New Books in Critical Theory

Martin Fitzgerald, "The Umbrella Man and Other Stories: What We Talk about When We Talk about the JFK Assassination" (Biteback Publishing, 2026)

What does the JKF assassination mean to us now? In ⁠The Umbrella Man and Other Stories: What We Talk About When We Talk About the JFK Assassination⁠ [https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-umbrella-man-and-other-stories-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-the-jfk-assassination-martin-fitzgerald/c3e5c0f495443656], (Biteback Publishing, 2026) ⁠Martin Fitzgerald⁠ [https://bsky.app/profile/4hundredblows.bsky.social] explores the lives and stories of the people present on that day in Dallas at Dealey Plaza. In doing so, the book examines cultural memory, artistic representations, history, conspiracy theory and the global impact of the event. Drawing on personal reflections, rich archival sources, and contemporary interviews, the book offers a brilliant and compelling narrative that goes beyond the circumstances of 1963 to the present day. The book will be of significant interest to a range of humanities scholars as well as to anyone interested in the ongoing legacy of one of the twentieth century’s defining events. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory]

Luna Sabastian, "Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva" (Harvard UP, 2025)

Fascism swept the world in the 1920s and 1930s, but not only because of the seductive rhetoric of Mussolini, Hitler, and their collaborators. In India as well, a distinctive brand of fascist thought emerged—influenced by Euro-American ideologies but also departing from them in critical ways. The first systematic examination of this political philosophy, Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva  [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780674299436](Harvard UP, 2025) revises our sense of what fascism can be, while demonstrating that it is very much with us in the form of Hindutva, the ethnic-nationalist movement at the center of Indian politics today. Luna Sabastian offers a novel interpretation of Hindutva, both its canonical formulation by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and its reinvention by Deendayal Upadhyaya after Indian independence. Sabastian shows how Hindutva generated ideas of Hindu race and religion that had the potential to erase Muslims not through genocide or ethnic cleansing but by means of violent absorption. Focusing on aggressive miscegenation, Indian fascists proposed a singular kind of racial project, eschewing notions of purity even while maintaining a starkly eliminationist objective. Fascism in India also grapples with Hindutva ideas of caste and its relation to race—particularly in comparison with Nazi uses of these concepts—and of sovereignty, which Indian fascists envisioned beyond the “blood and soil” narrative of the nation-state. Finally, Sabastian reflects on Hindutva’s reorientation toward Hindu piety after the creation of Pakistan effectively resolved India’s “Muslim problem.” Bringing clarity to an ideology little understood in the West, Fascism in India is an eye-opening perspective on Hindutva and a profound meditation on the proliferation and evolution of right-wing thought. Sachin Nikarge [https://independent.academia.edu/SachinNikarge] has extensively worked in consultative capacity with prominent foreign/diplomatic missions across both ‘hard’ as well as ‘soft’ power domains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory]

Recall This Book x The Caste Pod: a Crossover episode with Ajantha Subramanian

In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's natality principle (that new things are always and should always be being born, each one unique and endowed with limitless potential) we at RTB love it when a new podcast appears. Especially one as thoughtful and original as The Caste Pod [https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/up-partners/the-caste-pod], which assembles scholars and activists to make sense of what caste is, how it's experienced and how it has travelled globally. Join us to discuss and share an extended excerpt is its widely published (check out her earlier books!) founder Ajantha Subramanian [https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/ajantha-subramanian], Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, and producer (with Lori Allen) of the “Violent Majorities” [https://recallthisbook.org/category/violent-majorities-indian-and-israeli-ethnonationalism/] series here at RTB. John and Ajantha delve into the founding of the podcast, and then enter into the business end of the series, which is to explore the complex interplay between caste, race and class as organizing features of economic inequality and its corresponding features of cultural discrimination and oppression. Ajantha's extended conversation with Prachi and Ram of Savera, [https://www.wearesavera.org/press/] a multiracial, interfaith, anti-caste coalition of Indian Americans from The Caste Pod episode 10  [https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-diasporic-hindu-right-with-savera]lays bare its premise: to put scholars and activists into conversation and opens a space engineered for each to learn form the other. Before introducing the Savera excerpt, Ajantha frames the topic by way of Isabel Wilkerson's influential (if problematic) book Caste and its neglect of class and economic issues, and also the case against Cisco for caste discrimination in California  [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_discrimination_in_the_United_States]that in significant ways internationalized the fight around caste's role in perpetuating economic and political inequity. Listen and Read [https://recallthisbook.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/175-transcript-caste-pod-crossover-w-ajantha-7.26.pdf] Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory]

Heidegger in Ruins

Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it. In Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780300233186], Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised. Join YIVO for a discussion with Wolin about this book led by YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent. This book talk originally took place on September 20, 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory]

Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach, "Freedom to Know: Creating Community with Ambedkar, Du Bois, Iqbal, Ramabai and Tagore" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

Freedom to Know: Creating Community with Ambedkar, Du Bois, Iqbal, Ramabai and Tagore [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781399550536] (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) asks how a (world) community can be created to allow structural minorities equitable access to intellectual and material resources * Draws on a range of primary sources * Brings the work of W.E.B. Du Bois into conversation with his Indian contemporaries * Adds a novel historical perspective to recent scholarship on critical social epistemology * Diversifies current ways of doing Indian philosophy Abstract: In this book, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach studies how Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956), W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Mohammed Iqbal (1877-1938), Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) diagnose the epistemic oppression they perceive and experience, their analysis of the coloniality of being as its cause, and their proposals to counter it. Kirloskar-Steinbach explores how these voices seek to co-create a space in which they can experience what it means to be free from the conceptual domination of academic frameworks, relish that freedom with their collaborators and, in the equal participation that that space affords, develop open-ended concepts that help them to resist the coloniality of being. Jessica Zu's personal reflection: This book models for readers and scholars alike on how to practice "hermeneutical democracy." The notion of hermeneutical philosophy resonates strongly with Artruso Escobar's philosophy of "pluri-verse" instead of Eurocentric metaphysics of "uni-verse", Roger Ames's "zeotology" or philosophy of the living in Chinese traditions, and Brook Ziporyn's mystical atheism against the dominant paradigm of "nous as arché". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory]