Critical Theory 
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
3/10/2023
Actually, All of Shakespeare's Plays are About Race
by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
A new collection of essays argues that Shakespeare's works helped Renaissance Europeans to invent the category of "whiteness," and for later generations to refine and contest its meaning.
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SOURCE: New Statesman
3/4/2023
Why is the Right Obsessed with Gramsci?
by Alberto Toscano
A lack of familiarity with the actual writings of the Italian Marxist hasn't stopped the right, including Christopher Rufo and Nate Hochmann, from placing Antonio Gramsci at the center of a conspiracy theory about leftists seeking to conquer social institutions to undermine American society.
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SOURCE: Parapraxis
2/6/2023
Deconstructing "The Child"
by Jules Gill-Peterson
Since the Victorian era, Anglo-American conceptions of childhood have worked ideologically to place children at risk of harm through the justifying idea of love, and hide the reality that only a tiny percentage of young people experience youth as protected, secure, and nurtured.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
4/4/2022
Gramsci's Gift
by Alan Wald
As the political thought of the Italian marxist is increasingly used and misused in popular discourse, including in right-wing attacks on "cultural Marxism," has the time come for this generation's biography of Antonio Gramsci?
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/20/2021
Grief Is Evidence of Love
by Kellie Carter Jackson
The resurgence of the pandemic is an opportunity to reflect on the late theorist and public intellectual bell hooks, who "gave me... the language to understand grieving and healing as radical, communal acts."
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SOURCE: WBUR
12/16/2021
bell hooks, feminist and cultural critic, dead at 69
Host Lisa Mullins speaks with Min Jin Lee, award-winning author and former student of hooks, about the legacy hooks leaves behind.
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SOURCE: MSNBC
12/15/2021
bell hooks Leaves Legacy of Feminist Thought Embracing and Embraced by Black Women
by Anthea Butler
"I’m among the generation of teachers who were influenced by her thinking and by her admonition that 'popular culture is where the pedagogy is, where the learning is'."
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
12/6/2021
What are Frantz Fanon's Lessons for Today?
by Pankaj Mishra
Taken at the moment of the Algerian fight for independence and other colonial liberation movements, "The Wretched of the Earth" was first seen as a beacon of liberatory thought. A new edition frames the ambivalences in Fanon's work on freedom.
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SOURCE: Dissent
9/30/2021
The Real Foucault
by Michael C. Behrent
"Why does Foucault now feel like our contemporary, almost forty years after his death? Why are leftists turning against him? And why are some conservatives adopting him?"
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8/29/2021
Critical Theory Opposes the Right Wing's Cancel Politics
by Leah Allen and Pipa Marguerite
Before Critical Race Theory, the Frankfurt School of social criticism was a preferred target of the right. Ironically, it is the right that has been most agressively and systematically moving to "cancel" ideas it opposes, and the Frankfurt School that shows how to resist.
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5/23/2021
Theorizing Politics as Endless Struggle: Bernard Harcourt's "Critique and Praxis"
by Eric Laursen
Bernard Harcourt attempts to rescue critical theory from the grasp of utopians and academics by refocusing on the need to connect critique of society with action to change it, through recognition that there is no end point of politics.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
2/21/2021
Emmanuel Macron’s Socially Constructed Bogeymen
by Daniel W. Drezner
What, exactly, "Islamo-leftism" is, and what relationship it could possibly have to American academic theories, are two big questions left unanswered by the French President's attacks on academic ideas.
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