New Books in Critical Theory Marshall Poe

This provocative and interesting book has received considerable attention. Roaring reviews and interviews include  The Financial Times (UK), The Telegraph (UK), Modem (Radio Switzerland Italian), Hufftington Post (Italy), El Diario (Spain), ABC (Australia), History Today (UK), The New Republic (USA), The New Yorker (USA), among others around the world.
During the interview, Alfani tells of the challenges of putting together. Also, how the book builds on prior research and his interests in diverse fields in social sciences. About the book:
How the rich and the super-rich throughout Western history accumulated their wealth, behaved (or misbehaved) and helped (or didn't help) their communities in times of crisis.
The rich have always fascinated, sometimes in problematic ways. Medieval thinkers feared that the super-rich would act 'as gods among men'; much more recently Thomas Piketty made wealth central to discussions of inequality. In this book, Guido Alfani offers a history of the rich and super-rich in the West, examining who they were, how they accumulated their wealth and what role they played in society. Covering the last thousand years, with frequent incursions into antiquity, and integrating recent research on economic inequality, Alfani finds--despite the different paths to wealth in different eras--fundamental continuities in the behaviour of the rich and public attitudes towards wealth across Western history. His account offers a novel perspective on current debates about wealth and income disparity.
Alfani argues that the position of the rich and super-rich in Western society has always been intrinsically fragile; their very presence has inspired social unease. In the Middle Ages, an excessive accumulation of wealth was considered sinful; the rich were expected not to appear to be wealthy. Eventually, the rich were deemed useful when they used their wealth to help their communities in times of crisis. Yet in the twenty-first century, Alfani points out, the rich and the super-rich--their wealth largely preserved through the Great Recession and COVID-19--have been exceptionally reluctant to contribute to the common good in times of crisis, rejecting even such stopgap measures as temporary tax increases. History suggests that this is a troubling development--for the rich, and for everyone else.
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From the theatre mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument for the protection and concealment of identity.
Even as they conceal and protect, masks – as faces – are an extension of the self. At the same time, they are a part of material culture: what are masks made of? What traces do they leave behind? Acknowledging that that mask-wearing has become increasingly weaponized and politicised, in Mask (Bloomsbury, 2024) Dr. Sharrona Pearl looks at the politics of the mask, exploring how identity itself is read on this object.
By exploring who we do (and do not) seek to protect through different forms of masking, Dr. Pearl's long history of masks helps us to better understand what it is we value.

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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Hegel and Speculative Realism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) has two main objectives. Firstly, to assess the speculative realist formulations of the real regarding the ‘withdrawn’ object, radical contingency, the absolute register of extinction, and the current interest in ‘powers philosophy’, with special attention to their possible relation to the absolute scope of Hegelian philosophy. Secondly, to invite the reader to reconsider Hegel in a new way; uncovering rare insights into his thoughts on astronomy, actuality, the concrete and non-being. Johns’ inclination is to not mistake the necessary path to the absolute as the only path. Johns argues that Hegel describes the unique trajectory of the dialectical relationship between Nature and Idea as a Spirit oriented by both logical and physical (spatio-temporal) dimensions. Johns reads this as a theory of singularity and makes the bold claim that there may be other paths not taken by the Hegelian spatio-temporal path synonymous with the dialectic; synthesis, sublation and unfolding. In-fact, speculative philosophy should not be satisfied to study only “what exists” but also what “could exist” or what it means to “inexist” and should entertain multiple modes of potential becoming between Hegel’s initial triad of logical categories; Being, Non-Being and Becoming.
Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His dissertation was entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.
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Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) places contemporary poetics in dialogue with posthumanism and biomedicine in order to create a framework for advancing a posthuman-affirmative ethics within the culture of medical practice. This book makes a case for a posthumanist understanding of the body—one that sees health and illness not as properties possessed by individual bodies, but as processes that connect bodies to their social and natural environment, shaping their capacity to act, think, and feel. Tana Jean Welch demonstrates how contemporary American poetry is specifically poised to develop a pathway toward a posthuman intervention in biomedicine, the field of medical humanities, medical discourse, and the value systems that guide U.S. healthcare in general.
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Raj Patel, the renowned political economist and New York Times bestselling author of The Value of Nothing, teams up with the physician Rupa Marya to offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. Decolonizing heals what has been divided, reestablishing our relationships with the Earth and one another. Combining the latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization with the stories of Marya's work with patients in marginalized communities, activist passion, and the wisdom of Indigenous groups, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (FSG, 2021) points the way toward a deep medicine that has the potential to heal not only our bodies, but the world. “This book advances a new level of diagnosis that incorporates history and lines of power into our understanding of the root causes of health disparities and the rise of inflammatory disease in industrialized places, offering compelling treatment options for what is ailing people and the planet”.
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In The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (Duke UP. 2023), Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes "epidemic media" to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities accruing from diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.
Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches at the Department of English and Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She studies global media cultures, environmental media and critical health studies. Her early research includes two monographs When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular, while the co-edited volume exemplifies her current research, The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk.
Priyam Sinha is a doctoral candidate in the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached here. 
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