Rizvana Bradley, "Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form" (Stanford UP, 2023)

In his book Reality TV (Routledge, 2017), author Jon Kraszewski explores reality television’s relationship to the American cityscape. Starting with show such as Candid Camera and An American Family, Kraszewski positions reality television in cities where individuals were able to thrive regardless of social class. In this space, early reality television created a laboratory for individuals. Moving to the early 1990s and beyond, Kraszewski challenges the ways in which reality television persisted in this relationship with the city although most viewers do not have the means to live in cities. Using case studies of how the Bravo network exploits the urban servant, the examination of “Boston” Rob Marino and Tiffany “New York” Pollard as reality show representative of major global American cities, and how shows such as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Alaska: The Last Frontier, and Swamp People, Krasweski present the complex and often problematic relationships between American urban space and the way in which reality television uses and exploits that space in relation to their characters. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

1 Maalis 201854min

What is the history of a “history book”? In How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History Of History (Zero Books, 2018), Marshall Poe, founder and Editor-In-Chief of the New Books Network, tells the story of why and how we have the “history books” we have. The book uses the literary device of “Elizabeth Ranke,” an ideal type of the modern academic historian, to show how academic disciplines, the structure of college and careers, the tensions between popular and academic publishing, and the morality and ethics of history, shape the “history book.” Whilst each chapter critically relates a stage in Elizabeth’s life and career to the form “history books” take, the overall message of the book is a positive defense of history in the current social and political juncture. A short and accessible text, the book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the artifact called “a history book.” 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 Helmi 201846min

My father has this personality quirk that drives me crazy. Whenever and wherever he travels, no matter how far, he refuses to reset his watch to the local time. For him, it’s always whatever time it is in Cincinnati, Ohio, even if all the clocks around him flash the fact that it isn’t, even if he’s taking my mother, for example, on their once-in-a-lifetime dream vacation to Hawaii and the sun is setting in perfect postcard colors. “No wonder I’m sleepy,” he’ll say, glancing at his watch. “It’s two in the morning.” I don’t know quite why it drives me so crazy. Maybe it’s his small refusal to accept where he is at that moment or maybe its his small insistence that, at any moment, he’s always home. I just know that, with a wristwatch and a strong will, my father has decided to ignore the laws of time. It turns out that he’s not so different from most of us who fly frequently from one time zone to another. In his new book, Jet Lag (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Chris Lee illuminates what happens to us when, thousands of feet in the air, trapped in an uncomfortable seat in coach or luxuriously sprawled out in first-class, we race ahead of the clock or fall behind it. Suddenly the sun shines when it shouldn’t or the night comes to soon, and were out of synch, not only with time but, it can seem, with the world around us, even with ourselves. We’re jet-lagged, and, as Lee cleverly shows, were experiencing much more than an inconvenience. We’re experiencing something like modernity itself, where time, technology, and our global condition are not only made evident but also, as we stagger off our flights, exhausting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

27 Helmi 201850min

How can reading change the world? In Reading as Collective Action: Texts as Tactics (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Nicholas Hengen Fox, who teaches literature, writing and social justice courses at Portland Community College, explores how literature can make a public impact. A timely book that speaks directly to our current political moment, Reading as Collective Action calls for a move beyond the text in itself to understand how texts are used to imagine and create another world. The potential of a world transformed is seen in the analysis of poetry’s importance after September 11th; The Grapes of Wrath, practical organizing, and the politics of redistribution in response to the great recession; along with how efforts to make texts public might transform academic institutions. The book closes by contextualizing the analysis with Habermas’ theories, offering a note of optimism. At present the book is an essential read for anyone thinking through how best to make a social, political, and aesthetic difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

