New Books in Critical Theory

The story is a familiar one. In 1882, the British invaded Egypt to secure payment on the country’s crippling foreign debts and quash the movement for fiscal sovereignty and constitutional rule that had formed under the Egyptian military officer Ahmed ‘Urabi Pasha. The common sense in the critical American academy has long been that the decades of occupation that ensued were a logical extension of Egypt's integration into an increasingly Western dominated global economy: from the 1850s onward, Egypt's economy had exemplified third world dependency, the essence of which was reliance on the export of a primary commodity—cotton. In the name of the free global market, the British ensured that more and more of the country's land would be devoted to supplying cotton to England's industrial mills. In other words, the occupation rested on and reinforced notions of liberal universalism that, in actuality, served as alibis for imperial expansion. Meanwhile, a sellout landed elite acted as complicit in Britain's larger objectives of expanding foreign land ownership. Surely, this story contains important truths. Yet it doesn't explain certain things. For instance, British administrators and political economists weren't particularly interested in the landed elite—at least not as much as they were in the small landholding Egyptian peasant, or fellah. For another, their very hopes for the fellah made Egypt a target for the relocation of foreign financial capital from Europe—a relocation that led to a decade-long financial boom. With few exceptions, historians of modern Egypt have yet to make sense of these confounding variables. That is, until now. In Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2020), Aaron Jakes tells, for the first time, the story of Egypt’s turn-of-the-century financial boom and the crises that ensued. Along the way, Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought in struggles that raged over the occupation by tracing the ramifications of what he dubs “colonial economism”: the animating theory of British imperial rule that held Egyptians to be capable of only acting according to their bare material interests. The result is a work that has been widely regarded as the most important scholarly book about modern Egypt to come out in decades. And as this conversation with the author attests, Egypt’s Occupation is a must-read not only for historians of Egypt, but for anyone invested in understanding the historical imbrication of capitalism with race and empire. Tune in. Aaron Jakes is Assistant Professor of History and Co-Director of Capitalism Studies at The New School, where he teaches courses on the modern Middle East and South Asia, global environmental history, and the history of capitalism. Nancy Ko is a PhD student in History at Columbia University, where she works at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East 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

23 Mar 20211h 39min

Today I talked to Carol J. Adams about two of her classic texts that have recently been republished. The first book we discuss, first published in 1990, is The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, a landmark text in the ongoing debates about animal rights. In the two decades since, the book has inspired controversy and heated debate. The Sexual Politics of Meat argues that what, or more precisely who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture, and that the meanings attached to meat eating are often clustered around virility. We live in a world in which men still have considerable power over women, both in public and in private. Carol Adams argues that gender politics is inextricably related to how we view animals, especially animals who are consumed. Further, she argues that vegetarianism and fighting for animal rights fit perfectly alongside working to improve the lives of disenfranchised and suffering people, under the wide umbrella of compassionate activism. The second book we discuss, first published in 2004, is The Pornography of Meat. For 30 years, since the publication of her landmark book The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams and her readers have continued to document and hold to account the degrading interplay of language about women, domesticated animals, and meat in advertising, politics, and media. Serving as sequel and visual companion, The Pornography of Meat charts the continued influence of this language and the fight against it. This new edition includes more than 300 images, most of them new, and brings the book up to date to include expressions of misogyny in online media and advertising, the #MeToo movement, and the impact of Donald Trump and white supremacy on our political language. Never has this book--or Adams's analysis--been more relevant. Carol J. Adams is the author of numerous books, including The Sexual Politics of Meat, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals, and The Pornography of Meat. She is the co-editor of several pathbreaking anthologies, including most recently Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (with Lori Gruen). Her work is the subject of two recent anthologies, Defiant Daughters: 21 Women of Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Art of the Animal: 14 Women Artists Explore The Sexual Politics of Meat, in which a new generation of feminists, artists, and activists respond to Adams' groundbreaking work. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. 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 Mar 20211h 18min

Disorienting Neoliberalism: Global Justice and the Outer Limit of Freedom (Oxford UP, 2020) takes on a number of different dimensions of neoliberalism to help readers consider not only how this ideological framework structures our lives, but also to lead us towards the capacity to reorient our thinking and understanding of the world, and politics. Benjamin McKean explores the way that we can try to see beyond the operational framing that neoliberalism provides in order to prompt readers, and, more specifically, political theorists, to a kind of activism.  McKean’s thesis compels us to think about our political and economic situations in a broader, global perspective, as our consumer experiences are, in fact, global in nature and operation. Disorienting Neoliberalism demystifies the bewildering transnational components of the commodities we interact with on a daily basis, unpacking the way that the transnational supply chain for our goods and services obscures the exploitation and violence inherent in the production of these goods. Because of the promise of freedom through the market as a key attraction for neoliberal thinking, McKean also investigates how much freedom individuals actually have if their entire orientation – in politics and economics – is framed by neoliberalism. We are made to feel powerful as consumers in the market since we can make choices and experience a kind of freedom in this context. But this is based on the conception that the market itself is out of our control and is, itself, disorienting. Thus, we need to reconsider what we think about as our real, actual freedom and how this is contextualized by our experiences and environments. McKean’s analysis asks the reader to try to consider how our freedom is constrained within neoliberalism, and what it is that we need to do to reorient our thinking and our actions to move beyond this framework. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

18 Mar 202146min

In this episode, I interview Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University in Amsterdam, about his book, The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony, recently published by SUNY Press. In the book, van der Heiden takes up the question of testimony, which is popular in philosophical discourses today—from analytic epistemological approaches to those that emerge from critical race and feminist theory. While important advances are made in these disciplines, van der Heiden argues that contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony that combines the ontological, epistemological, ethical, and logical elements of testimony in order to more fully understand what occurs in the event of bearing witness. Beginning with six literary experiments, The Voice of Misery approaches the event of testimony and its connection to language at the limits of what can be expressed: in the silent, the unspeakable, the mute. From this grounding, the text then moves into a more traditionally philosophical investigation of the peculiarity and particularity of testimony in a dazzling dialogue with the most well-known figures of recent continental thought: Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, amongst others. Ultimately, van der Heiden extrapolates from the thinkers and authors with whom he engages an effective and moving overview of the acts of witnessing and bearing witness, allowing us to better understand how these twinned acts structure our realities. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

18 Mar 20211h 8min

In this episode, I interview R.A. Judy, professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, about his book Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black, which was published by Duke University Press in 2020. In Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham’s 1937 remark “we should have our liberty 'cause . . . us is human flesh" as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. Drawing on numerous fields, from literary theory and musicology, to political theory and phenomenology, as well as Greek and Arabic philosophy, Judy engages literary texts and performative practices such as music and dance that express knowledge and conceptions of humanity appositional to those grounding modern racialized capitalism. Operating as critiques of Western humanism, these practices and modes of being-in-the-world—which he theorizes as “thinking in disorder,” or “poiēsis in black”—foreground the irreducible concomitance of flesh, thinking, and personhood. As Judy demonstrates, recognizing this concomitance is central to finding a way past the destructive and dominative force of the ontology of racial capitalism that still holds us in thrall. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. 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 Mar 20211h 14min

What makes racist feelings and ideas objectionable? In his book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (Red Globe, 2011), M. Fakhry Davids, a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, argues that racism, like the impulse to destroy or act on hatred, is an ineluctable part of us all. Borrowing, but also augmenting the work of his fellow neo-Kleinians (particularly John Steiner and Herbert Rosenfeld) on “psychic retreats” and “defensive organizations”, he names the “internal racist organization” as a normal part of the mind, deeming it a non-pathological component of psychic structure. David’s thinking has a decidedly hopeful tinge. If accepted, it promises to help open up the kinds of conversations clinically and otherwise that can be had about racist feelings. After all, if they are average and expectable, they are human. And what is accepted as human can potentially be talked through and about, which promises to constrain harmful action. What I love about David’s thinking is that in updating a psychoanalytic model of mind that accounts for racism, he wipes political correctness and the super ego off the table. By placing the “internal racist organization” as an equal player inside of us, alongside the Oedipal, the ego and the id, it becomes something that you just can’t wish away. That said, if we accept his argument, we do find ourselves contending with the age old problem of the drives, or the paranoid schizoid, wherein managing ourselves in relation to the lure of destructiveness (of which racist feelings play their part) is a life long project. The hope is that if we can come to accept racist thinking as a response to overwhelming and primitive anxieties, (rather than a moral failing), we can see it as a warning sign that internally we are askew. Following David’s, racism can never be expunged (as seems to be the neoliberal fantasy) from the self. In fact, and truly this is the last word, it follows us to the grave. Tracy D. Morgan: Psychoanalyst, LCSW-R, M.Phil., Editor, New Books in Psychoanalysis.  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 Mar 202156min

How did telecommunications shape Victorian London? In Serving a Wired World London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital Katie Hindmarch-Watson, an Assistant Professor in history at Johns Hopkins University, tells the history of London through the lenses of technology, gender, class, and sexuality. The book offers a rethinking of liberal subjectivity and the city at the end of the nineteenth century, showing how the Victorian obsessions with privacy and respectability intersected with technology to create the urban and social fabric of London. The book also draws on queer history, demonstrating the importance of sex scandals in the Victorian and Edwardian eras for understanding urban, technology, and gender histories. A fascinating read, the book will be an essential text across the humanities and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

15 Mar 202139min

What is the difference between Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president? Why should we understand Trump as part of a dangerous “fourth wave” of radical right politicians? Dr. Cas Mudde’s new book The Far Right Today (Polity, 2019) argues that politicians like Le Pen represented a 20th-century marginalized populist radical right party but Trump (and others across the globe) represent a fourth wave in which the 21st-century radical right parties are normalized and mainstreamed all over the world such that three of the world’s largest democracies (India, the United States, and Brazil) have or have had radical right leaders. It is this normalization that Mudde identifies as crucial to our understanding of the radical right around the globe – and any possible responses available from liberal democracies. Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia and a Professor II in the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo. Mudde has written numerous scholarly books published in 23 languages (many of which focus on extremism and populism) and regularly publishes in popular outlets such as The Guardian. He hosts Radikaal, a podcast about the radical aspects politics, music, and sports. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

15 Mar 202152min