Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
Suspicious of what he called the spectator's "sticky" adherence to the screen, Roland Barthes had a cautious attitude towards cinema. Falling into a hypnotic trance, the philosopher warned, an audienc...
1 Jan 20241h 15min
Jason Read, "The Politics of Transindividuality" (Haymarket Books, 2017)
Many major political questions today revolve around questions of human nature; what sort of people we are and what sort of people we're capable of being constitute both the goals and limits of the sor...
31 Dec 20231h 15min
Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press, 2020)
Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from al...
31 Dec 20231h 15min
Hongwei Bao, “Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China” (NIAS Press, 2018)
Hongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which means “comrade” and in more recent decades has bee...
31 Dec 202344min
Annie McClanahan, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture" (Stanford UP, 2016)
When teaching a public course called “The Age of Debt” this winter break, I had the strange realization that one of the the most successful readings in that course, the one which most clearly explaine...
28 Dec 202359min
Nicole Seymour, "Glitter" (Bloombury, 2022)
Glitter (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Nicole Seymour reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Dr. Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have shifted across centur...
28 Dec 202327min
D. B. Maroon, "Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience" (Lawrence Hill Books, 2023)
In this hard-hitting collection of essays, D.B. Maroon presents a personal biography of America, Blackness, and racial politics with unflinching style, and delivers a relentless truth-telling on some ...
28 Dec 20231h 1min
Stuart Elden, “Foucault: The Birth of Power” (Polity Press, 2017)
How did Foucault become a public, political intellectual? In Foucault: The Birth of Power (Polity Press, 2017), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, ...
26 Dec 202346min
