Episodes

  • Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, "An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948" (Columbia UP, 2024)

    Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, "An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    Jun 29 2024
    In Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, some of whom would go on to become acclaimed authors, scholars, and critics—came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. What brought these Muslim, Jewish, and Christian friends together, and what became of them in the aftermath of 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba? Sonja Mejcher-Atassi tells the story of this unlikely friendship and in so doing offers an intimate cultural and social history of Palestine in the critical postwar period. She vividly reconstructs the vanished social world of these protagonists, tracing the connections between the specificity of individual lives and the larger contexts in which they are embedded. In exploring this ecumenical friendship and its artistic, literary, and intellectual legacies, Mejcher-Atassi demonstrates how social biography can provide a picture of the past that is at once more inclusive and more personal. This group portrait, she argues, allows us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine. Bringing a remarkable era to life through archival research and nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948 (Columbia UP, 2024) unearths prospects for historical reconciliation, solidarity, and justice. Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Reading Across Modern Arabic Literature and Art (2012), as well as coeditor of The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous: A Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual (2021), Rafa Nasiri: Artist Books (2016), and Archives, Museums, and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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    54 mins
  • Matthew Goldmark, "Forms of Relation: Composing Kinship in Colonial Spanish America" (U Virginia Press, 2023)

    Matthew Goldmark, "Forms of Relation: Composing Kinship in Colonial Spanish America" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
    Jun 28 2024
    Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation: Composing Kinship in Colonial Spanish America (University of Virginia, 2023) shows the importance of textual, religious, and bureaucratic ties to struggles over colonial governance and identities. Dr. Matthew Goldmark analyses these ties as forms of kinship forged outside of the well-studied paradigms of sex, biology, and procreation. He demonstrates how colonial actors—Spanish and Indigenous—vied for power when they argued that identity could be shaped by spiritual fatherhood, standardised education, or the regulation of doctrine. Forms of Relation illustrates why we must interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how non-procreative kinships shaped the Spanish colonial regime. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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    40 mins
  • Christina M. García, "Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art: The Body, the Inhuman, and Ecological Thinking" (U Florida Press, 2024)

    Christina M. García, "Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art: The Body, the Inhuman, and Ecological Thinking" (U Florida Press, 2024)
    Jun 28 2024
    Christina M. García’s book, Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art: The Body, the Inhuman, and Ecological Thinking (University Press of Florida, 2024), looks at Cuban literature and art that challenge traditional assumptions about the body. García examines how writers and artists have depicted racial, gender, and species differences throughout the past century - specifically, how these works interact with ecologies of the human and nonhuman across diverse media, time periods, and ideologies. To answer these questions, García uses the lenses of new materialism, critical race studies, critical animal studies, queer studies, and poststructuralism and identifies historical continuities in the way they have emphasized the shared materiality of bodies. Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art demonstrates that through their attention to the connections that different kinds of bodies share, Cuban creators have long undermined rules of classification and unification, reimagining community as shared vulnerability and difference. Christina M. García is assistant professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston. Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Joshua Schuster, "What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals" (Fordham UP, 2023)

    Joshua Schuster, "What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals" (Fordham UP, 2023)
    Jun 28 2024
    Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham UP, 2023) examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and interpret these events. Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these extinction events also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life. What Is Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present. Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is the author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics and co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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    57 mins
  • Jin Feng, "The Transpacific Flow: Creative Writing Programs in China" (Association for Asian Studies, 2024)

    Jin Feng, "The Transpacific Flow: Creative Writing Programs in China" (Association for Asian Studies, 2024)
    Jun 27 2024
    In 2009, Fudan University launched China’s first MFA program in creative writing, spurring a wave of such programs in Chinese universities. Many of these programs’ founding members point to the Iowa Writers Workshop and, specifically, its International Writers Program, which invited dozens of Mainland Chinese writers to take part between 1979 and 2019, as their inspiration. In her book, The Transpacific Flow: Creative Writing Programs in China (Association for Asian Studies, 2024), Jin Feng explores why Chinese authors took part in the U.S. programs, and how they tried to implement its teaching methods in mainland China–clearly, a very different political and cultural environment. In this interview, Jin and I talk about the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Chinese authors that attended, and the surprising links between U.S. and Chinese academia. Jin Feng is Professor of Chinese and Japanese and the Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature at Grinnell College, USA. She has published four English monographs: The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Purdue University Press: 2004), The Making of a Family Saga (SUNY Press: 2009), Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance (Brill, 2013), and Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways (University of Washington Press, 2019), three Chinese books such as A Book for Foodies and numerous articles in both English and Chinese. You can read an excerpt of The Transpacific Flow here. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Transpacific Flow. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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    40 mins
  • Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, "Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics" (U Arizona Press, 2024)

    Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, "Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics" (U Arizona Press, 2024)
    Jun 25 2024
    Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics (U Arizona Press, 2024) by Dr. Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo offers new understandings of contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives by looking at the genre’s growth in stories by and for young BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and diasporic readers. Through a careful examination of the genre, Dr. Quintana-Vallejo analyses the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalised rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for a growing and popular genre. While the most traditional iteration of the bildungsroman—the coming-of-age story—follows middle-class male heroes who forge their identities in a process of complex introspection, contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives represent formative processes that fit into, resist, or even disregard narratives of socialisation under capitalism, of citizenship, and of nationhood. Dr. Quintana-Vallejo delves into several important themes: how the coming-of-age genre can be used to study adulthood, how displacement and international or global heritage are fundamental experiences, how multi-diasporic approaches foreground lived experiences, and how queerness opens narratives of development to the study of adulthood as fundamentally diverse and nonconforming to social norms. Dr. Quintana-Vallejo shows how openness enables belonging among chosen families and, perhaps most importantly, freedom to disidentify. And, finally, how contemporary authors writing for the instruction of BIPOC children (and children otherwise affected by diaspora and displacement) use the didactic power of the coming-of-age genre, combined with the hybrid language of graphic narratives, to teach difficult topics in accessible ways. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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    53 mins
  • Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, "Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction" (Ohio State UP, 2024)

    Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, "Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction" (Ohio State UP, 2024)
    Jun 25 2024
    In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2024), Jerry Rafiki Jenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction--the monsters of White rage, respectability, not-ness, and serial killing. Arguing that such monsters represent specific ideologies of American anti-Blackness, Jenkins shows that despite their various motivations for harming and killing Black people, these monsters embody the horrors that emerge when Black American is disassociated from American. Although these monsters of anti-Blackness are dangerous because they can terrorize Black people with virtual impunity, their "anti-Black sadism," as Jenkins calls it, is what makes them repulsive. Jenkins examines a variety of these monstrous forms in Tananarive Due's The Between, Victor LaValle's The Changeling, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, and many other works. While these monsters and the texts that they populate ask us to think about the role that anti-Blackness plays in being or becoming American, they also offer intellectual resources that Black and non-Black people might use to combat the everyday versions of human monstrosity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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    45 mins
  • Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: A Lecture by Anthony Grafton

    Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: A Lecture by Anthony Grafton
    Jun 22 2024
    Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton, where he has taught since 1975. He is an historian of early modern Europe, and the author and co-author of over a dozen books, including The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997), and Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2020). In November 2006 he spoke to the Institute about Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Harvard University Press, 2006), which he co-wrote with Megan Hale Williams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
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    42 mins