Departments

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Critical Theory

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    3/10/2023

    Actually, All of Shakespeare's Plays are About Race

    by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

    A new collection of essays argues that Shakespeare's works helped Renaissance Europeans to invent the category of "whiteness," and for later generations to refine and contest its meaning. 

  • SOURCE: New Statesman
    3/4/2023

    Why is the Right Obsessed with Gramsci?

    by Alberto Toscano

    A lack of familiarity with the actual writings of the Italian Marxist hasn't stopped the right, including Christopher Rufo and Nate Hochmann, from placing Antonio Gramsci at the center of a conspiracy theory about leftists seeking to conquer social institutions to undermine American society. 

  • SOURCE: Parapraxis
    2/6/2023

    Deconstructing "The Child"

    by Jules Gill-Peterson

    Since the Victorian era, Anglo-American conceptions of childhood have worked ideologically to place children at risk of harm through the justifying idea of love, and hide the reality that only a tiny percentage of young people experience youth as protected, secure, and nurtured. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    4/4/2022

    Gramsci's Gift

    by Alan Wald

    As the political thought of the Italian marxist is increasingly used and misused in popular discourse, including in right-wing attacks on "cultural Marxism," has the time come for this generation's biography of Antonio Gramsci? 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    12/20/2021

    Grief Is Evidence of Love

    by Kellie Carter Jackson

    The resurgence of the pandemic is an opportunity to reflect on the late theorist and public intellectual bell hooks, who "gave me... the language to understand grieving and healing as radical, communal acts."

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    12/6/2021

    What are Frantz Fanon's Lessons for Today?

    by Pankaj Mishra

    Taken at the moment of the Algerian fight for independence and other colonial liberation movements, "The Wretched of the Earth" was first seen as a beacon of liberatory thought. A new edition frames the ambivalences in Fanon's work on freedom.

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    9/30/2021

    The Real Foucault

    by Michael C. Behrent

    "Why does Foucault now feel like our contemporary, almost forty years after his death? Why are leftists turning against him? And why are some conservatives adopting him?"

  • 8/29/2021

    Critical Theory Opposes the Right Wing's Cancel Politics

    by Leah Allen and Pipa Marguerite

    Before Critical Race Theory, the Frankfurt School of social criticism was a preferred target of the right. Ironically, it is the right that has been most agressively and systematically moving to "cancel" ideas it opposes, and the Frankfurt School that shows how to resist. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    2/21/2021

    Emmanuel Macron’s Socially Constructed Bogeymen

    by Daniel W. Drezner

    What, exactly, "Islamo-leftism" is, and what relationship it could possibly have to American academic theories, are two big questions left unanswered by the French President's attacks on academic ideas.