plotznik

149 “I have not Finished…” Rokhaya Diallo on being Black, Muslim, and frequently interrupted (Emilie Diouf, JP)

Emilie Diouf of Brandeis English, whose monograph on genocide and trauma is forthcoming, joins John to speak with the celebrated French journalist and activist Rokhaya Diallo. Diouf places Diallo within a transnational black intellectual tradition, founded in the interwar period in the Negritude movement; it was then that Paulette, Jeanne, and Anne Nardal’s literary salon became a meeting ground for African, Antillean, and African-American intellectuals, in the Parisian suburb of Clamart.

The three discuss the slowly changing racial climate in France and globally; how to counter ethnonationalism; as well as the currents of dissent or disdain that threaten to disrupt even leftwing political solidarity.

Mentioned in the Episode

Diallo has directed 8 documentaries among which her 2013 award winning film, Les Marches de la Liberté (Steps to Freedom) . She is also the author of many books, including most recently, La France tu l’aimes ou tu la fermes or France, Love it or Shut it, a collection of her major articles on the “struggle against oppression in France and globally.”

Ne reste pas à ta place, or Don’t try to fit in, (2016)

and forthcoming book Le dictionnaire amoureux du féminisme or A Feminist Lover’s Dictionary (Editions Plon, March 2025)

Les Indivisibles: humor watchdog organization. Parody ceremony Y’a Bon Awards given to the “most racist sentences” every year.

Rokhaya Diallo

Coordination des Femmes Noir

Awa Thiam, La Parole aux Négresses

Afrofeminism

2005 Clichy-sous-bois, a Paris banlieue, was the site of major unrest. Zyed Benna, 17, of Tunisian descent, and Bouna Traoré, 15, of Mauritanian descent, died tragically in a substation while trying to avoid detention.

The leading French TV station, TF1, made waves (and history) by hiring Harry Roselmack in 2016

Diallo’s own strong X/Twitter presence allows her to talk about being harassed—on Twitter/X itself!

and she has a podcast with Grace Ly, Kiffe Ta Race

Diallo’s film Les Marches de la Liberté 2013

From Paris to Ferguson ( De Paris à Ferguson : coupables d’être noirs) 2016

African Americans in Paris: James Baldwin and Josephine Baker in the 1930s, but also Angela Davis in the 1960s being perceived as an Algerian

Faiza Guene Just Like Tomorrow (Kif kif demain)

Read and Listen to the episode here.

148* Albion Lawrence: Scientists Cooperate while Humanists Ruminate (EF, JP)

Back in 2021, John and Elizabeth sat down with Brandeis string and quantum theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth into the question, “Why do scientists seem to do collaboration and teamwork better than other kinds of scholars and academics?”

The conversation ranges from the merits of collective biography to the influence of place and geographic location in scientific collaboration to mountaineering traditions in the sciences. As a Recallable Book, Elizabeth champions The People of Puerto Rico, an experiment in ethnography of a nation (in this case under colonial rule) from 1956, including a chapter by Robert Manners, founding chair of the Brandeis Department of Anthropology. Albion sings the praises of a collective biography of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, A Message to Our Folks. But John stays true to his Victorianist roots by praising the contrasting images of the withered humanist Casaubon and the dashing young scientist Lydgate in George Eliot’s own take on collective biography, Middlemarch.

First image taken of a black hole by a collaboration of scientists for the *Event Horizon Telescope* (EHT) project

Discussed in this episode:

Richard Rhodes Making of the Atomic Bomb

Ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite

James Gleick, The Information

Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Black Hole photographs win giant prize

Adam Jaffe, “Geographic Localization of Knowledge Spillovers as Evidenced by Patent Citations“

Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind

Julian Steward et al., The People of Puerto Rico

Paul Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks

Jenny Uglow, Lunar Men

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Listen to and Read the episode here.

146* Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early Christianity (JP)

Peter Brown‘s fascinating Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD chronicles the changing conceptions of wealth and treasure in late antiquity and the first centuries of Christianity. For our 2020 series in the rise of money (we also spoke to Thomas Piketty and Christine Desan) Brown related the emergence, in the 3rd and 4th century AD, of striking new ideas about charity and how to include the poor inside a religious community.

Brown explains how the very categories of “the wealthy” and “the poor” had to be invented in late Antiquity. Hence the importance of civic euergetism in the Greek and Roman worldview–i.e. benefaction and charity strictly confined to the good of the city.

145 Violent Majorities 2.3 Long-Distance Ethnonationalism Roundup (LA, AS, JP)

John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism. Looking back at their conversations with Peter Beinart on Zionism and Subir Sinha on Hindutva, Lori begins by asking whether Peter underestimates the material entanglements keeping Jewish American support for Israel in place. Ajantha wonders if a space has been opened up by Zionism’s more naked dependence on coercion and brute force. When John expresses puzzlement about the fervent ethnonationalism of minorities within a pluralistic society Lori and Ajantha point out that a sense of minority vulnerability may heighten the allures of long-distance ethnonationalism.

144 Violent Majorities 2.2 Subir Sinha on Hindutva as Long-Distance Ethnonationalism

Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with Subir Sinha, who teaches at SOAS University of London, comments on Indian and European media, and is a member of a commission of inquiry exploring the 2022 unrest between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, UK.

The catalysts he identifies for the rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) include the emergence of new middle classes after economic liberalization, the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11, the 2008 crisis in capitalism, and the spread of new communications technologies.

143 Violent Majorities 2.1: Peter Beinart on long-distance Israeli ethnonationalism (LA, AS)

Political anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen are back to continue RTB’s Violent Majorities series with a set of three episodes on long-distance ethno-nationalism. Today, they speak with Peter Beinart (an editor at Jewish Currents and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York) about his just-released book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. It aims to mobilize Jewish religious ethics and teachings to reach a Jewish-American audience shaped by Zionism. Beinart seeks to debunk myths that prevent many from realizing that the moral abominations committed against Palestinians are part of the Israeli settler-colonial-nation-state project.

142* Greg Childs on seditious conspiracy (EF, JP)

What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP.

141 The Hyphen Unites: Avi Shlaim on Arab-Jewish Life (Yuval Evri, JP)

Avi Shlaim, is a celebrated “New Historian” whose earlier work established him as an influential historian of Middle Eastern politics and especially of Israel’s relations with the Arab world. Most recently he has turned to his own Iraqi/Israeli/British past in Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew–which he refers to as an “impersonal autobiography.”

He speaks today to John and his Brandeis colleague Yuval Evri, the Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies. Yuval’s 2020 The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew explores how fluidity in such categories as the “Arab-Jew” becomes a source of resistance to exclusive claims of ownership of land, texts, traditions, or languages.

140* Octopus World: Other Minds with Peter Godfrey-Smith (EF, JP)

Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. His truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) Metazoa and most recently Living on Earth (John raves about that book here.)

139 Recall This Story: Ivan Kreilkamp on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “Foxcastle” (JP)

Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University English professor and no stranger to Recall This Book, is the author of two books on Victorian literature and one about Jennifer Egan. For this episode of Recall This Story, Ivan reads Sylvia Townsend Warner‘s “Foxcastle. It was first published in The New Yorker in 1975 and became the final story in her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin.

138c. What Just Happened? David Cunningham (Herbert Hoover gave us Woody Guthrie)

Welcome to the final episode of What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years.David Cunningham, chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, is author of Klansville, U.S.A. and There’s something happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence His ongoing research includes the recent wave of conflicts around Confederate monuments and other sites of contested memory.

David’s vision of what has changed in 2024 relates to an extended analogy to the election of 1972, when the avowedly racist George (“Segregation….forever“) Wallace almost rode right-wing fury to victory.

138b. What Just Happened? Vincent Brown (Ronald Reagan Gave Us Punk Rock)

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. In this episode, Vincent Brown (History professor at Harvard) last spoke with us about his own work on Caribbean slave revolts; his many other well known projects include the recent PBS series The Bigger Picture.

138a. What Just Happened? Mark Blyth (An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets)

Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transformations (2002), Angrynomics (2020; with Eric Lonergan) and (with Nicolo Fraccaroli) Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (New York: Norton 2025).

137 David Peña-Guzmán: Animals dream, which makes them morally considerable (JP)

In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in animal studies–“a philosophical interpretation of biological subjectivity.” Although we share no linguistic schema with animals there is lots more evidence than just You Tube (octopuses, dogs, signing chimpanzees, brain scans of dreaming birds etc) to suggest oneiric behaviors and underlying mental states occur all over the animal kingdom. Here is what it means that we are not alone in our dreams…

136* Beth Blum on Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP)

Beth Blum, Associate Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019).

In 202o, she spoke with John about how how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the “neo-stoical” self-help gurus of today, who preach male and female versions of “stop apologizing!” You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll either help yourself or learn how to stop caring.

135.2 Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana” (JP)

{You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here]

Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, “Miles City, Montana” in our new series, Recall This Story.

135.1 Recall This Story: Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg reading and discussing Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana” (JP)

[this is the first half of the story; the second half can be found here]

134* Etherized: Anne Enright in a Novel Dialogue conversation (Paige Reynolds, JP)

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be sure that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”–though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos…is not as interested in your period as you might think.”

133 Beri Marusic on Grief and other Expiring Emotions (Katie Elliott, JP)

Why is that when a loved one dies, grief seems inescapable–and then diminishes? The brilliant Edinburgh philosopher Berislav Marusic‘s “Do Reasons Expire? An Essay on Grief” begins with his grief for the unexpected and early loss of his mother: “I stopped grieving or at least the grief diminished, yet the reason didn’t really change. It’s not like that my mother stopped mattering to me or that I stopped loving her, but still this change in grief somehow seemed reasonable.” What are philosophers and the rest of us to make of this durable insight?

132* Policing and White Power with David Cunningham and Daniel Kryder

This June 2020 episode, part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book’s first exploration of police brutality, systemic and personal racism and Black Lives Matter. Elizabeth and John were lucky to be joined by by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham,two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades.

Many of the mechanisms that create an oppressed and subordinated American community of color can seem subtle and indirect, despite the insidious ways they pervade housing law (The Color of Law), education (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together, Savage Inequalities) and the carceral state (The Condemnation of Blackness, The New Jim Crow, Locking Up Our Own).