New Books in Critical Theory

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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Born Again: Romanticism and Fundamentalism (U Toronto Press, 2025) examines the deep historical roots of fundamentalism in Protestantism and the imaginative traditions of Romantic literature. It explores how the resurgence of fundamentalist thought within “born again” Christianity seeks to repress the trauma of modernity through the belief that the world must be radically transformed to align with a divine standard.
By analysing the logic of this repression, the book reveals an alternative vision: a “revivalist rebirth” that offers a new ethical imperative to creatively shape the world in collaboration with others. Thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Percy Shelley, and Friedrich Schlegel are central to the analysis, as are the literary works Faust and Frankenstein. Jeffrey Champlin illustrates how a revivalist imagination challenges blind faith, presenting figures of life reawakened to conscious moral and political engagement. Engaging with Arendt’s politics of natality and Derrida’s ethics of survival, Born Again offers pathways to reimagine a world that confronts the profound losses fueling fundamentalist ideologies, making it a timely and thought-provoking exploration for contemporary readers.
Jeffrey Champlin is Director of the Learning Commons and Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College Berlin. His research emphasizes connections between literature and political theory.
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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Many Americans have a constant dread of impending doom. Glued to the screens of our computers and smartphones, we sense that some total catastrophe is just around the corner. But what if our anxiety stems from an event that’s already completely destroyed an old world? What if the real cataclysm was the introduction of those computers and smartphones, and our current political, cultural, and social crisis is just our way of merely dealing with the fallout?
So argues the political theorist James Poulos, who is my guest in Episode 7 of Season 6 on Madison’s Notes. Having earned his PhD in government at Georgetown University, he was a founding editor of The American Mind, Return, and Frontier, where he is currently editorial director. The author of The Art of Being Free (2017), Human, Forever (2021), I Know This Sounds Crazy (2024), and an upcoming book called, Golden Age Problems, he recently wrote a Palladium Magazine essay called, “The Dostoevskian Moment,” which we use along with Human, Forever to discuss the digital technology crisis.
Along the way we discuss media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Jean Beaudrillard, the American political tradition, post-Cold-War civilizational states, cryptocurrency and AI, digital sovereignty, the modern camps fighting over technology among effective altruists, vitalists, gnostics and post-humanists, conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy, the Pink Police State, why Mars colonies are safer for humanity than Lunar ones, and the genius of David Lynch.
Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes. Please share and enjoy.

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