New Books in Critical Theory

Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich, who conceived of EHRP, once described as "the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals."One essayist and grocery store worker describes what it is like to be an "essential worker" during the pandemic; another reporter and military veteran details his experience with homelessness and what would have actually helped him at the time. These dozens of fierce and sometimes darkly funny pieces reflect the larger systems that have made writers' bodily experiences, family and home lives, and work far harder than they ought to be.Featuring introductions by luminaries including Michelle Tea, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Astra Taylor, Going for Broke is revelatory. It shows us the costs of income inequality to our bodies and our minds--and demonstrates real ways to change our conditions. 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 Feb 202454min

Bankers brought the global economic system to its knees in 2007 and nearly did the same in 2020. Both times, the US government bailed out the banks and left them in control. How can we end this cycle of trillion-dollar bailouts and make finance work for the rest of us? Busting the Bankers' Club confronts the powerful people and institutions that benefit from our broken financial system—and the struggle to create an alternative. Drawing from decades of research on the history, economics, and politics of banking, economist Gerald Epstein shows that any meaningful reform will require breaking up this club of politicians, economists, lawyers, and CEOs who sustain the status quo. Thankfully, there are thousands of activists, experts, and public officials who are working to do just that. Clear-eyed and hopeful, Busting the Bankers' Club: Finance for the Rest of Us (U California Press, 2024) centers the individuals and groups fighting for a financial system that will better serve the needs of the marginalized and support important transitions to a greener, fairer economy. Busting the Bankers’ Club is an eye-opening account of the failures of our financial system, the sources of its staying power, and the path to meaningful economic reform from Professor Gerald Epstein, Founding Codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 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 Feb 20241h 1min

In Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy (Duke UP, 2023), Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States. She draws on an extensive archive of historical and meteorological data spanning two centuries to show how American scientific institutions used information about the weather to establish and reinforce the foundations of a white patriarchal settler society. Grossman outlines the relationship between climate data and state power in key moments in the history of American weather science, from the nineteenth-century public data-gathering practices of settler farmers and teachers and the automation of weather data during the Dust Bowl to the role of meteorological satellites in data science’s integration into the militarized state. Throughout, Grossman shows that weather science reproduced the natural world as something to be measured, owned, and exploited. This data gathering, she contends, gave coherence to a national weather project and to a notion of the nation itself, demonstrating that weather science’s impact cannot be reduced to a set of quantifiable phenomena. 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 Feb 202441min

Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher’s Guide provides concrete information and approaches that will help instructors include women and people of color in the typical music history survey course and the foundational music theory classes. This book provides a reconceptualization of the principles that shape the decisions instructors should make when crafting the syllabus. It offers new perspectives on canonical composers and pieces that take into account musical, cultural, and social contexts where women and people of color are present. Secondly, it suggests new topics of study and pieces by composers whose work fits into a more inclusive narrative of music history. A thematic approach parallels the traditional chronological sequencing in Western music history classes. Three themes include people and communities that suffer from various kinds of exclusion: Locales & Locations; Forms & Factions; Responses & Reception. Each theme is designed to uncover a different cultural facet that is often minimized in traditional music history classrooms but which, if explored, lead to topics in which other perspectives and people can be included organically in the curriculum, while not excluding canonical composers. Dr. Horace J. Maxile, Jr. is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Baylor University. His primary interests are the concert music of Black composers, music semiotics, and gospel music. His research has appeared in scholarly journals such as Perspectives of New Music, American Music, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Black Music Research Journal. Dr. Kristen M. Turner is a Lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her work centers on issues of race, gender, and class in American popular culture at the turn of the twentieth cen­tury. Her research has appeared in collected editions and scholarly journals including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, American Studies, and Musical Quarterly. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research is about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

27 Feb 202433min

Today, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most diverse contexts such as food and drinks, clothing, music, tourism and the digital sphere, even leading to the resurgence of apparently obsolescent modes of production such as craft. It also significantly transforms urban areas, their local economies and development. Alessandro Gerosa's The Hipster Economy: Taste and Authenticity in Late Modern Capitalism (UCL Press, 2024) analyses this complex set of related phenomena to argue that the quest for authenticity has been a driver of Western societies from the emersion of capitalism and industrial society to today. From this premise, the book advances multiple original contributions. First, it explains why and how authenticity has become a fundamental value orienting consumers' taste in late modern capitalism; second, it proposes a novel conceptualisation of the aesthetic regime of consumption; third, the book constitutes the first detailed analysis of the resurgence of the neo-craft industries, their entrepreneurs, and the economic imaginary of consumption underpinning them, and fourth, it analyses how the hipster economy is impacting the urban space, favouring new logic of urban development with contrasting outcomes. Open-source PDF version found at this link!  Jeff Adler is an ex-linguist and occasional contributor to 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

27 Feb 202449min

Through a creative focus on skin, in Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke UP, 2021), Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology Research Program to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers' skin. These dermatologists sought relief for white soldiers while denying that African American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were also vulnerable to harm. Their experiments led to the development of pharmaceutical cosmetics, now used by women in Ho Chi Minh City to tend to their skin, and to grapple with the damage caused by the war's lingering toxicity.  In showing how the US military laid the foundations for contemporary Vietnamese consumption of cosmetics and practices of beauty, Tu shows how the intersecting histories of militarism, biomedicine, race, and aesthetics become materially and metaphorically visible on skin. Yadong Li is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at Tulane University. He is interested in the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. If you are interested in any of these topics, feel free to contact him by email: yli88@tulane.edu / lydooooong@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

26 Feb 20241h 1min

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2023), Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech's hold over every aspect of the economy. Capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - have been replaced with big tech's platforms and rents. Meanwhile, with every click and scroll, we labour like serfs to increase its power. Welcome to technofeudalism. Drawing on stories from Greek Myth and pop culture, from Homer to ​Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power and ultimately what it will take overthrow it. Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

26 Feb 202452min

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators’ relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world. Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making. Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@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

23 Feb 20241h 5min