New Books in Critical Theory

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community. 
In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story by interrogating the lives of laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. The book is both a personal journey and a history of Black labor in the United States from enslavement to the present day with a focus on a critical era: after Southern Emancipation to the early 20th century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves.
Dr. Kelley captures the character of the lives of Black workers not only as laborers, activists, or members of a class but as individuals whose daily experiences mattered – to themselves, to their communities, and to “the nation at large, even as it denied their importance.” As she weaves together rich oral histories, memoirs, photographs, and secondary sources, she shows how Black workers of all genders were “intertwined with the future of Black freedom, Black citizenship, and the establishment of civil rights for Black Americans.” She demonstrates how her own family’s experiences mirrors this wider history of the Black working class – sometimes in ways that she herself did not realize before writing the book.
Even as the book confronts violence, poor working conditions, and a government that often legislated to protect the interests of white workers and consumers, Black Folk celebrates the ways in which Black people “built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance, grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity, and their survival.” Black Folk looks back but also forward. In examining the labor and challenges of individuals, Dr. Kelley sheds light on reparations and suggests that Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be spaces of resistance and labor activism in the 21st century.
Dr. Blair LM Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history. She is also the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson from the University of North Carolina Press.
Dr. Kelley mentions Dr. Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Duke University’s Behind the Veil oral history project, and Philip R. Rubio’s There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality.
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Despite reform efforts that have grown in scope and intensity over the last two decades, the machine of American mass incarceration continues to flourish. In Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future, formerly incarcerated activist and organizer Emile Suotonye DeWeaver argues that the root of the problem is white supremacy.

During twenty-one years in prison, DeWeaver covertly organized to pass legislation impacting juveniles in California’s criminal legal system; was a culture writer for Easy Street Magazine; and co-founded Prison Renaissance, an organization centering incarcerated voices and incarcerated leadership. DeWeaver draws on these experiences to interrogate the central premise of reform efforts, including prisoner rehabilitation programs, arguing that they demand self-abnegation, entrench white supremacy, and ignore the role of structural oppression.

DeWeaver intervenes in contemporary debates on criminal justice and racial justice efforts with his eye-opening discussion of the tools we need to end white supremacy—both within and outside the carceral setting. Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine adds a sharp and unique perspective to the growing discourse on racial justice, incarceration, and abolition.

This episode considers: parole boards; hidden factors that extend sentences; how power is structured; why most reforms repackage inequality; and ways to restructure power.

Our guest is: Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, who is a formerly-incarcerated activist and a 2022 Soros Justice Fellow. California’s Governor Brown commuted his life sentence after twenty-one years for his community work. He has written for publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, Colorlines, The Appeal, The Rumpus, and Seventh Wave.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Hands Up, Don't Shoot

Freemans Challenge

Stitching Freedom

Education Behind The Wall

What Might Be

Carceral Apartheid

No Common Ground

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculation (Duke UP, 2026) takes Black speculative fiction as a central archive for understanding global security culture from the Reagan administration to the present. Drawing on black feminist, critical race, and queer of color theoretical traditions, Justin L. Mann posits that world-breaking is an ethical and aesthetic orientation to the dangerous, worldmaking process of securitization--the process by which state and parastate agents augment and build up the tools, techniques, and infrastructures intended to make people safer. World-breaking appears in the fiction of Octavia E. Butler, Colson Whitehead, N.K. Jemisin, in the music and video work of Janelle Monae, as well as unexpected places such as the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes. Breaking the World charts the difference between securitization and "Black insecurity." Linking securitization to mass incarceration and the militarization of policing, Mann contributes to Black feminist and abolitionist conversations that seek an end to institutional and structural violence. Breaking the World emphasizes that world-breaking is an important aspect of the Black radical imagination, showing that speculation is an essential response to the dangerous worlds of securitization"-- Provided by publisher.
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Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (U California Press, 2025) traces the cultural and intellectual histories that have informed the prevalent ideas of deserts across the globe. The book argues that Saharanism—a globalizing imaginary that perceives desert spaces as empty, exploitable, and dangerous—has been at the center of all desert-focused enterprises. Encompassing spiritual practices, military thinking, sexual fantasies, experiential quests, extractive economies, and experimental schemes, among other projects, Saharanism has shaped the way deserts not only are constructed intellectually but are acted upon. From nuclear testing to border walls, and much more, Brahim El Guabli articulates some of Saharanism’s consequential manifestations across different deserts. Desert Imaginations draws on the abundant historical literature and cultural output in multiple languages and across disciplines to delineate the parameters of Saharanism. Against Saharanism’s powerful and reductive vision of deserts, the book rehabilitates a tradition of desert eco-care that has been at work in desert Indigenous people’s literary, artistic, scholarly, and ritualistic practices.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat with Brahim El Guabli to talk about Saharanism, energy extraction, borders, and the ways deserts have been imagined as zones of sacrifice and permission. Brahim El Guabli also reflected on how these imaginaries shape migration, war, and ecological futures—from North Africa to Gaza.

Brahim El Guabli is Associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence.

Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer based in Boston. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.
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Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin’s work as fragmented, disjointed, esoteric and dispersed, with no clear narrative or cohesive philosophy. Duy Lap Nguyen, Associate Professor in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, paints a different picture of Benjamin’s work. In Nguyen’s revealing, latest book, Walter Benjmain and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism (Bloomsbury, 2024), he navigates through Benjamin’s complex organon and meticulously puts together these apparently disperse philosophical threads into a cohesive whole.

Nguyen argues that Benjamin’s work demonstrated a holistic philosophical project, and he takes the reader through the latter’s early critical engagement with anarchist praxis and Kantian thought, through to Benjamin’s ‘Marxist’ turn that put him in conversation with the Frankfurt School. The historical materialism of Benjamin, Nguyen carefully demonstrates, was centred on his critique of the ahistorical conceptions of time and history that were the foundation for popular, contemporaneous notions of ‘progress’. Benjamin rallied against neo-Kantians and early twentieth century social democrats alike for their adherence to the ‘infinite struggle’, which posited the necessity for the continued, unachievable pursuit of the realisation of some ethical beyond, abstracted from historical conditions and forces of production, namely capitalism, that made their realisation impossible. Against these ahistorical conceptions, Benjamin’s historical materialism saw modernism as a historically specific form of society, and not the eternal, fate-bound destiny that humanity was entrapped into.

Duy Lap Nguyen’s book offers a new insight into not only the crucial philosophy of Walter Benjamin, which demands resurrection in our historical juncture of overlapping crises and fascistic resurgence, but a richly detailed investigation into the ideas, people, and movements that surrounded Benjamin in his time. Nguyen’s book, then, provides a holistic account of Benjamin’s often forgotten philosophical contributions, how they were shaped, and what Benjamin can contribute to the critique of today’s political economy.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.
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