Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on Long-Distance Israeli Ethnonationalism (LA, AS)

Before you left your house this morning, chances are that you used products and consumed goods that were produced by modern slavery. From the coffee you drink, to the clothes and shoes that you wear, to the phone that you use, modern slavery is a pervasive global problem that encroaches into the daily lives of all of us.  In Addressing Modern Slavery (UNSW Press, 2019), Professor Justine Nolan and Associate Professor Martijn Boersma provide a comprehensive and accessible account of the role of businesses, governments and consumers in the proliferation of modern slavery. They address both the gaps in protection of workers in the global supply chain, and what more can be done to protect the dignity and human rights who are denied the chance to earn a decent living. In today's conversation, we spoke about the emergence of corporate social conscience, the work that laws can do, the role that civil society can play, and a need for better enforcement mechanisms which will adequately address modern slavery. This is a really important book about a global phenomenon that is unsustainable. A must read for businesses, governments and consumers.  Professor Justine Nolan is the Director of the Australian Human Rights Institute and a Professor in the Faculty of Law and Justice at UNSW Sydney. Her research focuses on the intersection of business and human rights, in particular, supply chain responsibility for human rights and modern slavery. Dr. Martijn Boersma is an Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame Australia and an Adjunct Fellow at the University of Technology Business School. His research focuses on the intersection of business and society, and includes areas such as labour standards in supply chains; corporate governance and social responsibility; gender diversity in corporate leadership; modern slavery; and employment and industrial relations. Jane Richards is a Lecturer in Law at York Law School, UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

14 Tammi 20241h 11min

In White Saviorism and Popular Culture: Imagined Africa as a Space for American Salvation (Routledge, 2022), Kathryn Mathers interrogates the white savior industrial complex by exploring how America continues to present an imagined Africa as a space for its salvation in the 21st century. Through close readings of multiple mediated sites where Americans imagine Africa, White Saviorism and Popular Culture examines how an era of new media technologies is reshaping encounters between Africans and westerners in the 21st century, especially as Africans living and experiencing the consequences of western imaginings are also mobilizing the same mediated spaces. Kathryn Mathers emphasizes that the articulation of different forms of humanitarian engagement between America and Africa marks the necessity to interrogate the white savior industrial complex and the ways Africa is being asked to fulfill American needs as life in the United States becomes increasingly intolerable for Black Americans. Drawing on case studies from Savior Barbie (@barbiesavior) to Black Panther and Black is King, Mathers posits that global imperialism not only still reigns, but that it also disguises white supremacy by outsourcing Black American emancipation onto an imagined Africa. This is crucial reading for courses on the cultural politics of representation, particularly in relation to race, social media and popular culture, as well as anyone interested in issues of representation in the global humanitarianism industry. Bryant Scott is a professor in the Liberal Arts Department at Texas A&M University at Qatar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

14 Tammi 20241h 20min

In the post-civil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, from people with disabilities to women's rights activists and LGBTQ coalitions. Increasingly since the 1980s, white, right-wing social movements, from family values coalitions to the alt-right, now claim the collective memory of civil rights to portray themselves as the newly oppressed minorities. The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton UP, 2023) reveals how, as these powerful groups remake collective memory toward competing political ends, they generate offshoots of remembrance that distort history and threaten the very foundations of multicultural democracy. In the revisionist memories of white conservatives, gun rights activists are the new Rosa Parks, antiabortion activists are freedom riders, and antigay groups are the defenders of Martin Luther King's Christian vision. Drawing on a wealth of evidence ranging from newspaper articles and organizational documents to television transcripts, press releases, and focus groups, Hajar Yazdiha documents the consequential reimagining of the civil rights movement in American political culture from 1980 to today. She shows how the public memory of King and civil rights has transformed into a vacated, sanitized collective memory that evades social reality and perpetuates racial inequality. Powerful and persuasive, The Struggle for the People's King demonstrates that these oppositional uses of memory fracture our collective understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we go next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

12 Tammi 202430min

Focusing on the didactic nature of the work of Reinaldo Arenas, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas: Queering Literature, Politics, and the Activist Curriculum (U Florida Press, 2022) demonstrates the Cuban writer’s influence as public pedagogue, mentor, and social activist whose teaching on resistance to normative ideologies resonates in societies past, present, and future. Through a multidisciplinary approach bridging educational, historiographic, and literary perspectives, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas illuminates how Arenas’s work remains a cutting-edge source of inspiration for today’s audiences, particularly LGBTQI readers. It shows how Arenas’s aesthetics contain powerful insights for exploring dissensus whether in the context of Cuba, broader Pan-American and Latinx-U.S. queer movements of social justice, or transnational citizenship politics. Carefully dissecting Arenas’s themes against the backdrop of his political activity, this book presents the writer’s poetry, novels, and plays as a curriculum of dissidence that provides models for socially engaged intellectual activism. Sandro R. Barros, assistant professor in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education program at Michigan State University, is the author of Competing Truths in Contemporary Latin American Literature: Narrating Otherness, Marginality, and the Politics of Representation.  Rafael Ocasio is Charles A. Dana Professor of Spanish at Agnes Scott College. He is the author of A Gay Cuban Activist in Exile: Reinaldo Arenas and Cuba’s Political and Sexual Outlaw: Reinaldo Arenas.  Angela L. Willis is professor of Hispanic studies and Latin American studies at Davidson College. Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

