Books by Timothy Brennan

This passionate book is a bracing critique of the critical self-indulgence that calls itself cosmopolitanism. Brennan traces his subject from Orwell to Kristeva, from "third world" writing to the Nobel Prize. A critical call to arms, the book strips the false and heedless from the new cosmopolitanism in order to revitalize the idea.

Intends to recover the notion of culture as a collective, hybrid and plural experience, in light of the political imperative that rules us. In bringing together some of the figures most closely associated with Said and his scholarship, this volume looks at Said, the literary critic and public intellectual, Palestine and Said's intellectual legacy.

Shows how the popular music of the Americas is an act of devotion to an African religious worldview that survived the ravages of slavery and found its way into the rituals of everyday listening. This book explores the challenge posed by Afro-Latin music to a world music system dominated by a few wealthy countries.

Taking stock of contemporary social, cultural, and political currents, Timothy Brennan explores key turning points in the recent history of American intellectual life. He contends that a certain social-democratic vision of politics has been banished from public discussion, leading to an unlikely convergence of the political right and the academic left and a deadening of critical opposition. Brennan challenges the conventional view that affiliations based on political belief, claims upon the state, or the public interest have been rendered obsolete by the march of events in the years before and after Reagan. Instead, he lays out a new path for a future infused with a sense of intellectual and political possibility.In highlighting the shift in America's intellectual culture, Brennan makes the case for seeing belief as an identity. As much as race or ethnicity, political belief, Brennan argues, is itself an identity-one that remains unrecognized and without legal protections while possessing its own distinctive culture. Brennan also champions the idea of cosmopolitanism and critiques those theorists who relegate the left to the status of postcolonial "e;other."e;Wars of Position documents how alternative views were chased from the public stage by strategic acts of censorship, including within supposedly dissident wings of the humanities. He explores how the humanities entered the cultural and political mainstream and settled into an awkward secular religion of the "e;middle way."e; In a series of interrelated chapters, Brennan considers narratives of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Clinton impeachment; reexamines Salman Rushdie's pre-fatwa writing to illuminate its radical social leanings; presents a startling new interpretation of Edward Said; looks at the fatal reception of Antonio Gramsci within postcolonial history and criticism; and offers a stinging critique of Hardt and Negri's Empire and the influence of Italian radicalism on contemporary cultural theory. Throughout the work, Brennan also draws on and critiques the ideas and influence of Heidegger, Lyotard, Kristeva, and other influential theorists.