Matt Mahmoudi, "Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control" (U California Press, 2025)
As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance industries. And when US Immigration Customs Enforcement...
23 Mar 202555min
Amanda M. Greenwell, "The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature" (UP of Mississippi, 2024)
The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2024) theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US lit...
22 Mar 202539min
Rahul Rao, "The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2025)
From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The Psychic Lives of Statues by Rahul Rao offers an insi...
21 Mar 202557min
Colby Gordon, "Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers a prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds. In this stri...
20 Mar 202554min
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, "Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2023)
Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition ...
19 Mar 20251h 2min
Mark Neocleous, "Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police" (Verso, 2025)
Today I talked to Mark Neocleous about his new book Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police (Verso, 2025). For more than two decades, Neocleous has been a pioneer in the radical critique of p...
18 Mar 20251h 22min
Action Without Hope
In his new book, Nathan K. Hensley describes a mood or a vibe or an intuitive response to the contemporary moment when one feels powerless in the face of collapsing societal systems. Given the entrenc...
17 Mar 202521min
Maggie M. Cao, "Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Maggie Cao is the first book to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism around the gl...
16 Mar 202540min
