Ear to the Pavement

In episode 25, the third installment in our Deconstructing Feminism series, Allison and author and activist Yasmin Nair discuss "The Right to Sex" by Amia Srinivasan, situating it in relation to Kyla Schuller's "The Trouble With White Women" and Rafia Zakaria's "Against White Feminism," books discussed in the series' previous two episodes. Throughout the discussion, Nair continually touches on issues of hierarchy and deference in the publishing world, arguing that an awareness of such dynamics is important in any feminist analysis.

Yasmin Nair: https://yasminnair.com/

"The Right to Sex": https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374721039/therighttosex

Amia Srinivasan: https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/person/professor-amia-srinivasan

Kyla Schuller: https://www.kylaschuller.org/

Rafia Zakaria: https://www.rafiazakaria.com/

Related links to Nair's writing on White feminism, trauma feminism, and the politics of publishing:

The Perils of Trauma Feminism (Current Affairs): https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/12/the-perils-of-trauma-feminism

Nair on books and publishing: https://yasminnair.com/category/book-reviews/

Episode 24 is part two of Allison's conversation with writer and activist Yasmin Nair, about White Feminism, and about two books on the topic: "The Trouble With White Women" by Kyla Schuller, and "Against White Feminism" by Rafia Zakaria. This episode zeroes in on these authors' treatment of the phenomenon of the White female Trump voter as a touchstone for contemporary intersectional feminist analysis. For more background on the history of Whiteness studies, see "The Wages of Roediger" by Cedric Johnson.

Yasmin Nair: https://yasminnair.com/

Kyla Schuller: https://www.kylaschuller.org/

Rafia Zakaria: https://www.rafiazakaria.com/

"The Wages of Roediger" by Cedric Johnson: https://nonsite.org/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-the-left-we-need/

Episode 23 is the first in a new series with writer and activist Yasmin Nair, about contemporary feminist books. We begin the series with an examination of two recent titles: "The Trouble With White Women" by Kyla Schuller, and "Against White Feminism" by Rafia Zakaria. While Schuller's and Zakaria's common call for the dismantling of White feminism is, as Nair states, "interesting and necessary," each of these books also contains its own distinct set of pitfalls, a closer analysis of which sheds light on the complicated and troubling issues arising at the intersection of modern-day American feminism, antiracism, academia, and publishing. For more background on the history of Whiteness studies, see "The Wages of Roediger" by Cedric Johnson.

Yasmin Nair: https://yasminnair.com/

Kyla Schuller: https://www.kylaschuller.org/

Rafia Zakaria: https://www.rafiazakaria.com/

"The Wages of Roediger" by Cedric Johnson: https://nonsite.org/the-wages-of-roediger-why-three-decades-of-whiteness-studies-has-not-produced-the-left-we-need/

In episode 22 of "Ear to the Pavement" - the first in a new series about the American South - Allison talks with Professor Adolph Reed, Jr. about his new book, "The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives," published in 2022 by Verso. In the book, Reed speaks as a member of the last generation with a living memory of the Jim Crow order, offering a corrective to our increasingly caricatured notions of what the order actually was. By weaving together his own personal stories of growing up under Jim Crow with his signature political analysis, Reed shows us that it was the stuff of ordinary, everyday life that held the system together.

Adolph Reed, Jr.: https://live-sas-www-polisci.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/adolph-reed

"The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives": https://www.versobooks.com/books/3945-the-south

The expectation of radical self-sufficiency is a hallmark of the neoliberal U.S. economy in the early 21st century, and the arts are no exception. The rise of the discourse and practice of "musical entrepreneurship" within the classical music field is a case in point. In episode 21 of "Ear to the Pavement", Allison speaks with musicologist Marianna Ritchey about about her book, "Composing Capital," which looks critically at the neoliberalization of musical labor, and the broader questions it raises about what art is for, who gets to produce it and under what conditions, and how the arts serve different political ideologies.

Marianna Richey: https://www.umass.edu/music/member/marianna-ritchey

"Composing Capital": https://www.powells.com/book/composing-capital-9780226640235

In episode 20, Allison speaks with author and social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove, about her book "Main Street: How a City's Heart Connects Us All." In it, Fullilove argues for a vision of Main Street - from large cities to rural farm towns - not as dead but as "machines for living" or "factories of invention" that not only build community but that can help us solve some of our biggest problems, like inequality, racism, and the climate crisis.

"Main Street: How a City's Heart Connects Us All": https://nyupress.org/9781613321263/main-street/

In episode 19, the fifth in a series about books related to #MeToo, Allison speaks with authors Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan about "Sexual Citizens" (2020). It's a book that everyone seems to be talking about, and for good reason: "Sexual Citizens" offers us a profoundly liberating and at the same time pragmatic new roadmap for thinking about and addressing one of the most heated issues of our time, sexual assault on college campuses. Author Lacy Crawford, whose explosive 2020 memoir "Notes on a Silencing" chronicles her own campus sexual assault, also joins the conversation.

Jennifer Hirsch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_S._Hirsch

Shamus Khan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamus_Khan

"Sexual Citizens": https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781324001706

Lacy Crawford: https://lacycrawford.com/

"Notes on a Silencing": https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316491556

In episode 18, the fourth in a series about books related to #MeToo, Allison talks again with author and activist Yasmin Nair, this time about Chanel Miller's 2019 memoir, "Know My Name." The book is a blistering and tender account, from Miller's perspective, of her sexual assault by Stanford University student Brock Turner, and its harrowing aftermath in The People v. Turner case. Miller's writing is brilliant and deft, and manages to convey both her personal story as well as the mechanisms of the broken system that was supposed to bring justice. Allison and Yasmin examine how Know My Name resists a lot of the problematic issues that often beset so-called "survivor" narratives, and what the emergence of Miller's voice has meant for the larger politics of #MeToo.

Chanel Miller: https://www.chanel-miller.com/

The tension between race and class that continues to bedevil the American left flared up recently when a talk that prominent scholar Adolph Reed was slated to give to the New York City chapter of DSA was cancelled. The skirmish created such a ripple it was covered by the New York Times. But what really lies beneath this dustup? Author and labor activist Bill Fletcher, Jr. reflects on how the left handles differences within its own ranks, whether the antiracist movement really has a class problem, the need for both allies and comrades (and the difference between the two), and what needs to change if the left is serious about building real power.

Bill Fletcher, Jr.: http://billfletcherjr.com/

Adolph Reed: https://nonsite.org/author/adolph-reed

New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html

In Episode 16, the third in a series about books related to #MeToo, Allison talks with NYC-based journalist JoAnn Wypijewski about her recent book, "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority, & the Mess of Life," published by Verso. In this collection, spanning thirty years of reporting on scandals from Abu Ghraib to the Harvey Weinstein saga, Wypijewski reveals our tendency to flatten complex stories in pursuit of villains and victims, in the process forging a "poisoned solidarity" that actually undermines the possibility of true social justice.

JoAnn Wypijewski: https://www.thenation.com/authors/joann-wypijewski/

"What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority, & the Mess of Life": https://www.versobooks.com/books/3178-what-we-don-t-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-metoo