New Books in Critical Theory

Recent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis (Stanford UP, 2022), Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences.Darian-Smith looks deeply into each of these three cases of catastrophic wildfires and finds key similarities in all of them. As political leaders and big business work together in the pursuit of profits and power, anti-environmentalism has become an essential political tool enabling the rise of extreme right governments and energizing their populist supporters. These are the governments that deny climate science, reject environmental protection laws, and foster exclusionary worldviews that exacerbate climate injustice.The fires in Australia, Brazil and the United States demand acknowledgment of the global systems of inequality that undergird them, connecting the political erosion of liberal democracy with the corrosion of the environment. Darian-Smith argues that these wildfires are closely linked through capitalism, colonialism, industrialization, and resource extraction. In thinking through wildfires as environmental and political phenomenon, Global Burning challenges readers to confront the interlocking powers that are ensuring our future ecological collapse.Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

“Nước Việt Nam: a home, a cradle, a point of departure” (Gandhi, 1).The Vietnamese word nước embraces the duality of land and water with an idea of “home.” Through a nuanced examination of the meaning of homeland and politics of belonging, Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi proposes nước to understand complex positionalities of refugee settlers on lands sutured through the traumas of US empire, militarization, and settler colonialism. Division in area studies has foreclosed conversations on how histories of settler colonialism and empire bring to light unexpected connections between Indigenous people and settlers across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. By bringing together Vietnamese refugee settlers in Israel Palestine and Guam, Gandhi asks the difficult question of how we can imagine decolonial futurities when the creation of “home” for refugee settlers was predicated on the settler colonial project of dispossessing Indigenous people. Drawing inspiration from nước that embraces contradictions through relationality, Gandhi charts both the archipelago of US empire and resistance to imagine decolonization based on fraught acknowledgement of histories and relationalities between people, land, and water.Gandhi's new monograph is a vital read for both scholars and public interested in critical refugee studies, Indigenous studies, settler colonialism, US empire, and archipelagic history. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar). Her interdisciplinary research engages critical refugee studies, settler colonial studies, and transpacific studies. She also hosts a podcast, Distorted Footprints, through her Critical Refugee Studies class.Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode Kim speaks with Lauren Fournier about autotheory.Lauren has recently published a book on the subject, titled Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (MIT Press, 2021). In the episode she points to Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts as the book that made the term famous, but refers us to a longer history of autotheoretical feminist writing, including work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks.She also mentions critical research by Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism” and the book I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus.Lauren is a writer, curator, and artist, who currently holds a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in visual studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently co-editing a special issue of ASAP Journal on Autotheory with her colleague Alex Brostoff. Her novella, All My Dicks, is forthcoming with Fiction Advocate.Image: Art by Sona Safaei-SoorehMusic used in promotional material: ‘Braided Flower’ by Lee Maddeford Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In the decades after World War II, the American economy entered a period of prolonged growth that created unprecedented affluence—but these developments came at the cost of a host of new environmental problems. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of them, such as pollution-emitting factories, waste-handling facilities, and big infrastructure projects, ended up in communities dominated by people of color. Constrained by long-standing practices of segregation that limited their housing and employment options, people of color bore an unequal share of postwar America’s environmental burdens.This reader collects a wide range of primary source documents on the rise and evolution of the environmental justice movement. The documents show how environmentalists in the 1970s recognized the unequal environmental burdens that people of color and low-income Americans had to bear, yet failed to take meaningful action to resolve them. Instead, activism by the affected communities themselves spurred the environmental justice movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, environmental justice had become increasingly mainstream, and issues like climate justice, food justice, and green-collar jobs had taken their places alongside the protection of wilderness as “environmental” issues.Christopher W. Wells's book Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader (U Washington Press, 2018) is a powerful tool for introducing students to the US environmental justice movement and the sometimes tense relationship between environmentalism and social justice.Brady McCartney is an interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar at the University of Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Kim talks to Patrick Deer about the Military Industrial Complex, a term used by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a 1961 speech to describe a permanent war economy, and the political, economic, and cultural matrix that sustains it. References are made to James Ledbetter’s book Unwarranted Influence and Seymour Melman’s book The Permanent War Economy.Patrick Deer is Associate Professor at the Department of English, New York University. He focuses on war culture and war literature, modernism, and contemporary British and American literature and culture, and Anglophone literature and human rights. His book Culture in Camouflage explores the emergence of modern war culture in the first half of the 20th century.Image: Scene from the film Doctor StrangeloveMusic used in promotional material: “Grim Desert Aftermath” by Kevin Bryce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Race, Culture and Media (Sage, 2021), Anamik Saha provides an account of the role that media plays in both circulating and shaping ideas about race and racism in the contemporary world. Saha argues that we need to move beyond a focus on representation to engage with how media makes race. As Anamik describes in our interview, alongside providing a much-needed summary of existing work on the media, race and racism, the book also breaks new ground theoretically. By synthesising approaches from postcolonial studies, critical political economy and cultural studies, Saha puts forward an approach he calls ‘postcolonial cultural economy’, one which attends to the specific conjunctural context within which race is made and contested; the intertwined, but separate, forces of capitalism and racism; and which gives equal importance to the role that media production, texts, and consumption as forces which shape race and racisms. With case studies and key themes, ranging from the European migration ‘crisis’ of the mid-2010s to Black Twitter anchoring its analysis, this is an invaluable textbook for students and researchers working in the fields of critical media studies, cultural studies, internet studies and beyond.Gummo Clare is a PhD researcher in the School of Media and Communications, University of Leeds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Irune Gabiola explores affect, ecofeminism, and intersectional struggles in Latin America, focusing on COPINH's resistance in Honduras. The podcast discusses the impact of the Makila industry, ecofeminism in indigenous communities, collective care, Utopia as a community space, resilience in Honduras, and themes of care and self-care in Latin America and Spain.

Through his blog K-Punk, Mark Fisher become one of the cult figures of cultural theory after the economic crash of 2008. One of Fisher’s insights, widely taken up by the online memesphere, was that capitalism breeds depression. Mike Watson picks up Fisher’s prognosis when the locked-down pandemic world is mired in a depression that is economic and psychological, and no doubt exacerbated by the transfer of culture and life online.In the aftermath, The Memeing of Mark Fisher (Zero Books, 2021) revisits the Frankfurt School theorists who worked in the shadow of World War Two, during the rise of the culture industry. In examining their thoughts and drawing parallels with Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, Watson aims to render the Frankfurt School as an incisive theoretical toolbox for the post-Covid digital age.Taking in the phenomena of QAnon, twitch streaming, and memes, Watson argues that the dichotomy between culture and political praxis is a false one. As more people have access to the means for theoretical and critical engagement online, he urges the online left to build a real-life cultural and political movement.Mike Watson speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about Mark Fisher’s legacy in critical online spaces, the democracy of memes and their aesthetic warfare, the Acid Left, and how the Frankfurt School thinkers foreshadowed our current moment.Mike Watson is a theorist, critic and curator who is principally focused on the relationship between culture, new media and politics. He hosts the podcast Theorywave Nights. Can the Left Learn to Meme? Mark Fisher’s K-Punk blog archive K-Punk anthology Know Your Meme database Capitalist Realism bed meme 4chan Wojak meme Doomer meme The Acid Left podcast Mike’s book memed by Academic Fraud Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What is the future for the House of Commons? In Held in Contempt: What’s Wrong with the House of Commons? Hannah White, Deputy Director of the Institute for Government, sets out a critique of the way a key institution at the heart of British democracy is failing to deliver for citizens, staff, and Members alike. Set against the backdrop of Brexit, the Coronavirus pandemic, and various institutional scandals, the book details how the Commons fails in its role of holding government to account; is unrepresentative of the population as a whole; is overly complicated and arcane; and is housed in a building that is no longer fit for purpose. At the heart of the book is a challenge to MPs to reform both their own culture and the Commons itself. Ultimately, the book is a defence of the high standards that the Commons should aspire to and has a range of recommendations to make this happen. It is essential reading for every British citizen, and anyone interested in politics.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode Kim talks with Mustafa Yavas about Alienation.Mustafa quotes Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. He also references Albert Camus’ books The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, and Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. Towards the end of the episode, he mentions Bertrand Russell’s 1930 article “In Praise of Idleness.”For listeners interested in reading more on alienation, he recommends Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization; David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and Rahel Jaeggi’s Alienation. He also suggests three great movies that dwell on the subject: Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann; Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, and Tolga Karacelik’s Toll Booth.Mustafa is a postdoctoral scholar in sociology at NYU Abu Dhabi, where he works on work! He is writing a book called White Collar Blues about the transnational Turkish middle class, for which he has recently completed a brilliant book proposal (editors take note!). His previous research focused on boundary processes in social, economic, and political settings, including status homophily in social networks, residential segregation by income, and collective identity formation in social movements.This week’s image is a 1920 painting of Sisyphus at his futile labor by Franz Stuck. Available on Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory