New Books in Critical Theory

It is a compulsion of the human race to find a way to memorialize those we have lost and why we have lost them, from a gravestone of a loved one to war monuments that honor thousands who died in battle. In Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory (Fordham UP, 2025), Andrea Zarafshon Moore examines how contemporary music has been used to memorialize three recent crises in the United States: the AIDS crisis, 9-11, and ongoing anti-Black violence. Moore reads these crises and the music that memorializes them to reveal the ways the are methodologically and ideologically similar to and different from each other. She explores the broader debates and discourses through which commemoration is always filtered and the ways interpretive consensus has been constructed and articulated in both musical and other memorial forms. Moore weaves close musical analysis with a wide-ranging discussion of how Americans memorialize, who Americans memorialize, and what memorials are meant to accomplish.
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A serene beach. The classroom of an elite private school. The still nights in an upscale residential neighborhood. An acclaimed poet with a quiet, dignified mode of address. The sonic etiquette and experience of quiet is integral to each of these scenes. The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance (Rutgers UP, 2026) examines what the emergence of quiet as an elite aesthetic, privilege, and entitlement means for minoritized people who are often narrated as loud, disruptive, and disturbing, sonically, visually, and otherwise. Taking the Caribbean and its diasporas as its key sites of study, the book explores what we can learn from efforts to transform the region into the quintessential site of quiet leisure, in part, through the enactment of regimes of sonic discipline and surveillance directed against its majority Black population. Analyzing the work of Afro-Caribbean artists that catalog and critique sonic surveillance, the book questions the ways that quiet gets produced both as a regulatory ideal of racial, gender, sexual, national, and civilizational belonging and as a universal object of desire.
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Glitter (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Nicole Seymour reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Dr. Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have shifted across centuries-from ancient cosmetic to queer activist tool, environmental pollutant to biodegradable accessory-along with its composition, which has variously included insects, glass, rocks, salt, sugar, plastic, and cellulose. Through a variety of examples, from glitterbombing to glitter beer, Seymour shows how this substance reflects the entanglements of consumerism, emotion, environmentalism, and gender/sexual identity.
Glitter is part of the Object Lessons series: short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Published by Temple University Press in 2026, The Heartland of US Empire: Race, Region, and the Queer Filipinx Midwest examines Filipinx cultural representations in the Midwest since the early twentieth century. In it, Dr. Thomas Xavier Sarmiento shrewdly considers the impact of American exceptionalism and U.S. imperialism in a region where white, middle-class, heterosexual, and Christian is the norm. He employs a queer, decolonial Filipinx methodology that traces how narratives of America’s heartland position Filipinxs in the region as non-normative due to their racial, gender, sexual, and national statuses. As a result, The Heartland of US Empire locates queer Filipinxs in the geographic center of the nation and at the center of cultural narratives, thereby mapping alternative images of diasporic Filipinx identity and experience alongside U.S. regional and national identities, histories, and realities.

Tom Sarmiento is an associate professor of English and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at Kansas State University. He specializes in Filipinx American and queer literature and culture and teaches courses in Asian American literature, Cultural Studies, film adaptation, and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. His works have appeared in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, The SAGE Encyclopedia on Filipina/o/x America Studies, Asian American Literature Discourse and Pedagogies, and in a special issue he guest edited for American Studies. In addition to his work in Literature & Cultural Studies, he is invested in helping students see writing as a nonlinear process and as a tool for social change.

Donna Doan Anderson is an assistant professor in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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What explains the rise of religious populism in contemporary Turkish
politics and society? How does industrialization help to explain change
and continuity in social and religious life in Muslim majority
countries? In his new book Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers (University of California Press, 2025), Utku Balaban examines Turkey’s rapid post-Cold War industrialization and argues that the answers to
these questions lie in a class analysis centered on the relationships
between employers and employees situated within larger contexts of
globalization and historical Islamization. Political and religious
transformations occurring in the 1980s and 1990s are not the result of a
cultural backlash to or rejection of “Westernization,” or a nostalgia
for an idealistic past. Rather, Balaban argues they are related to the
rise of a socio-economic-political class he calls the “faubourgeosie” that strategically employ Islamic populism as a method of protecting their interests against other primary class actors. These
changes are internal to the mechanics and logics of capitalism as
shifts in the traditional relations of production produced new alliances
and networks based on small-scale capital accumulation.
Balaban’s Turkish case study can be applied to other Muslim-majority
countries in which small-scale industrialists similarly dealt with
economic anxiety and aspirations through recourse to popular Islamist
rhetoric not as a specifically moral strategy, but as a political one.

Industrial Islamism recently received the best new book in the category of international political economy from the International Studies Association.

Dr. Utku Balaban is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Xavier University. He is the author of A Conveyor Belt of Flesh: Urban Space and the Proliferation of Industrial Labor Practices in Istanbul’s Garment Industry (2011) and Social Inclusion Practices in Turkey (2015).

Dr. Jaclyn Michael is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States.
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