses history for contemporary political purposes. Mitchell argues that memories of empire are at the root almost every aspect of Britain’s culture wars. From battles over statues to skirmishes within hallowed Oxbridge halls he argues that imperial nostalgia infects British politics.Dr. Mitchell earned his doctorate at Queen Mary, University of London in 2014. His dissertation was on the India Office records and the historiography of the early modern British Empire. In addition to Imperial Nostalgia, he is the co-author of Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilization and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century British Empire with Alan Lester and Kate Boehme also with Cambridge University Press, 2021. Peter Mitchell is currently an Oral History and Public Engagement Officer with the University of Manchester working on “NHS: Voices of Covid-19” (funded by the AHRC and in partnership with the British Library Oral History Archive).Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

In The Dawn of Redemption: Ethics and Tradition in a Time of Power (Evrit, 2021), Mikhael Manekin argues that modern Jewish nationalism--widespread today among secular as well as religious Israeli-Jews--is incompatible with traditional Jewish ethics. Manekin, an Orthodox religious Jew and anti-Occupation activist, draws on traditional texts, as well as his own family history, in an attempt to reconcile a religious ethical system created in the diaspora with the political reality of a modern nation state. He argues that Jewish ethics, grounded in a long-time religious-tradition, can fuel and guide critically minded, politically engaged citizens. Specifically, Manekin argues that the Jewish tradition denounces the desire for power and control, as well as ideologies of ethnic superiority and political subjugation.Mikhael Manekin is the director of the Alliance Fellowship program, a network of Arab and Jewish progressive leaders in Israel. Before running the Alliance, Mikhael served as the director of Molad- a non-partisan progressive think tank in Jerusalem focused on democratic change in Israel. Prior to that, Mikhael was the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli military veterans’ group focused on educating the public as to the results of military control of the West Bank and Gaza. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife Yael, and their children Ruth Sarai and Noach.Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Jeffrey Hooke's The Myth of Private Equity: An Inside Look at Wall Street's Transformative Investments (Columbia Business School, 2021) is a scathing indictment of the high-flying world of private equity. Piece by piece, Hooke takes apart the PE value proposition and shows, instead of the claimed "higher returns and lower volatility", a startling record of poor performance, exorbitant fees, completely opaque reporting, and a network of enablers that allow the business model to proceed. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Today I talked to Michelle Caswell about her new book Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021).What is the place of archives in our society? In archival studies, an answer to this question often presents an idea of linear, progressive temporality. A common trope goes: We learn history to have a better future. That is why history, and archives as a site of historical evidence, is important. In her thoughtful, groundbreaking work, a feminist archival studies scholar Caswell challenges the white imaginary of linear, progressive time embedded in our conception of archives. Pointing out how community archives from different ethnic communities across the US present cyclical temporalities where oppressions repeat, Caswell emphasizes the importance of activating the archives for their liberatory potential in the present. Over a year has passed since the murder of George Floyd and the beginning of the global pandemic that has highlighted not only structural inequality, but also an ongoing material and symbolic annihilation of Black Americans. As Michelle Caswell argues in her book, imagining liberatory memory work is an urgent project that needs to happen in the now.In the introduction, Caswell begins with the question of the liberatory potential of community archives. Chapter 1 outlines the cyclical conception of time in critique of chronoviolence of white, dominant linear temporality. In chapter 2, Caswell draws from four focus groups to show how different ethnic groups use community archives to address repetitive oppressions by constructing corollary records. Chapter 3 focuses on her work with the South Asian American Digital Archives (SAADA) and the road to discovering the importance of liberatory activation. In Chapter 4, Caswell pushes back against the idea of archivists as passive technicians and repositions them as liberatory memory workers. In the conclusion, Liberation Now! Caswell emphasizes the need to disrupt the dominant narrative on future by embracing the joy of advocacy in the present. Urgent Archives will be an excellent resource for anyone who is interested in critically re-evaluating archives in academia and beyond.In the interview, Caswell recommends following two readings to the listeners:SAADA. Our Stories: An Introduction to South Asian America. Philadelphia: SAADA, 2021."The Chronopolitics of Racial Time," Time & Society, Special Issue: The Social Life of Time, 29, no. 2 (May 2020): 297-317. Michelle Caswell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 –1797) was one of the most important moral philosophers and political theorists ever. Her writings on liberty and equality have been embraced by thinkers both in her own day and since her early death. Lionized by feminists and demonized by others as dangerous and a loose woman to boot, Wollstonecraft produced a small but powerful, persuasive corpus.But a major aspect of Wollstonecraft’s thought is far less well known—perhaps because it not about what we all want and assume is our due. True, she was interested in rights. But in her 2021 book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (Notre Dame UP, 2021), Erika Bachiochi shows that Wollstonecraft wrote extensively about duties and responsibilities.Further, unlike advocates of free love in later centuries or the champions of the Sexual Revolution, Wollstonecraft, living as she did in a period when rakes abounded and women died often in childbirth, wrote about chastity and the need for men to behave responsibly and become faithful husbands and loving fathers. Bachiochi expands our understanding of Wollstonecraft and makes her a far more complex thinker than the one-dimensional woman portrayed in feminist lore.Importantly, this book is not only about Wollstonecraft. It also traces how feminism lost touch with the needs of mothers as it became centered on providing as much access to abortion as possible and to equality in the workplace at the expense of a more holistic view of the needs of women of many stripes.Bachiochi makes a convincing case that the relentless focus of influential figures like Ruth Bader Ginsburg on abortion “rights” and advancing the interests of mostly professional women ended up privileging men (and, increasingly, corporations, who prefer workers unencumbered by families) in that abortion and contraception freed men of any need to refrain from irresponsible sexual conduct.Every feminist—every person, really, should read this book because it contrasts the neglected moral vision of Wollstonecraft with the morally compromising Ginsburgian position of predicating the equality of women upon unfettered access to abortion. Bachiochi shows that many women’s rights activists and theoreticians up until very recent decades opposed both contraception and abortion on the grounds that both ultimately ended up devaluing the role of women as mothers and caregivers generally and made becoming pregnant seem careless and not something to be celebrated.A major strength of Bachiochi’s book is her examination of the work of the legal scholar and human rights expert, Mary Ann Glendon. Glendon has magisterially documented how Ginsburg and her compatriots stripped feminism of its previous foci on the ethic of caregiving and the value to society of hearth and home. Glendon points out that much of modern feminism has left women with rights but little else in terms of practical or moral support if they happen to be poor or not, say, Supreme Court Justices.Bachiochi concludes her book with policy prescriptions for a feminism that is more humane and more representative of the needs of all women and not solely career-obsessed ones. Moreover, the book is not just about women but, in the vein of Wollstonecraft herself, about how men and women can work in whatever sphere to create a society where all can flourish and, another important consideration for Wollstonecraft, excel intellectually and morally.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Today we are joined by Jessica Luther, a freelance investigative journalist, and Kavitha Davidson, a sport and culture writer with the Athletic, who together are the authors of Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back: Dilemmas of the Modern Fan (University of Texas Press, 2020). Our free-flowing conversation covered the use of indigenous American imagery by sporting teams in the United States, athletes and domestic violence, and falling out of love and into love with sports.Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back is a comprehensive book that examines fourteen issues facing contemporary sports fans, including: football and CTE, doping, racist mascots, unequal pay, LGBTQ+ participation, representation in sports media, domestic violence, bad owners, the NCAA and amateurism, and the cost of building stadiums and hosting mega-events like the Olympics and World Cup. Rather than ‘sticking to dribbling,’ Luther and Davidson demonstrate the inherent politics of sports culture. In each chapter, they address the different ways that sports influence political issues and showcase how some athletes, organizers and fans have responded to the failure of sporting life to live up to our expectations. For example, in their chapter on racist mascots, Luther and Davidson trace out the human costs of awful caricatures like Chief Wahoo, but also highlight how even teams that work closely with American Indian groups still open the door for native people’s disparagement by their rival fans.Their work is both aimed at people who might feel left out of sporting life, including women, people of color, or LGBTQ+ fans. Their chapter on representation in sports media, for example, offers an innovative oral history of media figures from marginalized groups. At the same time, they also address issues facing all sports fans including how to justify (or not) watching the NFL and college football when so many players are suffering from CTE.Their work offers fresh critiques of sports from within a progressive and capitalist framework. In their chapters on the MLB’s free market system, they note that it has done a better job of producing competitive parity than the NFL’s salary cap and they also point out that it benefits players whose salaries are constrained by the cartelization of the leagues. They strongly critique the NCAA’s approach to player compensation and I look forward to hearing them both more in the future on Name, Image and Likeness rights. They take seriously the problems of stadium building, especially gentrification, but still consider the possibilities for people’s enjoyment of a new arena. Their chapter “Watching Women’s Basketball When People Tell You You’re the Only One” offers hope for fans who want to support a league with genuinely revolutionary potential.Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back is a wide-ranging analysis and discussion of many of the key issues facing sports fans from two leading sports writers. Their work will be of general interest to sports fans, but particularly useful for people teaching about sports history, sociology or politics.Keith Rathbone is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Personally, I hate the This-Day-in-History genre. Far too often it is some Great-Man-History trope, representing a rather archaic way of thinking about history. However, I love the social media accounts of Working Class History. For the past few years, this anonymous collective have been using FaceBook, Twitter, and Instagram to tell the stories of strikes, anti-fascist resistance, and profiles of people who tried to create a better world. One of the things I love about the project is that it is not narrowly “class based”, in that World Class History engages feminism, LBGTQ+ liberation, and a range of liberation movements. If many of the vignettes are tragic as there are far too many martyrs for social justice, they are always inspirational. Working Class History reminds us that we are not alone in our diverse struggles against the hegemonic power of capital and the forces of reaction.Today I’m speaking with John of Working Class History, a member of this collective of activists. While none of the group are professional historians, they have published a book: Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance and Rebellion with a forward by Noam Chomsky, published by PM Press in 2020. You can follow the work of this anonymous collective on all the major social media platforms.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics