New Books in 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

Marxism is having a moment; higher workloads, stagnating wages, rising costs of living, a new economic crisis every few years, a warming climate and now almost two years of a worldwide pandemic have all led to a number of people across the world, especially younger people, to self-identify with ideas once thought to be in the dustbin of history. But while people may find Marx’s theories helpful for understanding what’s happening, turning these interpretations into sustained commitments is another thing. What’s more, Marx’s works often turn out to be less definitive than is often imagined, giving us rigorous methods of inquiry that we then need to develop and adapt to other fields. Being a Marxist then is not simply about adopting a particular series of propositions, but a way of interpreting and engaging with the world.This is one of the animating ideas for my guest today, Ted Stolze, here to discuss his essay collection Becoming Marxist: Studies in Philosophy, Struggle, and Endurance (Haymarket Books, 2020). While Marx occupies a central place throughout the essays, readers will find engagements with a variety of figures, going back as far as Aristotle or the Apostle Paul, all the way up to the present with essays on Zizek and Deleuze. In between these poles are studies of Hobbes, Spinoza, Hegel and many other early modern thinkers. Throughout the essays, Stolze puts Marxist practice in dialogue with philosophy and vice-versa, showing us how political struggle demands philosophical inquiry, not simply for the purpose of political and tactical clarity, but for the same reasons people have turned to philosophy for several millennia now. Socrates famously said the unexamined life is not worth living, kicking off an entire tradition of self-examination. It’s this tradition Stolze believes activists and organizers ought to draw on today to better understand what it might mean to become Marxist.Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series.Ted Stolze holds an M.A. in religion and a PhD in philosophy. He is an associate professor of philosophy at Cerritos College. He is the coeditor of The New Spinoza and has published numerous articles on philosophy, politics and religion. 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 Complaint! (Duke UP, 2021), Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Do we really need universities and colleges anymore? Have they become too politicized? Many conservatives have started to write off American academia. They contend that it is so irremediably, irretrievably woke that the best that those on the right can hope for is to try to advance their ideas and live according to their principles outside it.Other conservatives still in academe just keep their heads down and try to maintain some kind of conservative presence within it, get their work done and do their best for their students.What does the increasing dominance of the left/liberal worldview in academe have on the intellectual development of college students and what are the consequences for conservative academics and for American society at large?Or are things really that bad for academics who do not swear fealty to left-liberal values? Is there still a healthy respect on college campuses for fundamentals such as the cultivation of reason and respect for the notion of “reasonableness?” Is “reasonableness” even something worth salvaging?In his 2021 book Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education (Princeton UP, 2021), Jonathan Marks examines the deleterious effects of the left-leaning sociocultural homogenization of American higher education. He calls upon college instructors to renew their commitment to inculcating in their students the ability to reason for themselves and to reason with others. He argues that a healthy democracy requires a strong base of liberally-educated people given that reason is the best way to solve economic and political problems and simply to lead fulfilling lives.Marks identifies as a conservative and yet he takes issue with conservatives and populists who are giving up on American higher education as nothing more than a vast leftist indoctrination mill. He disputes this despairing, defeatist position of the right when it comes to academia while presenting a clear-eyed view of how the left does indeed frequently politicize scholarship.Marks provides a case study of this trend in the shape of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against the state of Israel.Jonathan Marks makes a passionate case for the value of liberal education—and lays out clearly what that consists of and its importance for those who consider themselves liberal and those who very much don’t.This book should be read by academics, college students, parents about to send their children off to college and anyone who cares about where society-shaping new ideas are developed and timeless ones are passed along to new generations. And for millions of Americans, colleges are still where much of this occurs.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

With its ultimate debacle in August 2021, a discussion of the twenty-year military involvement of America and the West in Afghanistan is most timely. Accordingly, there is no one more pertinent to speak to about this history than premier British historian Jeremy Black. In a dialogue with Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society, Professor Black expertly delineates why the once promising American campaign in Afghanistan went seriously amiss. Given how timely the discussion is, this is an episode of ‘Arguing History’, that should not be missed. Listeners might be interested in Black's book Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: A Global History (Rowman & LIttlefield, 2016). Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story of how Al Qaeda grew in the West.In forensic and compelling detail, Jytte Klausen traces how Islamist revolutionaries exiled in Europe and North America in the 1990s helped create and control one of the world's most impactful terrorist movements--and how, after the near-obliteration of the organization during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they helped build it again. She shows how the diffusion of Islamist terrorism to Europe and North America has been driven, not by local grievances of Western Muslims, but by the strategic priorities of the international Salafi-jihadist revolutionary movement. That movement has adapted to Western repertoires of protest: agitating for armed insurrection and religious revivalism in the name of a warped version of Islam.The jihadists-Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, and their many affiliates and associates--also proved to be amazingly resilient. Again and again, the movement recovered from major setbacks. Appealing to disaffected Muslims of immigrant origin and alienated converts to Islam, Jihadist groups continue to recruit new adherents in Europe and North America, street-side in neighborhoods, in jails, and online through increasingly clandestine platforms.Taking a comparative and historical approach, deploying cutting-edge analytical tools, and drawing on her unparalleled database of up to 6,500 Western jihadist extremists and their networks, Klausen has produced the most comprehensive account yet of the origins of Western jihadism and its role in the global movement.Jytte Klausen is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University and an Affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.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