New Books in American Politics

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Michael Berry, Director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies on American scapegoating, Chinese censorship and the sad story of Fang Fang's brave and influential COVID-19 memoir, Wuhan Diary.

Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more details.

Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected].

The word neoliberalism is often used more as an insult than a description of a set of beliefs. And people can be rather hazy about the beliefs it refers to – although the mix generally includes free markets, privatisation and globalisation and high levels of inequality. In his book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford UP, 2022), Professor Gary Gerstle of Cambridge University charts how both rightists and leftists embraced neo liberal ideas which prevailed for some three decades until they were challenged by the populist ethno nationalism of Trump and his imitators. But can ethnonationalism prevail? Professor Gerstle argues its too soon to say whether ethnonationalism will become the new post neoliberal orthodoxy

For centuries, art censorship has been a top-down phenomenon—kings, popes, and one-party states decided what was considered obscene, blasphemous, or politically deviant in art. Today, censorship can also happen from the bottom-up, thanks to calls to action from organizers and social media campaigns. Artists and artworks are routinely taken to task for their insensitivity. In this new world order, artists, critics, philanthropists, galleries, and museums alike are recalibrating their efforts to increase the visibility of marginalized voices and respond to the people’s demands for better ethics in art. But what should we, the people, do with this newfound power?

With exclusive interviews with Nan Goldin, Sam Durant, Faith Ringgold, and others, Farah Nayeri tackles wide-ranging issues including sex, religion, gender, ethics, animal rights, and race. By asking questions such as: Who gets to make art and who owns it? How do we correct the inequities of the past? What does authenticity, exploitation, and appropriation mean in art?, Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age (Astra Publishing, 2022) provides the necessary tools to navigate the art world.

Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students.

The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened.

Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day.

Ellen Schrecker is a retired professor of history at Yeshiva University and the author of numerous books, including No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, and The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

The Big No (U Minnesota Press, 2022) is an edited volume, assembled and overseen by political theorist Kennan Ferguson, who also provides the Introduction. This group of essays came out of a conference at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The theme of the conference, also created and managed by Kennan Ferguson, and of the book, is the concept of “no” in terms of our understanding of thought, politics, and philosophy. The contributors to the book come mostly from philosophic backgrounds – and thus the emphasis in these articles is on pushing against established theoretical conceptions. But the concept of The Big No is confronting not just saying “no” to something but to decline to work towards solutions, to resolve to say no and not to determine other options. As Ferguson notes in the Introduction, No, in contrast to Yes, “stands against consensus, against assumption, against presumption, against the easy passage…it disturbs order and propriety, forcing power to act nakedly and bringing to the forefront the implicit and accepted.”

The essays in The Big No trace three different kinds of No. The first is the no of resistance—which may, at its most radical, become the no of revolution. The second no is the no of forking paths—an entire grouping of different possibilities and results—this no includes the challenge to reconsider philosophy, to instead take up the idea of non-philosophy, or to completely undercut the very basis of philosophy. The third no is of absolute refusal, of abolition. This third no “looks elsewhere,” denying the basis for whatever request is being made. This no also refuses “the presumptions of unity, of communal experience, and of collective purpose.” These essays take the reader through a variety of schools of thought and modes of thinking, as we are considering what it is to refuse, to deny, to say no to structures, power, demands, expectations, processes, and ways of thinking.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

The great political ideas and movements of the modern world were founded on a promise of universal emancipation. But in recent decades, much of the Left has grown suspicious of such aspirations. Critics see the invocation of universality as a form of domination or a way of speaking for others, and have come to favor a politics of particularism—often derided as “identity politics.” Others, both centrists and conservatives, associate universalism with twentieth-century totalitarianism and hold that it is bound to lead to catastrophe.

This book develops a new conception of universality that helps us rethink political thought and action. Todd McGowan argues that universals such as equality and freedom are not imposed on us. They emerge from our shared experience of their absence and our struggle to attain them. McGowan reconsiders the history of Nazism and Stalinism and reclaims the universalism of movements fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia. He demonstrates that the divide between Right and Left comes down to particularity versus universality. Despite the accusation of identity politics directed against leftists, every emancipatory political project is fundamentally a universal one—and the real proponents of identity politics are the right wing. Through a wide range of examples in contemporary politics, film, and history, Universality and Identity Politics (Columbia UP, 2020) offers an antidote to the impasses of identity and an inspiring vision of twenty-first-century collective struggle.

Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Impossible David Lynch (2007), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), and Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019). He is the coeditor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston. He is also cohost of the Why Theory podcast, which brings continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine cultural phenomena.

The important new book by Alicia Puglionesi, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022), is a fat sampler of episodes that show how origin stories get made, what happens when white-supremacist origin stories are mistaken for empirical fact, and how the political impacts persist. The book is decidedly anti-capitalist; resoundingly anti-colonial. It is an invitation not to jettison story-work, but to imagine, collectively, origin stories of the present that might bring into being a more just future.

In Whose Ruins could easily be categorized as Environmental History or Native Studies. But Puglionesi forges a book that is more than either field could accomplish alone. The “power” of the book’s subtitle has a double meeting: political power and the energy sources of a capitalist economy (oil, hydropower, and nuclear energy).

The book is organized into four sections, or “sites,” that visit four evocative land features: a hulking, conical earth mound in present-day West Virginia adjacent to a decommissioned state prison; wells dug into the ground in smalltown Pennsylvania; rocks that tell stories (they’re etched with petroglyphs) along the Susquehanna River with kin fragmented elsewhere; the Sonoran Desert rich with pottery, uranium, and physicists, both white and Native. In each of these sites, people with different political projects—some announced, some implicit—have generated multiple accounts of the landscapes and ideas of value.

Within a context of shifting political power, white-settler stories about each site displaced empirical knowledge of Native labor, skill, presence, and endurance with harmful fables of white origins and of Native communities’ need for white “rescue.” Into the present day, the effect has been to justify white theft of Native land and deadly violence against tribal communities for the purposes of resource extraction. In the end, even the false white origin stories became a resource to commodify.

Puglionesi is a writer of poetry, fiction, academic scholarship, and, now, In Whose Ruins, a mass-market trade publication. She holds a PhD in History of Medicine and is a lecturer in Medicine, Science and Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. On the page, Puglionesi has a friendly, funny, quiet presence—an affable Where’s Waldo that centers the relationships of historical actors (including spirits) and the work of scholars such as Kim TallBear, Zoe Todd, and Eve Tuck.

This conversation explores ways of living in good relation via writing; the status of truth; the relevance of singer-songwriter Prince for labor studies; and many other themes. It discusses the important book by Chadwick Allen, Earthworks Rising (Minnesota, 2022). In an unrecorded snippet, we also swap names of our favorite local indie bookstores. So check out Red Emma’s the next time you’re in Baltimore, MD (or on Bookshop.org) and Symposium, Riff Raff, and Paper Nautilus when your compass points to Providence, RI.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.

Does the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces–historical, psychological, economic, and culture–to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond a culture in which facts are too easily dismissed, and develop a few highly practical skills for separating truth from lies.

Disinformation explains:

Unlike the far-too-numerous one-sided, politically ideological treatments of the post-truth culture, Disinformation does not seek to point the finger of blame at any individuals or groups; instead, its focus is on how a number of disparate forces have influenced human behaviors during a time when all of humanity is struggling to better understand and more effectively control (for better or worse) challenging new technologies that are straining the limits of human intellectual and emotional capacity.

Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction. Here Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the "affective infrastructures" emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. This lens also lets Bosworth place populist social movements in the critical geographical contexts of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, ongoing settler colonialism, and global empire--crucial topics when grappling with the tensions embedded in our era's immense environmental struggles. 

Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century (U Minnesota Press, 2022) reveals the complex role populism has played in shifting interpretations of environmental movements, democratic ideals, scientific expertise, and international geopolitics. Its rich data about these grassroots resistance struggles include intimate portraits of the emotional spaces where opposition is first formed. Probing the very limits of populism, Pipeline Populism presents essential work for an era defined by a wave of people-powered movements around the world.

In Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11 published in 2022 with Broadleaf Books, Maha Hilal describes how narratives of 9/11 and the war on terror have been constructed over the last twenty years and the various ways in which they have justified state violence against Muslims. Hilal offers answers to many questions, including and especially how the war on terror started, what its impact on American Muslims and Muslims abroad has been, and how to work to dismantle it.

Hilal holds a PhD in Justice, Law, and Society from American University and has received many awards, including the Department of State's Critical Language Scholarship, the Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace, and a Reebok Human Rights Fellowship.

The book is written accessibly, making difficult concepts and themes easy to follow and understand. It is easily assignable in undergraduate and graduate courses and makes for an essential read for policymakers and for anyone interested in the Muslim American experience post-9/11, and perhaps anyone who denies the existence of institutional Islamophobia and naively thinks the U.S. is the beacon of light and justice in the world—because this book shows with ample evidence that it’s not.

In our conversation today, Hilal tells us the story of the origins of the book, what its contributions are, what makes it different from other books on Islamophobia, the roles that U.S. presidents since 9/11 have played in reinforcing and exacerbating Islamophobic rhetoric in the U.S. We also talk about the many U.S. policies, domestic as well as international, that legitimate the existence of Islamophobic state violence, the ways in which the FBI uses informants to entrap Muslims, the legal and narrative strategies that allow for the U.S. to commit extreme forms of torture against Muslims. We end with a discussion on internalized Islamophobia and, among other things, its harmful impact on Muslim Americans.

Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at [email protected].