James Scorer, "Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers and activists, resisters of occupation. But while this is no doubt a central part of his thinking, it misses another context he was very much interested in: the clinic. While he was not an orthodox Freudian or trained analyst, he was deeply interested in many of the questions that psychoanalysts are also interested in, and this intersection proved to be very productive, generating thousands of pages of lesser known works. This is what Mary Edwards, philosophy lecturer at Cardiff University, has written about in her new book Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2022). Working through Sartre’s output from beginning to end, it first sets the stage with his early claims about the nature of the self and the possibility of knowing a person. From there, it works to his later works, in particular his voluminous yet unfinished biography of Gustave Flaubert, where Edwards finds Sartre developing and applying a very particular method of understanding a person while nonetheless maintaining a respect for their free nature. While Sartre never completed his intended project, Edwards finds his attempt suggestive for rethinking life both in and beyond the clinic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

19 Elo 20231h 47min

In Passionate Work: Endurance after the Good Life (Duke UP, 2022), Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being "passionate about your work" as an affective project that encourages people to endure economically trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work.  Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong demonstrates how passion can emerge in instances that would not typically be understood as passionate. Gamification numbs crippling boredom by keeping call center workers in an unthinking, suspensive state, pursuing even the most banal tasks in hope of career advancement. Coworking spaces marketed toward freelancers combat loneliness and disconnection at the precise moment when middle-class sureties are profoundly threatened. Ultimately, Hong argues, the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism in which passion is offered as the solution for the injustices of contemporary capitalism. Hong is assistant professor in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. He is interested in labor and its relationships with affect, technology and capitalism. His works can be found in Social Text, New Media & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, among others. 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

18 Elo 202348min

"Today’s 'pro-Europeans' would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt to link the two baffling and outrageous," writes Hans Kundnani in Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst, 2023). Yet, he does so - taking the reader on a historical journey through the development of European identity from Christendom to the coincidence of the Enlightenment and the development of colonialism to the pan-European movement that grew out of the first world war and peace project (or was it?) that emerged from the second. Not only is pro-Europeanism “analogous to nationalism - something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale," Kundani argues, but the EU itself has “become a vehicle for imperial amnesia" thereby promoting and privileging “whiteness”. Hans Kundnani is a fellow at the Open Society Foundations Workshop, an associate scholar at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and a visiting scholar at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research. From 2018-22, he was a full-time researcher at Chatham House, including as director of the Europe Programme. Before that, he was a researcher at the German Marshall Fund, the Transatlantic Academy, and the European Council on Foreign Relations. In 2014, he published The Paradox of German Power. *The author's own book recommendations are Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism by Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (Penguin Modern Classics, 2006 - first published in 1956) Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

17 Elo 202348min

Today’s guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi’s recently published articles include “Legions of Superheroes: Diversity, Multiplicity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book,” in Social Text; and wrote the introduction to “Queer About Comics,” a special issue of American Literature, with Darieck Scott. A bit about the book:  n 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as "new mutants," social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies--including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants--alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

17 Elo 20231h 23min

Limited legal protections for privacy leave minority communities vulnerable to concrete injuries and violence when their information is exposed. In Privacy at the Margins (Cambridge UP, 2021), Scott Skinner-Thompson highlights why privacy is of acute importance for marginalized groups. He explains how privacy can serve as a form of expressive resistance to government and corporate surveillance regimes - furthering equality goals - and demonstrates why efforts undertaken by vulnerable groups (queer folks, women, and racial and religious minorities) to protect their privacy should be entitled to constitutional protection under the First Amendment and related equality provisions. By examining the ways even limited privacy can enrich and enhance our lives at the margins in material ways, this work shows how privacy can be transformed from a liberal affectation to a legal tool of liberation from oppression. Jake Chanenson, CS Ph.D. at UChicago Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

16 Elo 202322min

The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (U Minnesota Press, 2023) examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms. The civil rights and the educational disability rights movements, Mayes shows, have both collaborated and worked at cross-purposes since the beginning of school desegregation. Disability rights advocates built upon the opportunity provided by the civil rights movement to make claims about student invisibility at the level of intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Although special education ostensibly included children from all racial groups, educational disability rights advocates focused on the needs of white disabled students, while school systems used disability discourses to malign and marginalize Black students. From the 1940s to the present, social science researchers, policymakers, school administrators, and teachers have each contributed to the overrepresentation of Black students in special education. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, The Unteachables explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect. Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

13 Elo 202355min

Michael J. Diamond's book Ruptures in the American Psyche: Containing Destructive Populism in Perilous Times (Phoenix Publishing, 2022) describes Trumpism: the strong allegiance to former President Donald Trump that is in evidence among a sizable portion of the US population. How did Trump come to be elected in 2016, and who supported him during his presidential tenure - and why? How is it that he continues to hold cult-like status, exerting a strong influence not only on many individuals but also on numerous elected officials, despite his defeat in 2020? Why does his character continue to be an object of fascination even among anti-Trumpists, and why will Trumpism continue to play a major role in the American sociopolitical landscape even now he has left the presidential stage?  Diamond ponders these questions through the lenses of American history and culture, political theory, social phenomena, group dynamics, and psychoanalysis. In exploring the relationship between large-group regression, cultism, destructive populism, delusional thinking, conspiratorial beliefs, authoritarianism, and leadership characterised by narcissism and paranoia, psychoanalytic ideas pertaining to group dynamics, malignant regression, and leadership are brought into play. Prominent psychoanalytic thinkers who have addressed these topics and whose work usefully contributes to the discussion include Bion, Freud, Fromm, Bollas, Kernberg, Lifton, Rosenfeld, and Volkan, as well as Bleger, Jaques, and several more recent Kleinian/Bionian-influenced analysts. Most important, the book makes use of these understandings to reestablish a sufficiently containing frame that strengthens the body politics' nonpathological elements in order to come to grips with these disturbing factors. Whatever their political beliefs, psychoanalysts in the US and worldwide will find much to think about in reading this book's application of their discipline to today's sociopolitical environment. In addition, the book's insights extend beyond arguments targeting a strictly psychoanalytic audience in order to reach social and political thinkers, as well as activists, who are deeply concerned about dangers threatening the very foundations of democracy in the US and worldwide. And finally, the thoughtful lay person will appreciate the accessibility to all these fields that the book provides, and will come away with a much deeper understanding of just what motivates us to take a stand for or against a given political figure. In short, conceptual tools are provided that lead to greater understanding as well as effective strategies and tactics for containment of destructive forces - largely unconscious ones - that imperil our society. Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022). 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 Elo 20231h 8min

Zahi Zalloua provides the first examination of Palestinian identity from the perspective of Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies. Examining the Palestinian question through the lens of settler colonialism and Indigeneity, this timely book warns against the liberal approach to Palestinian Indigeneity, which reinforces cultural domination, and urgently argues for the universal nature of the Palestinian struggle. Foregrounding Palestinian Indigeneity reframes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a problem of wrongful dispossession, a historical harm that continues to be inflicted on the population under the brutal Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. At the same time, in a global context marked by liberal democratic ideology, such an approach leads either to liberal tolerance – the minority is permitted to exist so long as their culture can be contained within the majority order – or racial separatism, that is, appeals for national independence typically embodied in the two-state solution. Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC) not only insists that any analysis of Indigeneity's purchase must keep this problem of translation in mind, but also that we must recast the Palestinian struggle as a universal one. As demonstrated by the Palestinian support for such movements as Black Lives Matter, and the reciprocal support Palestinians receive from BLM activists, the Palestinian cause fosters a solidarity of the excluded. This solidarity underscores the interlocking, global struggles for emancipation from racial domination and economic exploitation. Drawing on key Palestinian voices, including Edward Said and Larissa Sansour, as well as a wide range of influential philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek, Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, Zalloua brings together the Palestinian question, Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies to develop a transformative, anti-racist vision of the world. Zahi is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, and Director of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College, USA. 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 Elo 20231h 3min