New Books in Critical Theory

Dr. Claire Jean Kim explores the relationship between anti-Asian racism and structural anti-Blackness. The guest discusses the field of studying Asian Americans and race, emphasizing the importance of understanding the interconnectedness of discrimination. The chapter also explores the landmark Supreme Court decision in 1927 that ruled against a Chinese American schoolgirl's right to attend a white school. Examining the treatment of Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, highlighting the erasure of Supreme Court cases and the distinction made between the two groups. The chapter explores the concept of solidarity and the failure of the Asian American critique of white supremacy to address anti-black persecution.

Henrik Fürst and Erik Nylander discuss the value of art education in Swedish folk high schools, exploring admissions, teaching, assessments, students' experiences, and the importance of the arts. They evaluate Swedish cultural policy and its impact, the demographics and recruitment patterns of students, challenges faced by teachers and students in the admissions process, and the societal value of art education.

Racial capitalism, invisible but threaded throughout the world, shapes our lives. Focusing on the experiences of white, Black, and Latinx residents of Cincinnati, Sarah Mayorga argues that residents' interpretations of their circumstances, what she calls urban specters, are often partial recognitions of the exploitation and dehumanization produced by racial capitalism. In Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism (UNC Press, 2023), much scholarly work on racial capitalism has necessarily focused on historical, theoretical, and macro-level accounts. Mayorga takes these vital insights and applies them to two contemporary working-class neighborhoods, centering the lives of working-class and poor people. Using data from interviews with 117 residents, Mayorga maps how racial capitalism creates the everyday harms people know all too well. Chronic underdevelopment, private property, and policing, she shows, have produced these harms. In this enlightening book, Mayorga identifies small windows into abolitionist possibilities that create different types of relations, ones based on care and connection. This is a guide for anyone trying to understand urban inequality, but also more importantly, for how we might create a different world.Richard E. Ocejo is professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

How do migrants make sense of migration? In Coloniality and Meritocracy in unequal EU migrations: Intersecting Inequalities in Post-2008 Italian Migration (Bristol UP, 2023), Simone Varriale, Lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough University, explores the experiences of Italian migrants to Britain to critique notions of meritocracy. Combining a rich set of interview data with a deep understanding of theories of colonialism, and inequality, the book rethinks the recent history of migration in the EU. The book challenges existing narratives of both who is a migrant and the meaning of migration, as well as critiquing stereotypes associated with Northern and Southern Europe. The book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, as well as for anyone wishing to understand inequality and migration today.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Brown Saviors and Their Others: Race, Caste, Labor, and the Global Politics of Help in India (Duke UP, 2023), Arjun Shankar draws from his ethnographic work with an educational NGO to investigate the practices of “brown saviors”—globally mobile, dominant-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who drive India’s help economy. Shankar argues that these brown saviors actually reproduce many of the racialized values and ideologies associated with who and how to help that have been passed down from the colonial period, while masking other operations of power behind the racial politics of global brownness. In India, these operations of power center largely on the transnational labor politics of caste. Ever attentive to moments of discomfort and complicity, Shankar develops a method of “nervous ethnography” to uncover the global racial hierarchies, graded caste stratifications, urban/rural distinctions, and digital panaceas that shape the politics of help in India. Through nervous critique, Shankar introduces a framework for the study of the global help economies that reckons with the ongoing legacies of racial and caste capitalism.Arjun Shankar is Assistant Professor of Culture and Politics at Georgetown University.Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

More than twenty years ago, 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan set into motion a hugely consequential shift in America’s foreign policy: a perpetual state of war that is almost entirely invisible to the American public. War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (New Press, 2023), by the journalist and political analyst Norman Solomon, exposes how this happened, and what its consequences are, from military and civilian casualties to drained resources at home.From Iraq through Afghanistan and Syria and on to little-known deployments in a range of countries around the globe, the United States has been at perpetual war for at least the past two decades. Yet many of these forays remain off the radar of average Americans. Compliant journalists add to the smokescreen by providing narrow coverage of military engagements and by repeating the military’s talking points. Meanwhile, the increased use of high technology, air power, and remote drones has put distance between soldiers and the civilians who die. Back at home, Solomon argues, the cloak of invisibility masks massive Pentagon budgets that receive bipartisan approval even as policy makers struggle to fund the domestic agenda.Necessary, timely, and unflinching, War Made Invisible is an eloquent moral call for counting the true costs of war.Jeff Bachman is an associate professor 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

Why study the arts in school? In Schools and Cultural Citizenship: Arts Education for Life (Routledge, 2023), Pat Thomson, Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham and Christine Hall, Emeritus Professor and former Head of Education at the University of Nottingham, examine this question by introducing findings from the Tracking Arts Learning and Engagement (TALE) Project. The book reflects on perspectives of teachers, students, school managers, and arts organisations as to how “arts rich” schools are constituted and what is needed for them to survive and thrive. The book is offers deep theoretical and empirical insights, and will be accessible and essential reading across the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and for anyone interested in the value of arts education.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. 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 interview James Fenelon discusses his new book entitled Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, recently published with Routledge (2023).The book traces 500 years of European-American colonization and racialized dominance, expanding our common assumptions about the ways racialization was used to build capitalism and the modern world-system. Professor Fenelon draws on personal experience and the agency of understudied Native (and African) resistance leaders, to weave a story too often hidden or distorted in the annals of the academy, that remains invisible at many universities and historical societies. Fenelon identifies three epochs of racial constructions, colonialism, and capitalism that created the USA. Indigenous nations, the first to be racialized on a global scale, African peoples, enslaved and brought to the Americas, and European immigrants. It offers a sweeping analysis of the forces driving the invasion, occupation, and exploitation of Native America and the significance of labor in American history provided by Indigenous people, Africans, and immigrants, specifically the Irish. Indian, Black and Irish makes major contributions toward a deeper understanding of where Supremacy and Sovereignty originated from, and how our modern world has used these socio-political constructions, to build global hegemony that now threatens our very existence through wars and climate change. It will be a vital resource to those studying history, colonialism, race and racism, labor history, and indigenous peoples.James Fenelon is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Indigenous Peoples Studies at California State University, San Bernardino. He is also currently the Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change at Swarthmore College. His books include Redskins? Sports Mascots, Indian Nations and White Racism, Indigenous Peoples and Globalization (with Thomas D. Hall), and Culturicide, Resistance and Survival of the Lakota (Sioux Nation).Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, is published with RoutledgeAidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Dr. Nicole Nguyen examines the role of US courts in the global war on terror, questioning the treatment of terrorism defendants. She explores alternative approaches to political violence, challenges the dominant narrative, and emphasizes the need for a transnational perspective. The podcast highlights the internal inconsistencies within the criminal legal system in terrorism cases and discusses the impact of media coverage on terrorism and political violence.

The academic boycott of Israel, a branch of the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, is one of the richest—and most divisive—topics in the politics of knowledge today. In Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Nick Riemer addresses the most fundamental questions raised by the call to sever ties with Israeli universities, and offers fresh arguments for doing so. More than a narrow study of the boycott campaign, the book details how academic BDS relates to a range of live controversies in progressive politics on questions such as disruptive protest, silencing and free speech, the real-world consequences of intellectual work, the rise of the far right, and the nature of grassroots campaigning.Written for open-minded readers, the book presents the fullest justification for the academic boycott yet given, considering BDS efforts on campuses around the world. The opening chapters explore the fundamentals of the academic boycott campaign, detailing the conditions on the ground in Palestinian and Israeli higher education and analyzing debates over the boycott and its adoption or resistance in the west. The later chapters contextualize the boycott with respect to broader questions about the links between theory and practice in political change. Directly rebutting the arguments of BDS’s opponents, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine demonstrates the political and intellectual soundness of a controversial and often misrepresented campaign. In defending an original view of the differences between reflecting on politics and doing it in the specific context of the liberation of Palestine, the book’s arguments will have a resonance for many wider debates beyond the context of either universities or the Middle East.Nick Riemer is senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. As a Palestine solidarity activist, Riemer has published widely in both academic and popular outlets and been criticized openly by conservative media. In addition to his Palestine solidarity work, his political activity includes long-term, close involvement both with the Australian National Tertiary Education Union and with the Refugee Action Coalition in Sydney, a grassroots refugee rights group. He has written for The Guardian, Jacobin, Al Jazeera English, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and many other publications.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory