Recall This Book

Guests Natasha Roth-Rowland, Lori Allen, and Ajantha Subramanian discuss the Jewish far right, the transnational formation of far-right actors in Israel, and the shared ideologies of territorial maximalism, racial supremacy, and natalism. They also explore the use of violence, the role of women, and the impact of neoliberalism and far-right billionaires on Israeli settlement projects.

Prof. Balmurli Natrajan, Lori Allen, and Ajantha Subramanian kick off the series on Indian and Israeli ethnonationalism. They discuss the historical links between Indian ethnonationalism and European fascism, the role of caste in shaping a Hindu majority, and countering India's slide towards fascism. They also explore the significance of religion in the Hindu Right movement and the tactics of Hindutva in equating ethnonationalism with Hindu religiosity. Additionally, they delve into the characteristics of Hindutva and its influence on society, including its impact on labor and unionism.

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 (U Chicago Press, 2020). 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.Mentioned in this episode: Laurence Ralph, Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago (U Chicago Press, 2014) 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) Read Here:45 Global Policing 3 Laurence Ralph: Reckoning with Police Violence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recall This Book 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 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 (Norton, 2023) 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.Mentioned in the episode: 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 the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Plotz of Recall This Book spoke in 2020 with Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar about his marvelous new book on 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.”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 Read Here:43 Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the Formation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Guillory (NYU English author of the pathbreaking Cultural Capital) is here to discuss his amazing new Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (U Chicago Press, 2022)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 Professor's 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.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 Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America Ulster Defence Association Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing: FBI perspective and reported book Two of the “after-action” reports on Charlottesville that David discusses are: “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) Lessons Charlottesville (should have) taught us: “Prohibiting Private Armies at Public Rallies” (Georgetown Law School, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and protection, September 2020). Listen and Read Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To mark the publication of John's book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press (2023), 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 its tone actually 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.Recall This Book 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.On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public BooksDiscussed 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 Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

n 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.With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze’ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion…Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La’or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices