Recall This Book

John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent--not just in how America's campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance. Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off. Mentioned in the episode: M. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit" Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 importantreminder 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 . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in 2019, John spoke with the celebrated comic novelist Stephen McCauley. Nobody knows more about the comic novel than Steve--his latest is You Only Call When You're in Trouble, but John still holds a candle for his 1987 debut, Object of My Affection, made into a charming Jennifer Aniston Paul Rudd movie. And there is no comic novelist Steve loves better than Barbara Pym, a mid-century British comic genius who found herself forgotten and unpublishable in middle age, only to roar back into print in her sixties with A Quartet in Autumn. Steve and John’s friendship over the years has been sealed by the favorite Pym lines they text back and forth to one another, so they are particularly keen to investigate why her career went in this way. In the episode, they talk about some of these favorite sentences from Pym, and then turn to the comic novel as a genre. They talk about the difference between humorous and comic writing, the earthiness of comedy, whether comic novels should have happy or sad endings, and whether the comic novel is a precursor to, or an amoral relief from, the sitcom. They also discuss some of Steve’s fiction, including his Rain Mitchell yoga novels. In Recallable Books John recommends Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell and Steve recommends After Claude by Iris Owens. Discussed in this episode: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy “The Beast in the Jungle,” Henry James The Thurber Carnival, James Thurber The Group, Mary McCarthy After Claude, Iris Owens Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym Less than Angels, Barbara Pym The Sweet Dove Died, Barbara Pym Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth The Sellout, Paul Beatty My Ex-Life, Stephen McCauley You can listen here or read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in 2021, John and Elizabeth sat down with Brandeis string 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.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.Ieva described researching the topic, balancing structural understandings of how guns become entangled with people on both sides of the border with an emphasis on individual stories. The three 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.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/FilmsIeva 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 prasied the contested Northern Irish spaces of Anna Burns' novel Milkman (2018)Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 (Princeton UP, 2014) 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 the importance of civic euergetism in the Greek and Roman worldview–i.e. benefaction and charity strictly confined to the good of the city.In early Christianity, this was replaced by compensatory almsgiving by the rich to benefit the lowly poor, or beggars. That notion of the rich being “less likely to enter heaven than a camel going through the eye of a needle”–that, says Brown, “was Jesus at its wildest.” Augustine even preached about almsgiving as “like a traveller’s check” that let the rich bank up credit in heaven.But most crucial of all to Brown’s argument about changed ideas of wealth is that Christianity initiated the world-transformational notion of corporate identity. Before Oxford, before the East India Company, before IBM, the “managerial Bishop” (Brown’s brilliant coinage) is not wealthy in his own right, but is an agent of “impersonal continuity.”.Brown thinks Foucault got this kind of “pastoralism” in Church leaders partially right. But Foucault–“an old fashioned Catholic in many ways” Brown remarks slyly–underestimated the desire of the Christian community to designate a “consumer-driven” church hierarchy in which they can invest.Pressed on the question of resonance to our own day, Brown (as a “good semi-Durkheimian of the Mary Douglas variety”) stresses that “these are almost incommensurable societies.” And he does note an ominous Roman parallel in present-day “personalization of power”–understanding the odious Putin by reading Seneca. Nonetheless, Brown makes clear his enduring admiration for Late Antiquity–compared to classical Greece and perhaps to our own day–because of its “remarkable tolerance for anomaly.” Brown has that too, more power to him!Mentioned in the Episode Peter Brown, Body and Society (1968) Peter Brown,. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1968) Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (1981) Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul (2015) Evelyne Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e-7e siè (Economic Poverty and Social Poverty) Augustine, Confessions (c. 400 AD and many other works available here ) Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (on priests and the importance of the pastoral or shepherding metaphor) George Lakoff and Michael Johnson, Metaphors We Live By Seneca, Letters from a Stoic Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.The three explore various questions. Does the successful rise of Hindu ethnonationalism in the UK stem from a perceived contrast between benign Hinduism and dangerous Islam? Does the need for popular ratification through electoral democracy limit the scope of long-distance ethnonationalism? Is there a limit to how effectively Zionists and Hindutvites in the US and UK can wield claims to wounded religious minority sentiment while benefiting from from the hollowing out of democratic institutions? And finally, the three ask if the ominously successful assimilation of Zionism into American right-wing politics may also start working for Hindutva.Mentioned in the episode: Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands Recall This Book with Shaul Magid on Meir Kahane Ben Lorber on masculinist “Bronze-Age” Zionism Recallable Books:Lori singles out The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, (1979) by Rosemary Sayigh, anthropologist and oral historian. It explores the ways Palestinian nationalism and organized resistance to their dispossession and oppression took hold in the refugee camps of Lebanon.Ajantha’s choice is Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies, published in 2020, a readable, poignant, and edgy account of US empire, Islam, and race and the challenges of being an South Asian American Muslim. She also recalls the film Mississippi Masala from 1991, a compelling take on race and class dynamics in the US Indian diaspora.John proposes Paul Breines’ Tough Jews and Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola–to which Ajantha adds Hanif Kureshi’s Buddha of Suburbia.Listen and Read Here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.The trio discuss the growth of Hindutva in the US and UK since the 1990s and its further consolidation. Social media has been key to Modi’s brand of authoritarian populism, with simultaneous messaging across national borders producing a globally dispersed audience for Hindutva. Particularly useful to transnational political mobilizations has been the manufacture of wounded Hindu sentiments: a claim to victimhood that draws on the legitimizing language of religious minority rights in the US and UK.They also note more hopeful signs: Dalit and other oppressed caste politics have begun to strengthen in the diaspora; the contradictions between lived Hinduism and Hindutva have become clearer; there are some demographic and structural barriers to Hindutva’s further growth in the UK and US.Subir’s Recallable Book is Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop:The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (Harper Collins India, 2023), which looks at the proliferation of Hindutva Pop, a genre of music that is made to go viral and whip up mob violence against religious minorities.Mentioned in this episode: Subir Sinha, “Fragile Hegemony: Modi, Social Media, and Competitive Electoral Populism in India.” International Journal of Communication 11(2017), 4158–4180. Subir Sinha, “‘Strong leaders’, authoritarian populism and Indian developmentalism: The Modi moment in historical context.” Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.019 Subir Sinha, “Modi's People and Populism's Imagined Communities.” Seminar, 7 5 6 – A u g u s t 2022, pp.18-23. Edward T. G. Anderson, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism. London: Hurst & Co., 2023. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, is the parent organization of the Sangh Parivar, or Hindu nationalist family of organizations. It espouses principles of Hindu unity and aims to transform India into a Hindu supremacist nation-state. Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Organization, is a branch of the Sangh Parivar. Its stated aims are to engage in social service work, construct Hindu temples, and defend Hindus. On the anti-caste discrimination bill in the UK parliament, see David Mosse, Outside Caste? The Enclosure of Caste and Claims to Castelessness in India and the United Kingdom The Ganesh Puja period is a 10-day festival that honors the Hindu god Ganesha, and usually takes place in late August or early September. Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso; Revised edition, 2016. Yohann Koshy, “What the unrest in Leicester revealed about Britain – and Modi’s India.” The Guardian, 8 February 2024. Richard Manuel, Cassette Culture in North India: Popular Music and Technology in North India. University of Chicago .Press; 2nd ed. Edition,1993. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices