127* Helena De Bres on Life-Writing (JP, EF)

How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories–how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Discussing autofiction by Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, John and Elizabeth begin to understand that the line between real-life fact, memory, and fiction is not quite as sharp as we had thought.

“[Memoirs] leave out the person to whom thing happened, The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being So they say ‘this is what happened’ but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened.”

Virginia Woolf, “Sketch of the Past”

George_Charles_Beresford_-_Virginia_Woolf_in_1902_-_Restoration.jpg

Joining Recall This Book for this conversation is philosopher Helena De Bres, author of Artful Truths (2021), How to be Multiple (2023) and before that a series of influential articles including “The Many, not the Few: Pluralism about Global Distributive Justice”, “Justice in Transnational Governance”, “What’s Special About the State?” “Local Food: The Moral Case”  and “Narrative and Meaning in Life”.  (Her website contains links to her many fine articles for fellow philosophers and for the general public).  She has recently  begun to work on moral philosophy, especially the question of what makes a life meaningful, and on philosophy of art.

John ranks his favorite anthropologists, while Elizabeth wonders whether autofiction necessarily takes on the affect of an academic department meeting–and what that affect has to do with Kazuo Ishiguro.

Southease_River_Ouse_north
Woolf: “The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river.” (pictured: the River Ouse, near Southease, where Woolf lived….and died)

Discussed in this episode:

“A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf

“Finding Innocence and Experience: Voices in Memoir,” Sue William Silverman

The Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk

My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard

How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life, Sheila Heti

An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro

The Moth

The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Renato Rosaldo

Memoir: An Introduction, G. Thomas Couser

The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell

Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Alex Woloch

Listen and Read Here

126 E.G. Condé / Steve Gonzalez on Hurricanes, Fiction, and Speculative Ethnography (EF)

Sordidez, by E.G. Condé, Stelliform Press, 2023

In this episode, Elizabeth talks with Steven Gonzalez, anthropologist and author of speculative fiction under the pen name E.G. Condé. They discuss the entanglement of politics, Taíno animism, and weather events in the form of a hurricane named Teddy. Steve describes the suffusion of sound he has experienced in Puerto Rico and the soundlessness at the heart of hurricanes, and tells us about his academic work on data centers, and a collaborative speculative film that imagines a world without clouds.

Steve and Elizabeth reflect on current shifts within anthropology that are opening the discipline to other modes of expression, including speculative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, in the tradition of Ursula K. Leguin (the subject of a recent episode and of John’s recent book Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea: My Reading) and of Arkady Martine, Byzantine historian and author of A Memory called Empire, and A Desolation Called Peace. As her Recallable Book, Elizabeth offers an anthropological space opera, The Expanse.

Mentioned in the episode:

“World without Clouds” by Jia Hui Lee, Luísa Reis Castro, Julianne Yip, Steven Gonzalez, and Gabrielle Robbins.

Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City by Vera S. Candiani.

Haraway, Donna. “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective 1.” In Women, science, and technology, pp. 455-472. Routledge, 2013.

Marcus, George E. “On the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now: Notes on a contemporary anxiety in the making of ethnography.” Cross Cultural Poetics 12, no. 12 (2003): 7-20.

Read and Listen to the episode here.

125*David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld

In Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023)

“I feel the feathers softly gather upon

My shoulders and my arms, becoming wings.

Melodious bird I’ll fly above the moaning

Bosphorus, more glorious than Icarus,

 I’ll coast along above the coast of Sidra

 And over the fabled far north Hyperborean steppes.”

— from “To Maecenas”, The Odes of Horace, II: 20.

Their tongues are ashes when they’d speak to us.

David Ferry, “Resemblance”

The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way.

In conversation with Elizabeth for this episode of Recall this Book, originally broadcast back in 2021, poets Roger Reeves and David Ferry join the procession through the underworld, each one leading the other. They talk about David’s poem Resemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave he just visited, eating in the corner of a small New Jersey restaurant and “listening to a conversation/With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back/From where they went to when they went away?”

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks–at the Diner, 1942.

Roger reads “Grendel’s Mother,” in which the worlds of Grendel and Orpheus and George Floyd coexist but do not resemble each other, and where Grendel’s mother hears her dying son and refuses the heaven he might be called to, since entering it means he’d have to die.

Henry Justice Ford, ‘Grendel’s Mother Drags Beowulf to the Bottom Of The Lake’, 1899

So furious. So furious, I was,

When my son called to me, called me out

Of heaven to come to the crag and corner store

Where it was that he was dying, “Mama,

I can’t breathe;” even now I hear it—

Roger Reeves, “Grendel’s Mother”

Mentioned in this episode

David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press

Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by David Ferry, University of Chicago Press

Horace, The Odes of Horace, translated by David Ferry, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.

Roger Reeves, King Me, Copper Canyon Press

Roger Reeves, Best Barbarian, W.W. Norton Press

Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric , Harvard University Press.

Read transcript of the episode here.

Listen to the episode here.

124 The Reeducation of Race with Sonali Thakkar (JP)

NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race, begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word “equality” get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, to be replaced by “educability, plasticity”? She and John sit down to discuss how that switcheroo allowed for a putative anti-racism that nonetheless preserved a sotto voce concept of race.

They discuss the founding years of UNESCO and how it came to be that Jews were defined as the most plastic of races, and “Blackness” came to be seen as a stubbornly un-plastic category. The discussion ranges to include entwinement and interconnectedness, and Edward Said’s notion of the “contrapuntal” analysis of the mutual implication of seemingly unrelated historical developments. Sonali’s “Recallable Book” shines a spotlight on Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism–revised in 1955 to reflect ongoing debates about race and plasticity.

Mentioned in the episode:

Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (1977) 

Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education” (1954) in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought  ( “the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming” ) 

Franz Boas, “Commencement Address at Atlanta University,” May 31, 1906 (this is where he says the bit about “the line of cleavage” 

Franz Boas, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, Final Report, immigration COmmission (1911) 

W.E.B. Du Bois, “Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace,” (1945) 

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) 

Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History“

Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination 

IHRA definition of Antisemitism.

Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (1952) 

Natasha Levinson, “The Paradox of Natality: Teaching in the Midst of Belatedness,” in Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing our Common World, ed. by Mordechai Gordon (2001) 

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (on the contrapuntal) 

Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law 

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 1950 Statement on Race 

UNESCO, 1951 Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences 

Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (on the methodological nationalism of postcolonial studies and new approaches that challenge it) 

Recallable books:

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950, 1955 rev. ed.) 

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)

Read and Listen to the episode here.

123* Sheila Heti speaks about awe with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)

In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice.

Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Color (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be” ) as well as the protagonist’s temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.”

If you enjoyed this Novel Dialogue crossover conversation, you might also check out earlier ones with Joshua Cohen, Charles Yu, Caryl Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner and Orhan Pamuk.

Works by Sheila Heti mentioned in the episode

Pure Colour
How Should a Person Be?
Alphabetical Diaries
Ticknor
We Need a Horse (children’s book)
The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman)

Also mentioned:
Oulipo Group
Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard
Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star)
Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House 
William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble.

Listen to the episode here

Transcript

 

122 The Culture Trap, with sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP)

In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of race, ethnicity, and education, and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores “ethnic expectations” for Caribbean schoolchildren in New York and London. His work starts with the basic puzzle that while black Caribbean schoolchildren in New York are often considered as “high-achieving,” in London, they have been conversely thought to be “chronically underachieving.” Yet in each case the main cause — of high achievement in New York and low achievement in London — is said to be cultural. We discuss the concept of ethnic expectations and the ways it can have negative effects even when the expectations themselves are positive, the dense intertwining of race, class, nation, colonial status, and gender, and the travels of the concept of culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Mentioned in the episode:

The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report [the Sewell Report] (2021)

The Moynihan Report (1965)

Georg Lukacs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (1923)

Diane Reay, “What Would a Socially Just Educational System Look Like?” (2012)

Bernard Coard, How the Caribbean Child is made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System

Steve McQueen, Small Axe, “Education,” (2020)

Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019)

B. Brian Forster, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020)

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Adieu Culture: A New Duty Arises” (2003)

David Simon’s TV show The Wire (and also Lean on Me, and To Sir, with Love and with major props from Derron, Top Boy)

Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle (1994)

Listen and Read

121* Ajantha Subramanian on the Caste of Merit (EF,JP)

Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss  The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India. It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajantha talked to JP and EF about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and class, and race) privilege–in India, yes, but also in American and other meritocratic democracies as well.

