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

Capitalism seems to many to be in a sort of constant crisis, leaving many struggling to make ends meet. This desperation was intensified in 2008, and for many never went away in spite of claims of a general economic ‘recovery.’ More recently, the tensions and shortcomings of our current socioeconomic system have been exacerbated by the COVID-crisis, with poorly compensated frontline workers struggling to stay safe in workplaces that have failed to take adequate care of their health and safety. The feeling that we’ve stuck riding along the precipice of disaster for years now is an animating idea for my guest today, Albena Azmanova, here to discuss her recent book Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Utopia or Crisis (Columbia University Press). The book argues that the animating element of contemporary life under capitalism is precarity, and the driving force behind this precarity is the insatiable drive for profits which leaves workers desperately trying to keep up with capital. Synthesizing history, philosophy, economics and policy analysis, the book takes a sharp look at the elements that make up our current situation, and what our possibilities are for change. Albena Azmanova is an associate professor of political and social theory at Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies. She is also the author of The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgement. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. 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 Sep 20201h 9min

Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, in Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso), Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “civilisation”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects. Jessica Whyte is Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. She has published widely on human rights, humanitarianism, sovereignty and war. She is author of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben, (SUNY 2013) and The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso, 2019) and an editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. More of her research is available here: https://unsw.academia.edu/JessicaWhyte Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

8 Sep 20201h 8min

How should we understand the role of cultural industries in contemporary society? In Global Cultural Economy (Routledge) Christiaan De Beukelaer, a senior lecturer in cultural policy at the University of Melbourne, and Kim-Marie Spence, a postdoctoral researcher at Solent University, explore and explain the interrelationship between culture and economy across the world. The book covers a range of subjects, from inequality and diversity, through government funding and cultural policy, to development and sustainability, illustrating each subject with examples from a vast range of artforms and nation states, as well as global policy organisations. The book is essential reading for creative industries, arts and humanities, and social science scholars, as well as for anyone interested in a declonising their perspective on global culture. 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 Sep 202044min

In Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press), Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, and surveillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US war on terror's violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities. Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and performance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the US security state that visualize subjugated histories of US militarism and make palpable what he terms “the sensorial life of empire.” In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war. Ronak K. Kapadia is an interdisciplinary scholar and cultural theorist of race, security, and empire in the late 20th and early 21st century United States. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. 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 Sep 202049min

An incisive new look at the black diaspora, examining the true roots of antiblackness and its destructive effects on all of society. Thanks to movements like Black Lives Matter, Western society's chronic discrimination against black individuals has become front-page news. Yet, there is little awareness of the systemic factors that make such a distinct form of dehumanization possible. In both the United States and Brazil--two leading nations of the black diaspora--a very necessary acknowledgment of black suffering is nonetheless undercut by denial of the pervasive antiblackness that still exists throughout these societies. In The Denial of Antiblackness. Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering (University of Minnesota Press), João H. Costa Vargas examines how antiblackness affects society as a whole through analyses of recent protests against police killings of black individuals in both the United States and Brazil, as well as the everyday dynamics of incarceration, residential segregation, and poverty. With multisite ethnography ranging from a juvenile prison in Austin, Texas, to grassroots organizing in Los Angeles and Black social movements in Brazil, Vargas finds the common factors that have perpetuated antiblackness, regardless of context. Ultimately, he asks why the denial of antiblackness persists, whom this narrative serves, and what political realities it makes possible. This book is available open access until August 31 here.  João H. Costa Vargas is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University. You can tweet her and suggest books at @MariniCandela   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 Aug 20201h 10min

Dr. Waleed Mahdi’s book, Arab Americans in Film: From Hollywood and Egyptian Stereotypes to Self-Representation (Syracuse University Press) offers a comparative analysis of the portrayals of Arab Americans in film and interrogates how such representations have been, and continue to be, disrupted and challenged. By approaching such cinematic representations as a critical site of inquiry from which to analyze the shape of national identity, then, Arab Americans in Film questions the role of cultural productions in perpetuating images of exclusion and inclusion, and the possibility of re-narrating the Arab American experience beyond such imperatives. In examining the cultural production of Arab American identity in film, Arab Americans in Film importantly unsettles ‘the national’ as a theoretical category of analysis to illustrate how the construction of Arab American ‘Otherness’ is not simply a product of U.S. orientalist histories but of constructions of the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ which exist in both US and Arab state national narratives. In so doing, the book captures the multi-layered articulations of Arab American subjectivity across US and Arab collective memories and filmmaking industries in an effort to explore the heterogeneity of Arab Americans’ consciousness in ways which locate their narratives at the crossroads of the individual and the collective, the local and the national, and the national and the transnational. Through an in-depth discussion of a wide variety of films from three distinct, and yet comparable, cinematic genres – Hollywood cinema, Egyptian cinema, and Arab American cinema – Arab Americans in Film traces the competing narratives of Arab American belonging to enhance the understanding of how Othering is at once constructed and challenged, and what is at stake in those ongoing, parallel processes. Waleed Mahdi is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma with joint affiliations in the Department of International and Area Studies and the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics. This interview is part of an NBN special series on "Mobilities and Methods". Josephine Chaet is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of authoritarian politics and women's organizing in Amman, Jordan.'   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 Aug 202047min

In White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation (Beacon, 2019), Lauren Michele Jackson analyzes Christina Aguilera, high fashion, the conceptual poetry of Kenneth Goldsmith, digital blackface, and the dearly departed video platform Vine. She demonstrates that cultural appropriation (especially of Black culture by white artists) is prevalent and deeply rooted in America’s history of inequality. Beyond that, though, she explores why white artists feel drawn to appropriate Blackness: what does appropriated Blackness give to white artists? Status? Sex appeal? Avant-garde credibility? Funding? And why doesn’t it give those same things to Black artists? White Negroes is a timely and engrossing (and funny) work of cultural criticism from a major new critical voice. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.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

19 Aug 20201h 2min

Latinos have long influenced everything from electoral politics to popular culture, yet many people instinctively regard them as recent immigrants rather than a longstanding racial group. In Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism (The New Press, 2020), Laura Gómez, a leading expert on race, law, and society, illuminates the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making of Latino identity that has spanned centuries, leaving a permanent imprint on how race operates in the United States today. Pulling back the lens as the country approaches an unprecedented demographic shift (Latinos will comprise a third of the American population in a matter of decades), Gómez also reveals the nefarious roles the United States has played in Latin America—from military interventions and economic exploitation to political interference—that, taken together, have destabilized national economies to send migrants northward over the course of more than a century. It’s no coincidence that the vast majority of Latinos migrate from the places most impacted by this nation’s dirty deeds, leading Gómez to a bold call for reparations. In this audacious effort to reframe the often-confused and misrepresented discourse over the Latinx generation, Gómez provides essential context for today’s most pressing political and public debates—representation, voice, interpretation, and power—giving all of us a brilliant framework to engage cultural controversies, elections, current events, and more. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. 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 Aug 20201h 3min