Art – Recall This Book

152 Why I Paneled: A Backwards Glance by Kristin Mahoney and Nasser Mufti (JP)

In RTB 151, you heard the Kristin, Nasser and John discussing what might happen before their Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference actually took place. This episode, recorded a few weeks later, looks back at what actually occurred and see how it aligned with or defied the panelists’ prior expectations.

The three discuss what it means to have an emergent and residual shticks; differences between how you prepare to talk to undergraduates and your peers matter, and the three agree that going in without any expectations of your audience makes for a weaker presentation. Imaginary interlocution makes for better pre-gaming.

151 Why I Panel, Part One: Kristin Mahoney, Nasser Mufti (JP)

Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up–we inflict it on our peers, we inflict it on ourselves. Why?

To answer that question, Recall This Book assembled three (if you count John) scholars of Victorian literature asked to speak at the Spring 2025 Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference. Their discussion began with the idea that agreeing to give papers is an act of “externalized self-promising” and ranged across the reasons that floating ideas before our peers is terrifying, exhilarating and ultimately necessary.

Kristin Mahoney‘s books include Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Nasser Mufti ‘s first scholarly book was Civilizing War and he is currently working on a monograph about what Britain’s nineteenth century looks like from the perspective of such anti-colonial thinkers as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. (RTB listeners don’t need to hear about John or his Arendt obsession.

Mentioned in the episode

Theosophical Society in Chennai

Annie Besant

Jiddu Krishnamurthi in his early life was a not-quite-orphan child guru for Besant.

Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies on grand theorizations of race by folks like Acton

C L R James

Adorno’s Minima Moralia provides Nasser with an important reminder oF the importance of “hating tradition properly.”

H G Wells, The Time Machine and its modernist aftermath eg in the opening pages of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and in Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors and The Good Soldier, which is in its own peculiar way a time-travel novel.

The three discuss Foucault’s notion of capillarity a form of productive constraint, which Nasser uses to characterize both early 20th century Orientalism, and the paradigms of postcolonialism that replaced it,

Paul Saint Amour’s chapter on Ford Madox Ford is in Tense Future.

John Guillory on the distinctions between criticism and scholarship in Professing Criticism; the rhizomatic appeal of B-Side Books.

The “hedgehog and the fox” as a distinction comes from a poem by Archilochus—and sparked Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay of the same name.

Pamela Fletcher the Victorian Painting of Modern Life .

Listen to the episode here. Read the Episode here.

147 Ieva Jusionyte on U.S. Guns in Mexico: Exit Wounds [EF, JP]

John and Elizabeth had the chance to talk with Ieva Jusionyte, anthropologist, journalist, emergency medical technician. Her award-winning books include Exit Wounds, which uses anthropological and journalistic methods to follow guns purchased in the United States through organized crime scenes in Mexico, and their legal, social and personal repercussions.

In addition to hearing how Ieva researched the topic, balancing structural understandings of how guns become entangled with people on both sides of the border with an emphasis on individual stories, we also talked about how language captures and fails to capture violence, the ways violence and the fear of violence organize space, and the importance of a humble, responsive, and empathetic approach to speaking with people touched by gun violence.

Ieva’s “bookshelf” for Exit Wounds

Mentioned in this episode:

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985)

Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence (1991)

Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2004)

Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009) tr. by Lisa Dillman, see RTB episode 48 “Transform, not Transfer: Lisa Dillman on Translation

Deborah Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 2019

Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian (1985)

Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer (1998) and the “state of exception”

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)and the “zone”

Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (2023)

Recallable “Books:”

Ieva suggested E.P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (1975) for its thoughtful framing of state violence and its incredible detail, and also Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (2000), for the ways in which the book’s structure enacts its argument.

Elizabeth went with the documentary by Raul Paz Pastrana, Border South (2019), which also weaves together the stories of those affected, including the anthropologist Jason De León, in ways that account for the multidimensionality of human experience.

John picked the contestatory Northern Irish spaces of Anna Burns’ novel Milkman (2018)

Listen and Read Here

1 Minimalism with Tory Fair

In this episode, John and Elizabeth speak with Tory Fair, sculptor and professor in the Art Department at Brandeis about minimalism. They discuss the difference in involvement expected from the viewer of a minimalist work and other work, and compare modes of minimalism, from Donald Judd to Samuel Beckett to Marie Kondo. Their discussion of the correct amount of guidance to expect or to want from an artist also turns to a lively chat on the experience of going to the museum, and whether that is best approached as directed by the artist or curator, or as a search for an unexpected occurrence. Then in Recallable Art, Tory recommends the Daybook Installation at DIA by Anne Truitt, and John recommends Aesop’s fables. Continue reading “1 Minimalism with Tory Fair”