De Gruyter Brill on the Wire

As we see in the news every day, climate change is already upon us. The climate crisis is no longer a bridge to be crossed in the future. It must be dealt with today.

In this first episode of our new themed series Survival by Degrees, Dr. Nicolas Graham describes the influence of fossil fuels in sustaining our unending quest for economic growth and profit. He also highlights the drastic changes needed along production lines to become eco-friendly. He talks about these in the context of his book “Forces of Production, Climate Change, and Canadian Fossil Capitalism,” published by Brill.

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Few figures stand as prominently in Marxist theory and history as V.I. Lenin. The revolutionary who played a pivotal role in one of the most important events in world history has received reverence, damnation, and everything in between, but much of that response depends on deep misunderstandings of both what he thought and what he did. This misunderstanding was deep enough that even he took notice of it at several points, remarking that readers tended to take his theories out of their context and misunderstanding the underlying points. Understanding Lenin, then, will not just mean rereading his work, but understanding the world Lenin was working in, the what’s impossible to understand without considering the where’s, when’s and why’s.

To that effect, Alan Shandro has stepped in with a book that seeks to do just that. Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle (Haymarket Books, 2015) is a sustained attempt to reread Lenin in light of Gramsci’s oft-ignored remark that Lenin was one of his biggest influences in developing his own theories of hegemony. The book spends the first couple chapters contextualizing Lenin by looking at some of his contemporaries, particularly Kautsky, Bernstein and Plekhanov, before turning to Lenin’s own works, and reading through them slowly and meticulously. The result is a study that works its way from Lenin’s writings in the 1890’s all the way to the end of his life in the 1920’s, giving us the ability to see Lenin’s development of ontological and epistemological themes that run throughout his life and work. While Shandro is not always easy to read, the book has a number of crucial insights for political organizers, and will repay serious effort. Many books have been written on Lenin over the years, but few have bothered to study his own work so meticulously and thoroughly.

Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series.

Alan Shandro is a professor of political theory, previously at Laurentian University, and is currently a visiting professor at York. He is on the editorial board for Science & Society.

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Gender, and regulations of and discourses on it, have historically been a cornerstone of the conservative Christian belief system. The stance of the Catholic Church on feminism, for instance, has often been criticized for being reductive and exclusionary. As Christianity has exerted a profound influence on the government and principles of the United States from the time of its founding, in this modern age, it is natural to examine the extent of its influence on LGBTQ-related, and particularly trans-related legislation.

In the fourth episode of our themed series Across the Rainbow, Dr. SJ Crasnow, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, and author of the article “The Legacy of ‘Gender Ideology.” Dr. Crasnow talks to us about the current state of anti-trans legislation in the U.S., and the role played by conservative Christianity in shaping it.

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The rich and complex prose of the celebrated Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky provides a detailed look at the fabric of European literary and social discourse and continues to attract scholarly attention, even 200 years after his birth.

2021 marks the bicentenary of Dostoevsky’s birth. To commemorate this occasion, join us in conversation with Prof. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literature, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, as she takes us through the brief-yet-colourful life, most notable works, and myths surrounding the celebrated Russian author.

The discussion is an extension of “The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review”, published by Brill and edited by Prof. Vladiv-Glover.

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Imagination is a fundamental trait of the human species.

Given how our most commonplace experiences get filtered differently through the lens of our imaginations, it deeply influences everything we think about and do. For better or worse, imagination is “the resin that binds human civilization together.”

In this new episode, Keith Moser, Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Mississippi State University, leads a thought-provoking discussion on “Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory”, which is one of the most compelling transdisciplinary examinations of imagination to date.

The book collates a colorful collection of radical and fresh perspectives about imagination, ranging from reflections on gendered imagination to the oft-overlooked worldview of ecocentrism. This collection is also one of the first academic publications to provide a much-needed platform to contemporary artists in its final section, “Artists Reflect on Imagination: An Imaginative Epilogue.”

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Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is often invoked, but usually as a means of cultural critique and analysis. However, my guest Lorenzo Fusaro argues in his recent book Crises and Hegemonic Transitions: From Gramsci's Quaderni to the Contemporary World Economy (Haymarket Books, 2020) that Gramsci’s work is permeated by Marx’s economic critique and his theories of value. Split into two parts, the book is both a critical rereading of Gramsci, followed by a rereading of the last century of economic and political developments. The first half of the book involves a careful rereading of key concepts in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, rethinking concepts such as hegemony as being more closely related to the base, instead of simply being superstructural description. Hegemony is not above and beyond economic dynamics and antagonisms, but emerges from them and changes alongside them. This allows for a broadening of the theory conceptually, and also allows him to apply it to international relations, instead of being confined to a particular state. The second half of the book then traces the economic history of the 20th century, starting with the rise of the United States in the international scene in the 1920’s, and following through to its eventual unraveling on the world stage in the present day. And even though the book was first published in 2018, at the end Fusaro offered some speculations on how this reworked theory of hegemony might help us think about the recent COVID crisis and its aftermath. Synthesizing theory, history and economics, this is a book that offers a powerful punch, and will reward readers from a number of different angles, and offers some dynamic theoretical resources for understanding our current crisis, and what might be just around the corner. 

The book was first published by Brill as part of the Historical Materialism book series, and is now available in paperback from Haymarket.

Lorenzo Fusaro received his PhD in international political economy at King's College, London. He is an associate professor of political economy at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico, and is also one of the editors of Revisiting Gramsci’s Laboratory.

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Meryl Altman's new book Beauvoir in Time, published by Brill Rodopi Press (2020), situates Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) in its historical context and responds to criticism that muddles what she actually said about sex, race and class. She takes up three aspects of Beauvoir's work today’s feminists find problematic: the characterizations of the frigid woman and lesbians, the analogy of race and class that obscures Black and working-class women and her examples drawn from white middle-class experience. Charged with ethnocentrism, her contribution is distorted by not considering her place and time. Through close reading of Beauvoir's writing in many genres, alongside expansive criticism, Altman shows that what appears as a problem for feminist theory is best understood by a full consideration of Beauvoir’s engagement with Freudian, Marxist and anticolonial thinkers. Extremely helpful in understanding the place of The Second Sex within international feminist theory, Altman offers insights into how Beauvoir is still relevant in the age of intersectionality and identity politics.

Meryl Altman is Professor of English and Women's Studies at DePauw University.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current writing project is on the intellectual history of women and the origins of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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In this episode, Steven Fine, Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, Israel, discusses his new book Arch of Titus: From Jerusalem to Rome—and Back, published in Brill’s Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy E-Books Online collection.

He explores how the Arch has been a symbol of subjugation as well as empowerment for both Jewish and Christian cultures as they evolved across centuries; how it is a door to the story of the Jewish community’s resilience; how it has inspired other monuments of power over globally; the layers of meaning it contains; and the reverberation, and thus enhancement, of its meaning in the digital age.

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World Christianity publications proliferate but the issue of methodology has received little attention. World Christianity: Methodological Considerations (Brill, 2020) addresses this lacuna and explores the methodological ramifications of the World Christianity turn. In twelve chapters scholars from various academic backgrounds (anthropology, religious studies, history, missiology, intercultural studies, theology, and patristics) as well as of multiple cultural and national belongings investigate methodological issues (e.g. methods, use of sources, choosing a unit of analysis, terminology, conceptual categories,) relevant to World Christianity debates. In a closing chapter the editors Frederiks and Nagy converge the findings and sketch the outlines of what they coin as a ‘World Christianity approach’, a multidisciplinary and multiple perspective approach to study Christianity/ies’ plurality and diversity in past and present.

Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. Student from South Korea in the Department of History & Ecumenics, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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What should the relationship between school and society be? Obstinate Education: Reconnecting School and Society (Brill, 2019) argues that education is not just there to give individuals, groups and societies what they want from it, but that education has a duty to resist. Education needs to be obstinate, not for the sake of being difficult, but in order to make sure that it can contribute to emancipation and democratisation. This requires that education always brings in the question whether what is desired from it is going to help with living life well, individually and collectively, on a planet that has a limited capacity for giving everything that is desired from it. This text makes a strong case for the connection between education and democracy, both in the context of schools, colleges and universities and in the work of public pedagogy.

Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education.

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