9 Tammi 202457min

In this eye-opening and compelling work, psychologist Melanie Joy reveals the common denominator driving all forms of injustice. The mentality that drives us to oppress and abuse humans is the same mentality that drives us to oppress and abuse nonhumans and the environment, as well as those in our own groups working for justice. How to End Injustice Everywhere: Understanding the Common Denominator Driving All Injustices, to Create a Better World for Humans, Animals, and the Planet (Lantern Publishing & Media, 2023) offers a fascinating examination of the psychology and structure of unjust systems and behaviors. It also offers practical tools to help raise awareness of these systems and dynamics, reduce infighting, and build more resilient and impactful justice movements. Melanie Joy, PhD, is a Harvard-educated psychologist, celebrated speaker, and the author of seven books, including the bestselling Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows; and Getting Relationships Right: How to Build Resilience and Thrive in Life, Love, and Work. Melanie’s work has been featured in major media outlets around the world, and she has received a number of awards, including the Ahimsa Award – previously given to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela – for her work on global nonviolence. Melanie has given talks and trainings in over 50 countries, and she is also the founding president of the international NGO Beyond Carnism. Kyle Johannsen is a Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

8 Tammi 20241h 14min

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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

7 Tammi 202447min

At the outset of Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (Duke UP, 2023), Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism’s feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism, and the communist revolutions that opposed it to outline how cats have long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and “sabo-tabbies,” La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration. Arya Rani is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

5 Tammi 202437min

Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2) ethnonationalism. The three friends discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the "slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste" and Natasha Roth-Rowland's description of the "territorial maximalism" that has been central to Zionism. The role of overseas communities loomed large, as did the roots of ethnonationalism in the fascism of the 1920s, which survived, transmuted or merely masked over the subsequent bloody century, as other ideologies (Communism and perhaps cosmopolitan liberalism among them) waxed before waning. The conversation also examines the current-day shared playbook of the long-distance far-right ideologies of Zionism and Hindutva. And it concludes with a reflection on the suitability of the term fascism to describe such organizations and their historical forebears as well as other contemporary movements. Mentioned in the episode Snigdha Poonam’s recent book Dreamers investigates the “angry young men” engaged in Hindutvite attacks, including those who are economically and educationally marginalized, as well as those who resent what they see as their wrongful decline from privilege. Yuval Abraham’s “The IDF unit turning ‘Hilltop Youth” Settlers into Soldiers” is an investigation into how Israeli settlers from violent outposts are being inducted into a new military unit responsible for severe abuses of Palestinians across the West Bank. (However, in describing Israel’s “hilltop youth” as coming from “lower rungs,” Lori feels she may have overstated their marginalization. Although one report describes Israel’s hilltop youth as young men recruited from unstable homes, others point to the Israeli state’s unwillingness to stop them.) Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky's Children, on the rise of the transnational youth movement, Betar. A correction: Jabotinsky was from Odessa (modern Ukraine), but much of his support was in Poland. RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) as the first institutionalization of the Hindutva project and a living remnant of 1920s fascism. The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) arises as the political wing of the RSS and comes to prominence around the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque. Lori's interview with Zachary Lockman in MERIP about historical changes in American Jewish attitudes towards Zionism. Ajantha refers to the argument in Natasha Roth-Rowland's recent dissertation ("'Not One Inch of Retreat': The Transnational Jewish Far Right, 1929-1996"), that the turn towards Zionism is linked in the US with a turn away from Communism as another transnational movement, waning as Zionism was waxing. Lori mentions the grim effects of the redefinition of anti-Semitism put forward in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA), one response to which is the 2020 Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands discusses Zionist support of Hindutva activism and lobbying in the US. One group that has modelled its congressional activism on that of the American Jewish Committee and AIPAC is the Hindu American Foundation. Ajantha mentions Hindutvites repurposing their online Islamophobia in support of Israel after Hamas’s October 7th military operation. Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism” discusses radical Black thinkers who have argued that racial slavery was a form of American fascism. Robert Paxton’s “The Five Stages of Fascism” makes the case that the KKK may be the earliest fascist organization. Recallable Books Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingard, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism. Joshua Cohen The Netanyahus (John spoke with Cohen about the novel in Recall This Book 110) Susan Bayly's Saints, Goddesses and Kings. Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi's India. Read transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

4 Tammi 202447min