Mahboob Qirvanian and Behnaz Mirzai, "Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

Since the global financial crisis that began in 2008, the role of the financial sector in contemporary capitalism has come under increasing scrutiny. In the global North, the expansion of the financial sector over the last 40 years has paralleled a decline in manufacturing employment and an increase in personal indebtedness, giving rise to the perception that speculation and usury have come to replace production as the engine of economic growth. In the global South, financial liberalization has exacerbated long-standing patterns of boom-and-bust cycles, and the growth of the financial sector has caused anxieties that speculative investments in natural resource extraction, urban real estate, and rural farm land are dispossessing and displacing people rather than improving human development. Overall, the growth of the financial sector has created the perception that we’re entering a new phase in capitalism’s history in which speculation and rent-seeking have displaced production as the engines of economic growth. My guest today, the political economist Nick Bernards, challenges this narrative. In his new book, Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2024), Bernards argues that we need to re-center labor in narratives about the expansion of finance, that speculation and the subsumption of nature are always central to capitalism, and that major private-sector financial institutions have actually been reluctant to invest in major development projects in the global south. The main problem with the growth of finance is that it makes more exploitation, displacement, and environmental damage – in short, more capitalism – possible. Nick Bernards is Associate Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is the author of A Critical History of Poverty Finance (Pluto, 2022) and The Global Governance of Precarity (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

18 Marras 20241h 21min

The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education remains to this day the largest and most ambitious attempt to provide free, universal college education in the United States. Yet the Master Plan, the product of committed Cold War liberals, unfortunately served to reinforce the very class-based exclusions and de facto racism that plagued K–12 education in the nation's largest and most diverse state. In doing so, it inspired a wave of student and faculty organizing that not only forced administrators and politicians to live up to the original promise of the Master Plan—quality higher education for all—but changed the face of California itself.  Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan (UNC Press, 2023)  is the first and only comprehensive account of the California Master Plan. Through deep archival work and sharp attention to a fascinating cast of historical characters, Andrew Stone Higgins has excavated the forgotten history of the Master Plan: from its origins in the 1957 Sputnik Crisis, through Governor Ronald Reagan's financial starvation and his failed quest to introduce tuition, to the student struggle to institute affirmative action in university admissions. Abigail (Abby) Jean Kahn is a PhD candidate in the history of education at Stanford's Graduate School of Education. She also currently sits on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

18 Marras 20241h 1min

Contested Spaces: A Critical History of Canadian Public Libraries As Neutral Places, 1960-2020 (Library Juice Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive and critical history of controversial events at Canadian public libraries, and an examination of the real-world impacts of neutrality policies in Canadian public library space use. What events at public libraries in Canada have created controversies and prompted protests? What were the issues at stake? What kinds of outcry or protest occurred? Did politicians get involved? Did the events happen, or did they get cancelled, and why? What kinds of impacts or outcomes resulted? This book answers these questions and brings the Canadian historical context into the ongoing conversations that are critiquing the concept of neutrality in libraries. It considers relevant librarian perspectives alongside critical theories to interrogate the myth of library neutrality, and to seek positive and productive ways for libraries to engage with and serve their communities that honour library values and foster inclusivity, care, safety, and social justice. Whitney Kemble is the Liaison Librarian for Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her interests include critical librarianship, social justice in libraries, abolition, fat liberation, and privacy rights and surveillance. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

15 Marras 202433min

The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema (Indiana UP, 2024) traces the surprising role of ethnography in French cinema in the 1960s and examines its place in several New Wave fictions and cinéma vérité documentaries during the final years of the French colonial empire. Focusing on prominent French filmmakers Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, author Laure Astourian elucidates their striking pivot from centering their work on distant lands to scrutinizing their own French urban culture. As awareness of the ramifications of the shrinking empire grew within metropolitan France, these filmmakers turned inward what their similarly white, urban, bourgeois predecessors had long turned outward toward the colonies: the ethnographic gaze. Featuring some of the most canonical and best-loved films of the French tradition, such as Breathless and La Jetée, this is an essential book for readers interested in national identity and cinema. Here's the link to Astourian's essay on Jean Rouch's Moi, Un Noir discussed in the podcast.  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 Marras 202429min

The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement and the Great Society or a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racialization of crime. In Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (U Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Grasso interrogates the intertwined histories of street and corporate crime to find that the differences in punishment are more than modern hypocrisy. Examining the carceral and regulatory states' evolutions from 1870 through today, Grasso argues that divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference such as eugenics to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct. Even after eugenics was discredited, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Using an impressive array of sources and methods, Dr. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America's legal system. Dr. Anthony Grasso is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University Camden. His research focuses on American political development, law, and inequality. Mentioned: Susan’s interview with Dr. Joanna Wuest on Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (Beard Books, 1989) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

11 Marras 202456min

Daniela Berghahn's award-winning monograph Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Contemporary Transnational Film (Edinburgh UP, 2023) is the first systematic analysis of decentred exoticsm in contemporary transnational and world cinema. By critically examining regimes of visuality such as the imperial, the ethnographic and the exotic gaze, which have colonised our minds and ways of looking, the monograph makes an important contribution to the urgent agenda of decolonising film studies. Exotic Cinema was awarded The Janovics Center Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre (best book) and the African Studies Centre award at Babes-Bolyai Univeristy in Cluj-Napoca.  The research website www.exotic-cinema.org offers some insights into the scope and aims of this project.  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 Marras 202438min

In this episode of High Theory, Esther Gabara talks with us about Non-Literary Fiction, that is, works of fiction that belong to the world of contemporary art, rather than the world of contemporary literature. She focuses on literary and narrative strategies used by Latin American and Indigenous American artists to make “non-objective” forms of visual art under the pressures of neoliberalism. To learn more, check out her book, Non-Literary Fiction: Art of the Americas under Neoliberalism (Chicago University Press, 2022). In our conversation, Esther gave us a theoretical bibliography of thinkers from Latin America who have shaped her work on non-literary fiction. Prominent among these figures are Ferreira Gullar in Brazil and Juan Acha in Mexico, who were the founding thinkers of the term “Non-Objectualism”-- a term that informs the fiction making practices Esther studies. We found this cool piece on Juan Acha that might be worth reading. She also named the philosopher Rodolfo Kusch and his work with indigenous storytellers. Kusch’s book on Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América was translated into English and published by Duke in 2010. And finally she named the indigenous artist and activist Manuel Quintín Lame, who collaborated with the Columbia artist Antonio Caro. Each of these figures features in her book as a theorist in their own right, in a context where art is a critical practice. Esther Gabara is a professor of Romance Studies at Duke University, where she works with modern and contemporary art, literature, and critical theory from the Americas. Her teaching in the departments of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University covers visual studies, modernism, photography, Pop Art and popular culture, feminism, public art, and coloniality in contemporary art. Her prior publications include the bilingual exhibition catalogue, Pop América, 1965-1975 (Nasher Museum of Art/Duke University Press, 2018), for an exhibition she curated at the Nasher Museum of Art, and Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008). 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 Marras 202414min

How did the Algerian war of independence shape contemporary sociology? In Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire: Forging Sociology in Anticolonial Struggle (Polity Press, 2023), Amin Perez, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Quebec in Montreal, explores the sociological practice and friendship of Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad. Using a range of archival and contemporary methods, the book shows the impact of anticolonialism on these key figures in sociology and demonstrates the ongoing importance of their work today. Theoretically and historically rich, as well as being accessible, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities. 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 Marras 202436min