6 Helmi 201838min

In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti and Andrea Bernardi interview Franklin Obeng-Odoom who teaches urban economics and political economy in the School of Built Environment at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2016, Dr Obeng-Odoom won the Patrick Welch Prize awarded by the Association for Social Economics. He also won the EAEPE-Kapp Prize 2017 for “Marketising the commons in Africa: the case of Ghana” Review of Social Economy 74 (4), 390-419. He has recently published Reconstructing Urban Economics: Towards a Political Economy of the Built Environment (Zed Books, 2016) The shift of world populations into cities and the increasing concentration of activities in urban areas have generated new debates about cities as well as rejuvenating old debates, turning them into global concerns. The economics of cities and regions has, therefore, attained a particularly important status in the twenty-first century. Yet many writers on urban economic issues have never formally studied the subject. Many are mainstream economists who apply their general (equilibrium) economics to cities, but most of them have very little appreciation of the political economy of cities and much less understanding of the built environment, its history, complexities, and peculiarities. The result is the rise of a highly mathematical, mystical urban economics abstracted from critical political, institutional, and social processes at a time when real-world urban economics is urgently needed. This book seeks to offer a corrective to this state of affairs, and to generate further interest in critical real-world urban economics. Through the analysis, exposition, and critique of the urban world in which we live, the book shows fundamental contradictions in the wisdom that more mainstream urban economists have offered over the years. It offers clear alternatives that show that another urban world is possible. Carlo D’Ippoliti is associate professor of political economy at Sapienza University of Rome, and editor of the open access economics journals PSL Quarterly Review and Moneta e Credito. Within EAEPE he is the research area coordinator of History of Political Economy; more info at his website www.carlodippoliti.eu. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPEs permanent track on Critical Management 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 Tammi 201853min

Is making art a job? This question is central to The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers (Stanford University Press, 2017), the new book by Alison Gerber, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at Lund University. The book explores the working lives of artists by thinking through the idea of value in their work. At the heart of this exploration are four accounts of being an artist; four accounts of value; and four accounts of the occupation. These four accounts—pecuniary, credentialising, vocational, and relational—connect and conflict with each other to explain the place of both art and the artist in contemporary society. Using rich and detailed interview and ethnographic data, the book is essential reading for its contribution to contemporary sociology of culture and its insights into the art world. 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 Tammi 201852min

Spanning several decades, the work of Ella Shohat, a Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, has introduced conceptual frameworks that fundamentally challenged conventional understandings of Israel, Palestine, Zionism and the Middle East. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements (Pluto Press, 2017) gathers together her most influential political essays, interviews, speeches, testimonies and memoirs, as well as previously unpublished material. Shohat’s transdisciplinary perspective illuminates the cultural politics in and around the Middle East. Juxtaposing texts of various genres written in divergent contexts, the book offers a vivid sense of the author’s intellectual journey. Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work 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

16 Tammi 201850min

Every young generation inspires a host of comparisons—usually negative ones—with older generations. Whether preceding a criticism or punctuating one, “kids these days” is a common utterance. Perhaps because of the ubiquity of the internet and their heavy presence on it, Millennials have been the most parsed and monitored generation as its members are still in the process of coming of age in history. Stereotypes abound in the media and popular culture: Millennials are lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and immature. Synthesizing an array of social science research that has been conducted not just on this cohort but on the society they find themselves struggling to navigate, writer Malcolm Harris in Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (Little, Brown and Company, 2017) aims to get readers to question these stereotypes and myths and instead think about how Millennials are trying to survive within today’s shifting social structures and conditions. More than any other generation, Millennials have been raised to think of everything they do as a way to build human capital and invest in their own future. And they do so at time in American history when higher education is becoming increasingly expensive as wages are declining, work is becoming more precarious and less stable, and the future of the social safety net is showing signs of either eroding or at least completely transforming in the future. In short, the book refreshingly considers the forces that have helped shape who Millennials are and why they behave and think as they do. With luck, it will encourage a discussion of the root causes behind serious problems that this young cohort confronts (precarity, youth poverty, over-medication, and over-work) and their possible solutions instead of the same tired stereotypes. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. 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 Tammi 201844min