brian bean, "Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition" (Haymarket, 2025)

In Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis (Cornell University Press, 2020), Dr. Jodi Rios examines relationships between blackness, space, and racism, in the northern suburbs of St. Louis. She argues that the “double bind of living as Black in North St. Louis County means that Black residents both suffer from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability that occurs when they simply occupy space” (1). Rios theorizes “Blackness-as-risk” as foundational to the historical and contemporary construction of metropolitan space. She documents the ways in which Black residents in the north St. Louis suburbs are subject to excessive ordinances and constant policing. Yet, these residents also resist such constraints. After the murder of Michael Brown in August 2014, Black Lives Matter protests erupted throughout St. Louis as well as across the country. Through the lens of such protests, Rios theorizes “Blackness-as-freedom” as “the unique capacity of blackness to embody freedom in the face of death and to imagine other worlds, other futures” (5). Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a transdisciplinary work that draws from history, ethnography, geography, as well as architecture and design, to show how anti-blackness is produced and contested when Black people occupy space. Jodi Rios is a scholar, designer, and educator whose work is located at the intersection of physical, social, and political space. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

5 Jan 202153min

Seemingly fleeting and barely legible insults, slights, and derogations might seem morally insignificant. They’re the byproducts of ordinary thoughtlessness and insensitivity; moreover, insofar as they inflict harm at all, the harm seems miniscule – hurt feelings, disappointment, annoyance, momentary frustration. Aren’t such things as insults and put-downs in the eye of the beholder, anyway? Surely, there are bigger fish to fry. In The Ethics of Microaggression (Routledge 2021), Regina Rini takes seriously this kind of skeptical stance towards the phenomena of microaggression. Indeed, she finds that a common understanding of microaggression is too vulnerable to skeptical challenge. However, she then develops and defends an alternative conception of microaggression that preserves the experiences of those who suffer microaggression while quelling skeptical objections. Along the way, she also proposes strategies for morally dealing with microaggressors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

4 Jan 20211h 2min

It is often assumed that American politics is dominated by financial elites and the 1%, who use their massive wealth to gain power and influence, pushing for legislation that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. The actual mechanics of how this works, however, are often difficult to see and understand, obscured by distortion via the media, politicians, and the stories we often tell ourselves about how political change happens. These narratives often tell us about noble figures who come forward with powerful speeches and pieces of legislation that pushes us forward, as well as figures who sell out and cave to the powers that be. What these narratives often leave out is the broader context that those leaders were in the middle of, not only shaping but being shaped by the organizing that was happening around them.  Filling in this gap are my guests today, Kevin Young and Michael Schwartz (cowriter Tarun Banerjee was unable to join us), here to discuss their book Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It (Verso, 2020). A work of political theory, sociology and history, this book covers a lot of different areas, but underlying it all is a belief in the importance of mass organizing to resist the power of capital. The first half of the book delivers an insightful and critical look at the Obama presidency, looking at his failures and limitations when it came to healthcare reform, Wall Street regulation and environmental protection, looking to understand the underlying mechanics of his political orientation and how they were insufficient for the tasks at hand. The later chapters of the book then look at various political successes, such as the labor movements during the depression of the 1930's and the struggles for civil rights in the 1960's, analyzing the ways massive organizing efforts were made to apply political and financial pressure and force capital to the bargaining table. Written with a brilliant combination of academic rigor and accessibility, this is a how-to guide for how to organize movements and challenge power, and will be of interest not just to people who want to understand the world, but who want to change it as well. Kevin Young is an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is also the author of Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia (2017). Michael Schwartz is a distinguished professor emeritus of sociology at Stony Brook University, and is also the author of The War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (2008). Tarun Banerjee is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

30 Des 20202h 8min

In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), Alyson K. Spurgas, Ph.D. examines the “new science of female sexuality” from a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that measures the disconnect between subjective and genital female arousal, contemporary psychiatric diagnoses for low female desire, new models for understanding women’s sexual response, and cutting-edge treatments for low desire in women—including from the realms of mindfulness and alternative healing. Spurgas makes the case that, together, all of these technologies create a “feminized responsive desire framework” for understanding women’s sexuality, and that this, in fact, produces women’s sexuality as a complex problem to be solved. The biggest problem, Spurgas argues, is that gendered and sexualized trauma—including as it is produced within techno-scientific medicine itself—is too often ignored in contemporary renderings. Through incisive textual analysis and in-depth qualitative research based on interviews with women with low desire, Spurgas argues for a more radical and communal form of care for feminized—and traumatized—populations, in opposition to biopolitical mandates to individualize and neo-liberalize forms of self-care. Ultimately, this is a book not just about a specific diagnosis or dysfunction but about the material-discursive regimes that produce and regulate femininity. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent study, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant”, was published in Gender Issues Journal. His interests include the sociology of art and culture, sociology of death and dying, and sociology of sex and gender. More can be found about Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. by going to his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo at wmpenn dot 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

28 Des 20201h 19min

In The Haitians: A Decolonial History (UNC Press, 2020), leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. The Haitians (UNC Press, 2020) also critically retheorizes the very nature of slavery, colonialism, and sovereignty. Here, Casimir centers the perspectives of Haiti's moun andeyo--the largely African-descended rural peasantry. Asking how these systematically marginalized and silenced people survived in the face of almost complete political disenfranchisement, Casimir identifies what he calls a counter-plantation system. Derived from Caribbean political and cultural practices, the counter-plantation encompassed consistent reliance on small-scale landholding. Casimir shows how lakou, small plots of land often inhabited by generations of the same family, were and continue to be sites of resistance even in the face of structural disadvantages originating in colonial times, some of which continue to be maintained by the Haitian government with support from outside powers. Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. 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 Des 20201h 18min

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2020) recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocates collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, Elam foregrounds theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way rather to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of imperial rule, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Aligning Frantz Fanon’s political writing with Erich Auerbach’s philological project, Elam brings together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought to demonstrate how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present. J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong.  Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Zifeng Liu is a PhD candidate in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. His dissertation examines Black left feminism and Mao’s China. 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 Des 20201h 44min

Adam Fabry's book The Political Economy of Hungary: From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2019) explores the political economy of Hungary from the mid-1970s to the present. Widely considered a 'poster boy' of neoliberal transformation in post-communist Eastern Europe until the mid-2000s, Hungary has in recent years developed into a model 'illiberal' regime. Constitutional checks-and-balances are non-functioning; the independent media, trade unions, and civil society groups are constantly attacked by the authorities; there is widespread intolerance against minorities and refugees; and the governing FIDESZ party, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, controls all public institutions and increasingly large parts of the country's economy. To make sense of the politico-economical roller coaster that Hungary has experienced in the last four decades, Fabry employs a Marxian political economy approach, emphasising competitive accumulation, class struggle (both between capital and labour, as well as different 'fractions of capital'), and uneven and combined development. The author analyses the neoliberal transformation of the Hungarian political economy and argues that the drift to authoritarianism under the Orb n regime cannot be explained as a case of Hungarian exceptionalism, but rather represents an outcome of the inherent contradictions of the variety of neoliberalism that emerged in Hungary after 1989. Adam Fabry is a lecturer of Political Economy at the National University of Chilecito (UNdeC), Argentina. He received his PhD from Brunel University under the supervision of Gareth Dale. Adam’s research interests include: international political economy, uneven and combined development, neoliberalism, and the history and politics of the far-right, with a regional focus on Central Eastern Europe and Latin America. His work has been published in international journals, such as Capital & Class, Competition & Change, Historical Materialism. The Political Economy of Hungary: From State Capitalism to Authoritarian Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2019) is his first monograph. 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 Des 202057min

Let’s face it, 2020 has been a hell of a year. We could all use a good laugh. But as historians and/or fans of history, we have to read something historically grounded, right? Well, fear not! Felix Biederman, Virgil Texas, Will Menaker, Brendan James, and Matt Christman, those rapscallions from the Chapo Trap House podcast wrote a book, The Chapo Guide to Revolution; A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason (Simon & Schuster, 2018), and it’s got a lot of history in it. I sat down with Matt Christman to talk about history, humor, and the hell-world of late capitalism. He offers his critiques of American liberalism and conservatism, as well as discussing how history shapes his thinking and analysis. Matt Christman co-hosts Chapo Trap House, a hugely popular and rather influential podcast. The Chapo crew includes the above authors (although the traitorous Brendan James was purged for revisionism and replaced with Amber A'Lee Frost). For the uninitiated, Chapo Trap House is a comedic political podcast that has been branded as the “Dirt Bag Left”. With a solid dose of scatological humor and subversive irony, it’s not for everyone, but I find it to be some of today’s smartest and most well-informed political and cultural criticism. On the Chapo podcast and in his other appearances, he displays an impressive command of history, frequently grounding his analysis in historical context. He also put out a few special episodes of Chapo Trap House called “The Inebriated Past”, the best of which offered insightful discussions of topics ranging from fascism to sewer socialism. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

24 Des 20201h 5min