Recommended Readings for Critical Theories

Of all the various types of critical theory, I identify most closely with cultural studies.

Some of My Favorite Books on Critical Theories

• Bringing It All Back Home: Essays On Cultural Studies, Lawrence Grossberg, 1997

• May ‘68 and Its Afterlives, Kristin Ross, 2002

• Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, Chantal Mouffe, 2013

• Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, 2001, 2^nd ed.

• The Modern Invention of Information, Ronald E. Day, 2001

• American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture, Shawn Michelle Smith, 1999

• The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism eds. Joseph Childers and Cary Hentzi, 1995

• Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, Arun Saldanha, 2007

Some of My Favorite Articles on Critical Theories

• “Connecting with the Cosmic: Arthur Russell, Rhizomatic Musicianship, and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92”, Tim Lawrence, 2007, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies

On top of being about disco and downtown NYC art music, this article made me stop judging Deleuze & Guattari based on their fanboys and instead appreciate how assemblage theory can help us avoid adopting Great Men approaches to history. Lawrence also writes superbly, even when harnessing academic language. And he’s considerate enough to have put this in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, an open access, peer-reviewed journal.

• “‘What Do We Want?’ ‘Materiality!’ ‘When Do We Want It?’ ‘Now!’”, Jonathan Sterne, 2014, Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society, eds. Tarleton Gillespie, Kirsten Foote and Pablo Boczkowski

Jonathan Sterne writes, thinks, and speaks wonderfully. Check out his repository as well as his blog. You’ll find some other great stuff like “Keyword: Journal”, “Pedagogy of the Job Market”, and “Communication as Techné”, not to mention an entire page stuffed full of advice for those venturing into academe. Can you imagine a world where all scholars and thinkers were routinely this generous?

• “Agent of Change: An Interview with bell hooks”, bell hooks, 1992, interviewed by Helen Tworkov for Tricycle

• “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies”, Stuart Hall, 1992, Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler

• “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction”, Emily Drabinski, 2013, The Library Quarterly

• “Library as Infrastructure”, Shannon Mattern, 2014, Places Journal

• “The Library Assemblage: Creative Institutions in an Information Society,” Natasha Gerolami, 2015, Journal of Documentation

• “The Half of Whiteness”, Shawn Michelle Smith, 2006, English Language Notes

• “The Body and the Archive”, Allan Sekula, 1986, October

• “Locating the Library in Institutional Oppression”, nina de jesus, 2014, In the Library with the Lead Pipe

• “A Critical Take on OER Practices: Interrogating Commercialization, Colonialism, and Content”, Sarah Crissinger, 2015, In the Library with the Lead Pipe

• “Cultural Studies: What’s In a Name? (One More Time)”, Lawrence Grossberg, 1995, anthologized in Bringing It All Back Home: Essays On Cultural Studies, Lawrence Grossberg, 1997

It’s unfortunate that this reading isn’t more widely accessible—although he does touch on a lot of similar topics in a few of the many articles he has on Academia.edu, which I feel vaguely dirty even linking to since it’s far from a substitute for an actual institutional repository.

Across this and some similar essays (“Wandering Audiences, Nomadic Critics,” “Cultural Studies and/in New Worlds,” “The Formations of Cultural Studies: An American in Birmingham,” “On the Political Responsibilities of Cultural Studies,” & “History, Politics, and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and cultural studies”)¹ Grossberg does a stellar job of showing how cultural studies has evolved from a group of scholars primarily from working class backgrounds interested in adult education & labor concerns to a more intentionally decolonial, feminist, and queer undertaking. He does a great job of explaining Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie, and other Cultural Studies touchstones, as well as showing how the cultural studies approach that he advocates for focuses on a materialist study of the effects of practices and how they are articulated, an approach that is simultaneously both anti-essentialist and not relativistic, basing a claim’s truthfulness on its ability to give the thinker purchase on effects in the world.

1. I also really like Grossberg’s “The Ideology of Communication: Post-Structuralism and the Limits of Communication,” which is on that non-IR site. It’s definitely not an introductory reading, but it’s a good one. ↩

Kudos

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