Episodes

  • Jordan S. Carroll, "Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

    Jordan S. Carroll, "Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
    Nov 22 2024
    Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Although fascists insist that tomorrow belongs to them, they have always been and will continue to be contested by antifascist fans willing to fight for the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    47 mins
  • Serene Khader, "Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop" (Beacon Press, 2024)

    Serene Khader, "Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop" (Beacon Press, 2024)
    Nov 21 2024
    After over 175 years, the feminist movement, now in its fourth wave, is at risk of collapsing on its eroding foundation. In Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Beacon Press, 2024), political philosopher Serene Khader advocates for another feminism—one that doesn’t overwhelmingly serve white, affluent #girlbosses. With empathy, passion, and wit, Khader invites the reader to join her as she excavates the movement’s history and draws a blueprint for a more inclusive and resilient future. A feminist myth buster, Khader begins by deconstructing “faux feminisms.” Thought to be the pillars of good feminism, they may appeal to many but, in truth, leave most women behind. Khader identifies these traps that white feminism lays for us all, asking readers to think critically about: –The Freedom Myth: The overarching misconception that feminism is about personal freedom rather than collective equality. –The Individualism Myth: The pervasive idea that feminism aims to free individual women from social expectations. –The Culture Myth: The harmful misconception that “other” cultures restrict women’s liberation. –The Restriction Myth: The flawed belief that feminism is a fight against social restrictions. –The Judgment Myth: The fallacy of celebrating women’s choices without first interrogating the privileges afforded or denied to the women. In later chapters, Khader draws on global and intersectional feminist lessons of the past and present to imagine feminism’s future. She pays particular attention to women of color, especially those in the Global South. Khader recounts their cultural and political stories of building a more inclusive framework in their societies. These are the women, she argues, from whom today’s feminists can learn. Khader’s critical inquiry begets a new vision of feminism: one that tackles inequality at the societal, not individual, level and is ultimately rooted in community. Serene Khader is Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College and Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Emily K. Crandall is a Doctoral Lecturer in Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College. She holds a PhD in Political Theory from the Graduate Center, CUNY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Carrie J. Preston, "Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Carrie J. Preston, "Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Nov 19 2024
    In this incisive critique of the ways performances of allyship can further entrench white privilege, author Carrie J. Preston analyses her own complicit participation and that of other audience members and theater professionals, deftly examining the prevailing framework through which white liberals participate in antiracist theater and institutional “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives. Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice (Oxford UP, 2024) addresses immersive, documentary, site-specific, experimental, street, and popular theatre in chapters on Jean Genet’s The Blacks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field, and Claudia Rankine’s The White Card. Far from abandoning the work to dismantle institutionalized racism, Preston seeks to reveal the contradictions and complicities at the heart of allyship as a crucial step toward full and radical participation in antiracist efforts. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Carrie J. Preston about the intersections of theater, racial justice, and social activism, the concept of “complicit participation,” and allyship. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    53 mins
  • Andrew Stone Higgins, "Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan" (UNC Press, 2023)

    Andrew Stone Higgins, "Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan" (UNC Press, 2023)
    Nov 18 2024
    The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education remains to this day the largest and most ambitious attempt to provide free, universal college education in the United States. Yet the Master Plan, the product of committed Cold War liberals, unfortunately served to reinforce the very class-based exclusions and de facto racism that plagued K–12 education in the nation's largest and most diverse state. In doing so, it inspired a wave of student and faculty organizing that not only forced administrators and politicians to live up to the original promise of the Master Plan—quality higher education for all—but changed the face of California itself. Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan (UNC Press, 2023) is the first and only comprehensive account of the California Master Plan. Through deep archival work and sharp attention to a fascinating cast of historical characters, Andrew Stone Higgins has excavated the forgotten history of the Master Plan: from its origins in the 1957 Sputnik Crisis, through Governor Ronald Reagan's financial starvation and his failed quest to introduce tuition, to the student struggle to institute affirmative action in university admissions. Abigail (Abby) Jean Kahn is a PhD candidate in the history of education at Stanford's Graduate School of Education. She also currently sits on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Nick Bernards, "Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism" (Pluto Press, 2024)

    Nick Bernards, "Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism" (Pluto Press, 2024)
    Nov 18 2024
    Since the global financial crisis that began in 2008, the role of the financial sector in contemporary capitalism has come under increasing scrutiny. In the global North, the expansion of the financial sector over the last 40 years has paralleled a decline in manufacturing employment and an increase in personal indebtedness, giving rise to the perception that speculation and usury have come to replace production as the engine of economic growth. In the global South, financial liberalization has exacerbated long-standing patterns of boom-and-bust cycles, and the growth of the financial sector has caused anxieties that speculative investments in natural resource extraction, urban real estate, and rural farm land are dispossessing and displacing people rather than improving human development. Overall, the growth of the financial sector has created the perception that we’re entering a new phase in capitalism’s history in which speculation and rent-seeking have displaced production as the engines of economic growth. My guest today, the political economist Nick Bernards, challenges this narrative. In his new book, Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2024), Bernards argues that we need to re-center labor in narratives about the expansion of finance, that speculation and the subsumption of nature are always central to capitalism, and that major private-sector financial institutions have actually been reluctant to invest in major development projects in the global south. The main problem with the growth of finance is that it makes more exploitation, displacement, and environmental damage – in short, more capitalism – possible. Nick Bernards is Associate Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is the author of A Critical History of Poverty Finance (Pluto, 2022) and The Global Governance of Precarity (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    1 hr and 25 mins
  • Whitney Kemble, "Contested Spaces: A Critical History of Canadian Public Libraries As Neutral Places, 1960-2020" (Library Juice Press, 2024)

    Whitney Kemble, "Contested Spaces: A Critical History of Canadian Public Libraries As Neutral Places, 1960-2020" (Library Juice Press, 2024)
    Nov 15 2024
    Contested Spaces: A Critical History of Canadian Public Libraries As Neutral Places, 1960-2020 (Library Juice Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive and critical history of controversial events at Canadian public libraries, and an examination of the real-world impacts of neutrality policies in Canadian public library space use. What events at public libraries in Canada have created controversies and prompted protests? What were the issues at stake? What kinds of outcry or protest occurred? Did politicians get involved? Did the events happen, or did they get cancelled, and why? What kinds of impacts or outcomes resulted? This book answers these questions and brings the Canadian historical context into the ongoing conversations that are critiquing the concept of neutrality in libraries. It considers relevant librarian perspectives alongside critical theories to interrogate the myth of library neutrality, and to seek positive and productive ways for libraries to engage with and serve their communities that honour library values and foster inclusivity, care, safety, and social justice. Whitney Kemble is the Liaison Librarian for Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her interests include critical librarianship, social justice in libraries, abolition, fat liberation, and privacy rights and surveillance. 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 and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    34 mins
  • Laure Astourian, "The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema" (Indiana UP, 2024)

    Laure Astourian, "The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema" (Indiana UP, 2024)
    Nov 14 2024
    The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema (Indiana UP, 2024) traces the surprising role of ethnography in French cinema in the 1960s and examines its place in several New Wave fictions and cinéma vérité documentaries during the final years of the French colonial empire. Focusing on prominent French filmmakers Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, author Laure Astourian elucidates their striking pivot from centering their work on distant lands to scrutinizing their own French urban culture. As awareness of the ramifications of the shrinking empire grew within metropolitan France, these filmmakers turned inward what their similarly white, urban, bourgeois predecessors had long turned outward toward the colonies: the ethnographic gaze. Featuring some of the most canonical and best-loved films of the French tradition, such as Breathless and La Jetée, this is an essential book for readers interested in national identity and cinema. Here's the link to Astourian's essay on Jean Rouch's Moi, Un Noir discussed in the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    29 mins
  • Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Nov 11 2024
    The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement and the Great Society or a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racialization of crime. In Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (U Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Grasso interrogates the intertwined histories of street and corporate crime to find that the differences in punishment are more than modern hypocrisy. Examining the carceral and regulatory states' evolutions from 1870 through today, Grasso argues that divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference such as eugenics to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct. Even after eugenics was discredited, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Using an impressive array of sources and methods, Dr. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America's legal system. Dr. Anthony Grasso is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University Camden. His research focuses on American political development, law, and inequality. Mentioned: Susan’s interview with Dr. Joanna Wuest on Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (Beard Books, 1989) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
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    58 mins