New Books in Critical Theory

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

In this episode, Uzma Jamil is speaking to Stephen Sheehi on epistemology, critical race theory and critical Muslim studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode, S. Sayyid talks with Barnor Hesse (Northwestern University) on the Antimonies of Afropessimism. Professor Barnor Hesse teaches in the department of African American Studies, at Northwestern University, he is the author of Raceocracy: White Sovereignty and Black Life Politics (forthcoming); co-editor of After #Ferguson, After #Baltimore: The Challenge of Black Death and Black Life for Black Political Thought; editor of ‘Unsettled Multiculturalisms & co-author of ‘Beneath the Surface: Racial Harassment’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode, Dr. Hizer Mir speaks with Momodou Taal on Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode, Dr. Ismail Patel talks with Prof. Hatem Bazian about structural Islamophobia, global politics and the demonisation of the Muslim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode, Dr. Ismail Patel sits down with Prof. Nazia Kazi to discuss her book “Islamophobia, Race and Global Politics” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Andrew Popp, a professor of history at Copenhagen Business School, and Jonathan Coopersmith, a professor (retired) of history at Texas A&M, talk about a recent special issue they edited in the journal History Compass with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The special issue brought together a number of business historians to assess the historical arguments of Thomas Piketty’s 2019 book, Capital and Ideology, which argues that societies have developed a number of ideologies to justify inequality. While largely sympathetic to Piketty’s aims, the historians involved prod and criticize aspects of his argument and evidence. Popp, Coopersmith, and Vinsel also discuss the need for more historians, particularly business historians, to focus on the history of inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor at Union Theological Seminary. Professor West is among the nation’s most distinguished philosophers. For several decades running, Cornel West has infused into public life reflections on love, justice, grace, liberation, beauty, dignity, and truth. He can be followed on Twitter at @CornelWest. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Hizer Mir in conversation with Yahya Birt who speaks on decolonial Muslim political activism and thought in Britain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

An interview with Prof. Salman Sayyid on post-orientalism, what it means and its place in Critical Muslim Studies.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

An interview with Salman Sayyid about decoloniality and its place in Critical Muslim Studies.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

An interview with Prof. Salman Sayyid on one of the theoretical constructs that underpins Critical Muslim Studies: Post-Positivism.  Interviewer: Hizer Mir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory experience communicates across visceral, material, and affective registers to offer new ways of relating, which challenge the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Blending environmental humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies, the book highlights how scent animates suppressed histories and marginalized memories. Dr. Hsu theorizes olfaction as a speculative, reparative practice. Examining projects from historical novels, memoirs, and speculative fiction to conceptual art and experimental perfumes, he reveals how these works mobilize scent to imagine alternative ways of sensing, relating, and creating more equitably livable worlds. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode of High Theory, Gloria Fisk talks to Kim about Prolepsis. Defined by Gerard Genette in the 1970s, prolepsis is a flash forward, the opposite of analepsis, a flash back. Initially the province of high modernism, this rhetorical device has become a well-worn trope with a surprising aptitude for representing violence in our current moment. Fisk shows us how prolepsis dramatizes the workings of structural violence in narrative form. In the episode, Gloria references Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (Random House 1967) and Michael Dango's Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair (Stanford UP 2021). The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Gloria Fisk writes about contemporary literature in a global context, with a particular interest in the novel. She works as an associate professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Her areas of interest include the critical debates surrounding world literature in the U.S. as well as novel theory, postcolonial studies, translation theory, and critical writing. In her first book, Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature (Columbia UP 2018), Gloria reads the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk as a case study in the unevenness of Western canons’ expansion across the eastern border of Europe. She theorizes the ways the Turkish novelist arrives among his readers in the U.S. and Europe, where he meets a standard for literary value that that emerges in tandem with him. In this episode, we discuss her current book project, in which Gloria theorizes the ethics and politics of prolepsis in contemporary world literature. Her project asks why so many novels that reach Anglophone readers today begin with a scene of terrible violence — a chemical spill, maybe, or untimely death at sea; incarceration, or a terrorist attack — to narrate in retrospect the paths that converge to create it? This use of prolepsis is historically specific to the contemporary period, so Gloria sets out to explain why. She shows that proleptic representations of violence were rare in Western literary traditions until the turn of the twenty-first century, but they have become ubiquitous now, because they work well to express new anxieties and hopes about the limits of our political communities, within and beyond the nation. The working title of her book is We Know How This Will End: Prolepsis, Tragedy, and the Representation of Structural Violence on a Global Scale. Look forward to seeing it in print! The image for this episode is an anonymous illustration from a 1554 broadsheet depicting celestial phenomenon over Salon-de-Provence. It was found for High Theory by Lily Epstein on the Public Domain Image 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

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism.Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more.A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. In this engaging philosophical biography, David Bather Woods reevaluates Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher’s relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. Bather Woods weaves together Schopenhauer’s ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. In doing so, this book answers some of life’s most challenging questions about how to deal with pain and loss, and how to live with ourselves and each other.Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn’t give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer’s life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today. David Bather Woods is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is coeditor with Timothy Stoll of The Schopenhauerian Mind. He has contributed chapters to The Proustian Mind, Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, and The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In a world beset by climatic emergencies, the continuing resonance of the flood story is perhaps easy to understand. Whether in the tortured alpha male intensity of Russell Crowe’s Noah, in Darren Aronofsky’s eponymous 2014 film, or other recent derivations, the biblical narrative has become a lightning rod for gathering environmental anxieties. However, Philip C. Almond’s masterful exploration of Western cultural history uncovers a far more complex Noah than is commonly recognised: not just the father of humanity but also the first shipbuilder, navigator, zookeeper, farmer, grape grower, and wine maker. Noah’s pivotal significance is revealed as much in his forgotten secular as in his religious receptions, and their major impact on such disciplines as geology, geography, biology, and zoology. While Noah’s many interpretations over two millennia might seem to offer a common message of hope, the author’s sober conclusion to Noah and the Flood in Western Thought (Cambridge UP, 2025) is that deliverance now lies not in divine but rather in human hands. Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought at The University of Queensland. A noted authority in the history of religion and of ideas, he has written many books on subjects as diverse as God, the Devil, the afterlife, witchcraft and witches, Adam and Eve, heaven and hell in Enlightenment England, and early modern demonic possession. His recent works include The Buddha: Life and Afterlife Between East and West (2024), Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History (2023), and The Antichrist: A New Biography (2020), all published by Cambridge University Press. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Twitter: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction considers nonfiction filmmakers and film collectives whose work advances an understanding of land as a locus of social and environmental responsibility. Diving into little-known archives to explore films that resonate across geographies, Becca Voelcker unearths key examples of eco-political counterculture, from farmer-filmmakers in Japan and Mali to a gardener-filmmaker in Massachusetts, and from filmed landscape-portraits of women in Los Angeles, Orkney, and the Navajo Nation to Indigenous documentaries about land dispossession in Colombia. Proposing "land cinema" as an urgent genre for our time, this book reveals how images and ideas produced half a century ago sowed the seeds for climate justice movements today. Becca Voelcker is Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was named a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2024. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Over the last thirty years, Latin America has undergone an unprecedented wave of reparations targeting victims of political violence during military regimes, Indigenous and Afro-Latin groups affected by historical processes of dispossession, and citizens suffering from environmental harm. Reparations prompt us to face uncomfortable pasts and in so doing, create conditions for imagination of multiple futures. In representing the experiences and hopes of those affected by political violence in El Salvador and Argentina, environmental harm in Guatemala and Peru, and colonial dispossession in Chile and Bolivia, reparations are built upon conflictive forms of future imagination, translation of harm and new forms of belonging to and beyond the nation state, which reifies as much as challenges state authority over the promises of actual repair. In today’s Latin American political debate, hopes for justice and democracy remain anchored to the question of the kinds of future that can be imagined through and after reparation. Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Helene Risør, and Karine Vanthuyne discuss their edited volume, The Futures of Reparations in Latin America: Imagination, Translation, and Belonging (Rutgers UP, 2026) Piergiorgio Di Giminiani is an associate professor in anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is the author of Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile and co-editor of Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America. Helene Risør is a teaching associate professor in anthropology and visiting research fellow at Copenhagen University. Professor Risør is also a senior researcher at the Millennium Institute for Research on Violence and Democracy based in Chile. Professor Karine Vanthuyne is professor in Anthropology at the University of Ottawa. Professor Vanthuyne is the author of La presence d’un passé de violences: mémoires et identités autochtones dans le Guatemala postgénocide, as well as co-editor of Power through Testimony: Residential schools in the age of reconciliation in Canada. Shodona Kettle is a PhD candidate at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. Her research explores demands for reparations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The emancipatory potential and limits of land justice, when land is at once home, property, territory, and homeland. Peasant farming was once an integral part of Palestine's agrarian fabric. But after military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, Israeli land confiscations and economic policies pushed rural cultivators into wage labor. In recent decades, Palestinian land titling and private developers have driven the slow transformation of agricultural land into real estate. In Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine (Stanford UP, 2026) Paul Kohlbry argues that we should see these changes as part of a larger process of agrarian annihilation, one in which state violence and market coercion together devastate the social, ecological, and economic relationships that make agrarian livelihoods possible. Kohlbry tells the story of those who, refusing annihilation, struggle both for the return of land, and for their return to it. Through long-term engagements in the central highlands of the West Bank, Kohlbry shows how peasant practices and ethics matter for those fighting to rebuild collective attachments to rural places, and the surprising ways that property ownership has become a means of both land dispossession and defense. Going beyond accounts that treat the peasant as a tragic figure or a heroic national symbol, Kohlbry foregrounds the complexity of agrarian life to reveal the relationships between agrarian regeneration and political liberation—ultimately connecting Palestine within a global struggle for land justice. Paul Kohlbry is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this timely and bold book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World (U Chicago Press, 2025), Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that consistently appears as a moral good actually ends up creating harm for so many. Claims to innocence protect migrant children, but often at the expense of their parents; claims to the innocence of the fetus work to punish women. Ticktin shows how innocence structures political relationships, focusing on individual victims and saviors, while foreclosing forms of collective responsibility. Ultimately, she wants to understand how the discourse around innocence functions, what gives it such power, and why we are so compelled by it, while showing that alternative political forms already exist. She examines this process across various domains, from migration, science, and environmentalism to racial and reproductive justice.Throughout the book, Ticktin shows how the concept of innocence intimately shapes why, how, and for whom we should care and whose lives matter—and how this can have devastating consequences when only an exceptional few can qualify as innocent. A politics grounded on innocence justifies a world built on inequality, designating most people—especially the racialized poor—as unworthy, undeserving, and less than human. As an alternative, she explores the aesthetics and politics of “commoning”—a collective regime of living that refuses a liberal politics of individual identity and victimhood. Miriam Ticktin is professor of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is the author of Casualties of Care and the coeditor of In the Name of Humanity. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Her book, Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory