Robin James, “Resistance and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism and Neo-Liberalism” (Zero Books, 2015)
How are contemporary pop culture ideas about resilience used by Neoliberal capitalism? Robin James addresses this question using philosophy of music (and by doing philosophy through music) in her new book Resistance and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, and Neoliberalism (Zero Books, 2015). The book opens with a discussion of Calvin Harris (& Florence Welch’s) Sweet Nothing as a way into theargument that ‘resilience discourse is what ties contemporary pop music aesthetics to neoliberal capitalism and racism/sexism’. James combines musicological analysis of specific techniques, such as soars, stutters and stops, with an exploration of the aesthetics of pop videos and a critical theoretical framework. In particular the book connects theories of biopower and biopolitics, along a critical take on gender and ethnicity, to the work of Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Rihanna. The text also offers a consideration of alternatives, whether those that have already been incorporatedinto contemporary pop, such the techniques and sounds of Atari Teenage Riot, or new strategies and new forms that might be beyond profit, beyond capital, and represent ‘bad investments’ to suck the life fromMulti-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy. The book will interest a range of humanities and social science scholars, as well as anyone keen to know more about popular music and critical theory. To learn more about Dr James work read her blog here. 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 Juni 201549min
Nick Crossley, “Networks of Sound, Style, and Subversion” (Manchester UP, 2015)
Can sociology explain punk? In a new book, Networks of Sound, Style, and Subversion: The Punk and Post-Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool, and Sheffield, 1975-80 (Manchester University Press, 2015), Nick Crossley from the University of Manchester offers an important new perspective on the birth of punk and post-punk in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield in the mid to late 1970s. Crossley uses social network analysis (SNA) to show why punk developed in specific places in specific ways. This is in contrast to existing work that seeks to ground punk in the strains of adolescent life in the crisis ridden 1970s, or in the actions of specific individuals. The book seeks to account for punk and post-punk in the four cities as a series of musical worlds, all of which have similarities shown by the SNA. Indeed, by concentrating on the networks that facilitated the rise of punk, the book shows how punk can be explained through networks of connected and sometimes competing sets of enthusiasts, before it became a subject of national moral panic. Combining readable examples of SNA with the story of punk, the book will be of interest to a popular, as well as academic, audience. Prof Crossley will be discussing some of his work that has followed the publication of the book, along with a range of papers on music and networks in Manchester on June 16th-18th 2015. 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 Maj 20151h 2min
Deborah Cowen, “The Deadly Life of Logistics” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
Our guest today tells us that the seemingly straightforward field of logistics lies at the heart of contemporary globalization, imperialism, and economic inequality. Listen to Deb Cowen, the author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), discuss how the field of logistics reshaped global capitalism, undermined worker power, and even transformed how we think about life and death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
9 Maj 201535min
Timothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society” (Pluto Press, 2015)
Struggles over information in the digital era are central to Tim Jordan‘s new book, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society (Pluto Press, 2015). The book aims to connect a critical theoretical reading of the idea of information with the architectures and practices surrounding information. The text begins by setting out how information is not separated from contemporary struggles over liberation and exploitation and points towards the principles of information politics that guide the reader through an engagement with contemporary theories, including the work of Haraway and Deleuze. These principles then inform theories of networks, recursion and the affordances of technologies that are used, in turn, to account for the platforms and battlegrounds of informational politics. The book does not offer up information as a new master discourse for political struggles, but rather shows, through examples including Facebook, the ICloud, the iPad, online gaming, and hacktivism, how information can be connected to, and can shape, other areas of social contestation. The text will be of interest to anyone using the internet, in particular those concerned with who is control of that space and how it might be reimagined. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
5 Maj 201552min
Zoe Thompson, ‘Urban Constellations: Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-industrial Britain’ Ashgate 2015
What is the fate of culture and urban regeneration in the era of austerity? In Urban Constellations: Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-industrial Britain (Ashgate, 2015), Zoe Thompson applies critical cultural theory to help understand this question. The book is based on four case studies, of The Lowry in Salford, The Deep in Hull, The Sage Gateshead and The Public in West Bromwich. These four case studies are read through a variety of methods, including walking and visual methods, along with two key theorists, Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin. Baudrillard and Benjamin are juxtaposed as important thinkers of culture, the symbolic and the urban, in an attempt to show the ambivalences of cultural buildings used for urban regeneration. The buildings are narrated as ‘dreamhouses’ within the symbolic, as well as the political, economy of post-industrial urban spaces. The book shows how all the case studies offer elements of hope and redemption for their locations, whether as sites for individual’s memory, in the case of The Sage, or as collective notions of art and culture, in the example of The Lowry. However the book also shows the risks associated with these spaces, as premature ruins, in the case of the now closed The Public, or sites reminding us of nature’s revenge in the form of climate change, as The Deep does. The book will be of interest to a large range of scholars across cultural and urban studies, through to architecture and critical theory, and it has important lessons for contemporary urban policy too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
11 Apr 201538min
Amanda Rogers, “Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geographies of Performance” (Routledge, 2015)
Identity, performance and globalisation are at the heart of the cultural practices interrogated by Amanda Rogers in Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geography of Performance (Routledge, 2015).The book explores the global networks of theatre that have emerged between Asia, America and Europe, using a variety of policy, practice and political examples. The book argues that globalisation, and the attendant transnational flows of people and culture, has both the potential to create theatre careers and new, important, works, whist at the same time constraining individuals, communities and cultural forms. The book draws on a rich combination of ethnographic and interview data, along with theoretically informed cultural analysis, using examples ranging from The British Council and the Singapore Art Festival, through Asian American and British East Asian identities, to controversial performances of theOrphan of Zhao. The book will be of primary interest to cultural,geography and performance scholars, but has valuable insights for social science and the humanities more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
25 Mars 201552min
Helena Gurfinkel, “Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature” (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014)
What is a father? In Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014), Helena Gurfinkel offers an insightful new vision of fatherhood through an engagement with English literature, Freudian psychoanalysisand queer theory. The book takes a range of authors who have depicted ideas of fatherhood, patriarchal relations and homosociality along with depictions of queer ideas of the family and of fatherhood itself. From Trollope, through James and Forster, to Hollinghurst and contemporary queer media, the book explores how the tightly drawn boundaries of the Victorian paternal relationship are represented and transformed in over a century of literary works. Moreover the core theoretical approaches, for example Freud’s theory of the negative Oedipus, are presented in an accessible opening chapter, making the book a readable entry into literary uses of these ideas.The book concludes by considering contemporary queer texts from and about the Female to Male Trans experience, perhaps the ultimate destabilisation of the heteronormative family binary. The book will appeal to both students of literature and critical theory scholars. 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 Mars 201533min
Nick Turnbull, ‘Michel Meyer’s Problematology: Questioning and Society” (Bloomsbury, 2014)
To be human is to question. This act of questioning is the essence of philosophy, as it allows ontology and epistemology to exist. For example, to understand what it is to be we must first ask the question of what it is to be. This insight, of the primacy of questioning, is at the heart of problematology, a philosophical approach explored in Nick Turnbull‘s new book Michel Meyer’s Problematology: Questioning and Society (Bloomsbury, 2014). The book has two core aims, to introduce problematology to the Anglophone world and to show how this approach can be useful for the social sciences. In particular the book mounts a defence of social science, grounded in the way problematology carves out a specific role for philosophy. The book ranges across Meyer’s work, including aesthetics, rhetoric, philosophies of science and language and political philosophy. The text engages with several key authors in post structuralism, including Derrida, showing the usefulness of Meyer’s thought for contemporary philosophy. However it goes beyond just the philosophical, illustrating how the neglect of Mayer in the English speaking world has missed the chance to found a new research programme in social science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
7 Mars 201552min
