Update: For my last words on Dr. Shenvi’s work, please see: “Critical Theory, Dr. Levinson, Dr. Shenvi, and Evangelicalism: Final Thoughts”

In articles, lectures, and interviews past, Dr. Neil Shenvi has attempted to answer questions like, “What is critical theory?” (HERE), arguing it is a “larger” discipline containing “Post-Colonial Studies, Queer Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Critical Race Theory” (HERE), “foundational” to many fields like “Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Feminist Studies, Anthropology, Literary Criticism” (HERE), the source of phrases like “‘cisgender,’ ‘intersectionality,’ ‘heteronormativity,’ ‘centering,’ and ‘white fragility’” (HERE), and is often called “‘identity politics’, ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘intersectionality’” (HERE)—a discipline which he recognizes “originated with the Frankfurt school in the 1930s but has evolved considerably since then” (HERE), and includes such scholars as Bradley Levinson, Robin DiAngelo, Ozlem Sensoy, Stephanie Wildman, Adrienne David, Jean Stefancic, Richard Delgado, Beverley Tatum, Maurianne Adams, Peggy McIntosh, and many others (HERE and HERE). In nearly every case, he presents his “core tenets of contemporary critical theory” (or similar) in answer to, “What is critical theory?”

But after much criticism, he has circumscribed his claims to what he calls specifically “contemporary critical theory“—a more narrow “critical theory” (and a fabrication, to my lights) represented by a more narrow group of scholars of his choosing, which, curiously, he says can also be called “‘critical social justice’ or ‘critical race theory,’” (HERE) . See, for example:

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