New Books in Critical Theory

Repercussions of communism are still felt throughout Central and
Eastern Europe. In fact, specters of communism remain vivid enough to
inspire a wide range of contemporary cultural production, from video
games to museum exhibits. This volume demonstrates how the region
remains in a state of transitioning away from communism, not having
secured a fully post-communist identity.

Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production (Central European University Press, 2025) adopts an
interdisciplinary approach to extend debates on the lasting impact of
the communist era across Central and Eastern Europe with chapters
thematically threaded through concepts including curation, immersion,
interaction, humor and authenticity. A 'trauma/nostalgia paradigm'
emerges as the tissue connecting the plurality of post-communist efforts
employed to address the region's contested pasts. Twelve original
essays by contributors from both 'inside' and 'outside' the region
detail how twenty-first-century cultural productions reengage the
communist past. The impact of this past is seen as fundamental to
understanding and shaping Central and Eastern European identities.
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The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (Verso Books, 2026) is the definitive history of a dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory.

“Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But
despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely
investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders,
right-wing intellectuals, and White House officials who believe a
coterie of left-wing scholars and students is plotting to undermine
Western civilization. Drawing on years of archival research and using
the tools of critical theory, A.J.A. Woods reveals how a group of German
thinkers known as the Frankfurt School was recast as the sinister
orchestrators of a global conspiracy. Instead of simply debunking this
conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the
political movements that have declared war on all that passes for
Cultural Marxism in the US, the UK, and Brazil.

Only when we understand the practices and weaknesses of those
reactionaries committed to fighting this illusory threat—a conflict
causing real-world damage—can we effectively resist. This is an
essential book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological currents
shaping politics in the twenty-first century.

A.J.A. Woods is an intellectual historian who lives in Brighton,
England. In 2022, Woods received a PhD from the Centre for the Study of
Theory and Criticism at Western University, Canada. Their writings on
conspiracy theories and reactionary politics have been translated into
four languages and appeared in Open Democracy, Patterns of Prejudice,
and Marx & Philosophy Review of Books.

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.
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This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the
dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print
culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one.

The serial
is everywhere. Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of
an ongoing narrative—from installments of Victorian novels to TV
episodes to comic books—seriality names the spread of installment-based
storytelling across a range of media. However, Ryan Engley argues that
seriality is not only a narrative structure but also a psychic
structure. Seriality—in its dependence on gaps, delay, and
constraint—names the fundamental trauma of contemporary life: that there
exists an intrinsic relation between self and other, a relation that is
often difficult to see and difficult to bear.

Through formal
readings of media texts alongside Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,
the dialectical method of G.W.F. Hegel, and Jean-Paul Sartre's
existentialism, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, 2026) shifts
the focus of seriality studies. In so doing, Engley presents a rebuttal
to the common refrain that our lives, like contemporary media, have
become endlessly fragmented. Rather, Engley finds, we have become
radically—serially—connected.

Ryan Engley
is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, USA, where
he teaches and researches the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and
media studies. Along with Todd McGowan, Engley co-hosts the podcast Why Theory, which brings Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine contemporary phenomena.

Helena Vissing,
PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California
and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She
can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).
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Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge, 2024) examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments: unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers. Forty case studies spanning four decades give evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. Architecture and Choreography builds histories and theories through which to examine these works, the contexts within, and processes through which the works emerged, and the critical questions they raise about ways to work together, sites and citations, ethics and equity, control and agency.

Three themes frame pairs of chapters. The first addresses disciplinarity through works that critically reflect upon their discipline’s tools, techniques, and conventions juxtaposed against projects that cite or use other art forms and cultural phenomena as source material. The second interrogates space and the role of spatial dispositifs, institutions, and sites, and their hidden and not-so-hidden conditions, as conceptual drivers and structures to subvert, trouble, unsettle, remember. The third asks who and what dances, finding a spectrum from mobilized architectural bodies to more than human cybarcorps. Modes of collaboration and the temporalities and life cycles of projects inform bookending chapters.

Architecture and Choreography offers vital lessons not only for architects and choreographers but also for students and practitioners across design and performance fields.
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Baudelaire's Objects (Bloomsbury,
2026) examines Baudelaire's multifaceted use of natural, domestic,
urban, and esthetic objects in his verse and prose poetry, as well as
the ways his poems reshape our understanding of objects and how those
objects destabilize, yet preserve, the subject-object relation. Charles
Baudelaire's representation of objects in the natural world establishes a
relation that is neither one of identity between human subject and
nature nor a relation of domination; he reveals both the natural world
and the human subject to be characterized by an irreducible doubleness
and nonidentity to itself. Likewise, everyday domestic objects in his
poems overflow their boundaries as simple metaphors; their often uncanny
aspect highlights their quasi-agency as they define and shape the
subject who interacts with them.

Baudelaire's poems-as-objects
also take on this kind of agency, acting upon readers in ways that both
require and surpass attempts to grasp the poems conceptually as art
objects for analysis. This reshaping of subjectivity and objectivity
acquires increased intensity in his urban poetry, where city objects are
at the intersection of the mythic, the historical, the esthetic, and
the commercial.

Baudelaire's Objects shows
how paying attention to objects differently, as Baudelaire's poems impel
readers to do, is to reorient ourselves in the world by giving objects
their due, recognizing the mediating qualities both of objects and of
the language with which we represent or create them. We can thus
reinvent our understanding of the limits and potential of human
subjectivity as it is inextricably intertwined with the world around us.

Guest
Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French and Director of the School of
World Languages and Cultures at the University of Vermont. He writes on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature with a particular focus on
the intersections of literature with philosophy and music. In addition
to Baudelaire's Objects, Dr. Acquisto’s books include French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music, The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy, Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, and Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Dissonance, Subjectivity, Transcendence.

Host
Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of
Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and
speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism
to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan
France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under
review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.
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