Hongwei Bao, “Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China” (NIAS Press, 2018)
Hongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which means “comrade” and in more recent decades has been a popular term to refer to gay people and sexual minorities more broadly. Based on ethnographic research and a solid theoretical base, Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China (NIAS Press, 2018) explores queer identity, activism, and governmentality in China, where negotiations between socialism and neoliberalism play out. From a cultural studies perspective, Bao examines a variety of topics from queer spaces in urban centers such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou to conversion therapy diaries to queer film festivals. This book speaks to a wide variety of humanities and social science fields and will appeal to those interested in a fresh study of postsocialist China, gay identity formation, activism, and LGBT 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
31 Joulu 202344min
Annie McClanahan, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture" (Stanford UP, 2016)
When teaching a public course called “The Age of Debt” this winter break, I had the strange realization that one of the the most successful readings in that course, the one which most clearly explained the 2008 crisis and the financialized economy, was written by an English professor. It was Annie McClanahan’s Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture (Stanford University Press, 2016). The book is a masterful exploration of the cultural politics of the financial crisis and a powerful mediation on how to make sense of an era of unrepayable debts. As a review in the LA Review of Books notes, McClanahan has resurrected and repurposed the rich tradition of Marxist literary criticism which brought us Raymond Williams, analyzing post-crisis literature, photography, and cinema as cultural texts registering “a new ‘crisis subjectivity’ in the wake of the mortgage meltdown’s shattering revelations.” Dead Pledges is a must read. For whom? Well, anyone living in the 21st century, concerned about insurmountable debts, thinking of how culture and the economy transect each other, and striving for a radical politics fit for the mortgaged times in which we live. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how managing surplus populations and tapping into fortunes at the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” are twin-logics that undergird poverty alleviation projects in rural Rajasthan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
28 Joulu 202359min
Nicole Seymour, "Glitter" (Bloombury, 2022)
Glitter (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Nicole Seymour reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Dr. Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have shifted across centuries-from ancient cosmetic to queer activist tool, environmental pollutant to biodegradable accessory-along with its composition, which has variously included insects, glass, rocks, salt, sugar, plastic, and cellulose. Through a variety of examples, from glitterbombing to glitter beer, Seymour shows how this substance reflects the entanglements of consumerism, emotion, environmentalism, and gender/sexual identity. Glitter is part of the Object Lessons series: short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
28 Joulu 202327min
D. B. Maroon, "Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience" (Lawrence Hill Books, 2023)
In this hard-hitting collection of essays, D.B. Maroon presents a personal biography of America, Blackness, and racial politics with unflinching style, and delivers a relentless truth-telling on some of the country’s fiercest debates and most profound challenges. From the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement to the murders of unarmed Black people, this essay collection invites readers to ask questions as much as it asks for accountability. Moving through debates on the 1619 Project to the rippling impact of resurgent white nationalism, the golden thread of each essay is the hopeful continuance of the Black community, as well as a call to greater truth as the first step toward reconciliation. Intersectional, personal, and ultimately centered on truth, love, and perseverance, Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience (Lawrence Hill Books, 2023) details and tends to the fractures in American culture. It is a meditation on how we can all do more to secure America’s vastly beautiful possibilities for all its citizens, rather than a few. D. B. Maroon is an expert on American culture, an anthropologist, and CEO of an urban research institute. Her essays have been published in The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self and Spirited: Affirming the Soul and Black Gay/Lesbian Identity. A committed public scholar, she's appeared in Bustle, Shape, Healthline, and Women's Health. She holds a PhD in anthropology from UC Santa Cruz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
28 Joulu 20231h 1min
Stuart Elden, “Foucault: The Birth of Power” (Polity Press, 2017)
How did Foucault become a public, political intellectual? In Foucault: The Birth of Power (Polity Press, 2017), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, follows up his book on Foucault’s Last Decade with research on Foucault’s work from the late 1960s to the middle 1970s. As with Foucault’s work at the time, the book is focused on the emergence of a new understanding of power, alongside detailed engagements with archival materials and the recently published College De France lecture series. The book offers an alternative reading to traditional periodisations of Foucault’s work, suggesting engagements with ancient Greece, ‘repressive’ theories of power, and his public political work, can be rethought to add nuance and depth to current understandings of Foucault’s theories of the ‘productive’ nature of power and the practice of his scholarship. The book is part of Elden’s broader project on Foucault much of which is detailed on his Progressive Geographies blog. The rich and detailed text will be of interest to social theorists, Foucault scholars, and anyone interested in how best to understand the meaning of power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
26 Joulu 202346min
David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019)
We are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Courtwright about the global nature of pleasure, vice, and capitalism. His new book is called The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (Harvard University Press, 2019). During our discussion, Courtwright walks us through the emergence of the worldwide commodification of vice and shares his views on "limbic capitalism," the network of competitive businesses targeting the brain pathways responsible for feeling, motivation, and long-term memory. The book is equally interesting and disturbing. And Courtwright offers timely recommendations about how we can understand and address the Age of Addiction. Coming from one of the world's leading experts on the history of drugs and addiction, this important work raises stimulating and sobering questions about consumption and free will. Courtwright is the author of Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 2001) as well as Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Harvard University Press, 1982). Lucas Richert is an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies intoxicating substances and the pharmaceutical industry. He also examines the history of mental health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
26 Joulu 202344min
Bryan McCann, "The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era" (U Alabama Press, 2017)
On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Bryan McCann (he/his)--Associate Professor of Communication at Louisiana State University--on a dope new work of cultural criticism The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (University of Alabama Press, 2017). The Mark of Criminality positions the work of key gangsta rap artists--Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur--as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable. McCann argues that, among other well-circulated meanings, the mark of criminality was a source of power, credibility, and revenue. By understanding gangsta rap as a potent, if deeply imperfect, enactment of the mark of criminality, we can better understand how crime is always a site of struggle over meaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
26 Joulu 20231h 2min
Jafari S. Allen, "There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life" (Duke UP, 2022)
In There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Duke UP, 2022), Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
25 Joulu 20231h 5min
