New Books in Critical Theory

In The Metabolic Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2020), Clémentine Deliss, a curator, researcher, and former director of the Frankfurt Weltkulturen Museum, explores possible functions for anthropological museums in a postcolonial culture. Anthropological museums in Europe, as products of imperialism, have been compelled to legitimate themselves because the very basis of their exhibitions, the history of their collections, came about all too often through colonial appropriation and outright theft.In this book, Deliss addresses this reality for enthographic or world culture museums in Europe, exploring the possible futures for these institutions. Connecting to reflections on her own work as the director of the Frankfurt Weltkulturen Museum with discussions of filmmakers, artists and authors to argue for an entity she calls the Metabolic Museum―an interventionist laboratory that opens up the potential of anthropological collections for the future.Holiday Powers (@holidaypowers) is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers sculpt alternate agencies, and game players submerge themselves in those alternate agencies. Thus, the fact that we play games demonstrates the fluidity of our own agency. We can throw ourselves, for a little while, into a different and temporary motivations.This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on their unique value. In Games: Agency as Art (Oxford UP, 2020), C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part our systems of communication and our art. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle. Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.Games also let us to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, it turns out, are a special technique for communication. They are a technology that lets us record and transmit forms of agency. Our games form a "library of agency" and we can explore that library to develop our autonomy. Games use temporary restrictions to force us into new postures of agency.Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Soham Sen talks about standpoint theory, a method of understanding the ways in which individual and collective experience influence public discourses. He begins from its origins in the civil rights movement and in the innovations of feminist thought, and follows it up with a discussion of its efficacy in understanding contemporary media.Soham Sen is pursuing his Masters in the Department of Communication Studies and is the Assistant Course Director of Public Speaking at the College of Media & Communication. His area of research includes border rhetoric and negotiation of immigrant identity , postcolonialism, and performance studies.Image: © 2022 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.How are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the current order? This is a question that has puzzled philosophers for centuries, and it’s the question that animates Dominik Finkelde’s book ​Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan, and the Foundation of Ethics (Columbia University Press, 2017). The book looks at these three major thinkers, and the ways they saw subjects as being immersed in a particular set of ethical orientations, but also always with a subtle but profound potential to do something beyond what they might’ve thought possible. Dominik Finkelde is a professor of contemporary political philosophy and epistemology at the Munich School of Philosophy, and is also the author of ​Zizek Between Lacan and Hegel and Benjamin Reads Proust.​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.Imagination is one of the most important elements of being human, but is most often assumed we know what it is, while rarely being analyzed. Here with me today is Jonathan Erickson to discuss his recent book Imagination in the Western Psyche: From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience (Routledge, 2019). The book looks at various theories of imagination through history, and then looks at what neuroscience can tell us about the functioning of imagination, as well as looking at what the functioning of imagination can tell us about neuroscience.Jonathan Erickson is a writer and educator, and holds a BA in English literature from UC Berkeley and a PhD in depth psychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California.Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it?We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony—understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology—Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century.Alex Williams and Jeremy Gilbert book Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back) (Verso, 2022) explores how these forces came to control our world. The authors show how they have shaped the direction of politics and government as well as the neoliberal economy to benefit their own interests. However, this dominance is under threat. Following the 2008 financial crisis, a new order emerged in which the digital platform is the central new technology of both production and power. This offers new opportunities for counter hegemonic strategies to win back power. Hegemony Now outlines a dynamic socialist strategy for the twenty-first century.Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices ranging from the film work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to the disability diaries of Bob Flanagan, to the Black queer speculative fiction of Renee Gladman. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-vérité, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Black Communist women throughout the early to mid-twentieth century fought for and led mass campaigns in the service of building collective power in the fight for liberation. Through concrete materialist analysis of the conditions of Black workers, these women argued that racial and economic equality can only be achieved by overthrowing capitalism.The first collection of its kind, Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing (Verso, 2022) brings together three decades of Black Communist women’s political writings. In doing so, it highlights the link between Communism and Black liberation. Likewise, it makes clear how Black women fundamentally shaped, and were shaped by, Communist praxis in the twentieth century.Organize, Fight, Win includes writings from card-carrying Communists like Dorothy Burnham, Williana Burroughs, Grace P. Campbell, Alice Childress, Marvel Cooke, Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma Dale Perkins, Vicki Garvin, Yvonne Gregory, Claudia Jones, Maude White Katz, and Louise Thompson Patterson, and writings by those who organized alongside the Communist Party, like Ella Baker, Charlotta Bass, Thyra Edwards, Lorraine Hansberry, and Dorothy Hunton.In this interview, I spoke with the editors of this collection, Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean. Charisse Burden-Stelly (@blackleftaf) is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Wayne State University. She is the author, with Gerald Horne, of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Life in American History.Jodi Dean (@Jodi7768) is a professor in the Political Science Department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited thirteen books, including recent Verso title Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging.Catriona Gold (@cat__gold) is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Many Canadians think of their country as a paragon of liberal democratic values at home, and a moderating force on the world stage—not so, argues the compelling new edited collection from Fernwood Publishing, Capitalism and Dispossession: Corporate Canada at Home and Abroad. In this conversation with co-editors, Dr. David P Thomas and Dr. Veldon Coburn, we discuss the book’s numerous case studies of how the Canadian state, and the corporate actors to which it delegates authority, are central actors within a system of global capitalism that is premised on processes of accumulation by dispossession in order to reproduce itself.Phil Henderson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy where his research interests focus on the interrelations between Indigenous land/water defenders and organized labour in what’s presently known as Canada. More information can be found at his personal website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own exploitation. They have also absorbed and reflected forms of protest within their art practice itself. The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art (Lund Humphries, 2021) maps, critiques, and celebrates activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to activism by artists, and activist forms of art.Gregory Sholette speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the vanishing distinctions between art, art activism, and traditional political activism, and the political dimensions of culture in a hyper-aestheticised world that is indicative of a broader crisis of capitalism. Sholette describes a new wave of activist art taking place not only within community-based protest groups, as it has for decades, but amongst professionally trained artists many of whom refuse to respect the conventional borders separating painting from protest, or art from utility.Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and activist. He has participated in, documented, and written about activist art for over forty years. He is the co-convenor of the school Social Practice Queens, a pioneering programme training artists to become social and political activists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory