Joshua Castellino, "Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment" (Policy Press, 2025)

Minna Salami's book Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2021) is a collection of thought provoking essays that explore questions central to how we see ourselves, our history, and our world. -What does it mean to be oppressed? -What does it mean to be liberated? -Why do women choose to follow authority even when they can be autonomous? -What is the cost of compromising one’s true self? -What narratives particularly subjugate women and people of African heritage? -What kind of narrative can heal and empower? As she considers these questions, Salami offers fresh insights on key cultural issues that impact women’s lives, including power, beauty, and knowledge. She also examines larger subjects, such as Afrofuturism, radical Black feminism, and gender politics, all with a historical outlook that is also future oriented. Combining a storyteller’s narrative playfulness and a social critic’s intellectual rigor, Salami draws upon a range of traditions and ideologies, feminist theory, popular culture—including insights from Ms. Lauryn Hill, Beyoncé, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and others—science, philosophy, African myths and origin stories, and her own bold personal narrative to establish a language for change and self-liberation. Sensuous Knowledge inspires reflection and challenge us to formulate or own views. Using ancestral knowledge to steer us toward freedom, Salami reveals the ways that women have protested over the years in large and small ways—models that inspire and empower us to define our own sense of womanhood today. In this riveting meditation, Salami ask women to break free of the prison made by ingrained male centric biases, and build a house themselves—a home that can nurture us all. Learn more about author Minna Salami at the MsAfropolitan blog. Lee M. Pierce (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at SUNY Geneseo specializing in rhetoric, race, and U.S. political culture. They also host the Media & Communications and Language channels for New Books Network and their own podcast titled RhetoricLee Speaking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

17 Sep 20211h

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. So we are reaching across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. Ginetta Candelario’s path from journalism-major-hopeful to sociologist, how her family history shaped her intellectual questions, what inspired her to return to Smith after campus racism drove her out, a model for building an intentional community, editing a journal dedicated to the scholarship and voices of women of color, and a discussion of Meridians: 20th Anniversary Reader. Our guest is: Dr. Ginetta Candelario, who is a faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Latina/o Studies Program, the Study of Women and Gender Program, and the Community Engagement and Social Change Concentration at Smith College. She is the founding vice president of the National Latin@ Studies Association, and a founding executive committee member of the New England Consortium for Latina/o Studies, and was appointed by the American Sociological Association to its Committee on Professional Ethics for 2017–20 and to the Finance Committee for 2021-2024. Dr. Candelario is widely published, serves on editorial boards, and is a peer reviewer. Her research interests include Dominican history and society, with a focus on national identity formation and women’s history; Blackness in the Americas; Latin American, Caribbean and Latina feminisms; Latina/o communities (particularly Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican); U.S. beauty culture; and museum studies. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in the Dominican Republic twice, and has been the editor of Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism since July 2017. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator and co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts. She is a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Dr. Candelario’s Ted Talk Meridians’ materials referenced in the podcast Meridians' portal for submissions Cien años de feminismos dominicanos, 1865-1965. Tomo I: El fuego detrás de las ruinas, 1865-1931. Co-edited by Ginetta Candalario, April J. Mayes, and Elizabeth Manley, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Archivo General de la Nación, 2016. Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops, Durham: Duke University Press, December 2007. Salome by Julia Alvarez Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko Democracy in Chains by Nancy McClean YouTube recording of the Meridians’ 20th anniversary celebration talks 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 Sep 202155min

How can ideas from sociology help us understand history and economics? In Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought (Columbia UP, 2021), Emily Erikson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale and Academic Director of the Fox International Fellowship, explores the major shift, which occurred during the seventeenth century, in the history and philosophy of economics. The book combines computational methods from sociology with a detailed and close engagement with historical sources and the philosophy of economics. It demonstrates how a key set of merchants proved highly influential in setting the terms of economics, in the context of the specific conditions and institutional settings in England during the period. The book also offers comparative analysis, adding depth to the numerous methods of testing its core hypothesis about what really drove the changes in economics. Clearly written, and deeply engaging, the book is essential reading for scholars in economics and the social sciences, as well as in history and the humanities. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

15 Sep 202137min

In this episode, I interview Rachel Zolf—a poet whose “interdisciplinary practice explores questions about history, knowledge, subjectivity, responsibility, and the limits of language, meaning, and the human”—about their new book, No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics, published by Duke University Press. In the text (which is both an essay in the etymological sense of an attempt as well as a longform poem, a making), Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan—“Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen. [No one / bears witness for the / witness.]”—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness articulates the Nazi holocaust as part of a constellation of horror that includes the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Israeli occupation of Palestine, and settler-colonial practices across the globe Thinking along with black feminist theory's notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One's Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing, its dangerous perhaps, and language. Zolf’s No One operates outside the bounds of the sovereign individual, hauntologically informed by the fleshly no-thingness that has been historically ascribed to blackness and that blackness enacts within, apposite to, and beyond the No One. No One bears witness to becomings beyond comprehension, making and unmaking monstrous forms of entangled future anterior life. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. 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 Sep 20211h 14min

Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed upscale consumer for more than four decades. Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so. The damning indictment of the mainstream media that flows through No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell UP, 2019) is a wakeup call about the critical role of the media in telling news stories about labor unions, workers, and working-class readers. As Martin charts the decline of labor reporting from the late 1960s onwards, he reveals the shift in news coverage as the mainstream media abandoned labor in favor of consumer and business interests. When newspapers, especially, wrote off working-class readers as useless for their business model, the American worker became invisible. In No Longer Newsworthy, Martin covers this shift in focus, the loss of political voice for the working class, and the emergence of a more conservative media in the form of Christian television, talk radio, Fox News, and conservative websites. Now, with our fractured society and news media, Martin offers the mainstream media recommendations for how to push back against right-wing media and once again embrace the working class as critical to its audience and its democratic function. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

3 Sep 202147min

We live in strange times. Politics around the world seem to be transforming into something new and often frightening. But this process has a history. In 1989, the bi-polar certainties of the Cold War gave way to a neo-liberal consensus, what Francis Fukuyama termed “the End of History”. Yet with BREXIT and Trump in 2016, the End of History seemed to be coming to an end itself. The current COVID crisis has only accelerated this process. To make sense of this Gramscian interregnum and its great variety of morbid symptoms, Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe started the Aufhebunga Bunga podcast in April 2017. Billing itself as the “global political podcast at the end of the end of history”, the podcast offers theoretically informed and often provocative analysis and commentary. The podcast has led to a book, The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century, out with Zero Books in 2021. In our discussion, these three scholars lay out their defense of the concept of the End of History, discuss post-politics and anti-politics, and explain how politics are back. They also diagnose the pandemic of Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome and explain which demographic groups are most susceptible to NOBS. Drawing from the recent history of the USA and UK, as well as Italy and Brazil, Hochuli, Hoare, and Cunliffe offer an analysis of our world and make some bleak predictions for what is to come in terms of future ideological formations. Alex Hochuli is a writer and translator living in Sao Paolo, Brazil, George Hoare is a political consultant in London, and Philip Cunliffe is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

3 Sep 20211h 7min

In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (Routledge, 2021) is a study of the connected ideas of "queer" and "gender performance" or "performativity" over the past several decades, providing an ambitious history and crucial examination of these concepts while questioning their very bases. The book traces how and why "queer" and "performativity" seem to belong together in so many discussions around identity, popular modes of gender display, and performance art. Drawing on art history and performance studies but also on feminist, queer, and sexuality studies, and postcolonial, indigenous, and critical race theoretical frameworks, it seeks to denaturalize these assumptions by questioning the US-centrism and white-dominance of discourses around queer performance or performativity. Dr. Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics and Research at the Roski School of Art & Design at the University of Southern California. Her recent publications include Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and Visual Arts and Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, co-edited with Erin Silver. The catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey, which she co-edited with Andy Campbell, and which accompanies a retrospective of Athey’s work at Participant Inc. (New York) and ICA (Los Angeles), was listed among “Best Art Books 2020” in the New York Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

3 Sep 202148min

One of the most fundamental aspects of modern life is that much of it is lived on and through social media. We create profiles, post pictures, update stories, and even find new careers and lovers on various sites and apps. But is all this good for us? Our always-online way of living has been called into question for quite some time now, with many people, young and old, finding themselves burned out and disconnected in a world with no shortage of connections. So what does this prevalence of social media mean for our society at large? This question is one of the starting points for my guest today, Matthew Flisfeder, in his new book Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (Northwestern UP, 2021). While he is curious about the affects of social media on society, he also spends much of the book trying to flip the question around and ask: what does the structure of our society mean for social media? Flisfeder is interested in thinking of social media in it’s social, political and economic context, seeing the form our current social media takes as a gateway into broader social and economic structures. This broad Marxist vision is brought together with the theories of subjectivity developed in recent critical theory, particularly of Slavoj Žižek, to better understand both the ways social media hooks us into exploitative mechanisms, but it also gives us some offramps for possible resistance. Flisfeder is no luddite; not only is he himself an enthusiastic user of social media, but his critique here is meant as a course-correction rather than an all-out condemnation. If social media today produces alienation rather than true connection, then what does that tell us about society more broadly? And, more provocatively, what does it mean for broader social critique to take the social in social media seriously? Matthew Flisfeder is an associate professor of rhetoric and communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is also the author of Postmodern Theory and Bladerunner and The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film. You can follow him on Twitter. 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 Aug 20211h 26min