New Books in Critical Theory

Few figures stand as prominently in Marxist theory and history as V.I. Lenin. The revolutionary who played a pivotal role in one of the most important events in world history has received reverence, damnation, and everything in between, but much of that response depends on deep misunderstandings of both what he thought and what he did. This misunderstanding was deep enough that even he took notice of it at several points, remarking that readers tended to take his theories out of their context and misunderstanding the underlying points. Understanding Lenin, then, will not just mean rereading his work, but understanding the world Lenin was working in, the what’s impossible to understand without considering the where’s, when’s and why’s.To that effect, Alan Shandro has stepped in with a book that seeks to do just that. Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle (Haymarket Books, 2015) is a sustained attempt to reread Lenin in light of Gramsci’s oft-ignored remark that Lenin was one of his biggest influences in developing his own theories of hegemony. The book spends the first couple chapters contextualizing Lenin by looking at some of his contemporaries, particularly Kautsky, Bernstein and Plekhanov, before turning to Lenin’s own works, and reading through them slowly and meticulously. The result is a study that works its way from Lenin’s writings in the 1890’s all the way to the end of his life in the 1920’s, giving us the ability to see Lenin’s development of ontological and epistemological themes that run throughout his life and work. While Shandro is not always easy to read, the book has a number of crucial insights for political organizers, and will repay serious effort. Many books have been written on Lenin over the years, but few have bothered to study his own work so meticulously and thoroughly.Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series.Alan Shandro is a professor of political theory, previously at Laurentian University, and is currently a visiting professor at York. He is on the editorial board for Science & Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. So we are reaching across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. Ginetta Candelario’s path from journalism-major-hopeful to sociologist, how her family history shaped her intellectual questions, what inspired her to return to Smith after campus racism drove her out, a model for building an intentional community, editing a journal dedicated to the scholarship and voices of women of color, and a discussion of Meridians: 20th Anniversary Reader.Our guest is: Dr. Ginetta Candelario, who is a faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Latina/o Studies Program, the Study of Women and Gender Program, and the Community Engagement and Social Change Concentration at Smith College. She is the founding vice president of the National Latin@ Studies Association, and a founding executive committee member of the New England Consortium for Latina/o Studies, and was appointed by the American Sociological Association to its Committee on Professional Ethics for 2017–20 and to the Finance Committee for 2021-2024. Dr. Candelario is widely published, serves on editorial boards, and is a peer reviewer. Her research interests include Dominican history and society, with a focus on national identity formation and women’s history; Blackness in the Americas; Latin American, Caribbean and Latina feminisms; Latina/o communities (particularly Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican); U.S. beauty culture; and museum studies. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in the Dominican Republic twice, and has been the editor of Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism since July 2017.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator and co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts. She is a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Dr. Candelario’s Ted Talk Meridians’ materials referenced in the podcast Meridians' portal for submissions Cien años de feminismos dominicanos, 1865-1965. Tomo I: El fuego detrás de las ruinas, 1865-1931. Co-edited by Ginetta Candalario, April J. Mayes, and Elizabeth Manley, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Archivo General de la Nación, 2016. Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops, Durham: Duke University Press, December 2007. Salome by Julia Alvarez Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko Democracy in Chains by Nancy McClean YouTube recording of the Meridians’ 20th anniversary celebration talks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How can ideas from sociology help us understand history and economics? In Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought (Columbia UP, 2021), Emily Erikson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale and Academic Director of the Fox International Fellowship, explores the major shift, which occurred during the seventeenth century, in the history and philosophy of economics. The book combines computational methods from sociology with a detailed and close engagement with historical sources and the philosophy of economics. It demonstrates how a key set of merchants proved highly influential in setting the terms of economics, in the context of the specific conditions and institutional settings in England during the period. The book also offers comparative analysis, adding depth to the numerous methods of testing its core hypothesis about what really drove the changes in economics. Clearly written, and deeply engaging, the book is essential reading for scholars in economics and the social sciences, as well as in history and the humanities. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. 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, I interview Rachel Zolf—a poet whose “interdisciplinary practice explores questions about history, knowledge, subjectivity, responsibility, and the limits of language, meaning, and the human”—about their new book, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics, published by Duke University Press.In the text (which is both an essay in the etymological sense of an attempt as well as a longform poem, a making), Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan—“Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen. [No one / bears witness for the / witness.]”—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness articulates the Nazi holocaust as part of a constellation of horror that includes the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Israeli occupation of Palestine, and settler-colonial practices across the globe Thinking along with black feminist theory's notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One's Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing, its dangerous perhaps, and language. Zolf’s No One operates outside the bounds of the sovereign individual, hauntologically informed by the fleshly no-thingness that has been historically ascribed to blackness and that blackness enacts within, apposite to, and beyond the No One. No One bears witness to becomings beyond comprehension, making and unmaking monstrous forms of entangled future anterior life.Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (Routledge, 2021) is a study of the connected ideas of "queer" and "gender performance" or "performativity" over the past several decades, providing an ambitious history and crucial examination of these concepts while questioning their very bases. The book traces how and why "queer" and "performativity" seem to belong together in so many discussions around identity, popular modes of gender display, and performance art. Drawing on art history and performance studies but also on feminist, queer, and sexuality studies, and postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race theoretical frameworks, it seeks to denaturalize these assumptions by questioning the US-centrism and white-dominance of discourses around queer performance or performativity.Dr. Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics and Research at the Roski School of Art & Design at the University of Southern California. Her recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and Visual Arts and Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, co-edited with Erin Silver. The catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey, which she co-edited with Andy Campbell, and which accompanies a retrospective of Athey’s work at Participant Inc. (New York) and ICA (Los Angeles), was listed among “Best Art Books 2020” in the New York Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed upscale consumer for more than four decades. Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so.The damning indictment of the mainstream media that flows through No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell UP, 2019) is a wakeup call about the critical role of the media in telling news stories about labor unions, workers, and working-class readers. As Martin charts the decline of labor reporting from the late 1960s onwards, he reveals the shift in news coverage as the mainstream media abandoned labor in favor of consumer and business interests. When newspapers, especially, wrote off working-class readers as useless for their business model, the American worker became invisible. In No Longer Newsworthy, Martin covers this shift in focus, the loss of political voice for the working class, and the emergence of a more conservative media in the form of Christian television, talk radio, Fox News, and conservative websites.Now, with our fractured society and news media, Martin offers the mainstream media recommendations for how to push back against right-wing media and once again embrace the working class as critical to its audience and its democratic function. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

We live in strange times. Politics around the world seem to be transforming into something new and often frightening. But this process has a history. In 1989, the bi-polar certainties of the Cold War gave way to a neo-liberal consensus, what Francis Fukuyama termed “the End of History”. Yet with BREXIT and Trump in 2016, the End of History seemed to be coming to an end itself. The current COVID crisis has only accelerated this process. To make sense of this Gramscian interregnum and its great variety of morbid symptoms, Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe started the Aufhebunga Bunga podcast in April 2017. Billing itself as the “global political podcast at the end of the end of history”, the podcast offers theoretically informed and often provocative analysis and commentary. The podcast has led to a book, The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century, out with Zero Books in 2021.In our discussion, these three scholars lay out their defense of the concept of the End of History, discuss post-politics and anti-politics, and explain how politics are back. They also diagnose the pandemic of Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome and explain which demographic groups are most susceptible to NOBS. Drawing from the recent history of the USA and UK, as well as Italy and Brazil, Hochuli, Hoare, and Cunliffe offer an analysis of our world and make some bleak predictions for what is to come in terms of future ideological formations.Alex Hochuli is a writer and translator living in Sao Paolo, Brazil, George Hoare is a political consultant in London, and Philip Cunliffe is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent.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/critical-theory

In Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation (Routledge, 2019), Hannah McCann asks, “how can we consider femininity in a way that best attends to people’s experiences of, and attachment to, feminine styles?” McCann takes readers through popular and scholarly feminist commentary to understand, and critique, how embodied feminine styles are comprehended as effects of an oppressive system which also plays a significant role in upholding and perpetuating this system. Instead of positing that femininity is necessarily empowering or essentially good, McCann insists that femininity is neither inherently disempowering, nor it is necessarily bad. McCann contests the idea that those who appear, embody or perform femininity are not “cultural dupes labouring under false-consciousness” but are agentic in their own right as they navigate life and negotiate with power structures and navigate life and their own becoming in it. There is acknowledgement in the book about the messiness of gender and recognition of the fact that masculinity and femininity are rarely coherent and uniformly expressed or articulated.McCann uses the term “femininity” to illustrate “style of the body” or appearance, which is a “non-inevitable normative descriptor” that demands attention to more complexity than what is accrued to norms and descriptions. It considers how femininity as a “bodily property” has been conceived of in feminist discourse and how such conception figures in the lives of those who inhabit such styles and the identities that accompany them. It does not dismiss femininity as irrelevant, and does not reject its embodies styles, even as it does not place emphasis on representation as exclusively having the power to bring about political transformation. McCann enquires, “What can the body as feminine do? And What might utopian femininity” look like, while prefacing it with the statement that these questions can be asked instead of feminine embodiments being rendered intelligible only as oppressed. McCann explores queer femininity with attention to her conviction that “feminine styles and accoutrements deserve attention outside of evaluations of their presumed representational significance.”Dr. Hannah McCann is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research in critical femininity studies explores feminist discourse on femininity, queer femme LGBTQ+ communities, beauty culture, and queer fangirls. She has published in various journals including European Journal of Women’s Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her monograph Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation was published with Routledge in 2018, and her co-authored textbook Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures with Red Globe Press in 2020.Sohini Chatterjee is PhD Student in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Western University. She works on queer cultural studies, trans and queer activism, and resistance movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Can new language reshape our understanding of the past and expand the possibilities of the future? The Crime Without a Name: Combatting Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America (Counterpoint, 2021) follows Pitner’s journey to identify and remedy the linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. Ethnocide, first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term “genocide”), describes the systemic erasure of a people’s ancestral culture. For Black Americans, who have endured this atrocity for generations, this erasure dates back to the transatlantic slave trade and reached new resonance in a post-Trump world.Just as the concept of genocide radically reshaped our perception of human rights in the twentieth century, reframing discussions about race and culture in terms of ethnocide can change the way we understand our diverse and rapidly evolving racial and political climate in a time of increased visibility around police brutality and systemic racism. The Crime Without a Name traces the historical origins of ethnocide in the United States, examines the personal, lived consequences of existing within an ongoing erasure, and offers ways for readers to combat and overcome our country’s ethnocidal foundation. 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

In this engaging discussion, Matthew Flisfeder, an associate professor at the University of Winnipeg, dives into his book, Algorithmic Desire. He challenges listeners to rethink social media's impact on connections and identity, exploring how platforms reflect and influence societal structures. Flisfeder critiques the transformation of social media from a democratizing force to a tool for division, linking it to late capitalism. He also delves into the complexities of desire and identity in the digital age, urging a deeper reflection on our online lives and the structures that shape them.