New Books in Critical Theory

Katie Beswick, "Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture" (Routledge, 2025)

31 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How are working class women represented in contemporary culture? In Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture (Routledge, 2025),...

Nneka D. Dennie, "Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth Century Black Radical Feminist" (Oxford UP, 2023)

30 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1849, the Mary Ann Shadd Cary had not yet become one of the first Black woman newspaper editors in North America. She was decades away from being a...

Peter Allen, "How to Think about Politics: A Guide in Five Parts" (Oxford UP, 2025)

28 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What part should politics play in our everyday lives? In How to Think About Politics: A Guide in Five Parts (Oxford University Press, 2025) Peter A...

Jaleh Mansoor, "Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory" (Duke UP, 2025)

22 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Join me for conversation with Dr. Jaleh Mansoor (Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, Univer...

Tamara Lea Spira, "Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times" (U California Press, 2025)

19 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Envisioning queer futures where we lovingly wager everything for the world's children, the planet, and all living beings against all odds, and in incr...

Rasheedah Phillips, "Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time" (AK Press, 2025)

18 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we...

Lucia Soriano, "Embodying Normalcy: Women's Work in Neoliberal Times" (Lexington Books, 2024)

17 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Embodying Normalcy: Women’s Work in Neoliberal Times (Lexington Books, 2024) calls attention to how women in the United States do a type of unpaid ...

Eric Heinze, "Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left" (MIT Press, 2025)

16 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that peopl...

Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony" (Stanford UP, 2025)

15 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic y...

Robert F. Darden and Stephen M. Newby, "Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch" (Oxford UP, 2025)

14 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gospel singer and seven-time Grammy winner Andraé Crouch (1942-2015) hardly needs introduction. His compositions--"The Blood Will Never Lose Its Powe...

Maron E. Greenleaf, "Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon" (Duke UP, 2024)

10 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon (2024) is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the li...

Seulghee Lee, "Other Lovings: An Afroasian American Theory of Life" (Ohio State UP, 2025)

09 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Join me for a conversation with Dr. Seulghee Lee (Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, University of South Carolina) about ...

Jake Monaghan, "Just Policing" (Oxford UP, 2023)

08 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the...

Maïa Pal, "Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

07 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

With rigorous attention to history and empire, Maïa Pal's Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital (Cambr...

Eunji Kim, "The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy" (Princeton UP, 2025)

06 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In an age of growing wealth disparities, politicians on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm about the fading American Dream. Yet despite al...

Ipek A. Celik Rappas, "Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location" (Cornell UP, 2025)

04 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Filming in European Cities: The Labor of Location (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the effort behind creating screen production locations. D...

Martin Thomas, "The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization" (Princeton UP, 2024)

03 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of em...

Maliha Safri et al., "Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation" (U of Minnesota Press, 2025)

02 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, and Craig Borowiak talk about their new co-authored book Solidarity Cities: Conf...

Laleh Khalili, "Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy" (Profile Books, 2025)

01 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Whether it's pumping oil, mining resources or shipping commodities across oceans, the global economy runs on extraction. Promises of frictionless trad...

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

30 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering...

Franck Billé, "Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity" (Duke UP, 2025)

29 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity (Duke UP, 2025), Franck Billé examines the conceptual link between the nation-state ...

Nat Dyer, "Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray" (Bristol UP, 2024)

28 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the workings of financial markets to our response to the ecological crisis, economic theory shapes the world. But where do these ideas come from?...

Philip V. McHarris, "Beyond Policing" (Legacy Lit, 2024)

27 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What would happen if policing disappeared? Would we be safe? This book imagines a world without police. It's evident that policing is a problem. But w...

Emma Casey, "The Return of the Housewife: Why Women Are Still Cleaning Up" (Manchester UP, 2025)

26 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How has the rise of digital platforms changed domestic labour? In The Return of the Housewife: Why Women Are Still Cleaning Up (Manchester UP, 2025)...

Russell Blackford, "How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

25 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Liberalism is in trouble. As a set of ideas, it has lost much of its historical authority in guiding public policy and personal behaviour. In this pos...

Steven Hahn, "Illiberal America: A History" (Norton, 2024)

24 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That’s not us,' think again. In Illiberal America: A History (...

Sophie Lewis, "Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation" (Haymarket Books, 2025)

23 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2025) is a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love ...

Pil Ho Kim, "Polarizing Dreams: Gangnam and Popular Culture in Globalizing Korea" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

22 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gangnam is an exclusive zone of privilege and wealth that has lured South Korean pop culture industries since the 1980s and fueled the aspirations of ...

Michael Rosino, "Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism Inside American Grassroots Political Organizing" (UNC Press, 2025)

21 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In uncertain times, confronting pressing problems such as racial oppression and the environmental crisis requires everyday people to come together and...

Talia Mae Bettcher, "Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

20 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What does transphobic oppression have to do with sexism, heterosexism, and racism? How does a decolonial analysis help us understand trans oppression?...

Mary Bosworth, "Supply Chain Justice: The Logistics of British Border Control" (Princeton UP, 2024)

19 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the UK’s fully outsourced “immigration detainee escorting system,” private sector security employees detain, circulate and deport foreign nat...

Jina B. Kim, "Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing" (Duke UP, 2025)

18 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (Duke UP, 2025), Jina B. Kim develops what she calls crip-of-co...

Anita Say Chan, "Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future" (U California Press, 2025)

17 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It’s a common refrain: AI is neither good nor bad because that depends on how its used. Professor Anita Say Chan begs to differ. Chan is the author ...

Neil Kraus, "The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement" (Temple UP, 2023)

16 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Wage stagnation, growing inequality, and even poverty itself have resulted from decades of neoliberal decision making, not the education system, write...

Mingwei Huang, "Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century" (Duke UP, 2024)

15 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke UP, 2024), Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial...

What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions

14 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Leaders who introduce anti-racist approaches to their organizations often face backlash. In What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Instit...

Ysabel Gerrard, "The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life" (U California Press, 2025)

13 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How do young people use digital platforms? In The Kids are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life (U California Press, ...

Mimi Thi Nguyen, "The Promise of Beauty" (Duke UP, 2024)

12 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The Promise of Beauty (Duke UP, 2024), Mimi Thi Nguyen explores the relationship between the concept of beauty and narratives of crisis and catas...

Rebecca Zorach, "Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America's Racial Enterprise" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

11 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monumen...

"Queer Jews, Queer Muslims" with Adi Saleem and Shanon Shah

10 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of Radio ReOrient, Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward spoke to Adi Saleem and Shanon Shah. They discussed the recent publication of the b...

Ståle Holgersen, "Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World" (Verso, 2024)

09 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World (Verso, 2024), Ståle Holgersen develops a conceptualization of 'crisis' that moves b...

Sam Wetherell, "Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

08 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What does the history of Liverpool tell us about the future of Britain? In Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain (Bloomsbury, 2025), Sam Wetherall,...

What it Means to Forget

07 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The recent removal of information about Black, Indigenous, and female military personnel from the Arlington National Cemetery’s website exemplifies ...

Bruno Leipold, "Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2024)

06 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton UP, 2024), Bruno Leipold argues that, cont...

Atiya Husain, "No God But Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism" (Duke UP, 2025)

05 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Atiya Husain’s No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge and Terrorism (Duke University Press, 2025) uses the FBI Most Wanted lists to rethink theoretica...

Populism, Power, and the Crisis of Globalism: A Conversation with Wolfgang Streeck

04 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What explains the growing divide between elites and the broader public in democracies across Europe and the United States? In this episode of Internat...

We Have Never Been Woke: A Conversation with Musa al-Gharbi

03 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why does occupation reliably predict political leanings? What is social capitalism, and how does it span income classes? If social capitalists are sin...

Tiffany D. Joseph, "Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

02 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Despite progressive policy strides in health care reform, immigrant communities continue to experience stark disparities across the United States. In ...

Jason L. Newton, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest" (West Virginia UP, 2024)

29 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did the...

William Max Nelson, "Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

28 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Enlightenment Biopolitics (U Chicago Press, 2024), historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopol...

Alisha Ali et al., "Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health" (Routledge, 2024)

26 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The last few years have brought increased writings from activists, artists, scholars, and concerned clinicians that cast a critical and constructive e...

Anita Say Chan, "Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future" (U California Press, 2025)

25 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, 2025) illuminates the throughline betwe...

Peter Sloterdijk Knows it All

24 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today’s guest is Dr Thomas Sutherland, author of the Bloomsbury title, Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason ...

Matt Mahmoudi, "Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control" (U California Press, 2025)

23 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As the fortification of Europe's borders and its hostile immigration terrain has taken shape, so too have the biometric and digital surveillance indus...

Amanda M. Greenwell, "The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature" (UP of Mississippi, 2024)

22 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2024) theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social cr...

Rahul Rao, "The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2025)

21 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The P...

Colby Gordon, "Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

20 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers a prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theo...

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, "Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2023)

19 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capit...

Mark Neocleous, "Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police" (Verso, 2025)

18 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Mark Neocleous about his new book Pacification: Social War and the Power of Police (Verso, 2025). For more than two decades, Neoc...

Action Without Hope

17 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In his new book, Nathan K. Hensley describes a mood or a vibe or an intuitive response to the contemporary moment when one feels powerless in the face...

Maggie M. Cao, "Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

16 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Maggie Cao is the first book to offer a synthe...

Harriet Atkinson, "Showing Resistance: Propaganda and Modernist Exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53" (Manchester UP, 2024)

15 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How did exhibitions become a vital tool for public communication in early twentieth century Britain? Showing resistance reveals how exhibitions were t...

