New Books in Critical Theory
1,166 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 1 year ago - ★★★★ - 91 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Critical Theory about their New Books
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Episodes
Demeritocracy: Should We Still Believe in Meritocracy?
January 10, 2023 09:00 - 25 minutesTotal faith in meritocracy leads to the dangerous belief that all social winners and losers are wholly deserving. Instead, we need an economy of grace. Guests Victor Tan Chen, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium membe...
Richard Wolin, "Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology" (Yale UP, 2023)
January 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhat does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philoso...
Philippe-Richard Marius, "The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)
January 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Richard Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country...
Neoliberalism and Higher Education
January 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThis episode is a roundtable discussion on the influence of the neoliberal project on higher education. Our guests are Professor Emeritus Frank Fear from Michigan State University, Professor Claire Polster from the University of Regina, and Professor Ruben Martinez from Michigan State University. The conversation is wide-ranging across topics such as the quantification of higher education and the concept of students as customers. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell ...
Peter Hudis, "Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades" (Pluto Press, 2015)
January 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFrantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Caribbean and African psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary whose works, including Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are hugely influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and post-Marxism. His legacy remains with us today, having inspired movements in Palestine, Sri Lanka, the US and South Africa. Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades (Pluto Press, 2015) is a critical biography of his extraordinary life. ...
Carlos Alberto Sánchez, "A Sense of Brutality. Philosophy after Narco-Culture" (Amherst College Press, 2020)
January 06, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesContemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limit...
White Balance: How Do Race and Class Intersect?
January 06, 2023 09:00 - 13 minutesUnderstanding race in America requires understanding its relationship to class. Guests Joshua Bennett, writer and poet Julian Bourg, Professor of History at Boston College Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, "Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje" (Academic Studies Press, 2023)
January 06, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesAfter more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps' book Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje (Academic Studies Press, 2023) focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf,...
(In)efficiency: Should Efficiency be a Moral Value?
January 05, 2023 09:00 - 16 minutesEfficiency has moved from a technique for measuring machines to a widely held moral value. But at what cost? Guests Jennifer Alexander, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota and author of The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control Tom Hodgkinson, founder and editor of The Idler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
Vanessa A. Bee, "Home Bound: An Uprooted Daughter's Reflections on Belonging" (Astra, 2022)
January 04, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesVanessa A. Bee is a consumer protection lawyer with a freelancing habit. Primarily interested in inequality, corporate power, the American Left, and Washington D.C. She also loves a good meandering essay. Book Recommendations: Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus Hernan Diaz, Trust Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures....
Gareth Dale, et al., "Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age: Struggling to Be Born?" (Haymarket Books, 2021)
January 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe last several decades have seen a mass consolidation of wealth among a few, the rest of the world left to various degrees of dispossession. On top of this, the revolutionary movements that characterized much of the 19th and 20th centuries have generally disappeared or retreated, reform being the name of the game for most progressives. In spite of this, revolutionary movements and events have actually increased in the last few decades. This seeming contradiction is one of the animating idea...
Mairead Sullivan, "Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger Between Feminist and Queer" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
January 01, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesThe loss of lesbian spaces, as well as ideas of the lesbian as anachronistic, has called into question the place of lesbian identity within our current culture. In Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger Between Feminist and Queer (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Mairead Sullivan probes the perception that lesbian status is in retreat, exploring the political promises—and especially the failures—of lesbian feminism and its usefulness today. Lesbian Death reads how lesbian is conceptualized in relation to ...
Aaron Moulton, "The Influencing Machine" (Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, 2022)
December 31, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn the 1990s, a network of twenty Soros Centres for Contemporary Art sprung up across Eastern Europe: Almaty, Belgrade, Budapest, Kiev, Ljubljana, Prague, Riga, Sarajevo, Tallinn, Warsaw, and Zagreb among them. These centres, funded as their name suggests by Geroge Soros’ Open Society Foundation, had as their mission the cataloguing of dissident pre-1989 art and the introduction of new forms of artistic practice to the art scenes of post-Eastern Block states. Within a decade, the centres woun...
Tommie Shelby, "The Idea of Prison Abolition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
December 30, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourBy any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper moral response to this? Can prisons and the practices surrounding incarceration feasibly be reformed, or should the entire enterprise be abolished? If the latter, then what? If the former, what are the necessary reforms? In The Idea of Prison Abolition (Princeton UP, 2022), Tommie Shelby undertakes a systematic and critical examination of the argume...
Abdul Alkalimat, "The Future of Black Studies" (Pluto Press, 2022)
December 29, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe marginalisation of Black voices from the academy is a problem in the Western world. But Black Studies, where it exists, is a powerful, boundary-pushing discipline, grown out of struggle and community action. In The Future of Black Studies (Pluto Press, 2022), Abdul Alkalimat, one of the founders of Black Studies in the US, presents a reimagining of the future trends in the study of the Black experience. Taking Marxism and Black Experientialism, Afro-Futurist and Diaspora frameworks, he pr...
Ed Cohen, "On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know" (Duke UP, 2022)
December 28, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAt thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know (Duke UP, 2022), Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a ...
Luke Munn, "Automation Is a Myth" (Stanford UP, 2022)
December 27, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourFor some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the immense human labor behind "autonomous" processes....
The Partially Examined Life: A Conversation with Wes Alwan
December 26, 2022 09:00 - 45 minutes"The Partially Examined Life" is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it." In this interview, I chat with PEL host, Wes Alwan, about creating one of the longest-running philosophy podcasts. Wes discusses the personal value he's gotten from participating in publically-available debates and discussions. We also talk about the relevance of philosophy today and how to deal with controversial subjects. Wes Alwan (we...
Sayan Dey, "Green Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems" (Routledge, 2022)
December 26, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesGreen Academia: Towards Eco-Friendly Education Systems (Routledge, 2022) can be read as a systemic long-term counter-intervention strategy against any form of impending pandemics in the post-COVID era and beyond. It argues that anti-nature and capitalistic knowledge systems have contributed to the evolution and growth of COVID-19 across the globe and emphasises the merits of reinstating nature-based and environment-friendly pedagogical and curricular infrastructures in mainstream educational ...
Naa Oyo A. Kwate, "White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
December 25, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutesThe long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community. Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through targeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation (U Minnesota Press, 2023)...
The Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States: Part 3 of 3
December 25, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourPart 3 of 3. In the spring of 1942, James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, gave a series of lectures in New York on the first decade of the movement. The challenges, the setbacks, the accomplishments and the lessons learned were recounted with Cannon’s trademark style that managed to be accessible while also maintaining the revolutionary militancy he was trying to carry on. The lectures would eventually become a book, The History of American Trotskyism, 1928-38: Report of a Part...
Pedro Lebrón Ortiz, "The Philosophy of Marronage" (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021)
December 25, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutesPedro Lebrón Ortiz's book The Philosophy of Marronage (Filosofía del cimarronaje) theorizes the broader context behind the notion of "cimarronaje," marronage. Usually conceived of as enslaved peoples' flight from the plantation during colonial times, cimarronaje is an expansive term referring to the mentality of living beyond oppressive societal norms. Lebrón Ortiz synthesizes philosophical notions behind cimarronaje to argue that we can see evidence of cimarronaje that continue today. Other...
The Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States: Part 2 of 3
December 24, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourPart 2 of 3. In the spring of 1942, James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, gave a series of lectures in New York on the first decade of the movement. The challenges, the setbacks, the accomplishments and the lessons learned were recounted with Cannon’s trademark style that managed to be accessible while also maintaining the revolutionary militancy he was trying to carry on. The lectures would eventually become a book, The History of American Trotskyism, 1928-38: Report of a Part...
Arya Aryan, "The Post-War Novel and the Death of the Author" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
December 23, 2022 09:00 - 34 minutesArya Aryan's The Post-War Novel and the Death of the Author (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) not only discloses and examines different functions and concepts of authorship in fiction and theory from the 1950s and 1960s to the present but it also reveals, at least implicitly, a trajectory of some of the modes and functions of the novel as a genre in the last few decades. It argues that the explicit terms of much of the theoretical and philosophical debate surrounding the concept of authorship in the...
The Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States: Part 1 of 3
December 23, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourPart 1 of 3. In the spring of 1942, James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, gave a series of lectures in New York on the first decade of the movement. The challenges, the setbacks, the accomplishments and the lessons learned were recounted with Cannon’s trademark style that managed to be accessible while also maintaining the revolutionary militancy he was trying to carry on. The lectures would eventually become a book, The History of American Trotskyism, 1928-38: Report of a Part...
Geert Lovink, "Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism" (Pluto Press, 2019)
December 22, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWhy is the internet making us so unhappy? Why is it in capital’s interests to cultivate populations that are depressed and desperate rather than driven by the same irrational exuberance that moves money? Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app. Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (Pluto Press, 2019) ...
Jacob Kramer, "The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance" (Temple UP, 2015)
December 21, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutesIn The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance (Temple University Press, 2015), Jacob Kramer examines how progressivism emerged at a time of critical transformation in American life. Kramer presents a study of Wilsonian-era politics to convey an understanding of the progressives’ views on radical America. Jacob Kramer is an Associate Professor of History at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Schneur Zalman New...
Quito J. Swan, "Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World" (NYU Press, 2022)
December 20, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourOceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, 2022) is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation. Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New ...
Clara E. Mattei, "The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
December 19, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourA groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they’ve had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an impor...
Chokepoint Capitalism: How Chokepoint Capitalism is Strangling Creative Industries
December 19, 2022 09:00 - 50 minutesMany of the creative industries look like an hourglass. On the one side, you have creators; on the other, the rest of us. In the middle, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say there's often a 'chokepoint.' Corporate behemoths -- be they streaming apps, publishers, tech giants, or others -- put on the squeeze, exploiting their market power to extract rents, push down wages, and push up costs. But Cory and Rebecca have solutions to break the stranglehold, and in this episode of Darts and Letters ...
Thomas M. Kemple, "Marx's Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
December 18, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourMarx’s Capital looms large today, a century and a half after first publication, a massive tome that attempts to document and map out the dynamics of a society consumed by capital accumulation. The complexity and scope, as well as its voluminous incompleteness upon his death, have left many readers perplexed, looking for a ‘royal road’ to comprehension. However, this has led to a number of misreadings, with commentators often trying to pick at what they assume is the core of the text, leaving ...
Ben Pitcher, "Back to the Stone Age: Race and Prehistory in Contemporary Culture" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
December 18, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesWhat does Prehistory mean to us now? In Back to the Stone Age: Race and Prehistory in Contemporary Culture (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022), Ben Pitcher, a Reader in Sociology at the University of Westminster, uses cultural studies to explore both the human past and our contemporary life. The book examines how ideas of the prehistoric speak to contemporary anxieties, political projects, and even diets and food choices. Moreover, many of these versions of the past are the basis for regressive politic...
Harvey J. Kaye, "The British Marxist Historians" (Zero Book, 2022)
December 16, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe British Marxist Historians, originally published in 1995, remains the first and most complete study of the founders of one of the most influential contemporary academic traditions in history and social theory. In this classic text, Kaye looks at Maurice Dobb and the debate on the transition to capitalism; Rodney Hilton on feudalism and the English peasantry; Christopher Hill on the English Revolution; Eric Hobsbawm on workers, peasants and world history; and E.P. Thompson on the making of...
Avgi Saketopoulou, "Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia" (NYU Press, 2023)
December 13, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourArguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023) calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking expe...
Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
December 12, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourFor decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a ...
Marco Codebò, "Novels of Displacement: Fiction in the Age of Global Capital" (Ohio State UP, 2020)
December 11, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutesIn Novels of Displacement: Fiction in the Age of Global Capital (Ohio State UP, 2020), Marco Codebò assesses the state of fiction in our time, an age defined by the combined hegemony of global capital and software. Codebò argues that present-day displacement originates in the dualism of power that pervades our polarized society and in the sweeping deterritorialization that is affecting people, objects, and signs. As the ties between subjectivity and territory break, being in the world means b...
AJ Withers, "Fight to Win: Inside Poor People's Organizing" (Fernwood, 2021)
December 11, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has been one of the leading organizations in the struggle for social justice within Canada for several decades. In the brilliant Fight to Win: Inside Poor People's Organizing (Fernwood Publishing, 2021), author AJ Withers draws on their own experience as an organizer, on interviews with the people with whom OCAP campaigned and with City bureaucrats alike, and on Freedom of Information requests to map the ‘social relations of struggle’ that contour ...
Barbara Katz Rothman, "The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID Pandemic" (Stanford UP, 2021)
December 11, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesWe are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough, and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power. Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity—drivers of our access to basic goods and services—rely on approval and legitimation by biomedicine. M...
Mathias Thaler, "No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
December 10, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourVisions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. In No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World (Cambridge UP, 2021), Mathias Thaler examines expressions of the utopian imagination, with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian...
Max Haiven, "Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2022)
December 08, 2022 09:00 - 54 minutesPalm oil is a commodity like no other. Found in half of supermarket products, from food to cosmetics to plastics, it has shaped the world in which we live. In Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (Pluto Press, 2022), Max Haiven tells a sweeping story that touches on everything from empire to art, from war to food, and from climate change to racial capitalism. By tracing the global history of this ubiquitous elixir we see how capitalism creates surplus populations: people made dependent on capitalis...
