Books

Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering

What happens when an idea born of genuine suffering is weaponized as a tool of social control? Traumatized is the story of how shell shock became PTSD, how Oprah turned pain into profit, and how 'authenticity' became the ultimate brand. It is a history of surveillance capitalism's greatest coup: convincing us that wounds define us and that accommodating each other's trauma is more important than challenging the powerful.

"In elegant, scorching, and completely unapologetic prose, Liu demonstrates how therapeutic models of selfhood have been weaponized as tools of class domination, leaving the left in a state of political crisis."- Jennifer Silva, author of Coming Up Short

Virtue Hoarders

Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.

"If a meaningful intellectual current does emerge from the wreckage of contemporary capitalism, it may well begin from the demystification of PMC liberal mores." - Conter

American Idyll

A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, American Idyll argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones.

"Catherine Liu offers a compelling polemic for liberalism—a dirty word for 1960s New Leftists and 1990s neoconservatives alike—and any book that annoys these two poles definitely has much going for it. Bringing her considerable knowledge of critical theory about film, literature, media, and philosophy to bear on this historical problem by linking trends within supposedly left/liberal humanities scholarship to the discourse of conservative punditry, American Idyll is nothing less than brilliant." - Paula Rabinowitz, author, Modernism, Inc.

Copying Machines

Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself. Exploring these anxieties and the efforts they prompted, this book opens a window on one of the most significant, if subtle, ideological battles waged on behalf of the human against the machine since the Enlightenment—one that continues in the wake of technological and conceptual progress today.

Oriental Girls Desire Romance

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance--now reprinted by Kaya Press--is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac.