New Books in Critical Theory

Climate change is devastating the planet, and globalisation is hiding it. Laurie Parsons's book Carbon Colonialism: How Rich Countries Export Climate Breakdown (Manchester UP, 2023) opens our eyes.  Around the world, leading economies are announcing significant progress on climate change. World leaders are queuing up to proclaim their commitment to tackling the climate crisis, pointing to data that shows the progress they have made. Yet the atmosphere is still warming at a record rate, with devastating effects on poverty and precarity in the world's most vulnerable communities. Are we being deceived? Outsourcing climate breakdown explores the murky practices of exporting a country's environmental impact. A world in which corporations and countries are allowed to maintain a clean, green image while landfills in the world's poorest countries continue to expand and droughts and floods intensify under the auspices of globalisation, deregulation and economic growth. Taking a wide-ranging, culturally engaged approach to the topic, the book shows how this is notonly a technical problem, but a problem of cultural and political systems and structures - from nationalism to economic logic - deeply embedded in our 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

Broadway has body issues. What is a Broadway Body? Broadway has long preserved the ideology of the "Broadway Body": the hyper-fit, exceptionally able, triple-threat performer who represents how Broadway musicals favor certain kinds of bodies. Casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure that gives preference to the Broadway Body. In Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford UP, 2023), author Ryan Donovan explores how ability, sexuality, and size intersect with gender, race, and ethnicity in casting and performance. To understand these intersectional relationships, he poses a series of questions: Why did A Chorus Line, a show that sought to individuate dancers, inevitably make dancers indistinguishable? How does the use of fat suits in musicals like Dreamgirls and Hairspray stigmatize fatness? What were the political implications of casting two straight actors as the gay couple in La Cage aux Folles in 1983? How did deaf actors change the sound of musicals in Deaf West’s Broadway revivals? Whose bodies does Broadway cast and whose does it cast aside? In answering these questions, Broadway Bodies tells a history of Broadway’s inclusion of various forms of embodied difference while revealing its simultaneous ambivalence toward non-conforming bodies. 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 The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other: From Spiritual Exercises to Political Transformation (Columbia UP, 2025), Daniel Wyche examines the political implications of what he calls practices of ethical self-change. These include Pierre Hadot’s notion of “spiritual exercises”; what the French sociologist of labor Georges Friedmann terms “interior effort”; Michel Foucault’s ethics of the “care of the self”; Martin Luther King Jr.’s understanding of “self-purification” as integral to direct action; and Audre Lorde’s claim that caring for herself constitutes a form of “political warfare.” Each reading furnishes Wyche with a lexicon of concepts and practices that he develops with great care toward a critical account of the self in relation to others.Daniel Louis Wyche is a Senior Scholar with the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.Nathan H. Phillips is an independent scholar working out of South Bend, Indiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Mark Christian Thompson's book, Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2022) examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century African American writers and thinkers, showing how their investments in sociology and anthropology gave way to a growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory by the 1960s. Thompson analyzes this shift in intellectual focus across the post-war decades, pinpointing its clearest expression in Amiri Baraka's writings on jazz and blues, in which he insisted on philosophy as the critical means by which to grasp African American expressive culture. More sociologically oriented thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, had understood blackness as a singular set of socio-historical characteristics. In contrast, writers such as Baraka, James Baldwin, Angela Y. Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X were variously drawn to notions of an African essence, an ontology of Black being. For them, the work of Adorno, Habermas, Marcuse, and German thinkers was a vital resource, allowing for continued cultural-materialist analysis while accommodating the hermeneutical aspects of African American religious thought. Mark Christian Thompson argues that these efforts to reimagine Black singularity led to a phenomenological understanding of blackness--a "Black aesthetic dimension" wherein aspirational models for Black liberation might emerge. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

What is the future of museums? In Deconstituting Museums: Participation’s Affective Work Helen Graham, an Associate Professor in School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, considers the current state of the sector and stresses the need for significant change. Drawing on both professional reflections and academic analysis, the book introduces the concept of the museum constitution as a key site for struggle within the institution. It shows the challenge of making participation meaningful, and the scale of transformation needed to reframe museums’ central ideas and activities. Essential reading for both academics and museum professionals, as well as audiences, the book is available open access 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