The wide-ranging discussion explored how inequality gets reproduced, passed on and justified. Caste–often framed as a fundamentally “Eastern” form of difference–not only seems to have a lot in common with race, but also shares a history through colonial, plantation-based capitalism. This may explain some of the ways “merit” has also made race (and class) disparities invisible in the United States. This helps explain ways in which dominant groups excoriate the “identity politics” of those seeking greater access to privileged domains, and claim their own independence from “ascriptive” identities–while silently relying on the privilege and other hidden advantages of particular racial or caste-based forms of belonging.

The companion text for this episode—Privilege by Shamus Khan–addresses very similar issues in the elite high school where he was a student, teacher and sociological researcher, St. Paul’s School. Khan traces a shift over the past decades (we argued a bit about the time frame) from a conception of privilege defined by maintaining boundaries, to one based on the privileged person’s capacity to move with ease through all social contexts.

Discussed in this episode:

Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India

Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor : How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students 

Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test

John Carson, The Measure of Merit

Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn

Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions

Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India

Listen and Read Here

120 Violent Majorities Roundup (Ajantha, Lori, JP)

Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2)ethnonationalism. Along with John they discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the “slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste” and Natasha Roth-Rowland‘s description of the “territorial maximalism” that has been central to Zionism. The role of overseas communities loomed large, as did the roots of ethnonationalism in the fascism of the 1920s, which survived, transmuted or merely masked over the subsequent bloody century, as other ideologies (Communism and perhaps cosmopolitan liberalism among them) waxed before waning.

Ajantha Subramanian

The conversation also examines the current-day shared playbook of the long-distance far-right ideologies of Zionism and Hindutva. And it concludes with a reflection on the suitability of the term fascism to describe such organizations and their historical forebears as well as other contemporary movements.

Lori Allen

Mentioned in the episode:

Snigdha Poonam’s recent book Dreamers investigates the “angry young men” engaged in Hindutvite attacks, including  those who are economically and educationally marginalized, as well as those who resent what they see as their wrongful decline from privilege.

Yuval Abraham’s “The IDF unit turning ‘Hilltop Youth” Settlers into Soldiers” is an investigation into how Israeli settlers from violent outposts are being inducted into a new military unit responsible for severe abuses of Palestinians across the West Bank. (However, in describing Israel’s “hilltop youth” as coming from “lower rungs,” Lori feels she may have overstated their marginalization. Although one report describes Israel’s hilltop youth as young men recruited from unstable homes, others point to the Israeli state’s unwillingness to stop them.)

Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky’s Children, on the rise of the transnational youth movement, Betar. A correction: Jabotinsky was from Odessa (modern Ukraine), but much of his support was in Poland.

RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) as the first institutionalization of the Hindutva project and a living remnant of 1920s fascism.

The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) arises as the political wing of the RSS and comes to prominence around the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque.

Lori’s interview with Zachary Lockman in MERIP about historical changes in American Jewish attitudes towards Zionism.

Ajantha refers to the argument in Natasha Roth-Rowland’s recent dissertation (“‘Not One Inch of Retreat’: The Transnational Jewish Far Right, 1929-1996”), that the turn towards Zionism is linked in the US with a turn away from Communism as another transnational movement, waning as Zionism was waxing.

Lori mentions the grim effects of the redefinition of anti-Semitism put forward in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA), one response to which is the 2020 Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.

Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands  discusses Zionist support of Hindutva activism and lobbying in the US. One group that has modelled its congressional activism on that of the American Jewish Committee and AIPAC is the Hindu American Foundation.

Ajantha mentions Hindutvites repurposing their online Islamophobia in support of Israel after Hamas’s October 7th military operation.

Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism” discusses radical Black thinkers who have argued that racial slavery was a form of American fascism.

Robert Paxton’s “The Five Stages of Fascism” makes the case that the KKK may be the earliest fascist organization.

Recallable Books

Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingard, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism.

Joshua Cohen The Netanyahus (John spoke with Cohen about the novel in Recall This Book 110)

Susan Bayly’s Saints, Goddesses and Kings.

Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi’s India.

Listen to and Read the episode here.

119 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2: Natasha Roth-Rowland (with Lori, Ajantha)

“What is mainstream shifts to the right every generation.”

Natasha Roth-Rowland is a writer and researcher at Diaspora Alliance, a former editor at +972 Magazine,  and an expert on the Jewish far right. She joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian midway through a three-part RTB series, “Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism.” Listen to episode 1 here.

The three discuss the transnational formation of the Jewish far right over the 20th and 21st centuries, the gradual movement of far right actors into the heart of the Israeli state, and the shared investment in territorial maximalism, racial supremacy, and natalism across the Zionist ideological spectrum.

Coming up next in RTB 120: Lori and Ajantha sit down with John to synthesize what Murli and Natasha had to say about Ethnonationalism in Indian and in Israel.

Mentioned in the episode

Ben Shitrit, Lihi. Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

El-Or, Tamar, and Gideon Aran. “Giving Birth to a Settlement: Maternal Thinking and Political Action of Jewish Women on the West Bank.” Gender and Society 9, no. 1 (February 1995): 60-78.

Neuman, Tamara. “Maternal ‘Anti-Politics’ in the Formation of Hebron’s Jewish Enclave.”

Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 51-70.

Neuman, Tamara. Settling Hebron: Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Krampf, Arie. The Israeli Path to Neoliberalism: The State, Continuity, and Change. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.

Read and Listen here.

 

118 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 1: Balmurli Natrajan (with Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian)

“The Slippery Slope to a Multiculturalism of Caste”

Professor Balmurli Natrajan has long studied questions of caste, nationalism and fascism in the Indian context: his many works include a 2011 book, The Culturalization of Caste in India. He joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian to kick off a three-part RTB series, “Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism.”

The three discuss the ideological bases of Indian ethnonationalism, including its historical links to European fascism, the role of caste as both a conduit and impediment to suturing a Hindu majority, the overlaps and differences between the mobilization work of the Hindu Right in India and the U.S., and possibilities for countering India’s slide towards fascism. 

Mentioned in the episode

B. R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste, Verso, 2014 [1936].
Zaheer Baber, “Religious nationalism, violence and the Hindutva movement in India,” Dialectical Anthropology 25(1): 61–76, 2000.
Meera Nanda, The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu, NYU Press, 2011.
Christophe Jaffrelot on Radikaal podcast, August 28, 2022.
Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, Columbia University Press, 1996.
Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021.
Jairus Banaji, “Fascism as a Mass-Movement: Translator’s Introduction,” Historical Materialism 20.1, 2012: 133-143.
Arthur Rosenberg, “Fascism as a Mass Movement,”  Historical Materialism 20.1 (2012) [1934]: 144-189.
Stuart Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show,” Marxism Today, January 1979.
Snigdha Poonam, Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing the World, Harvard University Press, 2018.
Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton University Press, 2001. (edited) 

Read and Listen to the episode here

117* Laurence Ralph Reckons With Police Violence (EF, JP)

In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John spoke back in 2020 with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. The book relates the decades-long history in which hundreds of people (mostly Black men) were tortured by the Chicago Police. Fascinatingly, it is framed as a series of open letters that explore the layers of silence and complicity that enabled torture and the activist movements that have helped to uncover this history and implement forms of collective redress and repair. Elizabeth and John ask Laurence about that genre choice, and he unpacks his thinking about responsibility, witnessing, trauma and channels of activism. Arendt’s “banality of evil” briefly surfaces.

“People are always reckoning. People are always trying, no matter how overwhelming the odds may be, people are always trying to fight back.”

Mentioned in this episode:

Laurence Ralph, Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Mahomedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa)

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, “banality of evil”; not optimism but hopefulness)

Recallable …..Stuff

Frederick Douglas, A Speech given at the Unveiling……

Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (here introduced by Angela Davis)

Listen to the episode here.

Read it here

116 “We are all latecomers”: Martin Puchner’s Culture (JP, EF)

RTB listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Anthology,  and author of many prizewinning books) from that fabulous RTB episode about his “deep history” of literature and literacy, The Written World.  And you know his feelings about P. G. Wodehouse from his Books in Dark Times confessions.

Today you get to hear his views on culture as mediation and translation, all the way down. His utterly fascinating new book, Culture: The Story of Us from Cave Art to K Pop argues that mediators, translators and transmitters are not just essential supplements, they are the whole kit and kaboodle—it is borrowing and appropriation all the way down.

Puchner loyally reps Recall this Book in Iraq

Cave art: Chauvet cave “Meaning rather than utility”

(cf Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams)

Recovery of Gilgamesh retold in David Damrosch’s The Buried Book)

David Ferry translation of Gilgamesh

John Guillory’s version of multiple forms of cultural transmission: “Monuments and Documents“

William Blake, “Drive your cart and plough over the bones of the dead“

Alex Ross writes eloquently in his book The Rest Is Noise about music’s “pulverized modernity”; the revival of ancient culture in a reformulated, fragmented and reassembled from.

Creolization as distinctively Caribbean (cf Glissant’s notion of creolite )

Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death (cf also Vincent Brown on the syncretism and continuity in Carribean deathways, Reaper’s Garden)

“revenants of the past” as a way of understanding what scholars do: a phrase from Lorraine Daston’s Rules–and was extensively discussed in the RTB conversation with Daston.

Peter Brown Through the Eye of the Needle on monastic wealth and the rise of “mangerial bishops”–a topic that came up in his conversation with RTB.

John presses the non-cenobitic tradition of the hermit monk, but Martin insists that most Church tradition shares his preference for the cenobitic or communal monastic tradition –even on Mt Athos.

Recallable Books

Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture

Richard Price, First Time (the dad of Leah Price?)

Aphra Behn Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (1688)

Roberto Calasso (an Umberto Eco sidekick?) The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Read and Listen to the episode here.

115* Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the Formation (JP)


“My subject was not my inward self, but…the worlds within me.”

John spoke in 2020 with Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar. The topic? His marvelous new book about that grumpiest of Nobel laureates, V. S Naipaul’s Journeys. Krishnan sees the “Contrarian and unsentimental” Trinidad-born but globe-trotting novelist and essayist as early and brilliant at noticing the unevenness with which the blessings and curses of modernity were distributed in the era of decolonization. Centrally, Naipaul realized and reckoned with the always complex and messy question of the minority within postcolonial societies.

He talks with John about Naipaul’s early focus on postcolonial governments, and how unusual it was in the late 1950’s for colonial intellectuals to focus on “the discomfiting aspects of postcolonial life….and uneven consequences of the global transition into modernity.” Most generatively of all, Sanjay insists that the “troublesome aspect is what gives rise to what’s most positive in Naipaul.”

Photo of Sanjay Krishnan by Cydney Scott for Boston University Photography

Discussed in the Episode

Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country (2012)

George Lamming, e.g. (In the Castle of My Skin, 1953)

V. S. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira (1957)

Miguel Street (1959)

Area of Darkness (1964)

The Mimic Men (1967)

A Bend in the River (1979)

V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961)
V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State (1971)
Aya Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968)

Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” Nobel Acceptance Speech

Richard Wright, Native Son (1940)

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (1989 theoretical work on postcolonialism)

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)

Marlon James (eg. The Book of Night Women, 2009)

Beyonce, “Formation“

Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1966)

Willa Cather “Two Friends” in Obscure Destinies

Listen Here

Read here

114 John Guillory Professes Criticism (JP, Nick Dames)

John Guillory (NYU English author of the pathbreaking Cultural Capital) visits RTB to discuss Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022, Chicago).

He speaks with John and with Nick Dames, co-editor of Public Books,  Professor of Humanities at Columbia and most recently author of The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton 2023).  The gap between criticism and scholarship looms large, as does the utility of Panofsky‘s 1940 distinction between “monuments” and “documents.” they ask what sorts of cultural documents achieve aesthetic memorability, for good or for ill.

Mentioned in the episode

W. B Yeats, “Monuments of unageing intellect”; a line from “Sailing to Byzantium” (1933).

George Eliot, in Middlemarch (1871-2): “Would it not be rash to conclude that there was no passion behind those [Samuel Daniels] sonnets to Delia which strike us [nowadays] as the thin music of a mandolin?”

Hannah Arendt Lectures of Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982) on judgment, and how general categories can be brought to bear on particulars.

Willa Cather The Professors House (1925)

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (1954; John has a short “B-Side” appreciation in Public Books).

Elaine Hadley Living Liberalism

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

Alvin Gouldner , The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979)

Listen and Read here.

A warm thanks today to Naomi Cohen; with her graduation from Brandeis (hurrah!) she departs as our audio intern after two terrific years in the position. And an equally enthusiastic welcome to Khimaya Bagla as she takes up the reins.

113* David Cunningham, January 6th and Asymmetrical Policing (JP, EF)

Recall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, 2021, he came back for this conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Something Happening Here, 2004) studied the contrast between the FBI’s work in the 1960’s to wipe out left-wing and Black protests and its efforts to control and tame right-wing and white supremacist movements. That gives him a valuable perspective on the run-up to January 6th–and what may happen next.

“The FBI was seeking to eliminate left-wing threats….with the Klan…the overriding motive was to control…not to eliminate.”

Mentioned in the Episode

David Cunningham collaborated on this article about the “common pattern of underestimating the threat from right-wing extremists.”

Ulster Defence Association

“Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia” (Hunton and Williams 2017)

“Virginia’s Response to the Unite the Right Rally: After-Action Review” (International Association of Chiefs of Police, December 2017)

Listen to episode here.

Read episode here.


112 Earthsea, and other realms: Ursula Le Guin as social inactivist (EF, JP, [UKL])

To mark the publication of John’s book Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press, John and Elizabeth take to the airways to share their love of Le Guin’s “speculative anthropology,” gender politics, and goats.

And we share a delight we’ve been holding back for just this occasion, a series of clips from John’s interview with Le Guin in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, in 2015 (a longer print-only version appeared in Public Books). Since Ursula is no longer with us, having died in 2018, it’s especially poignant to listen to their conversation. Though in fact, the tone of their conversation isn’t sad at all, but friendly, generous, and ruminative.

Mentioned in the Episode

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea

Friedrich Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”

Ursula K. Le Guin, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie“

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Lloyd Alexander, Taran Wanderer (and the Chronicles of Prydain)

Judith Butler Gender Trouble

Angelica Gorodischer (esp. Le Guin’s translation of Kalpa Imperial)

Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching, tr. Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Bones of the Earth” in Tales from Earthsea

John Plotz, Time and the Tapestry

Listen to the episode here

Read episode here

111* Samuel R Delany, Nevèrÿon and beyond (JP)

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John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre.  Reading him means leaving Earth, but also returning to the heady days when Greenwich Village was as caught up in the arrival of Levi-Strauss and Derrida to America as it was in a gender and sexuality revolution.

RTB loves him especially  for his mind-bending Neveryon series: did you know that many consider his 1984 novella from that series, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” (set both inside the world of Neveryon and along Bleecker Street in NY) the first piece of fiction about AIDS in America?

He came to Wellesley’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities to talk about Afrofuturism, but also carved out two little chunks of time for this conversation.

john delany 2.19

On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public Books

Discussed in this episode:

The Neveryon Series, “Racism and Science Fiction,” Triton (also referred to as The Trouble on Triton), “Aye, and Gomorrah,” “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” Samuel R. Delany

In Milton Lumky Territory, Confessions of a Crap Artist, Mary and the Giant, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

“The Science Fiction of Roe vs. Wade,” Palmer Rampell

Library of America Volumes, Ursula K. Le Guin (Delany disses them!)

A Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject, William Wilson

I Will Fear No Evil and By His Bootstraps, Robert A. Heinlein

The Fifth Season Novels, N.K. Jemisin

More than Human and The Dreaming Jewels, Theodore Sturgeon

The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein

(episode transcript available here: Delany RTB 3.7.19 Transcript)

Listen to the episode here

110* Novel Dialogue: Joshua Cohen (JP, Eugene Sheppard)

In this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard  speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them?

Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi)  landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel.

Continue reading “110* Novel Dialogue: Joshua Cohen (JP, Eugene Sheppard)”

109* Recall This Buck with Thomas Piketty (JP, Adaner)

Is Thomas Piketty the world’s most famous economic historian ? A superstar enemy of plutocratic capitalism who wrote a pathbreaking bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century? Or simply a debonair and generous French intellectual happy to talk redistributive justice? Join this 2020 conversation with John and Adaner Usmani (star of RTB’s episode 44: Racism as idea, Racism as Power Relation) to find out.

Continue reading “109* Recall This Buck with Thomas Piketty (JP, Adaner)”

108* Desan on Making Money (Recall This Buck )

Our Recall this Buck series, back in 2020 and 2021, explored the history of money, ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. We began by focusing on the rise of capitalism, the Bank of England, and how an explosion of liquidity changed everything.

Chris Desan

We were lucky to do so, just before the Pandemic struck, with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School, who recently published Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014).  She is also managing editor of  JustMoney.org, a website that explores money as a critical site of governance. Desan’s research explores money as a legal and political project. Her approach opens economic orthodoxy to question by widening the focus on money as an instrument, to examine the institutions and agreements through which resources are mobilized and tracked, by means of money. In doing so, she shows that particular forms of money, and the markets within which they circulate, are neither natural or inevitable.

Continue reading “108* Desan on Making Money (Recall This Buck )”