New Books in Critical Theory18 Touko 2025

Rasheedah Phillips, "Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time" (AK Press, 2025)

Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.

Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?

Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips’s own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time (AK Press, 2025) expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.

Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, lawyer, parent, and interdisciplinary artist working through a Black futurist lens. Phillips is the founder of the AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of the Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, and co-creator of the art duo Black Quantum Futurism. Phillips’ work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wire, New York Magazine, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and e-flux.

You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Rasheedah continue their conversation.

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(600)

Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan with Maxime Polleri (NYU Press, 2026)

The 2011 Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear disaster was the worst industrial nuclear catastrophe to hit Japan. It was a major event, rated at the highest severity, which released radioactive elements into th...

24 Loka 54min

No! The Art and Activism of Complaining

To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In No! The Art and Activism of Complaining, her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Sara Ahmed attunes her “fe...

22 Loka 52min

In Praise of Agnes Heller (1929-2019)

Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camaraderie, its virtues a...

22 Loka 13min

Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space with Amanda Batarseh (Syracuse UP, 2026)

A Conversation with the author Amanda Batarseh about Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space (Syracuse UP, 2026).Present in the heart of modern Palestinian literature is a pervasive...

21 Loka 36min

First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism with Teresa M. Bejan (Harvard UP, 2026)

Today, political theorists and philosophers treat as axiomatic the claim that all persons are equal. Dig deeper, however, and what we mean by equality—and what it demands from us, politically and othe...

20 Loka 55min

Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block with Talitha LeFlouria (Beacon Press, 2022)

In Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block (Beacon Press, 2022), historian Talitha L. LeFlouria centers Black women at the core ...

20 Loka 50min

In Defence of the Human Being: Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology with Thomas Fuchs (Oxford UP, 2021)

At a time when artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and digital technologies increasingly shape our understanding of what it means to be human, Fuchs argues that we need to recover a richer concepti...

18 Loka 44min

Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy with Roger T. Ames (SUNY Press, 2025)

Contrasts classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with Confucian "zoetology" ("the art of living"). In Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2025), ...

16 Loka 1h 3min