New Books in Critical Theory

Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (U Virginia Press, 2026) examines the epistemological adjustments that take place when we make water the source and medium for thinking about the world. Eschewing metaphorical readings of rivers, seas, and oceans, it brings together leading voices from across the social sciences and the humanities to argue rather for a distinct focus on materiality, engaging posthumanism, biotheory, and other cutting-edge theoretical approaches.
From the Caribbean Sea to the Indian Ocean, this rich collection is inhabited by migrants, port cities, and coral reefs. It explores the fruitful potential of water for literary, anthropological, and ethical studies, bringing both cohesive transdisciplinarity and fresh comparative perspectives to hydro-criticism. Taken together, the wide range of critical interpretative practices constitutes a signal contribution to the blue humanities.
Guest yasser elhariry is Associate Professor of French Studies and Chair of the Department of French & Italian Studies at Dartmouth College, where he is affiliated with the Programs in Comparative Literature, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. He is the author of This Book Is Full of Holes: Literary Bodies & the Invention of an Idiom and Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation & the Postfrancophone Lyric. He has published dozens of essays on Arabic and French lyric, translation, and postcolonialism. Along with Water Logics, he is coeditor most recently of Literature as Sound Studies, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean, Abdelkébir Khatibi: Literature & Theory, and The Postlingual Turn.
Guest Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University where she also holds affiliations with the Environmental Studies Program and the Middle East and North African Studies program, which she founded in 2022. Talbayev recently joined the faculty advisory board for the newly established Tulane Global Humanities Center. She concurrently serves as Professor Extraordinarius at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and as a member of the advisory board for the Center for Francophone Research at the University of Leipzig. She is the long-time Editor of Expressions maghrébines and a co-editor of the “Passagen” book series at Georg Olms Verlag (Germany). Talbayev is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean with Fordham UP and the co-editor of several edited collections; in addition to Water Logics and Rethinking Hospitality in the Mediterranean (both with our other guest today) these include a roundtable entitled “Ecocritical Terrains: Rethinking Tamazghan and Middle Eastern Environments” published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 2025.
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. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press.

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This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this book will take readers through a number of disparate topics, from the recent Disney remake of The Little Mermaid to experiments with psychedelics to the bizarre meanings one might find at its end. Uniting it all though is an unapologetically anticapitalist and utopian feminism, one that sees in various examples and experiences of femme glimpses both of the contradictions of our present moment and brief glimmers of what an emancipated world might look like.
Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer, with work appearing in a number of outlets including London Review of Books, The Drift and e-flux. Her previous books are Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now.

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This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this book will take readers through a number of disparate topics, from the recent Disney remake of The Little Mermaid to experiments with psychedelics to the bizarre meanings one might find at its end. Uniting it all though is an unapologetically anticapitalist and utopian feminism, one that sees in various examples and experiences of femme glimpses both of the contradictions of our present moment and brief glimmers of what an emancipated world might look like.
Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer, with work appearing in a number of outlets including London Review of Books, The Drift and e-flux. Her previous books are Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now.

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From the inside flap:
“
In this lucid and inventive work, Ian Buchanan argues that the pivotal concepts ‘assemblage’ and ‘affect,’ which were separated at birth, need to be reunited. Indeed, it is only by bringing them back together that we can fully understand their meaning. of Assemblage Theory and Affect (Bloomsbury, 2026) proposes three agenda-setting arguments:

1. Affect is a function of desire—its powers are the powers we attribute to desire. As such, like desire it should be considered a psychical agency. The assemblage, the body without organs and the abstract machine are all components of this psychical agency.
2. Affect is a capacitating power—it empowers us to meet life. Affect is not the measure of our response to a given stimulus, it is rather the capacity we have to respond to a stimulus in the way that we do. This is the essential argument of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic project which is a kind of survivor’s guide to late capitalism.
3. The capacitating power of affect depends upon the combinations of bodies without organs and abstract machines that we have been able to put together by means of the assemblages available to us. This is what Deleuze means by an ethics of desire.
”
Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University
nathan.smith@yale.edu

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Humiliation pervades our politics, from images of stripped Palestinian men in Gaza to mocking chants at MAGA rallies. It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks through bodies as well as words, and is expressed by those with too much power as well as by those with too little. In Driven to Their Knees, Roxanne Euben takes readers from conflicts in the Arabic-speaking world to America’s divided public square, advancing a theory of humiliation rooted in the ways people articulate and enact it. Euben analyzes some of the most conspicuous yet least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources ranging from Qurʾānic commentary by Islamists to videos, poetry, songs, and tweets from the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics (Princeton UP, 2025) reveals what the language of humiliation says—and also how it works. This groundbreaking book shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power, and the way it converts relations of power into crises of virility. Humiliation rhetoric defines both the humiliated and the humiliator and issues an urgent call for a remedy in the viscerally charged language of emasculation. For Donald Trump and Usama bin Laden alike, this means driving their enemy to his knees for all to see, and then boasting about it to compound the degradation. But for others, humiliation galvanizes their struggle to “stand erect,” uniting them in a refusal to be bowed low. Humiliation is not just about power but is itself a powerful language that does far more than reflect contemporary politics. The language of humiliation remakes the very world in which we live.
Roxanne L. Euben is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge; Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism; and (with Muhammad Qasim Zaman) Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (all Princeton).
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: here

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