Barbara Harris Combs, "Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
December 06, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourBodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society (U Georgia Press, 2022) asserts that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to be; it is just performed in more-nuanced ways. Barbara Harris Combs argues that racism is dynamic, so new theories are needed to help expose it. The Bodies-out-of-Place (BOP) theory she advances in the book offers such a corrective lens. Interrogating several recent racialized events—the Central Park birding incident, the killing of Ahmaud Arbery,...
Jasmine Calver, "Anti-Fascism, Gender, and International Communism: The Comité Mondial Des Femmes Contre la Guerre et Le Fascisme, 1934-1941" (Routledge, 2022)
December 05, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWomen played an essential role in the international struggle against fascism during the interwar period, though their work has been neglected in broader historiography. In Anti-Fascism, Gender, and International Communism (Routledge, 2022), Jasmine Calver provides a comprehensive history of the Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme (the International Committee of Women Against War and Fascism, or CMF), an international women's organization concerned with confronting the im...
Madeline Lane-McKinley, "Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times" (Common Notions, 2022)
December 04, 2022 09:00 - 51 minutesComedy is so frequently the topic of cultural dialogue, but it is rarely taken seriously as an object of study. Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times (Common Notions, 2022) offers a major contribution to theorizing comedy but also thinking about the particular politics of the genre today. Work is a joke and often the butt of our jokes. Madeline Lane-McKinley argues that in comedy, we find ways to endure and cope with the world of work, but also to question the conditions of ...
Irene Hilden, "Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive: Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive's Acoustic Legacies" (Leuven UP, 2022)
December 03, 2022 09:00 - 53 minutesDealing with the colonial archive entails acknowledging the inability to know everything, accounting for the archive’s limited and incomplete condition. Dealing with the colonial archive is not merely about stories of the past but also about the history of the present, and how it is interrupted by the past. — Irene Hilden, in conversation with New Books Network. With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive: Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive'...
Denise Ferreira Da Silva, "Unpayable Debt" (Sternberg Press, 2022)
December 03, 2022 09:00 - 48 minutesUnpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022) examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a black feminist “poethical” perspective. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler's 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African-American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes c...
Mathematical Morality: The Ideology that Justifies Billionaires
November 30, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesHow can billionaires justify the endless accumulation of wealth? Effective altruism. An almost religious philosophical belief. Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO and founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX is a major proponent, as is Elon Musk. Now, SBF and many in Effective Altruism have also embraced longtermism, a strand of extreme utilitarian thinking that tells us we should worry about the interests of future people -- trillions of future people, 1000s of years into the future, and in pl...
Hilan Bensusan, "Indexicalism: The Metaphysics of Paradox" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)
November 29, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Indexicalism: The Metaphysics of Paradox (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Hilan Bensusan clarifies the logic and structure of an essentially situated and indexical metaphysics that is paradoxical and can also be regarded as a chapter in the critique of metaphysics. Bensusan articulates a metaphysical view of the other – both human and non-human, in what Meillassoux calls 'the great outdoors' – that can never be totalised into a single or univocal whole. He develops an innovative account of perception...
On Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth"
November 29, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutesIn 1925, on the French occupied island of Martinique, one of the most prominent voices in post colonial theory was born, Frantz Fanon. He was born to parents of both African and French descent, and was brought up in the ways of French culture. For most of Fanon’s life, he identified with French nationality. He even fought for France in WWII. But despite his initial loyalty to France, the French colonizers didn’t see Fanon as equal. In his early adulthood, Fanon began to see colonialism for wh...
Sarah Abel, "Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome" (UNC Press, 2021)
November 29, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourOver the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the public to answer difficult questions about their identity by looking to the genome. At a time of intensified interest in issues of race and racism, the burgeoning influence of corporations like AncestryDNA and 23andMe has sparked debates about the commodification of identity, the antiracist potential of genetic science, and the promises and pitf...
The Future of Multiculturalism: A Discussion with Patti Tamara Lenard and Peter Balint
November 25, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesWhat is the best way to achieve societal harmony in a place in which groups of people with different identities are living together. Should minority groups be given exemptions from general policies and laws or is it better to say majority privilege should be removed by finding solutions in which the law applies equally to the minority and the majority. Owen Bennett Jones was joined by co-authors Peter Balint and Patti Lenard who have discussed these issues in Debating Multiculturalism: Should...