Mahboob Qirvanian and Behnaz Mirzai, "Life of an Enslaved African in the Ottoman Empire and Iran" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury 2024) argues for ressentiment's generative negativity, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Inspired by Kant and Nietzsche's philosophy, Zalloua identifies two modes of deploying ressentiment – private and public use – by substituting ressentiment for reason. This reinterpretation argues for a public use of ressentiment, for the wretched to universalize their grievances, to see their antagonism as cutting across societies, and to turn personal trauma into a common cause. A public use of ressentiment rails against the ideology of identity and victimhood and insists on ressentiment's generative negativity, its own rationality, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Reframing ressentiment as a tool to oppose the evils of capitalism, anti-Blackness, and neocolonialism, it both alarms the liberal gatekeepers of the status quo and promises to energize the anti-racist Left in its ongoing struggles for universal justice and emancipation. Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College and Editor of The Comparatist. His most recent work includes Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality (2023), Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021), Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti- Racist Future (2020), Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), and Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017). 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 Feb 39min

If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, Seung-hoon Jeong’s global frame highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the ‘soft-ethical’ inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their ‘hard-ethical’ symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror.  Reflecting both and suggesting their alternatives, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in terms of biopolitical ‘abjection’ and ethical ‘agency.’ In this frame, Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema (Oxford UP, 2023) explores a vast net of post-1990 films circulating in both the mainstream market and the festival circuit. Ultimately, the book renews critical discourses on global issues––including multiculturalism, catastrophe, sovereignty, abjection, violence, network, nihilism, and atopia––through a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies. Seung-hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He is the author of Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media, co-translator of the Korean edition of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature, and co-editor of The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema and Thomas Elsaesser’s The Mind-Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology. Steve Choe is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University who researches and teaches in film and media theory. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (2014), Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016) and ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin (2023). He is the co-editor of Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019) and editor of the Handbook for Violence in Film and Media (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

7 Feb 1h 21min

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sentimental Empiricism, Panagia explores the many directions of critical thought by Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault and how these theorists were pushing against, in many ways, the teleological structure as defined by Aristotle two millennia ago. This contrast in thinking is the heart of the book, helping the reader to consider distinctions between the more fixed classical ideas and a contemporary consideration of dispositionality and revisability. The research and broader historical sketch in Sentimental Empiricism leads to the thrust of Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience (Northwestern UP, 2024). In Intermedialities (Northwestern UP, 2024), Panagia continues to explore this concept of the revisability of our understanding of the world, and turns the specific focus to film. Film itself, as a medium and as a conveyor of ideas, is rarely at the center of discussions of politics and power. And yet this is the exact place where humans (audiences) can see movement, which is what we are always observing around us to contribute to how we essentially make sense of the world. Intermedialities compels the intertwining of political theory and the theory of film, with encounters between contemporary aesthetic theorists like Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Miriam Hansen, and Jean-Luc Godard and more traditional modern thinkers like David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Simondon. Intermedialities should be of particular interest to political theorists and political scientists since it posits the importance of understanding and thinking about the life and world around us and how we are all connected to taking in this life as movement. The medium of film, which provides us with concepts, images, imaginaries, and perceptions, contributes to so much of our memory and imagination, but is often dismissed as not “real” politics. Panagia and the theorists with whom he is thinking help to tease out the very political nature of the projection of moving images. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

6 Feb 1h 2min

Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project. Peter is haunted by the fact that some of the most ardent opposition to apartheid in his parents’ country of South Africa came from secular Jewish people, and is troubled by the nationalistic tendency of religiously observant Jews there in the apartheid era. The three also discuss questions of solidarity against and among authoritarians, Israel’s threat to international law, the dangers of minority alliances with majoritarian politics, campus politics, and the importance of seeing Gaza and Palestine as connected to us all. Peter’s Recallable Book is Accepting the Yoke of Heaven: Commentary on the Weekly Torah Portion, by Orthodox scientist, philosopher, and Judaica scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who emphasized the idolatry of investing the state with anything more than a supportive role in Jewish life. Mentioned in the Episode: 119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland with Ajantha and Lori Aparna Gopalan, "The Hindu Nationalists Using the Pro-Israel Playbook," Jewish Currents. Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. The Beinart Notebook podcast Listen and Read 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

6 Feb 54min

Critical Management Studies and Librarianship: Critical Perspectives on Library Management Education and Practice (Library Juice Press, November 2024) introduces key concepts in the field of critical management studies (CMS) and critiques dominant theories and concepts in the management field. The aim of CMS is to denaturalize dominant theories in the management field by introducing works and research from other fields (e.g., queer feminist theories, postcolonial studies, critical race theory). In this edited volume, Silvia Vong brings together contributions that offer critical perspectives on dominant CMS issues contextualized in LIS management education and practice such as strategic planning, consumer and assessment culture, and management institutes to name a few. In addition, the book includes discussions around approaches to leading using research and literature outside of the business and management literature to redress epistemic injustice in management education and provide inclusive and diverse perspectives on leadership. Silvia Vong is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at University of Toronto’s iSchool. She was a professional librarian for 15 years in various roles at different Canadian universities ranging from liaison librarian to head of public services to associate dean of scholarly, research, and creative activities. Her experience in teaching, collections, scholarly communications, and management contributed to her research as a professional in critical management studies in librarianship as well as addressing anti-racism in the profession. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025). 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 Feb 36min

What can archives tell us about the film industry? In Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive (Liverpool UP, 2024), James Fenwick, a senior lecturer in cultural and creative industries at the University of Manchester examines the range of possibilities offered by The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of London. The book draws on the experience of being an archival researcher to situate the archive in relation to time and place, specifically London and the early 2020s. It connects the diversity of material held in the archive, much of it the everyday record of film industry lives, to key issues of work, sustainability, and technological change shaping media production today. A rich, fascinating and personal narrative, the book will be essential reading for film scholars, as well as the wider arts and humanities community. 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 Feb 35min

With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are being championed as forces for good and as solutions to the complex challenges of the aid sector. Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful (Polity, 2024) argues, however, that digital innovation engenders new forms of violence and entrenches power asymmetries between the global South and North. Dr. Madianou develops a new concept, technocolonialism, to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial legacies. The concept of technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that digital infrastructures, data and AI play in accentuating inequities between aid providers and people in need. Drawing on ten years of research on the uses of digital technologies in humanitarian operations, Dr. Mirca Madianou examines a range of practices: from the normalization of biometric technologies and the datafication of humanitarian operations to experimentation in refugee camps, which are treated as laboratories for technological pilots. In so doing, the book opens new ground in the fields of humanitarianism and critical AI studies, and in the debates in postcolonial studies, by highlighting the fundamental role of digital technologies in reworking colonial genealogies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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 Feb 1h 2min

Resistance to feminist, queer, and antiracist pedagogies can take many forms in the composition class: silence during class discussion; tepid, bland writing that fails to engage with course content; refusal to engage with feminist and queer ideas; open and direct challenges to professors’ authority. According to Wilton Wright, Rewriting Resistance to Social Justice Pedagogies (Lexington Books, 2024) argues that composition studies has not adequately addressed the complex and deeply local contexts and causes of resistance. Therefore, the author argues that resistance research must first understand the origins and purpose for a student’s resistance, interrogating the language used to name and describe students who resist. Composition instructors must then give students the tools to uncover and investigate their reasons for resistance themselves, challenging students to continually interrogate their resistances. This book utilizes feminist composition pedagogies, masculinity studies, and queer pedagogies to engage student resistance in the writing classroom. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about the negotiation that humans make between oneself, identification of place, and the attachment/s they have to those places. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social),Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu 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 Jan 47min