New Books in Critical Theory Marshall Poe

According to Dr. Justin O’Connor, culture is at the heart of what it means to be human. But twenty-five years ago, the British government rebranded art and culture as 'creative industries', valued for their economic contribution, and set out to launch the UK as the creative workshop of a globalised world.
Where does that leave art and culture now? Facing exhausted workers and a lack of funding and vision, culture finds itself in the grip of accountancy firms, creativity gurus and Ted Talkers. At a time of sweeping geo-political turmoil, culture has been de-politicised, its radical energies reduced to factors of industrial production. Culture is Not an Industry: Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common (Manchester UP, 2024) is about what happens when an essential part of our democratic citizenship, fundamental to our human rights, is reduced to an industry.
Culture is not an industry argues that art and culture need to renew their social contract and re-align with the radical agenda for a more equitable future. Bold and uncompromising, the book offers a powerful vision for change.
Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.
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What would Nietzsche say… about today’s divisive issues and debates? I spoke with Glenn Wallis, author of the new book, Nietzsche Now!, on how the Great Immoralist guides us in understanding democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other urgent topics of our time. Wallis identifies six guiding principles in Nietzsche’s work that help navigate today’s concerns: curiosity, humor, courage, distance, solitude, and humor. Steeped in Nietzsche but never academic, dogmatic, or pious (which Nietzsche would have hated!), Wallis explains with infectious enthusiasm and meticulous care the reasons why Nietzsche may be the most relevant thinker for our time.
Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House), and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist’s Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (both with Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia.
Nietzsche Now! The Great Immoralist on the Vital Issues of Our Time (Warbler Press, 2023) is now available wherever books are sold.
Other Think About It episodes mentioned in this podcast:

Béatrice Longueness on Immanuel Kant’s What is Englightenment?


Melissa Schwartzberg on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract

Glenn Wallis on Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet

Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Threats to Democracy and H. L. Mencken’s Notes on Democracy


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Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public pledges to honor and achieve “diversity,” inequities persist through what Dr. Adia Harvey Wingfield calls the “gray areas:” the relationships, networks, and cultural dynamics integral to companies that are now more important than ever. The reality is that Black employees are less likely to be hired, stall out at middle levels, and rarely progress to senior leadership positions.
Dr. Wingfield has spent a decade examining inequality in the workplace, interviewing over two hundred Black subjects across professions about their work lives. In Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It (Amistad Press, 2023), she introduces seven of them: Alex, a worker in the gig economy Max, an emergency medicine doctor; Constance, a chemical engineer; Brian, a filmmaker; Amalia, a journalist; Darren, a corporate vice president; and Kevin, who works for a nonprofit.
In this accessible and important antiracist work, Dr. Wingfield chronicles their experiences and blends them with history and surprising data that starkly show how old models of work are outdated and detrimental. She demonstrates the scope and breadth of gray areas and offers key insights and suggestions for how they can be fixed, including shifting hiring practices to include Black workers; rethinking organizational cultures to centralize Black employees’ experience; and establishing pathways that move capable Black candidates into leadership roles. These reforms would create workplaces that reflect America’s increasingly diverse population—professionals whose needs organizations today are ill-prepared to meet.
It’s time to prepare for a truly equitable, multiracial future and move our culture forward. To do so, we must address the gray areas in our workspaces today. This definitive work shows us how.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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In Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2021), Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean. Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially influenced human/animal divide. Gosine refutes this presupposed binary and embraces animality through a series of case studies: a homoerotic game called puhngah, the institution of gender-based dress codes in Guyana, and efforts toward the decriminalization of sodomy in Trinidad and Tobago—including the work of famed activist Colin Robinson, paintings of human animality by Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Gosine's own artistic practice. In so doing, he troubles the ways in which individual and collective anxieties about “wild natures” have shaped the existence of Caribbean people while calling for a reassessment of what political liberation might look like.
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Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis (Pi Press, 2024) is not merely a book but a call to action-a rallying cry for societal introspection and transformation. With meticulous research and unflinching honesty, Dr. Karyne E. Messina offers a roadmap for reclaiming our integrity and forging a more just and equitable future. Engaging, insightful, and indispensable, this book is essential reading for anyone invested in the fate of our nation and the preservation of our collective identity. 
In Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis, Dr. Messina ingeniously uses Barbie to symbolize the multifaceted identity crisis gripping America. Barbie's transformation from Lilli reflects the complexities of stolen identity and cultural appropriation, mirroring the broader societal struggle with individual and national identity.Just as Mattel co-opted Barbie's identity from a German toymaker, America grapples with a loss of authenticity and integrity in its own narrative. Dr. Messina's exploration of Barbie's evolution serves as a poignant allegory for the broader issues at play, inviting readers to contemplate the profound implications of identity theft and cultural commodification. In essence, Barbie is our metaphorical lodestar, guiding readers through the labyrinthine complexities of America's identity crisis.Through Barbie's lens, Dr. Messina illuminates the interconnectedness of personal and collective identity formation, shedding light on how societal pressures and external influences shape our sense of self and continue to perpetuate racism and patriarchal structures-that can hamper our ability to build an authentic sense of community free of tribal isolationism.
Dr. Karyne E. Messina is a psychologist and child, adolescent, and adult psychoanalyst. In addition to maintaining a full-time private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, which is part of Johns Hopkins Medicine.
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Ariella Aisha Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium s brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day.
In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums - to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as 'past' and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.
Ariella Aisha Azoulay is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University
Yorgos Giannakopoulos is an Academy of Athens postdoctoral research fellow at King’s Collage London
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