New Books in Intellectual History

Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa. The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. He sought to publish a bilingual Arabic and French edition of the book by working with humanists in colonial institutions, but the project was ultimately undermined by the disregard of the French state. Textual Life considers Kamara’s story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change. Wendell H. Marsh argues that Kamara’s scholarship reflected what he calls the textual attitude, an orientation to the world mediated by reading. Colonial humanists shared this attitude even while upholding racial and religious hierarchies, and they took an interest in African texts and traditions. The bureaucrats and technocrats who succeeded them, however, disdained such dialogue—for reasons that bear a striking resemblance to the algorithmic antihumanism that is ascendant today. Drawing on Kamara’s body of work, colonial archival documents, and postcolonial knowledge production within Senegal, Textual Life offers a decolonial vision of the humanities. By engaging with African and Muslim intellectual resources, Marsh shows how thinkers like Kamara who were subjected to colonialism can help us find a future after empire. Wendell Marsh is Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. Madina Thiam is Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (Reedy Press, 2025), acclaimed scholars Lucas E. Morel and Jonathan W. White assemble Frederick Douglass’s most meaningful and poignant statements about Abraham Lincoln, including a dozen newly discovered documents that have not been seen for 160 years. Readers will encounter the distrust and vitriol Douglass directed at Lincoln throughout much of the Civil War, including his anger and frustration with the president as he moved slowly, but methodically, toward emancipation. Douglass’s writings also reveal how three personal interactions between these two great men led to powerful feelings of friendship and mutual admiration. After Lincoln’s assassination—as Jim Crow laws and political violence gutted the hard-won rights of Black Americans—Douglass expressed greater appreciation for Lincoln’s statesmanship during the Civil War and praised him as a model for postwar America. There is no one better than Frederick Douglass to offer a critical assessment of the Great Emancipator and savior of the Union. His reflections not only convey Lincoln’s contributions to the nation but also teach today’s generation timely lessons on how to fulfill the promise of the American republic. Measuring the Man sheds new light on the most critical period of American history and will transform the way we think about these two extraordinary leaders. Omari Averette-Phillips is a PhD Candidate in History and African American Studies at UC Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

This is the second episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS). An Albertan oil man and a socialist policy wonk from Saskatchewan banded together to think up “eco-development,” a precursor to today’s sustainable development. This unlikely duo forged a global consensus at the United Nations, effectively codifying the reigning orthodoxy of liberal environmental governance. They told us that capitalism and sustainability are indeed compatible. Might that be the most utopian of all green dreams? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely across the medieval and early modern globe. In Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image (Princeton University Press, 2025), Dr. Jack Hartnell charts the emergence and endurance of this striking image, used as a visual guide to the treatment of many ailments. Taking readers on a remarkable journey from medieval Europe to eighteenth-century Japan, Dr. Hartnell explains the historic popularity of this gruesome image and why the Wound Man continues to intrigue us today.Drawing on a wealth of original research, Dr. Hartnell traces the many lives of the Wound Man, from its origins in late medieval Bohemia to its vivid reincarnations in hundreds of manuscripts and printed books over more than three hundred years. Transporting readers beyond the specifics of bodily injury, Dr. Hartnell demonstrates how the Wound Man’s body was at once an encyclopedic repository of surgical knowledge, a fantastic literary and religious muse, a catalyst for shifting media landscapes, and a cross-cultural artistic feat that reached diverse audiences around the world. The Wound Man, we discover, held profound importance not only for healers and patients but also for scribes, students, nuns, monks, printmakers, and poets.Marvelously illustrated, Wound Man sheds light on the entwined histories of art and medicine, showing how premodern medical diagrams represent a unique site of contact between sickness, cure, painting, and print. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Zahi Zalloua, a Cushing Eells Professor at Whitman College and author of 'Fanon, Žižek, and the Violence of Resistance,' dives into the intersection of anti-colonial thought and psychoanalysis. He discusses how resistance often entails violence, contrasting the destructive and transformative aspects of it through Fanon and Žižek's perspectives. Zalloua critiques liberal anti-racism, emphasizing the need for a class struggle approach that transcends identity politics. He also links global capitalism to racialization and explores how Gaza serves as a catalyst for global political awareness.

The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) is an exploration of psychoanalysis' often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage. Throughout the chapters, the contributors write about psychoanalysis’ relationship with queerness, the ways in which queerness is represented in the psychoanalytic archive, and how that archive endures in the present and creates various disruptive effects both within and beyond the clinic. Each chapter from the global cohort of contributors approaches queerness from a different angle: they consider the literary aspects of queerness’ presence in the analytic world; the clinical complexities of working with queer and trans people; metapsychological inclusion and exclusion of queerness, and many other subjects. Taken together these contributions constitute a decisive intervention into the psychoanalytic canon. They are an unabashed demand for accepting and furthering the representation and inclusion of queer, and in particular trans, people within psychoanalysis. It is a call for action to utilize and deepen psychoanalysis’ enormous explicatory powers and bring together voices that have so far been denied a unity of expression, while critically reevaluating psychoanalysis’ historical relationship to queerness. Each chapter proposes different ways of thinking and writing psychoanalytically, with many of the papers queering the format and forms of expression commonly found in academic writing, through their use of dialogues, conversations, or other experimental forms of writing. Written almost exclusively by analysts, scholars, and activists who identify as trans and/or queer, this important volume puts theory into practice by centering queer and trans voices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with Christian, Greek-speaking elites in southeast Europe shaped national identities and structured global civilizational hierarchies over the decades that followed. Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025) tracks a notion of civilization that developed in early nineteenth-century France. Dr. Alex Tipei explores the constellation of ideas, beliefs, and practices this concept invoked – what she calls civilization-speak – and charts the cross-continental networks that employed it as an organizing principle. Drawing on archival and printed primary sources in six languages, Dr. Tipei maps out the uses of this civilization-speak on both sides of the continent, focusing on France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania. She shows how and why French liberals mobilized civilization-speak to, offering an innovative analysis of liberalism and capitalism’s relationship to informal empire. Calling into question long-standing assumptions about the rise of nationalism in southeast Europe, Unintended Nations explores how Franco-Balkan exchanges helped define political, civilizational, and biopolitical boundaries in the post-Napoleonic era. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Spike Bucklow, author of "The Year: An Ecology of the Zodiac," merges his background in chemistry and heritage conservation to explore the intricate connections between nature and human experiences. The discussion traverses the cyclical nature of time, emphasizing how seasonal shifts shape emotions and perceptions. Bucklow reflects on the balance of light and darkness, the ecological awakening of spring, and the deeper meanings behind the summer solstice. Through historical insights and literary reflections, he advocates for a harmonious understanding of science, nature, and cultural beliefs.

Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll see thrown about in op-eds and analysis pieces all over the net and the press. Dystopia is doing some kind of work in our political vocabulary that goes beyond a reference to those iconic dystopian novels or their sort of contemporary successors. … Sometimes politics seems to be so absorbed in the train of fantasy and the imaginary that it becomes worrying. But like it or not, or like specific expressions of the political imagination or not, the political arena is an arena of the imagination. Habermas once said that people don't fight for abstractions, but they do battle with images.                                                                                                                    – Matthew Benjamin Cole, NBN interview 2025 After centuries of contemplating utopias, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers began to warn of dystopian futures. Yet these fears extended beyond the canonical texts of dystopian fiction into post-war discourses on totalitarianism, mass society, and technology, as well as subsequent political theories of freedom and domination. Fear the Future: Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century (U of Michigan Press, 2025) demonstrates the centrality of dystopian thinking to twentieth century political thought, showing the pervasiveness of dystopian images, themes, and anxieties. Offering a novel reading of major themes and thinkers, Fear the Future explores visions of the future from literary figures such as Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell; political theorists such as Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault; and mid-century social scientists such as Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, David Reisman, C. Wright Mills, and Jacques Ellul. It offers a comparative analysis of distinct intellectual and literary traditions, including modern utopianism and anti-utopianism, mid-century social science, Frankfurt School critical theory, and continental political philosophy. With detailed case studies of key thinkers from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century, the book synthesizes secondary literature and research from a range of disciplinary areas, including in political theory, intellectual history, literary studies, and utopian studies. This wide-ranging reconstruction shows that while dystopian thinking has illustrated the dangers of domination and dehumanization, it has also illuminated new possibilities for freedom. Professor Cole published his book with the University of Michigan Press as Open Access: find the detailed insights and arguments that Matthew discusses in our interview here as an online publication with downloadable options. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges, and even electric trains. Kilometres of underground galleries led to casements hidden in the terrain, and turrets that rose from the ground to fire upon the enemy. The fortifications were invulnerable to the heaviest artillery and to chemical warfare. Despite this extensive preparation, France fell to Germany in a little under six weeks. Eight decades on, the Maginot Line is still remembered as an expensively misguided response to obvious danger. In The Maginot Line: A New History (Yale University Press, 2025), Dr. Kevin Passmore presents a groundbreaking account reevaluating the Maginot Line. He traces the controversies surrounding construction, the lives of the men who manned the forts, the impact on German-speaking inhabitants of the frontier, and the fight against espionage from within. Far from a backward step, the Maginot Line was an ambitious project of modernisation—one that was let down by strategic error and growing dissatisfaction with fortification. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history