New Books in Critical Theory

• Mark Griffiths, "Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

  Checkpoint 300, the highly securitized border facility between occupied Bethlehem and Jerusalem, is a central feature of Israeli control of Palestinian land and life. An apparatus of turnstiles, overcrowded corridors, and invasive inspections, the checkpoint regulates the movement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, granting access to some while excluding most. Offering a nuanced exploration of space in Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine (U Minnesota Press, 2025), Mark Griffiths reveals Checkpoint 300 as a stark symbol of Israeli colonialism that embodies larger systems of control and violence. Griffiths’s sensitive and timely work highlights the myriad ways Palestinians are affected by Israel’s spatial control—whether they travel through the checkpoint or not—demonstrating how colonial infrastructures of inequity extend far beyond their physical boundaries to shape daily life. Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, Griffiths examines how colonial power infiltrates family dynamics, enforces gendered mobility restrictions, shapes local economies, and extends into the global exchange of capital and security technologies. He also underscores how Palestinians endure and resist under oppressive conditions and how indigenous forms of life and living are sustained, illuminating how colonial space is contested and countered, unmade and remade. Blending meticulous research with vivid human stories to show the lived realities of borders, power, and resistance in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 portrays the checkpoint as an entry into the ways that colonial space is formed through security infrastructure that is both the product and producer of wider geographies of oppression, complicity, and control. Mark Griffiths is reader in political geography at Newcastle University. He is coeditor of Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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• Matt Houlbrook, "Songs of Seven Dials: An Intimate History of 1920s and 1930s London" (Manchester UP, 2025)

  How has central London changed in the last 100 years? In Songs of Seven Dials An Intimate History of 1920s and 1930s London (Manchester UP, 2025), Matt Houlbrook, a Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham, tells the story of a part of London that was the site for major contests over urban development, race, and the future of the city. Centred around a libel trial brought by a local café owner resisting the press’ lies about the area. From this, the book explores the wider context of property investment, the circulation of capital, the impact of Empire, and the changing meaning of what is now one of London’s most visited and most fashionable areas. The book will appeal to academic and general audiences, showing how the story of Seven Dials is still important to contemporary life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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• The Renaissance of Marxist Studies: A Discussion with Babak Amini

  The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in academic research in Marxism and related fields, and many researchers have been stepping up to the plate to offer rigorous analysis and critical reanimations of Marxist theory. One particularly exciting place where this is included is the Palgrave series Marx, Engels and Marxisms, which has been steadily putting new titles out for close to a decade. Including original monographs, edited collections and translated texts, the series covers a wide variety of topics for those interested in rediscovering and developing a Marxism ready to face the 21st century. This conversation with one of the editors is intended to serve as an overview of the series, with more traditional episodes to follow in the near future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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• Patrick Gamsby, "Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy and Modernity" (Routledge, 2025)

  Henri Lefebvre is a writer who has had many competing claims for ownership, from sociology to philosophy to urban geography, different scholars have attempted to grasp the nature of his thought. These competing attempts have been encouraged by Lefebvre’s rejection of systematicity in his thought and his eclectic, discursive writing style. In his book Henri Lefebvre, Metaphilosophy and Modernity (Routledge, 2025) Patrick Gamsby provides a new, interdisciplinary way of viewing Lefebvre’s work through the category of ‘metaphilosophy’. This, the term Lefebvre used to categorise his own perspective, emphasises the link between thought and action and therefore encourages us to foreground Lefebvre’s critique of alienation. The role of alienation as the ‘blockage of the possible’ also leads Gamsby to emphasis the utopian nature of Lefebvre’s thought as one directed to what could be. In our conversation we discuss how Gamsby came to this topic through his previous explorations of Lefebvre’s sociology of boredom, the importance of happiness for Lefebvre, the problems of technology and why Lefebvre saw great hopes in a new romanticism. We also discuss why we should be wary of packets of sweetener encouraging us to be happy. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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• Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)

  In Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press (2022), Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices ranging from the film work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to the disability diaries of Bob Flanagan, to the Black queer speculative fiction of Renee Gladman. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-vérité, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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