Tahrir Hamdi, "Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

14 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tahrir Hamdi is a Professor of Resistance Literature at the Arab Open University in Jordan. She is the author of the award-winning Imagining Palestin...

Karl Berglund, "Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

13 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What is the future of reading? In Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Digital Age (Bloombury, 2024), Karl Berglund, Assistant Professor ...

Nima Bassiri, "Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

12 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against...

Abby Innes, "Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

09 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Ma...

Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero, "Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization" (U California Press, 2024)

06 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Kaika & Dr. Luca Ruggiero reveals...

Alfie Bown, "Post-Comedy" (Polity, 2025)

05 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and i...

Sam Srauy, "Race, Culture and the Video Game Industry: A Vicious Circuit" (Routledge, 2024)

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

My guest today Sam Srauy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University, Her res...

Wan-Chuan Kao, "White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages" (Manchester UP, 2024)

28 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wan-Chuan Kao analyses premodern whiteness as operations of...

Linh Thuy Nguyen, "Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production" (Temple UP, 2024)

26 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Nearly fifty years after the end of the war in Vietnam, American children of Vietnamese refugees continue to process the meanings of the war and its c...

Giampaolo Conte, "A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms" (Routledge, 2024)

25 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms highlights how, since the recent financial crises, the expression ‘...

Tabish Khair, "Literature Against Fundamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

22 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Acclaimed novelist and academic Tabish Khair argues that literature as a distinct mode of thinking can counteract fundamentalism. Literature is a mode...

Adnan Husain on Reorienting History

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Adnan Husain about some of the challenges involved in reorienting history. We spoke about the...

Martyn Percy, "The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England" (Hurst, 2025)

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. Martyn Percy offers a bold and unsettlin...

Eugene W. Holland, "Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism" (SUNY Press, 2024)

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism (SUNY Press, 2024) argues that capitalism fosters sadism and masochism--...

Jamieson Webster, "On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe" (Catapult, 2025)

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And alth...

William M. Paris, "Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation" (Oxford UP, 2024)

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How does time figure in racial domination? What is the relationship between the capitalist organization of time and racial domination? Could utopian t...

Violent Majorities 2.2: Subir Sinha on Hindutva as Long-Distance Ethnonationalism

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as ...

Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. But, in America, t...

Melinda Cooper, "Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance" (Zone Books, 2024)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over s...

Briony Hannell, "Feminist Fandom: Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What is the connection between fan culture and feminism? In Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury, 2023), Briony Hannell, a lec...

Peter Burke, "Ignorance: A Global History" (Yale UP, 2024)

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Throughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of dar...

Professor Priyamvada Gopal on Anticolonial Resistance

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Professor Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. ...

Failed Passing

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ian Fleishman develops the concept of failed passing in his new book Flamboyant Fictions, which reimagines free will in queer lives as an accidental ...

In Conversation: Decolonial Activism and Islamophobia in France

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Amina Easat-Daas interviews Houria Bouteldja on decolonial activism and Islamophobia in France. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Iain D. Thomson, "Rethinking Death in and after Heidegger" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We are coming up on the centenary of Heidegger’s Being and Time, a text that radically reshaped the intellectual landscape. One of its most central...

Tao Leigh Goffe, "Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis" (Doubleday Books, 2025)

10 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of...

"Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations" (Fernwood Publishing, 2024)

09 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We are living through a world-rattling ecological inflection point, with an unprecedented consensus that capitalism is leading humanity into a social ...

Richard Rorty, "What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics" (Princeton UP, 2023)

08 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Chris Voparil about What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics (Princeton UP, 2023), a book of Richard Rorty's writings he co-edit...

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, "Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, I talked to Corinne Sugino, whose book Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines how mains...

Seung-hoon Jeong, "Biopolitical Ethics in Global Cinema" (Oxford UP, 2023)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, Seung-hoon Jeong’s global frame highlights two con...

Zahi Zalloua, "The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury 2024) argues for ressentiment's generative negativity, prompting a shift fro...

Davide Panagia, "Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France" (Fordham UP, 2024)

06 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Se...

Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on Long-Distance Israeli Ethnonationalism (LA, AS)

06 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes o...

Silvia Vong, "Critical Management Studies and Librarianship" (Library Juice Press, 2024)

02 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Critical Management Studies and Librarianship: Critical Perspectives on Library Management Education and Practice (Library Juice Press, November 2024...

Mirca Madianou, "Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful" (Polity, 2024)

01 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are ...

James Fenwick, "Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive" (Liverpool UP, 2024)

01 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What can archives tell us about the film industry? In Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive (Liverpool UP, 2024), James ...

Wilton S. Wright, "Rewriting Resistance to Social Justice Pedagogies" (Lexington Books, 2024)

30 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Resistance to feminist, queer, and antiracist pedagogies can take many forms in the composition class: silence during class discussion; tepid, bland w...

Peter Brian Barry, "George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality" (Oxford UP, 2023)

29 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author who...