New Books in Critical Theory

Carla FreemanView on AmazonThis marvelous ethnography traces one of the surprising outcomes of shifting neoliberal regimes in Barbados. As women find themselves leading entrepreneurial lives, they also find themselves engaging in a new range of emotions, both at work and at home. Carla Freeman's Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class (Duke University Press, 2014) follows the lives of a number of female Barbadians and finds that the demands of the twenty-first century economy create practices of care, attention and intimacy that shape their working lives and their leisure lives, their relationships with families and spouses as well as co-workers, their moments of rest or consumption as well as of business. It's an important transformation that has reshaped the lives of many Barbadians, and Freeman observes and probes changing landscapes of emotion with a great deal of nuance.

Natasha MyersView on AmazonAfter reading Natasha Myers's new book, the world begins to dance in new ways. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is a sensory ethnography of protein crystallographers that is based on five years of fieldwork conducted between 2003-2008 at a research university on the East Coast of the US. "Protein modelers are the scientists to watch in order to see what forms of life and what materialities are coming to matter in the twenty-first-century life sciences," according to Myers, and the book bears out this statement. Those forms of life and materialities emerge from kinesthetic and affective entanglements created and navigated by the scientists in the course of their modeling work. Understanding that work – in part thanks to a thoughtful exploration of the notion of "rendering" that unfolds over the course of the book – helps us understand the ways that scientific knowledge is fundamentally embodied and gestural, and refigures scientific cultures as performance cultures. This is an exciting, inspiring book that is simultaneously a careful study of a particular local scientific culture, and a model for how to re-enchant our knowledge of the living world.

Neil RobertsView on AmazonWhat does it mean to be free?  How can paying attention to the relationship between freedom and slavery help construct a concept and practice of freedom that is "perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight" (181)? In his book Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Neil Roberts (Africana Studies, Religion, and Political Science, Williams College) explores this and many other questions. Proceeding from and working with the concept and practice of marronage – modes of escape from slavery emerging from the Caribbean – Roberts articulates a theory of freedom that is historically specific while having trans-historical reverberations, and that is attentive to lived experiences of freedom and slavery. In doing so, he engages histories of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, diaspora, the Haitian Revolution, and American slavery. Arguing for the need to creolize political theory and philosophy, Roberts also takes up the thought and practice of W.E.B. DuBois, Hannah Arendt, Philip Petit, Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Edouard Glissant, Rastafari, and much more.

Anna L. TsingView on AmazonAnna L. Tsing's new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) joyfully bursts forth in a "riot of short chapters" that collectively open out into a mushroom-focused exploration of what Tsing refers to as a "third nature," or "what manages to live despite capitalism." Tsing's book is based on fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2011 in the US, Japan, Canada, China, and Finland, plus interviews with scientists, foresters, and matsutake traders in those places and in Denmark, Sweden, and Turkey. The book is an exemplar of the kind of work that can come out of thoughtful and extended scholarly collaboration, here resulting from Tsing's work with the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. The book treats matsutake mushrooms as objects and companions that are good to think with, offering an exuberant picture of what it might look like to live "in our messes" as parts of contaminated and contaminating multispecies worlds and assemblages. Tsing calls for renewed attention to the importance of "arts of noticing," of curiosity, of play, of polyphony, of adventure. And at the same time as it accomplishes all of this, The Mushroom at the End of the World is deeply committed to telling stories, taking us into moments in the lives of individual smellers and sellers and pickers and tasters and bosses and crusaders. It is a wonderful work of ethnography that, in many ways, transcends genre and discipline.

Jason W. Moore View on AmazonIn Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), author Jason W. Moore seeks to undermine popular understandings of the relationship among society, environment, and capitalism. Rather, than seeing society and environment as acting on an external, nonhuman nature, Moore wants us to recognize capitalism-in-nature. For Moore, seeing society and environment as separate has hampered clear thinking on the problems we face, such as climate change or the end of cheap nature, as well as political solutions to these issues. His book is an analysis of the interrelationship of capitalism and nature over the past few centuries as well as a critique of important environmental concepts such as the Anthropocene. Moore is assistant professor of sociology at SUNY-Binghamton and coordinator of the World Ecology Research Network. This book is a product of over a decade of research and writings on world ecology and evidence of his wide-ranging scholarship.

Rebecca Gordon-NesbittView on AmazonWhat are the alternatives to the current neo-liberal cultural settlement prevailing in much of the global north? In To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture: The Cultural Policy of The Cuban Revolution (PM Press, 2015),  Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, from The Centre for Cultural Change, argues that this question can be addressed by learning from the cultural policy of the Cuban revolution. The book draws on a wealth of archival material, coupled with the theoretical framework of Marxist Humanism, to give a detailed picture of the revolutionary period on the island and chart the lessons from that era. The book introduces the key policy documents and events, along with examples from a variety of cultural forms, including a detailed engagement with the role of film and cinema in the revolutionary era. The book will be essential reading for cultural studies and cultural policy scholars, alongside anyone seeking an alternative vision of culture's social role.

Phillip RoscoeView on AmazonSo many of our social questions are now the subject of analysis from economics. In A Richer Life: How Economics can Change the Way We Think and Feel (Penguin, 2015), Phillip Roscoe, a reader at the University of St Andrew's School of Management, offers a critique of the long march of economics into social life. The book covers a vast range of social examples, including dating, organ transplantation, and education, alongside accessible engagements with historical and contemporary economic theory. Using personal examples as well as academic expertise, Roscoe's book offers a primer in the social cost of economics, as well as what we can do to resit and challenge economistic modes of thought.

John Durham PetersView on Amazon[Cross-posted from the NBN Seminar] John Durham Peters' wonderful new book is a brilliant and beautifully-written consideration of natural environments as subjects for media studies. Accessible and informative for a broad readership. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is structured as a series of meditations on and explorations of water, fire, air, earth, and ether media. After a chapter that sets out some of the foundational ideas shaping the book and charts an intellectual landscape for rethinking media, each of the following chapters offers a carefully curated series of studies of particulars – dolphin jaws, candles, towers, watches, clouds, feet, bells, weathermen, Google, and more – as a means of examining the significance of infrastructure, forgetting, technicity, and other modes of understanding media. Peters asks us to come with a fresh perspective to notions that we otherwise take for granted, and the result is a thoughtful and inspiring account that brings together media studies, theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences in thoroughly compelling ways. Among other things, the book is a call for a "greener media studies" that "appreciates our long natural history of shaping and being shaped by our habitats as a process of mediation." What if, Peters asks, we took nature instead of the mind as the "epitome of meaning"? What are the stakes of doing so? The result is among the most exciting and enjoyable books that I've read in some time.

Elizabeth AnkerView on AmazonElizabeth (Libby) Anker has recently published Orgies of Feeling: Melodramatic Politics and the Pursuit of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2014). Anker is an associate professor of American Studies and political science at The George Washington University. Joining the conversation as guest host is, Lilly Goren. She is professor of political science at Carroll University and editor of Madmen and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury, 2015). How does melodrama advance a political narrative? In Orgies of Feeling, Anker reframes political theories of sovereignty, freedom, and power by analyzing the work of melodrama in contemporary politics. Based on her reading melodramatic discourses in the War on Terror, neoliberal politics, anticommunist rhetoric, Hollywood film, and post-Marxist critical theory, she argues that melodrama animates desires for unconstrained power.

Katie EllisView on AmazonPopular culture has been transformed in its attitudes towards disability, as representations across media forms continues to respond to the contemporary politics of disability. In Disability and Popular Culture: Focusing Passion, Creating Community and Expressing Defiance (Ashgate, 2015), Katie Ellis, a Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University, uses critical perspectives from disability studies to both challenge and celebrate the place of disability in popular culture. The book thinks through ideas of beauty, the role of children's toys, representations in television and music, as well as science fiction and sport. Alongside the range of sites of disability and popular culture, the book closes with a case study of social media and the limits of inspirational images. The book is essential reading for cultural studies scholars, but raises important questions for a general readership.

Am JohalView on AmazonThe French philosopher Alain Badiou is not best known for his engagement with ecological matters per se. Badiou's insights regarding being, truth, and political militancy are, however, highly relevant for the consideration of "the ecological question". Based on a doctoral thesis written under Badiou's supervision, Am Johal's new book, Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (Atropos Press, 2015) is a thinking through and with Badiou's work while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of our time: the relationship between human beings, technology, and nature; the meaning of change; and the possibilities of democratic politics and resistance. This, during an era that many now refer to as the "Anthropocene," a period in which the impact of human beings on geological conditions and change has become unmistakable. Ecological Metapolitics is a work of engaged philosophy that will illuminate readers' understanding of Badiou's oeuvre. The book also makes an important contribution to our understanding of the past, present, and future of a modernity troubled on scales local and global. In dialogue with one of the most significant French thinkers of the postwar period, the book engages in ideas and debates that reach well beyond the boundaries of national spaces, cultures, and politics.

Hilary NeroniView on AmazonDid you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship between female characters and violence in narrative cinema, and was attuned to function of violence in film and television. This was around the time the Abu Ghraib torture photos were leaked to the public. Over the next 10 years, torture porn appeared in the Saw and Hostel films, and it seemed that torture quickly became a routine element of thriller plots in movies and TV, such as the series 24. In The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press, 2015), Neroni makes a compelling case that, prior to 9/11, the stage had already been set for the dehumanizing fantasy of torture to appear in mass culture – via biopolitics. With this book, Neroni takes on the task of defining and understanding torture through a psychoanalytic lens, using films and television as case studies. The book is both compelling and readable, and argues that the fantasy and depiction of torture play a role as an ideology in national politics and policy, and that it's all more complicated than it seems–once you stop averting your eyes. Hilary Neroni teaches in the Film and Television Studies Program at the University of Vermont and is also the author of The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Her areas of interest include representations of gender and race in contemporary American film, violence in film, women directors, documentary film/video, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. She has published essays on women directors (in particular Jane Campion and Claire Denis) and on issues surrounding gender and violence in the cinema.

Aileen Moreton-RobinsonView on AmazonOwning property. Being property. Becoming propertyless. These are three themes of white possession that structure Aileen Moreton-Robinson's brilliant new inquiry into the dynamics of race and Indigeneity in "postcolonizing" societies like Australia.The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) collects and expands over a decade of work that speaks to key dynamics both at the heart, and sometimes obscured, within critical Indigenous studies. A Goenpul scholar from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, Australia, Aileen Moreton-Robinson is the author of numerous previous books and articles in the fields of law and sovereignty, whiteness, race and feminism, and is a Council Member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

Paul Bonin-RodriguezView on AmazonHow has American cultural and artistic policy changed over the last 25 years? Performing Policy: How Contemporary Politics and Cultural Programmes Redefined US Artists for the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2014) explains the process of policy-making, funding models, NGOs and specific places that have shaped the current cultural settlement in the USA. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez's book uses examples of policy reports, theatre and cross-arts organisations, as well as drawing on debates about creative platemaking. The multi-disciplinary approach allows Performing Policy to speak directly to the history of arts funding, in the context of the U.S.'s culture wars, as well as to the contemporary question of the role and purpose of the artist in society, along with how those artists might be educated. The book will be important reading for cultural policy and arts management students, as well as those in cultural studies.

Kate PahlView on AmazonLiterary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahl's Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2014) challenges these assumptions by showing the varieties of literary practice in Rotherham, England. The book engages with the locally particular to draw out a variety of general findings, relevant to methodological reflection and material culture debates. The book draws on a wealth of projects from the AHRC funded Connected Communities programme, including Fishing as Wisdom, The Imagine Project, and Language as Talisman. The book represents an important intervention into how we understand community, literacy and identity.