New Books in Critical Theory

Globalization is over. With US president Donald Trump pursuing an 'America First' agenda in trade and foreign policy, everyone now recognises the urgency of defending their own country's national interest. But what is the national interest and why did it disappear from the political agenda? Will Trump restore American national interests, or will he betray them? How might we know the difference? The National Interest: Politics After Globalization (Polity Press, 2025) answers these questions. It explains how and why globalist political leaders and bureaucrats abandoned the national interest over the past thirty years. Even today, many of our elites still sneer at the concept as an anachronism in an age of global environmental collapse and 'polycrisis'. But without it, there can be no political representation, and without representation there can be no democratic accountability. The national interest can be revived as part of a strategy of nation-building and national rebirth. This book makes the case for such a revival, heralding a new era of democratic renewal and international cooperation. Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

2 Aug 58min

In Nonbinary Jane Austen, Chris Washington theorizes how Jane Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Arguing that her writing works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether, Washington shows how she establishes a politics that ushers in a future built on plurality and possibility. Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, USA. Washington is the editor of a recent Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and is the author of Nonbinary Jane Austen, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Hope and Life in the Anthropocene (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and essays on the literature of the Romantic period and on contemporary theory and philosophy. Tristan Burke researches and teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and continental philosophy. He is the author of Byronism, Napoleonism, and Nineteenth-Century Realism: Heroes of Their Own Lives? (Routledge, 2022) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

2 Aug 1h 9min

Why does critical theory matter today? In Critical Theory: The Basics (Routledge, 2024), Martin Shuster, a Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, explores the history, thought and legacy of the Frankfurt School to demonstrate the urgency of critical theory for explaining the world. Beginning with the idea of needless suffering as a concept animating the theory and practice of thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Benjamin, the book ranges widely across topics including subjectivity, the social world, art, culture and religion. An accessible introduction to complex, but urgent, thought, the book is essential reading for arts, humanities and social science scholars, as well as for anyone who would like to change the world. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. 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 Aug 42min

Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton University Press, 2025) shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black life and asks whether a different kind of classicism—one of insurgence, fugitivity, and emancipation—is possible. Engaging with the work of Sylvia Wynter and other trailblazers in Black studies while drawing on his own experiences as a Black classicist, Dan-el Padilla Peralta situates the history of the classics in the racial and settler-colonialist settings of early modern and modern Europe and North America. He argues that immortalizing ancient Greek and Roman authors as “the classical” comes at the cost of devaluing Black forms of expression. Is a newfound emphasis on Black classicism the most effective counter to this phobia? In search of answers, Padilla Peralta ranges from the poetry of Juan de Castellanos to the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and paintings by contemporary artists Kehinde Wiley and Harmonia Rosales. Based on the prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, Classicism and Other Phobias draws necessary attention to the inability of the classics as a field of study to fully cope with Blackness and Black people. Dan-el Padilla Peralta is professor of classics at Princeton University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. 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 Jul 50min

Marx’s Capital looms large today, a century and a half after first publication, a massive tome that attempts to document and map out the dynamics of a society consumed by capital accumulation. The complexity and scope, as well as its voluminous incompleteness upon his death, have left many readers perplexed, looking for a ‘royal road’ to comprehension. However, this has led to a number of misreadings, with commentators often trying to pick at what they assume is the core of the text, leaving the rest behind. Against this, Thomas Kemple in his new book Marx's Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) argues that understanding Capital mean’s reading it not just for the economic equations, but the social and moral insights as well. Rather than see Marx’s quotations of literature and poetry as an embellishment to spice up the economic analysis, he sees it performing moral and analytic work as well, allowing Marx to explore the nature of capitalism at a much broader level than narrow economics will allow. Putting Marx in dialogue with his contemporaries, particularly Durkheim, Weber and Simmel, Kemple finds Marx’s work to be much more dynamic and comprehensive than many of his readers have previously realized. This little book offers close textual analysis that will enable readers to approach Marx with fresh eyes, seeing elements of their society and themselves in the text that may have previously gone unnoticed. Thomas Kemple is a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of several books, including Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market and the Grundrisse, Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling and most recently Simmel. 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 Jul 1h 10min

The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise of Black political control in the 1970s. Wildcat of the Streets documents how the “community policing” approach of Mayor Coleman Young (1974–1993)—including neighborhood police stations, affirmative action hiring policies, and public participation in law enforcement initiatives—transformed Detroit, long considered the nation’s symbol of racial inequality and urban crisis, into a crucial site of experimentation in policing while continuing to subject many Black Detroiters to police brutality and repression. In response, young people in the 1970s and 1980s drew on the city’s storied history of labor radicalism as well as contemporary shopfloor struggles to wage a “wildcat of the streets,” consisting of street disturbances, decentralized gang activity, and complex organizations of the informal economy. In this revelatory new history of the social life of cities, Michael Stauch mines a series of evocative interviews conducted with the participants to trace how Black youth made claims for political equality over and against the new order of community policing. Centering the perspective of criminalized and crime-committing young people, Wildcat of the Streets is an original interpretation of police reform, the long struggle for Black liberation, and the politics of cities in the age of community policing. Guest: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an Associate Professor at the University of Toledo. He historian of the modern United States with a focus on policing, politics, and the intersection of race, labor, and youth in social movements. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman 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 Jul 1h 5min

Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability. Honing a "cranky" approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own experiences as a toxic shock survivor and a menstrual pain and period dysphoria sufferer, Ela Przybyło questions why, on what terms, and for whom menstruation has been fixed around experiences of pain. Instead, they present a vision for menstrual justice that refuses the womaning of bleeding and the further erasure, dismissal, and denial of menstrual pain as real pain. If menstruating is framed as somatechnically elective, Przybyło contends, it provides avenues for both celebrating and appreciating cultures of bleeding as well as for remaining critical of the ways in which bleeding has been used as a transphobic and sexist tool to fix gender in place. 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 Jul 40min

What are dominant narratives of mixed race identity? What are those narratives doing, in everyday life and within philosophical discourse? How can attending to the narratives and actions of people who identify as mixed race not just interrupt these dominant narratives, but change our understandings of ancestry, race, sexuality, and much more? In Critical Mixed Race Philosophy: Rethinking Kinship and Identity (Lexington Books, 2025), Sabrina L. Hom tackles these questions to argue for the view that many mixed race people have taken up their positioning within and between racial groups in critical and transformative ways. If we disrupt the dominant tropes of objectifying mixed race people, Hom shows us, to attend to what they say and do, we can find a critical standpoint that adds much to our thinking about and collective action in regards to kinship, embodiment, and identity. Sabrina L. Hom is associate professor of philosophy and affiliate faculty of women's and gender studies at Georgia College and State University. 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 Jul 1h 26min