New Books in Critical Theory

NB: Because Amherst College Press is open-access, this book is available free for download here. Just when I thought I had a pretty good handle on the ways and means of American politics, Donald Trump “happened.” I watched with amazement as he insulted just about every establishment figure in the US–including the untouchable war-hero and senator John McCain!–and alienated large swathes of the American electorate–hispanics, women, people who think it’s important to be polite. And yet he rose; millions of right-thinking Americans continued to vote for him through the primaries and support him after he won them. Every time I said, “Well, that’s it, his run is over,” he trundled on, accompanied by a devoted, Trump-loving “base.” I don’t think I’m alone in my confusion about the Trump phenomenon, and I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to know how Trump did what he did. Happily, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams provides some answers in his excellent, short book The Rise of Trump: America’s Authoritarian Spring (Amherst College Press, 2016). What’s especially nice about MacWilliam’s work is that it’s based on evidence and logic, not partisanship and vitriol. What MacWilliams discovered is, well, surprising: there are, he shows, a goodly number of Americans who possess values that can only really be be called “Authoritarian,” and those Americans who have these values overwhelming support Trump. What’s most interesting is that these values were, in a sense, always there; they were, however, largely unrepresented among Americans’ political choices. Trump was, if not exactly the first (remember Pat Buchanan?), then the most expert at presenting them and “activating” the Authoritarian impulse in this reasonably large cohort of Americans. Trump uncovered or exposed Americans’ latent Authoritarianism. What the political parties will do with it now that it’s there for the taking is anybody’s guess.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

McKenzie Wark’s new book begins and ends with a playful call: “Workings of the world untie! You have a win to world!” Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso, 2015) creates a conversation between work from two very different Soviet and American contexts. After guiding readers through the work and theories of Alexander Bogdanov, whose focus on the importance of labor in organizing knowledge forms a central thread through the book as a whole, Wark traces some of those notions in the writing of novelist and utopian Andrey Platonov. The second half of the book extends the conversation into science studies, beginning in a chapter that considers the work of Feyerabend, Haraway, Barad, and Edwards in light of Bogdanov and Platonov’s approaches to labor and knowledge, and continuing into a chapter devoted to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. The result is a fascinating treatment of the centrality of labor and the importance of the not-necessarily-human to understanding and theorizing the Anthropocene. (As Wark reminds us, Labor is the mingling of many things, most of them not human.) The entire book is highly recommended, and for the STS-minded among us the third chapter of the book would make an especially useful assignment in a discussion group or seminar devoted to contemporary theory and/in STS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How is the notion of the avant-garde in art relevant today? What can contemporary social movements learn from the Situationists? What is the meaning of artistic value to forms of resistance? These, and many other, questions associated with the role of art in modern society are at the heart of The Composition of Movements to Come (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Stevphen Shukaitis, a senior lecturer in work and organisation at the University of Essex, approaches these issues from an Autonomist Marxist perspective, thinking through a diverse range of issues, for example cultural labour, and practices, for example the art strike. The book also uses a range of artistic examples, including a detailed engagement with Neue Slowenische Kunst to think through the composition of movements to come. The podcast discusses a forthcoming exhibition of the work of Gee Vaucher at Firstsite in Essex, UK. The book will be of interest to critical theorists, as well as scholars from art, politics and social movement studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Why did Michel Foucault radically recast the project of The History of Sexuality? How did he work collaboratively? What was the influence of Antiquity on his thought? In Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity Press, 2016) Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick explores these, and many more, questions about the final years in a rich intellectual life. The book combines detailed studies of Foucault’s recently collected lecture series with archival material and his publications, to give an in depth engagement with the changes and continuities in his thought during the last decade. Addressing questions associated with key terms, such as governmentality, as well as confession, the self, power, truth telling, and many other core ideas and themes, the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in this most important of Western thinkers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How can we explain the “occlusion of embodied power” and “lack of attention to race, gender, and sexuality” in the discipline of political science, a field “that claims power as a central analytical concept” (17)? In her new book, Embodied Power: Demystifying Disembodied Politics (Routledge, 2016), Mary Hawkesworth (Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University) brings intersectionality, feminist theory, and post- and de-colonial theory to bear on the mainstream study of politics. She argues for the need to move away from customary concepts of “power” and “the political” that mask state practices that construct various forms of hierarchy. These concepts and the methodologies and epistemologies they give rise to, she argues, lead the discipline unable to grapple with issues such as the carceral state or the violence of nation-building. At the same they cover over the ways that “racialization and gendering have been constitutive of knowledge production within the discipline” (17). In the interview, Hawkesworth discusses these conceptual practices of power as well as how intersectional attention to embodied power can reclaim the study of politics. John McMahon is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Beloit College. He is a former Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY, which sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Darian M. Parker joins the New Books Network to discuss his recently published book, Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling (Lexington Books, 2015). Through an ethnographic lens, Parker provides an anthropological glimpse into a New York City public school that is considered to be failing. Despite being rooted in a strong theoretical framework, the book should be accessible to anyone interested in education or policy making because of the familiar narrative laid out in a relatable manner. For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What can social theory offer to visions of an alternative society? In his new book, Social Theory for Alternative Societies (Palgrave, 2016), Dr Matt Dawson, a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow, explores how classical and contemporary social theory has grappled with this question. The book proposes three starting points for a vision of the good society, beginning with the identification of a social problem, through the suggestion of an alternative, to the justification for the alternative’s way of solving the social problem. Drawing on classical social theory from Du Bois, Durkheim and Marx, through to more recent ideas from Feminism, Cosmopolitanism, Neo-Marxism and Public Sociology, the book provides a new take on social theory as well as thinking through the meaning of what a good society might be. Dave O’Brien is the host of New Books in Critical Theory and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the Institute for Cultural and Creative Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research covers a range of areas between sociology and political science, including work on the British Civil Service, British Cultural Policy, cultural labour, and urban regeneration. His most recent books are Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries and After Urban Regeneration (edited with Dr. Peter Matthews). He tweets @Drdaveobrien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Ibram X. Kendi is an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books, 2016) offers a fast moving narrative of racist ideas beginning with the Puritan theologian and preacher Cotton Mather to the post-racial color-blind arguments in the age of Barack Obama. Through American history, racism has been justified by appeals to God’s word, science, nature, or common sense. He demonstrates how good intentioned efforts to overcome racism have often helped to cement racist ideas. The ideas of segregation and assimilation have rationalized racism and have reproduced and spread in the face of challenge by antiracist arguments. Americans have unsuccessfully attempted to root out racism through notions of self-sacrifice, “uplift suasion,” and educational persuasion. Kendi argues that overcoming racism, which hides classism and sexism, will require intelligent self-interest, not altruism. Americans, regardless of color, need to realize that when Black people are free of racism all will be free. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco’s new book, Cuba, the United States, and the Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930-1975 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), reaches across the Atlantic ocean and connects journalists, musicians, activists and poets as they moved between Cuba and the United States in the turbulent eras of revolution. Covering 1933 as well as 1959 allows Gronbeck Tedesco to make fresh observations about the intellectual and political climates of those moments as well as to point to important continuities. The ambitions and disillusionment that permeated the novels, plays, poetry and leftist politics frame this book, making it required reading for anyone interested in the fraught and conflictual intimacies between the two nations and those who journeyed back and forth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Television had been transformed by the rise of the format. In The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution Jean Chalaby, Professor of International Communication at City University London, charts the beginnings of the format for TV shows, through the globalization of the trade in TV formats, to conclude with reflections on the future of local and global TV markets. The book uses an eclectic set of theoretical frames, including Global Value Chains, World Systems Theory and work of the Annales School, to chart the political economy of the TV format. Using a wide range of examples, detailed case studies of local markets and local production systems (including the UK), the book shows how the format is now crucial to the modern television industry encompassing everything from the game show to the long form drama. The book will be of interest to all media and communications scholars, as well as anyone keen to know why we have the sorts of television programmes we have on our screens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory