New Books in Critical Theory

• Kevin M. Schultz, "Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

  A bracing, accessible history of white American liberals—and why it’s time to change the conversation about them.If there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism’s beard. Even liberals hate liberals—either because they can’t manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they’re so self-hating.This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz’s lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more—in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.Sharply assessing how decades of attacks on liberals and liberalism have steadily hollowed out the center of American political life, Schultz also explains precisely what needs to be done to avoid digging ourselves even further into the hole of polarization. The ultimate goal, he argues, is to achieve political fragmentation that will fuel the rise of a true multiparty system, where ideology will matter more, not less.With a tight command of postwar American history and a spirited voice, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A Critical History (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand—and envision a way forward in—the complicated landscape of American politics. Kevin M. Schultz is professor and chair of history at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). He is the author of Buckley and Mailer and Tri-Faith America. 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

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• Will Kitchen, "Culture, Capital and Carnival: Modern Media and the Representation of Work" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

  How is the world of work depicted on page and on screen? In Culture, Capital and Carnival: Modern Media and the Representation of Work Dr Will Kitchen, an Associate Lecturer at Arts University Bournemouth explores this question using a series of literary and media case studies. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque, the book assesses the possibilities of media texts, including histories, literature, films and sitcoms, to offer alternative visions of work. More critically, the analysis highlights media’s role in reinforcing exploitation and alienation within its seemingly playful and positive engagements with work. Theoretically rich, but accessible for the general reader, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding how media shapes our understanding of work today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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• Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, "Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone" (Columbia UP, 2025)

  Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories through which the field is defined: ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone.Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (Columbia UP, 2025) considers major contemporary authors who disavow identity even as their works and public personas respond in varied ways to the imperatives of being “Indian.” Chapters examine Bharati Mukherjee’s rejection of “ethnic” Americanness; Chetan Bhagat’s “bad English”; Amit Chaudhuri’s autofictional literary project; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s decision to write in Italian, interspersed with meditations on the iconicity of the theorists Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said. Through an innovative method of accented reading and sharing stories and syllabi from her teaching, Srinivasan relates the burdens of representation faced by ethnic and postcolonial writers to the institutional and disciplinary pressures that affect the scholars who study their works. Engaging and self-reflexive, Overdetermined offers new insight into the dynamics that shape contemporary Indian English literature, the politics of identity in literary studies, and the complexities of teaching minoritized literatures in the West. Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is assistant professor of English at Rice University. Her books include the essays What is We? (2025) and the coedited Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (2023), and her public writing has appeared in numerous venues. 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

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• Madison Schramm, "Why Democracies Fight Dictators" (Oxford UP, 2025)

  Over the course of the last century, there has been an outsized incidence of conflict between democracies and personalist regimes—political systems where a single individual has undisputed executive power and prominence. In most cases, it has been the democratic side that has chosen to employ military force.  Why Democracies Fight Dictators (Oxford UP, 2025) takes up the question of why liberal democracies are so inclined to engage in conflict with personalist dictators. Building on research in political science, history, sociology, and psychology and marshalling evidence from statistical analysis of conflict, multi-archival research of American and British perceptions during the Suez Crisis and Gulf War, and non-democracies' understanding of the threat from Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Madison V. Schramm offers a novel and nuanced explanation for patterns in escalation and hostility between liberal democracies and personalist regimes. When conflicts of interest arise between the two types of states, Schramm argues, cognitive biases and social narratives predispose leaders in liberal democracies to perceive personalist dictators as particularly threatening and to respond with anger—an emotional response that elicits more risk acceptance and aggressive behavior. She also locates this tendency in the escalatory dynamics that precede open military conflict: coercion, covert action, and crisis bargaining. At all of these stages, the tendency toward anger and risk acceptance contributes to explosive outcomes between democratic and personalist regimes. Madison Schramm, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto 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

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• Vincent Pak, "Queer Correctives: Discursive Neo-homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

  Queer Correctives: Discursive Neo-homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) explores Christian discourses of sex and sexuality in Singapore to argue that metanoia, the theological concept of spiritual transformation, can be read as a form of neo-homophobia that coaxes change in the queer individual. In Singapore, Christian discourses of sex and sexuality have materialised in the form of testimonials that detail the pain and suffering of homosexuality, and how Christianity has been a salve for the tribulations experienced by the storytellers. This book freshly engages with Michel Foucault's posthumous and final volume of The History of Sexuality by revitalising his work on biblical metanoia to understand it as a form of neo-homophobia. Drawing on Foucauldian critical theory and approaches in discourse studies, it shows how language is at the centre of this particular iteration of neo-homophobia, one that no longer finds value in overt expressions of hate and disdain for those with non-normative sexualities, but relies extensively on seemingly neutral calls for change and transformation in personal lives.Queer Correctives takes Singapore as a case study to examine neo-homophobic phenomena, but its themes of change and transformation embedded in discourse will be relevant for scholars interested in contemporary iterations of Foucault's concepts of discipline and technologies of the self. Together with interview data from religious sexual minorities in Singapore, it captures a burgeoning form of homophobic discursive practices that eludes mainstream criticism to harm through change and transformation. About Vincent Pak: Vincent Pak is Assistant Lecturer at The University of Hong Kong. His work is located in the fields of sociocultural linguistics and linguistic anthropology, where he’s interested in matters of gender, sexuality, and race. His monograph, Queer Correctives, considers the emergence of neo-homophobia in Singapore. About Pavan Mano: Pavan Mano is Lecturer in Global Cultures in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King's College London. He works at the intersections of critical & literary theory, politics and culture. His first monograph, Straight Nation (Manchester UP, 2025), interrogates postcolonial nationalism and the governance of sexuality in Singapore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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