New Books in Critical Theory

Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers are anthropologists who have an interest in studying film for its value in a way to view the world. In Violence’s Fabled Experiment (August Verlag, 2018), they examine three filmmakers: Werner Herzog, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Each artist is known for interesting, but controversial films that feature violence in different ways. In the book, Richard and Todd both critique and praise the importance of each and their methods and subjects. Richard and Todd are co-authors of the book, Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible. I interviewed them previously for this book in 2017.   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 Loka 201853min

I left the kitchen radio on while reading Jacqueline Rose‘s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) in preparation for this interview. It was June. Putting the book down for a minute to get a glass of water, I heard a news report that the children of refugee women were being removed from them at the American border. Rose is nothing if not prescient in her thinking and in this book, perhaps especially so. While most of us learn what we think “alla nachträghlichkeit” (after the fact), her mind has the capacity to trip the light fantastic. I follow her writing to discover what I won’t let myself know. Perhaps she has more access than most to the realm of the preconscious. It seems to be the case. This wide-ranging book (Rose is an exemplary literary critic and feminist theorist so she pulls from multiple intellectual arenas) is largely about motherhood and its enemies. She examines “mother” as a signifier demonstrating how it functions as a repository for blame and misogynist aggression. The book’s twilight message and hot tip for women on the religious right: beware veneration of the maternal for behind it often lies something quite venal. Mothers, Rose argues, cannot win for losing and yet remain fantastically vested with delivering the impossible: never ending happiness and total safety. “A simple argument,” she writes, “guides this book: that motherhood is, in Western discourse, the place in our culture where we … bury the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human.” To be fully human involves being in need of help, failing frequently and feeling unwieldy hate. (Her chapter on hating and the negation of mothers’ hateful feelings and the social impact of that negation is worth the price of the book alone.) I have the urge to offer an example from the social realm to make clear what Rose is getting at throughout this text—if only because I found myself fogging over at times while reading. My hazy response I believe relates to my resistance to the topic. Hearkening back to Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (another powerful book that caused me to often drift), Rose dares to look at motherhood as an institution, denaturalizing it to the core. The example that comes to mind comes from Kristin Luker’s incredible Dubious Conceptions, which debunked the ever-popular idea (see the Clinton Administration, circa 1996 that eviscerated the social safety net) that teen pregnancy creates poverty. The truth, Luker argues, is closer to the reverse: teen poverty may generate teen pregnancy, as poverty can foreclose roads to adulthood, leaving motherhood as a last resort. Poor teen girls who don’t carry to term and poor teen girls who become mothers occupy the same economic strata ten years on. It’s not the pregnancy that hurts their life chances but rather that economic policies are culpable. And yet, teenage mothers, scapegoats really, have long served to hide planned economic inequality; the truth, as it were, is buried in young female flesh. As our ugly summer wore on, I re-read this book, further preparing for the interview, in addition to spending time in the consulting room, doing what I do: listening to patients elaborate upon themselves. To state the obvious, the psychoanalyst makes her living being inundated with a plethora of words about mothers. To state the further obvious, as temps skyrocketed, Freud’s maxim regarding the repudiation of femininity as bedrock was being powerfully reinforced in America. July and August offered daily opportunities to witness... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

10 Loka 201854min

How can human rights campaigns function in consumer and celebrity society? In The Mass Appeal of Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Joel Pruce, assistant professor in political science at the University of Dayton, explores this question through the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. Rich with examples and detailed histories of the evolution of both human rights campaigns and celebrity and consumerist practices, the book challenges us to rethink contemporary political movements. Including critical discussions of Amnesty International, Save Darfur, Paris Hilton, Pussy Riot, and Live8, the book is essential reading for anyone concerned with how to change the world for the better, rather than just for the benefit of celebrity and consumer capitalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

3 Loka 201838min

In the last few decades, questions relating to Islam’s compatibility with liberal secular democracy, or the question of why Islam remains incompatible with Western liberal norms of thought and politics have generated considerable commentary in both scholarly and journalistic communities. Among the central assumptions driving such compatibility talk relates to Islam’s allegedly inherent incapacity for critique, a virtue often heralded as a signature achievement and characteristic of liberal secularism. Irfan Ahmad’s Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) represents a devastating indictment of this dominant liberal assumption that Islam is inimical to critique. Turning this assumption on its head, Ahmad combines historical, textual, and ethnographic methods to argue that critique is and has always been central to Muslim intellectual thought and lived practice. The distinctive feature of this book is the way it fluctuates the camera of analysis between a genealogy of Western liberal discourses of critique as a way to puncture their universality and inevitability, while bringing into view alternate logics and imaginaries of critique in Muslim thought and practice, past and present. Eminently readable, this book will be widely discussed and debated in multiple fields, including Religious Studies and Islamic Studies. SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. 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 Loka 201855min

Nick Hubble’s The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) is a thrilling, and timely challenge to the orthodoxy that proletarian and high-modernist literatures ought to be understood in opposition to one another. Featuring writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, D. H. Lawrence, John Sommerfield, H. G. Wells, and Walter Brierley, this study creates new critical space that reveals the modernism in the proletarian, and the proletarian in the modernist. It foregrounds ideas of intersubjectivity, intersectional struggles, and emancipatory discourses that rely on some way of relating the ‘I’ to the ‘We’. Covering the critical discourses that have shaped our understanding of these literary movements in the UK since the interwar period, Hubble brings his critical intervention to bear on the contemporary historical moment, and asks how the proletarian answer to the modernist question might inform our political and cultural imaginations as a neoliberal consensus collapses around us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

21 Syys 20181h 27min

Historically ubiquitous at least since the 15th century and integral to the rise and consolidation of capitalism, land dispossession has re-emerged as a hot button issue for governments, industries, social movements and researchers. In his first book Dispossession Without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (Oxford University Press 2018), Michael Levien explores the causes and consequences of India’s land wars in the contemporary neoliberal period. He distinguishes between dispossession in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence (developmentalist) and dispossession in its present-day iteration (neoliberal) as fundamentally different “regimes”. How these regimes of dispossession – their motivations, methods and forms – interact with specific agrarian milieus reveals the mechanics of dispossession as “a social relation of coercive redistribution” in particular contexts and time periods. A longitudinal case study of a village called Rajpura in western India dispossessed for a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) housing Mahindra World City (MWC), a private business process outsourcing cum real estate hub, forms the backbone of the book. Deeply unequal and politically quiescent, Rajpura is rain-scarce but predominantly agricultural. Post-SEZ Rajpura is marked by livestock depletion, loss of grazing lands and reduced opportunities for rural wage work, features of a semi-proletarianized condition increasingly common across the global countryside. Minimal linkages between Rajpura and the urbanizing but non-industrial economy initiated by MWC combined with the dramatic booms and busts of real estate speculation driven by state compensation policy on the other hand underscore Levien’s larger argument: “dispossession without development is a broader feature of India’s political economy”. Levien is Assistant Professor of Sociology in Johns Hopkins University.  Madhuri Karak holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Insurgent Difference: An Ethnography of an Indian Resource Frontier” analyzed resource extraction and development as mutually constitutive logics of rule in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found 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

20 Syys 201856min

As you’ll hear in this interview with Steven Stoll, his latest book Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017) is “really a book about capitalism.” Specifically, it’s about how the people of the southern mountains––meaning, the area between southern Pennsylvania and southern West Virginia––lost their land. Though the book focuses on Appalachia, Stoll presents readers with vivid confrontations between peasant economies and capitalism in the Atlantic World over the last four centuries to support his contentions. Stoll spends a lot of the book describing a time when people lived in the southern mountains without a dependence on money. That was possible when people could garden and draw from a rich ecological base, like a forest where they could grow rye, for example. (Speaking of rye, the third chapter offers a splendid reinterpretation of the Whiskey Rebellion by renaming it the Rye Rebellion––you’ll have to pick up the book to find out why.) That ecological base, Stoll argues, was compromised with the industrial invasion of the southern mountains in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then industrial capitalists “captured” the labor that went into practices like gardening. Stoll describes this process in our interview. “We think of industrial capitalism as eliminating all of these sources of subsistence, when in fact that is hardly ever true. They capture certain forms of subsistence that they find advantageous to use. Why the garden? If a family living in a coal town produces their own food, they can be paid a lower wage.” He explains that the labor of wives, daughters, young songs, grandparents––people not typically down in the mines––can be captured by industrial capitalism. “That labor, outside of the mine, can subsidize a wage for mining that would not otherwise sustain them.” Stoll closes the book with a hopeful reminder to readers that the story is far from over, but that people and landscapes cannot continue be regarded as “instruments of wealth,” as has been the case in the southern mountains since the nineteenth century. He ends with this inspiring thought, “Freedom, in order to have any meaning, must include the freedom to live in a village and farm as a household, with all its uncertainty.” Chelsea Jack is a PhD student in the Anthropology Department at Yale University. She focuses on sociocultural and medical anthropology. 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 Syys 201846min

This week we met Prof. Kurt Dopfer (Universität St Gallen, Switzerland) to talk about Modern Evolutionary Economics: An Overview (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a book he co-authored with eight other economists. Kurt attended in Nice the 30th annual edition of the EAEPE conference, the sponsor of the Economics channel at NBN. The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy is the scholarly home for the authors of this book. We tried to contextualize evolutionary economics within heterodox economics and to delineate the history of this approach to economics thanks to this book and the great and long career of Prof. Dopfer. The book is described by Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University) as ‘An excellent summary of what has been achieved in the field of evolutionary economics. I would hope that this book would be read by scholars steeped in ‘neoclassical’ economics and make them appreciate the power and potential of this scholarship.’ S. Metcalfe (University of Manchester) commented that ‘The publication of this clear and comprehensive introduction to the evolutionary dynamics of modern capitalism could not be more timely. The nature, causes and consequences of economic change are at the heart of current debates about the nature of capitalism, its virtues and vices locally, nationally and globally. This work draws on a wealth of economic thinking, old and new, to elucidate the primary role of innovation to the economic process and I can think of no better introduction to the pervasive and incessant role of human creativity to the operation of capitalism as an ordered but far from equilibrium system.’ 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 EAEPE’s 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

14 Syys 201845min