New Books In Critical Theory

Identity, performance and globalisation are at the heart of the cultural practices interrogated by Amanda Rogers in Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geography of Performance (Routledge, 2015).The book explores the global networks of theatre that have emerged between Asia, America and Europe, using a variety of policy, practice and political examples. The book argues that globalisation, and the attendant transnational flows of people and culture, has both the potential to create theatre careers and new, important, works, whist at the same time constraining individuals, communities and cultural forms. The book draws on a rich combination of ethnographic and interview data, along with theoretically informed cultural analysis, using examples ranging from The British Council and the Singapore Art Festival, through Asian American and British East Asian identities, to controversial performances of theOrphan of Zhao. The book will be of primary interest to cultural,geography and performan

What is a father? In Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014), Helena Gurfinkel offers an insightful new vision of fatherhood through an engagement with English literature, Freudian psychoanalysisand queer theory. The book takes a range of authors who have depicted ideas of fatherhood, patriarchal relations and homosociality along with depictions of queer ideas of the family and of fatherhood itself. From Trollope, through James and Forster, to Hollinghurst and contemporary queer media, the book explores how the tightly drawn boundaries of the Victorian paternal relationship are represented and transformed in over a century of literary works. Moreover the core theoretical approaches, for example Freud’s theory of the negative Oedipus, are presented in an accessible opening chapter, making the book a readable entry into literary uses of these ideas.The book concludes by considering contemporary queer texts from and about the Female to M

To be human is to question. This act of questioning is the essence of philosophy, as it allows ontology and epistemology to exist. For example, to understand what it is to be we must first ask the question of what it is to be. This insight, of the primacy of questioning, is at the heart of problematology, a philosophical approach explored in Nick Turnbull‘s new book Michel Meyer’s Problematology: Questioning and Society (Bloomsbury, 2014). The book has two core aims, to introduce problematology to the Anglophone world and to show how this approach can be useful for the social sciences. In particular the book mounts a defence of social science, grounded in the way problematology carves out a specific role for philosophy. The book ranges across Meyer’s work, including aesthetics, rhetoric, philosophies of science and language and political philosophy. The text engages with several key authors in post structuralism, including Derrida, showing the usefulness of Meyer’s thought for contempo

Victoria Hesford is an associated professor of Women and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. Her book Feeling Women’s Liberation (Duke University Press, 2013) examines the pivotal year of 1970 as defining the meaning of “women’s liberation.” Applying a theory of emotions to the rhetoric of mass media and the response of movement participants, Hesford demonstrates how our memory of the movement has been formed by either feelings of attachment, or dis-identification that hide its complexity and heterogeneity. The movement came to represent a radical form of feminism standing against the more staid liberal feminism of Betty Friedan. Instead of ideologically driven, Hesford argues that women’s liberation engaged in the “politics of emotion.” She demonstrates how the visceral media coverage and participant’s experience were mutual constituted in the “feminist-as-lesbian.” The language and multiple images of the feminist as a guerilla fig

Arts and culture are under threat in the age of austerity. This threat is underpinned by the misuse of the idea of participation in contemporary performance. This is one of the central arguments of Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2013) by Professor Jen Harvie. The book considers how arts and culture are changing in the era of neoliberalism, seeking to pinpoint the way that ideologies of individualisation, participation and creativity have, at best, ambivalent effects. The book sets out its argument by exploring the rise of working practices such as delegating and prosumption. The rise of the precarious labourer is linked with the rise of audience and spectator participation. Whilst this can have positive impacts, it is also part of shifting the basis for aesthetic work to the participant. A similar process occurs with the demand that the cultural practitioner become entrepreneurial- whilst this might make the practitioner more attentive to her audience it may also create an individua

Two Canadian socialist thinkers have published a new book on the successes and failures, the crises, contradictions and conflicts in present-day capitalism. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin trace the evolution of the international capitalist system over the last century. (Panitch is a professor of political science at Toronto’s York University while Gindin holds the Packer Chair in Social Justice at York.) They argue that today’s global capitalism would not have been possible without American leadership especially after the two World Wars and that the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve were more crucial in extending and maintaining American power than the Pentagon or the CIA. The U.S. capitalist empire is an “informal” one, they write, in which Americans set the terms for international trade and investment in partnership with other sovereign, but less powerful states. Panitch and Gindin also disagree w

