Recall This Book

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

107* Electro-Library with Jared Green (EF, JP)

Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created.

Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, film, reading, audiobooks, and podcasts. Which are the easiest and which the hardest artworks to get lost in? Would Frankenstein’s monster be more popular as a podcaster than as a YouTuber? (The answer to that one seems most likely to be yes).

106 Musical Collaboration: Francisco del Pino (JP)

Francisco del Pino is a widely celebrated composer from Buenos Aires, and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. John fell in love with his music (during his own semester there) when he heard a piece based on the poetry of Francisco’s longtime friend Victoria Cóccaro.

^{photo credit: Clara Elena Montes}

105* David Plotz: Books in Dark Times (JP)

Aside from being John’s (younger, suaver and beardier) brother, what has the inimitable David Plotz done lately? Only hosted “The Slate Political Gabfest“, written two books (“The Genius Factory” and “The Good Book“) and left Atlas Obscura to found City Cast.

panda bad, horse good: David Plotz feeds a new friend

So, when John called him up in April 2020 for the Books in Dark Times series, what was his Pandemic reading? The fully absorbing “other worlds” of Dickens and Mark Twain tempt David, but he goes another direction. He picks one book that shows humanity at its worst, heading towards world war. And another that shows how well we can behave towards one another (and even how happy we can be…) at “moments of super liquidity” when everything melts and can be rebuilt.

104 Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada: Journalistic Collaboration (JP)

Steve Fainaru and his brother Mark Fainaru-Wada wrote a bestselling and award-winning book (and accompanying PBS documentary series) about the NFL coverup of concussion trauma, League of Denial. This conversation inaugurates an occasional Recall this Book series on collaborative work: who does it well, what makes it succeed, why can’t grumpy isolatos like English professors get with the program?

103* Elizabeth Bradfield in Dark Times (JP)

For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfied, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer.

Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches.

102 Sassan Tabatabai: poetry, observation, and form (EF, JP)

“For me, there is something so solid and comforting in stone” says Sassan Tabatabai in our conversation, and in his poem “Firestones” the words roll, weigh and satisfyingly click together.

101* Chris Walley on Deindustrialization (EF, JP)

On a blustery fall morning back in 2019, RTB welcomed Christine Walley, anthropologist and author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. In the early 1980s Chris’s father, along with thousands of other steel workers, lost his job when the mills in Southeastern Chicago closed. The book is part of a multimodal project, including the documentary film, “Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story,” (with director Chris Boebel) and an NEH-funded digitization project of the Southeastern Chicago Historical Museum, a community-based archive of materials related to the neighborhood.

100 Nuclear Ghosts: Ryo Morimoto (EF, JP)

John and Elizabeth explore spectral radiation with Ryo Morimoto, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His new book Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima’s Grey Zone is based on several years of fieldwork in coastal Fukushima after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. Ryo’s book shows how residents of the region live with and through the “nuclear ghost” that resides with them.

The trio discuss ways that residents acclimatize themselves to the presence of radiation, efforts to live their lives in ways not only shaped by catastrophe and irradiation, and the Geiger counter as a critical object.

99* Gael McGill Visualizes Data (JP)

What’s a picture worth? How about the picture that allows scientists to grasp what’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring and developing different modes for visualizing evidence.