Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of its state. It shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neo...
Mar 09, 2025•2 hr 35 min•Ep 515•Transcript available on Metacast Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Kaika & Dr. Luca Ruggiero reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in the transition to twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Challenging our understanding of land financialization as a recent phenomenon propelled by high finance, Dr. Kaika and Dr. Ruggiero foreground 150 years of class struggle over ...
Mar 06, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep 123•Transcript available on Metacast 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 insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge. Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, a...
Mar 05, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep 260•Transcript available on Metacast My guest today Sam Srauy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University, Her research examines race, video games, and the political economy of the video game industry. Srauy’s work appears in various academic journals including Social Media + Society, First Mondays, Games and Culture, and Television and New Media. She teaches courses on identity, race/racism, digital media production, and video game studies/production. Prior t...
Mar 01, 2025•55 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wan-Chuan Kao analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. The book argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The 'before' of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation - one that simultaneou...
Feb 28, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast 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 consequences through creative work. Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production (Temple UP, 2024) examines how Vietnamese American cultural productions register lived experiences of racism in their depictions of family life and marginalization. Second-generation texts illustrate how the c...
Feb 26, 2025•2 hr 32 min•Ep 338•Transcript available on Metacast A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms highlights how, since the recent financial crises, the expression ‘liberal reform’ has entered common parlance as an evocative image of austerity and economic malaise, especially for the working classes and a segment of the middle class. But what exactly does ‘liberal reform’ refer to? The research analyzes the historical origins of liberal-capitalist reformism using a critical approach, starting with the origins of...
Feb 25, 2025•25 min•Ep 513•Transcript available on Metacast Acclaimed novelist and academic Tabish Khair argues that literature as a distinct mode of thinking can counteract fundamentalism. Literature is a mode of thinking, stories being one of the oldest thinking 'devices' known to humankind. The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships between its material ('language') and its subject matter ('reality'). Although present in oral literature, these relationships are exposed in their full com...
Feb 22, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep 337•Transcript available on Metacast The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. Martyn Percy offers a bold and unsettling truth: the British Empire and Great Britain are primarily English constructions, and the Church of England benefited from English enterprise and exploitation, serving as the spiritual arm of the imperial project. English Anglicanism has cast itself as the lead character in its own ‘serious fiction’—the main religious player in a drama of Church an...
Feb 21, 2025•50 min•Ep 158•Transcript available on Metacast Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism (SUNY Press, 2024) argues that capitalism fosters sadism and masochism--not as individual psychological proclivities but as widespread institutionalized patterns of behavior. The book is divided into two parts: one historical and the other theoretical. In the first, Eugene W. Holland shows how, as capital becomes global in scale and drives production and consumption farther and farther apart, it perverts otherwise free m...
Feb 21, 2025•2 hr 49 min•Ep 513•Transcript available on Metacast 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 opportunities and limitations of the idea of ‘the global’ as a way of organising history, and explored the relationship between the global and the decolonial. Adnan Husain is a Medieval European and Middle Eastern historian at Queen’s University, Canada. He has a particular interest in the relationship between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the m...
Feb 21, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with Subir Sinha, who teaches at SOAS University of London, comments on Indian and European media, and is a member of a commission of inquiry exploring the 2022 unrest between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, UK. The catalysts he identifies for the rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) include the emergen...
Feb 20, 2025•57 min•Ep 144•Transcript available on Metacast How does time figure in racial domination? What is the relationship between the capitalist organization of time and racial domination? Could utopian thinking give us ways of understanding our own time and its dominations? In Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (Oxford University Press, 2025), William Paris uses the tools of critical theory to draw out the utopian interventions in the works of W.E.B Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James...
Feb 20, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep 365•Transcript available on Metacast 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 although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that “teach us about the privilege that is breathing.” Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now th...
Feb 20, 2025•50 min•Ep 258•Transcript available on Metacast 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 soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages. As the brief reprieve of coronavirus spending made clear, no departure from government austerity will be tolerated without a corresponding act of penance. Yet we misunderstand the scope of neoliberal public finance if we assume austerity to be...
Feb 18, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast 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, this wasn’t always the case. Though for most of world history your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and for 200 years, that remarkable mobil...
Feb 18, 2025•29 min•Ep 200•Transcript available on Metacast What is the connection between fan culture and feminism? In Media Fandom, Digital Feminisms, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury, 2023), Briony Hannell, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester, explores the intersection of fandom, in a variety of forms, and feminist discourses on social media. Using an in-depth case study of Tumblr, the book charts the creation of a community of feminist fans, showing how the sense of being a feminist and belonging to a digital community are created and maint...
Feb 15, 2025•42 min•Ep 512•Transcript available on Metacast Throughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of darkness, Enlightenment thinkers tried to sweep superstition away with reason, the modern welfare state sought to slay the “giant” of ignorance, and in today’s hyperconnected world seemingly limitless information is available on demand. But what about the knowledge lost over the centuries? Are we really any less ignorant than our ancestors? In Ignoran...
Feb 14, 2025•46 min•Ep 240•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Professor Priyamvada Gopal, Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. We talked about her important work on anticolonial resistance, about the importance of the literary in imagining liberation, and about the relationship between the Muslim and the decolonial – and also had the opportunity to hear about some of her upcoming work. This episode is the first in our series on ReOrienting History. Learn more about your ad...
Feb 14, 2025•59 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast Ian Fleishman develops the concept of failed passing in his new book Flamboyant Fictions, which reimagines free will in queer lives as an accidental affirmation of identity despite efforts towards adherence to standards and norms. In this, he works with his predecessors in queer theory like Judith Butler, José Muñoz, Leo Barsani, Lee Edelman and others. In our conversation, Ian also gives us a glimpse of his readings of failed passing in widely varying texts such as the works of André Gide and J...
Feb 12, 2025•20 min•Ep 153•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Amina Easat-Daas interviews Houria Bouteldja on decolonial activism and Islamophobia in France. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory
Feb 12, 2025•46 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast 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 themes, death, remains one of its most difficult to understand, puzzling readers and scholars with language that at times can feel obscure and ethereal. This has generated a plethora of opinions on the topic, although without much of a consensus. Stepping in to try and clarify the topic is Iain Thomson in his new book Rethinking Death in and after He...
Feb 12, 2025•2 hr 34 min•Ep 238•Transcript available on Metacast 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 paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday Books, 2025), Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery,...
Feb 10, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep 346•Transcript available on Metacast We are living through a world-rattling ecological inflection point, with an unprecedented consensus that capitalism is leading humanity into a social and ecological catastrophe and that everything needs to change, and fast. Thankfully, radical environmental movements have forced the question of “system change” to the centre of the political agenda to make way for a just and livable world. Insurgent Ecologies: Between Environmental Struggles and Postcapitalist Transformations takes readers on an ...
Feb 09, 2025•53 min•Ep 121•Transcript available on Metacast 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-edited with W. P. Malecki. Richard Rorty, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, is perhaps best known today as the philosopher who, almost two decades before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in America. What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics (Princeton University Press, 2023) gathers ...
Feb 08, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep 510•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, I talked to Corinne Sugino, whose book Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans (Rutgers UP, 2024) examines how mainstream stories about Asian American success have come to serve harmful ideas about progress. At the turn of the century, Asian Americans have come to embody meritocracy and heteronormative family values, and more recently, some Asian Americans have become the face of law and order. These ideas become solidified in a variety of narratives, from blockbus...
Feb 07, 2025•47 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast If world cinema studies have mostly displayed national cinemas and their transnational mutations, Seung-hoon Jeong’s global frame highlights two conflicting ethical facets of globalization: the ‘soft-ethical’ inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their ‘hard-ethical’ symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both and suggesting their alternatives, global cinema draws attention to new changes in subjectivity and community that Jeong investigates in te...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Ep 227•Transcript available on Metacast The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury 2024) argues for ressentiment's generative negativity, prompting a shift from ressentiment as a personal expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective “No”. Inspired by Kant and Nietzsche's philosophy, Zalloua identifies two modes of deploying ressentiment – private and public use – by substituting ressentiment for reason. This reinterpretation argues for a public use of ressentiment, for the wretched to univers...
Feb 07, 2025•41 min•Ep 510•Transcript available on Metacast Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB's Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach ...
Feb 06, 2025•57 min•Ep 143•Transcript available on Metacast Political Theorist Davide Panagia (UCLA) has two new books out focusing on the broader themes and ideas of film, aesthetics, and political theory. Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France (Fordham University Press) interrogates French history and educational traditions from the Revolution through the postwar period and analyzes the cultural, social, political, and educational parameters that created the space for the French postwar political thinkers. In Sent...
Feb 06, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep 756•Transcript available on Metacast 
