New Books in Critical Theory

In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, "How does it feel to be a problem?"
In this profound response to that question, Zahi Zalloua endeavours to think through the shared Black and Palestinian experience of being racialized as a problem. Zalloua argues that today's anti-Blackness is not a lingering feature of a regrettable past that only occasionally manifests its ugly face. Rather, anti-Blackness permeates white civil society. Black being stands for the anti-human, its being is barred and degraded. And while Black being denotes criminality, Palestinian being denotes terrorism – a problematic being produced by Orientalism and used to legitimize oppression. Both the Black and Palestinian are framed as existential threats that undermine the very structures of white and Zionist dominance.

To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian (Bloomsbury, 2026) provides a searing critique of such assumptions, arguing that Blacks and Palestinians do exist as a problem, but a different problem than the one dictated by the petrifying white and settler gaze. They exist as a threat because the mechanisms of structural racism make them so. In order for racism to thrive, they must be othered in the profoundest sense. In asking how a politics can be constructed in the face of this hegemony, Zalloua constructs a model of solidarity that places Black lives and Palestinian liberation at the forefront of the anti-racist struggle
Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA, and Editor of The Comparatist. His most recent publications include To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian, Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance, The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment; and Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality.
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.

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What is the basis of English national identity? How has this changed over time, and what is its future? Tracing the history of English identity over more than 2,000 years, Think of England: Nation, People, and Race in the English Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2026) explores how being English has been understood as belonging to a nation, a people, or a race. Paul Kléber Monod examines the ancient and medieval inventions of a British and ethnic Anglo-Saxon identity, before documenting the violent creation of an English ethnic state within Britain, and the later extension of that imperial power into the wider world. Monod analyses the persistence of a specifically English language of cultural identity after 1707 and the revival of English racial identity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, highlighting the crucial role of imperial expansion and the recurring myth of “little England” pitted against larger enemies. Turning to the revival of English identity in the twenty-first century, this study raises probing questions about the resurgence and future of a divisive concept.
Paul Kléber Monod is a Canadian-born academic historian specializing in Jacobitism and British history in the 17th and 18th centuries. Since 1984 he has taught at Middlebury College, Vermont, where he is now A. Barton Hepburn Professor of History, and he is the author of a number of books and articles dealing with his period.
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.

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A powerful, unsettling, and unflinching exploration that forces readers to confront lynching as a devastating legacy of white childhood conditioning, and to reckon with the corrupting force of a system that trained children to become its willing executioners, Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children with Stacey Patton (Beacon Press, 2026) examines how the lynching of Black children became not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American racial violence. Drawing on meticulous archival research and vivid narrative storytelling, Strung Up traces how white supremacy trained itself socially, culturally, and psychologically to tolerate and ritualize the destruction of Black childhood, including the unborn.

Nationally recognized child advocate Dr. Stacey Patton locates the roots of this violence not solely in the United States, but in Europe’s long history of anti-child brutality. She reveals how centuries of public executions, corporal punishment, religious spectacle, and sanctioned cruelty exposed white children to extreme violence early and often. This violence, she argues, conditioned them to associate pain, domination, and death with moral order.

Patton traces this desensitization across the Atlantic where white children raised within these traditions became adults primed to reproduce racial terror, transforming inherited practices of child cruelty into instruments of white supremacy in the post-emancipation United States.

Blending history with developmental psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and research on adverse childhood experiences, Strung Up shows how violence is not only taught, but biologically and psychologically embedded across generations. Patton demonstrates how racial terror functioned as a system of socialization that shaped perception, behavior, and moral reasoning long before it produced the mob, the rope, or the fire.
Dr. Stacey Patton is a research associate at the Institute for Urban Research, an award-winning journalist, and a nationally recognized child advocate whose research focuses on the intersections of race and childhood. She is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday: A Memoir (Simon and Schuster) and Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America (Beacon Press). Her reporting on issues of child welfare, race relations, and higher education has appeared in multiple outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC News, Al Jazeera and the Chronicle of Higher Education. You can find her on Facebook and Substack.
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The Real Pain of Punishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice (Cambridge UP, 2026) highlights the concept of 'belonging' as an unprecedented lens for critically interrogating the legitimacy of incarceration across penal theory, sentencing practice, and human rights frameworks. The chapters chart pathways for bridging the gap between the normative idea of punishment and the stark realities of prison life. The final chapter, written with scholars currently and formerly incarcerated in a New York State facility, reflects on how embracing belonging within penal approaches can inform responses to harm grounded in humanization, proximity, empowerment, and collaboration. With this chapter and more, the book, advances a call for deeper epistemic dialogue within legal discourse on crime, punishment, and justice.

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Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order?
In Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape International Order (Columbia UP, 2026) Sasikumar Sundaram provides a bold new theory of rhetoric as power politics, demonstrating how non-Western states challenge their silencing within the Western-led international order. He argues that, in the deeply hierarchical international system, states in the lower rungs resort to rhetorical performances in order to be heard. Through anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetorical statecraft, states such as India, Brazil, and China seek to expose and exploit the contradictions in the legitimating principles, norms, and rules of the international system—and, in so doing, pursue and exercise power. Today, as Russia, Europe, and even the United States engage in anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric, Sundaram shows why lessons from the non-Western world are crucial to recognizing the dynamics of power politics and global disorder. A bracing challenge to established theories of power in international relations, Rhetorical Powers underscores the need to address enduring forms of silencing within the international order.
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