The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno’s most well known text written with Max Horkheimer, is reassessed in a new book of philosophy by Martin Shuster. Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers how autonomy might exist under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, following the disastrous inhumanity of events in the twentieth century. Shuster explores the nature of autonomy in four ways. The book opens with a re-reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as a means to engage and critique Kant’s notion of autonomy. The text then turns to consider a potential ‘response’ from Kant, in the form of Kant’s conception of a rational theology. It is here where Shuster considers the importance of God to Kantian ethics, most notably the role of God as

Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. While The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) will satisfy even advanced scholars working on “object-oriented ontology” and related issues, it’s also a fantastic introduction for readers who have never heard of “correlationism” or panpsychism, don’t quite understand what all of the recent humanities-wide Whitehead-related fuss is all about, and aren’t sure where to begin. After a helpful introduction that lays out the major terms and stakes of the study, seven chapters each function as stand-alone units (and thus are very assignable in upper-level undergrad or graduate courses) while also progressively building on one another to collectively advance an argument for what Shaviro calls a “speculative aesthetic

How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) charts the New Labour era of cultural policy, detailing the shift from the optimism of the late 1990s to the eventual crisis of funding and policy currently confronting culture in the UK. The book identifies the faustian pact between government and cultural sector, as increased funding came at the price of delivering economic and social policy agendas and responding to bureaucratic forms of management. The book uses a range of examples to illustrate this problematic bargain, from the disasters of the Millennium Dome and The Public, through an analysis of the 2012 Olympic Games. Alongside the range of cultural policy projects discussed is an exploration of the infrastructure, in particular the government departments and public bodies, which are at the root of the failure of British cultural policy between 1997 and

To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) a new book by Steven Fielding, Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. The book explores how British politics has been represented in fiction from the late Victorian era through to the present. The book identifies a fascinating set of core themes, including how the political class has been defended and attacked, how the idea of populism has developed over time, along with the changing role of women in British political fiction. A State of Play does not over-claim, stressing that although an understanding of fiction is essential to understanding politics, we still don’t know the exact relationship between people’s political participation and political fiction. However, it does make a convincing case that any understanding of the British p

It is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), Beth Driscoll, from University of Melbourne, extends and critiques the work of Pierre Bourdieu to account for modern literary tastes and the literary field in which those tastes are embedded. The book attempts to explore and defend the idea of the middlebrow in literature. ‘Middlebrow’ is defined by eight characteristics, whereby it is middle class, it has reverence to elite cultures, and it is entrepreneurial, mediated, feminized, emotional, recreational and earnest. In the main it is situated within the tension between the aesthetic and the commercial. The book uses four case studies to explore how this tension, along with the idea of the middlebrow, plays out. In the first case study the role of Oprah Winfrey as a tastemaker and cultural intermediary is explored as part of an analysis of book clubs. Th

What is funny? What makes you laugh? We think of laughter as being universal idea that applies to everyone, no matter their age, ethnicity, gender or social class. In Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour (Routledge, 2014), Sam Friedman tries to overturn our assumptions about comedy. The book draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to show how comedy is deeply related to social position, both in terms of what sorts of comedy people watch and listen to and also in terms of their sense of humour. Comedy is the basis for a form of distinction, as social groups differentiate themselves from others by their tastes. This applies not only to the upper and working class groups in society, but has implications for socially mobile individuals too. Moreover, the book shows how the assumption of good taste in comedy, which is related to having omnivorous cultural interests, is often bound up with symbolic violence from high social status groups towards the rest of society. Alo

What can possibly be wrong with the process of understanding in psychoanalytic treatment? Everything, according to Bruce Fink. In Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key (Routledge, 2014), he argues that since understanding is part of the Lacanian imaginary, it often leads to fixed assumptions and projections on the part of both analyst and analysand, inhibiting change, or the curative in psychoanalysis. Many of us probably have heard ourselves and others say that understanding why we do something hurtful or destructive does not seem to stop us from doing it; again and again and again. In the clinical vignettes, case studies, and theoretical papers compiled in this volume Fink suggests that rather than understanding, clinicians ought to strive to bring the unconscious to speech – to help analysands communicate knowledge once residing in the unconscious. Such knowledge is generated not through narrative, insight, or meaning making but parapraxes, slurred speech, and mix

It’s been 100 years since the start of the First World War, a conflict that cost millions of lives. In his recently revised book, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2013), Randal Marlin writes that Britain pioneered propaganda techniques to sell that war that have been imitated ever since. He tells how the British spread a false story about Germans boiling the bodies of their dead soldiers in corpse factories. It was designed to paint Germany as a uncivilized, ghoulish nation that had to be fought. Marlin also tells how American propaganda during the First World War helped foster the modern public relations and advertising industries. Marlin, who studied with the French propaganda theorist Jacques Ellul, sees propaganda as a manipulative exercise of power and he argues that in order to defend ourselves against it, we need to recognize its methods and techniques. His revised second edition analyzes how the Bush administration used fear to persuade Americans to support the invasion of Iraq. The book

In the aftermath of 9/11, the American political landscape and its discourses took a peculiar turn. America’s national sovereignty-conceived as the expression of its indomitable masculinity-had been challenged. Its mythical invulnerability had been crushed. The response of the United States to these events was both disturbing and enlightening. It revealed the darker underbelly of the American mythos, and revealed the highly gendered nature of American politics. Making use of gender testimony and other widely-shared cultural phenomena that arose during the ‘War on Terror’, Bonnie J. Mann constructs a notion of gender as bound up with the political. Listen in to our discussion of Dr. Mann’s new book Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror (Oxford University Press, 2014).Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would a truly ‘social’ social media look like? This is the core question of From Corporate to Social Media: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and Communication Industries (Routledge, 2014), the new book by Marisol Sandoval. The text is concerned with the emergence of a seemingly open and democratic space, social media, which is in fact subject to corporate dominance and control. The book aims to provide a political economy of the social relations in which media and communications industries are embedded, to reveal the inequalities of both power and control in social media. This point is illustrated through case studies of major corporations. Sandoval takes an important theme- including net neutrality, e-waste, ideologies, and labour conditions- and compares and contrasts CSR statements and positions with the reality of corporate actions on these themes. Case studies include Google, Apple, Disney and AT&T. The book concludes by considering how social media m

Kathrin Yacavone‘s Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography (Bloomsbury, 2013) is an engaging study that explores connections between two of the most significant thinkers of the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Considering Benjamin’s influence on Barthes’ later work on photography, the book also opens up the possibility of thinking of Barthes’ influence on how we think about and understand Benjamin in terms of the medium’s effects and significance in theoretical terms. Divided into two parts, the book situates Benjamin and Barthes in their respective historical and political contexts while pursuing a series of themes through their work on photography: self and other, autobiography, memory, and redemption. It also looks closely at each author’s readings of particular photographs, and even establishes links between these. An intriguing postscript explores the continuing relevance of the ideas of these thinkers into th

What is waste? William Viney‘s Waste: A Philosophy of Things (Bloomsbury, 2014) explores the meaning of waste across a variety of contexts, including literature, sculpture and architecture. The text begins by stressing the importance of time to our understanding of waste, as opposed to more traditional conceptions that are grounded in spatial distinctions. Rather than looking at waste through the dualities of useful or not useful, dirty or clean, William Viney asks us to be attentive to our relationship to objects in time, understanding how they are understood by the many narratives that they may contain, which they may have been party to, and which they may require for us to be able to understand them. The book draws on an emerging but established tradition of work that draws attention to the role of materiality and objects in our understanding of the world. By offering an alternative to the view that waste is the garbage of consumer capitalism, we can see the value of things as their potential, as it

Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez‘s Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2013), examines the intertwined relationship between tourism and militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines. Dr. Gonzalez questions dominant narratives of tourism as a tool of development by focusing on tourism as a means of both signifying and legitimating types of security provided by American military forces. Dr. Gonzalez uses an archive that includes literary works, travel brochures, highways, military bases and travel tours, in order to expose how tourism thrives on feelings of nostalgia, heroism and international brotherhood.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our taken for granted assumptions are questioned in a new book by Karl Spracklen, a professor of leisure studies at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. Whiteness and Leisure (Palgrave, 2013) combines two bodies of theoretical literature to interrogate leisure activities which seem innocuous or inoffensive. The book deploys insights from critical race theory along with the work of Jurgen Habermas to at once critique leisure as a site for the continued reproduction of inequality, but at the same time consider the utopian or transformative possibilities offered by leisure activity. The central inequality concerning Whiteness and Leisure is that of the socially constructed, but socially powerful, idea of race. Spracklen argues that whilst there is no scientific evidence for the vast swathes of claims made about race, the idea is influential in modern life. Most notably, ideas of race create categories of normal or taken for granted, in the case of whiteness, and other, exotic and different in the case of b