New Books in Critical Theory

Marshall Poe
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New Books in Critical Theory

Interviews with Scholars of Critical Theory about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

  1. 4D AGO

    Amanda M. Greenwell, "The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature" (UP of Mississippi, 2024)

    The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2024) theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature for children and adults. Through a range of texts, including James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man, Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, and more, Amanda M. Greenwell focuses on children and their literal acts of looking. Detailing how these acts of looking direct the reader, she posits that the sightlines of children serve as signals to renegotiate hegemonic ideologies of race, ethnicity, creed, class, and gender. In her analysis, Greenwell shows how acts of looking constitute a flexible and effective narrative strategy, capable of operating across multiple points of view, focalizations, audiences, and forms. Weaving together scholarship on the US child, visual culture studies, narrative theory, and other critical traditions, The Child Gaze explores the ways in which child acts of looking compel readers to look at and with a child character, whose gaze encourages critiques of privileged visions of national identity. Chapters investigate how child acts of looking allow texts to redraw circles of inclusion around the locus of the child gaze and mobilize childhood as a site of resistance. The powerful child gaze can thus disrupt dominant scripts of power, widening the lens through which belonging in the US can be understood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

    42 min

  2. MAR 9

    Abby Innes, "Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neoliberal capitalism. This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality. Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

    1h 35m

  3. FEB 28

    Wan-Chuan Kao, "White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages" (Manchester UP, 2024)

    White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wan-Chuan Kao analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. The book argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The 'before' of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation - one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward - than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

    1h 11m

  4. FEB 18

    Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)

    We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. But, in America, this wasn’t always the case. Though for most of world history your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and for 200 years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity. Then, as the twentieth century wound down, economic and geographic stasis set in, producing deep social polarization.  What happened? In Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity (Random House, 2025), Yoni Appelbaum introduces us to the reformers who destroyed American mobility with discriminatory zoning laws, federal policies, and community gatekeeping. From the first zoning laws enacted to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California, to the toxic blend of private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in mid-century Flint, Michigan, Appelbaum shows us how Americans lost the freedom to move. Even Jane Jacobs’s well-intentioned fight against development in Greenwich Village choked off opportunity for strivers—and started a trend that would put desirable neighborhoods out of reach for most of us. And yet he also offers glimmers of hope. Perhaps our problems as a nation aren’t as intractable as they seem. If we tear down the barriers to mobility and return to the social and economic dynamism Americans invented, we might be able to rediscover the tolerance and possibility that made us distinctive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

    29 min

  5. FEB 12

    Failed Passing

    Ian Fleishman develops the concept of failed passing in his new book Flamboyant Fictions, which reimagines free will in queer lives as an accidental affirmation of identity despite efforts towards adherence to standards and norms. In this, he works with his predecessors in queer theory like Judith Butler, José Muñoz, Leo Barsani, Lee Edelman and others. In our conversation, Ian also gives us a glimpse of his readings of failed passing in widely varying texts such as the works of André Gide and Jean Genet and the films of Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Todd Haynes, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan, to the music and public persona of Shawn Mendes and Troye Sivan. Ian Fleishman is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing (Northwestern 2024). His previous books are An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino (Northwestern 2018) and Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Hupert (Edinburgh 2023), co-edited with Iggy Cortez. Image: From the cover of Flamboyant Fictions, by Monograph / Matt Avery Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

    20 min

  6. JAN 17

    August H. Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards, "The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution" (Brill, 2024)

    The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest and urgency to questions of racial oppression and emancipation. We’ve now had about a decade of activists fighting for the idea that Black Lives Matter which eventually culminated in the summer of 2020 with millions taking to the streets. The actual concrete victories have been more of a mixed bag, which leads us to the question: what sort of politics are needed to achieve real emancipation? This led Kyle Edwards and August Nimtz back to the American Civil War, and more specifically to the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass. Both wrote quite prolifically on the events that were happening and were enthusiastic about its possibilities for the advancement of human freedom, but both brought some very different political values and ideas to their analysis. In studying these two figures together, Edwards and Nimtz are able to show how both a fight for Communism rooted in class struggle and a revolutionary liberalism rose to this profound historical moment. The result is The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time (Brill, 2024), a study with a concrete answer to the question of what sort of politics will be needed going forward. Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series by Brill and Haymarket. Kyle Edwards is a Curriculum Administrator at the University of Minnesota, and a member of AFSCME 3800. August Nimtz is a professor in the political science department at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of numerous books, including Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative Real-Time Political Analysis and The Ballot, the Streets―or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

    1h 42m

  7. JAN 11

    Jennifer Greenburg, "At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War" (Cornell UP, 2023)

    At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Jennifer Greenburg reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for "hearts and minds." Despite women technically being banned from ground combat units, the all-female teams were drawn into combat nonetheless. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing military trainings, this book challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women's rights and celebrated women's integration into combat as a victory for gender equality. Dr. Jennifer Greenburg critically interrogates a new imperial feminism and its central role in securing US hegemony. Women's incorporation into combat through emotional labor has reinforced gender stereotypes, with counterinsurgency framing female soldiers as global ambassadors for women's rights. This book provides an analysis of US imperialism that keeps the present in tension with the past, clarifying where colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality have resurfaced and how they are changing today. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

    46 min

  8. 12/05/2024

    J. Mijin Cha, "A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future" (MIT Press, 2024)

    To meet the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels must occur, as quickly as possible. But there are many unknowns when it comes to moving from theory to implementation for such a large-scale energy transition, to say nothing of whether this transition will be “just.”  In A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future (MIT Press, 2024), J. Mijin Cha—a seasoned climate policy researcher who also works with advocacy organizations and unions—offers a comprehensive analysis of how we can actualize a just transition in the U.S. context and enact transformational changes that meaningfully improve people’s lives. Cha provides a novel governance framework called the “Four+ Pillars,” formulated from original research to provide a way to move from theory to practice. The “Pillars” framework includes a novel analysis that guides readers in understanding how to formulate effective just transition policies, what makes them just or unjust, and, similarly, what makes transition just and unjust. The framework also combines theoretical discussions with original empirical research and provides insights into perceptions of just transition. Grounded in real-world perspectives that make the case for policies that advance a just transition for all, not just fossil fuel workers, Cha charts the path forward to an equitable and sustainable future that no longer depends on fossil fuels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

    28 min
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    About

    Interviews with Scholars of Critical Theory about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

    Information

    • Creator
      Marshall Poe
    • Years Active
      2013 - 2025
    • Episodes
      1.9K
    • Rating
      Clean
    • Copyright
      © New Books Network
    • Show Website
      New Books in Critical Theory

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