Alexander Etkind, “Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied” (Stanford UP, 2013)
Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is unsymbolized and melancholia is contained within the self, mourning is often an address to the other.Mourning might entail attempts to remember, creatively work through, and make manifest losses in poetry, memorials, histories, painting, and other art forms.Without access to the unconscious, cultural historians can only engage what has already been represented and written — that which has materiality and symbolic richness.Individual and mutigenerational testaments and rituals of mourning — warped, haunted, and incomplete — are all that scholars have available. Warped Mourning is about how three generations spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods have mourned the millions who perished in the Terror, the Stalinist political repressions of the 1930s.Etkind peruses a broad array of writings and artifacts, offering interpretations inflected by insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory.Autobiographies, fiction, film, visual art, academic writings, and sites of memory like monuments contribute to a complex rendering of the work and evolution of mourning: from the mimetic and demetaphorized (potentially deadly) performative acts in the 1950s by those who directly experienced the gulag, to the still traumatized and politicized mourning by their children in the 1960s and 1970s, and, finally, to the more estranged or distanced remembrances of the post-Soviet years and today. Etkind argues that the killings and torture of the Soviet period were not fully worked through for a number of reasons: the gulag was state violence (and the state controlled public mourning), the division between perpetrators and victims was far from clear, and mourning the persecuted eventually became entwined with mourning the ideas of communism.Unfinished mourning and consequent improper burial and recognition of purge victims produced a culture replete with specters and uncanny monsters.The unpaid debt to the dead also created a strange temporality.Until recently, perhaps, Russia’s present has been flooded by the past.In the absence of proper monuments or sufficient memory making, history haunts Russia, propelling its politics and shaping its narratives with an immediacy and force unknown in the West. 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 Juli 201550min
Joe Deville, “Lived Economies of Default: Consumer Credit, Debt Collection and the Capture of Affect” (Routledge, 2015)
Credit, debt and default are embedded into everyday life, whether as a constant part of people’s daily routines or as a constantly discussed topic in news media. Joe Deville‘s new book, Lived Economies of Default: Consumer Credit, Debt Collection and the Capture of Affect, helps to make sense of this by asking how this core part of the social world functions.The book draws on science and technology studies and theories of affect, to lay bare the practices of attaching the debtor to debt, and to getting debts to be repaid. The book has case studies of credit cards, collections agencies, telephone calls and letters, revealing the reality of default and debt in contemporary society. The book will appeal widely, not only to sociology, organization studies and anthropology, but also to politics, psychology, and the wider humanities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
20 Juli 201557min
Nancy Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere” (Polity, 2014)
How is “the public sphere” best conceptualized on a transnational scale? Nancy Fraser (The New School for Social Research) explores this pressing question in her book Transnationalizing the Public Sphere (Polity, 2014). Opening with Fraser’s foundational essay, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World,” the book then contains critiques of the essay from a range of scholars working in different fields and concludes with Fraser’s reply, “Publicity, Subjection, Critique.” The interview covers the history and formation of public sphere theory, the currents and forces in the “postnational constellation” that demands its rethinking, critical theory, what normative legitimacy and political efficacy look like on the transnational scale, and more. The book is of interest to democratic theorists, scholars of globalization, critical and postcolonial theorists, media studies scholars, and other fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
8 Juli 20151h 10min
Christian Fuchs, “Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media” (Routledge, 2015)
Social media is now a pervasive element of many people’s lives. in order to best understand this phenomenon we need a comprehensive theory of the political economy of social media. In Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (Routledge, 2015), Christian Fuchs, a professor of social media at the University of Westminster, brings together a range of media, social and economic theorists to explain social media. Using Raymond Williams to draw attention to the material conditions of control, production and use of social media, including case studies from the USA and China. Most notably the book insists on understanding the international division of labour behind the seemingly ephemeral aspects of online interactions. The book is essential reading for all of those active online, as well as those working in the political economy and critical theory traditions. It is available 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
28 Juni 201556min
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
