Cindy Hooper is a veteran of various local, state, and national political campaigns. She is the founder of a national organization for African American women that is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Hooper is also a member of the American Political Science Association. Her new book, Conflict: African American Women and the New Dilemma of Race and Gender Politics (Praeger Press, 2012), draws on all of her experiences. Please listen to our lively exchange.

 

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

Surrender is a difficult concept for many people in Western societies, where everything seems to evolve around the desire for control, predictability and power. In our age of anxiety, certainty and control has become the number one tool to help us take charge of our lives so we can pursue the elusive goal of being happy. In her book The Ecstasy of Surrender: 12 Surprising Ways Letting Go Can Empower Your Life (Harmony Books, 2014), psychiatrist and author Judith Orloff points to all the ways we can let go of our need for control and be successful in the process, in our relationships and our environment. She paints a compelling picture of harmony and friendship while being able to keep destructively negative influences in check.

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

When big claims are made about neurolinguistics, there often seems to be a subtext that the latest findings will render traditional linguistics obsolete. These claims are often met with appropriate scepticism by experienced linguistics practitioners, either because experience tells them not to believe the hype, or (in a few cases) because they were already obsolete and were managing just fine anyway. Alistair Knott‘s claim in Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax (MIT Press, 2012) is extremely atypical: it is that at least one strand of traditional linguistics, namely Minimalist syntax, is in fact more relevant than even its defenders believed. He argues that the necessary constituent steps of a reach-to-grasp action are, collectively, isomorphic to the syntactic operations that are required to describe the action with a sentence. Although this particular case is the focus of his discussion here, he also believes that the parallelism is more widespread, and that in fact Minimalism may have articulated a profound and general truth about the way human cognition works. To defend the parallel, this book surveys a wealth of research, covering both the neuropsychology of the relevant sensorimotor processes and the motivation for the linguistic analysis. In our interview, we discuss some of the particular challenges of positing this interdisciplinary synthesis, and look (perhaps optimistically) at the potential for the resolution of long-standing debates about the nature of the human syntactic capability.

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

Patrick Weil is the author of The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). He is a visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. The Sovereign Citizen is an historical study of denaturalization in the United States. It tells the story of what Weil believes is a revolution in the concept of citizenship, through exhaustive archival research. But is also a story about the actors that have made law what it is – immigrants, political radicals, criminal defense lawyers, bureaucrats, and judges.

 

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

In The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Duke UP, 2013), Daisuke Miyao explores a history of light and its absence in Japanese cinema. A commentary on the history of modernity, the book considers how an aesthetics of shadow emerged from a Japanese modern that was fundamentally transnational. A fascinating history of film, the book guides readers through the emergence and transformations of new dramatic genres and new ways of being a movie star in modern Japan. A corrective to the tendency to valorize directors in cinematic histories, the book gives voice to the cinematographers and other craftsmen of light and shadow who shaped the cinema of Japan through the mid-twentieth century. It is a wonderful story of flashing swords, sensual glances, battling movie studios, and tensions between technologies and aesthetics of illumination that alternately concealed and revealed. The Aesthetics of Shadow also treats us to close readings of some wonderful Japanese films that were a revelation for this reader: have YouTube handy as Miyao introduces you to Crossways (Jujiro) and That Night’s Wife, guiding your eye to visual traces that reveal broader histories of blindness, surveillance, and the tactile. Enjoy!

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

Kristin A. Goss is author of The Paradox of Gender Equality: How American Women’s Groups Gained and Lost Their Public Voice (University of Michigan Press 2013). She is associate professor of public policy and political science at Duke University.

Goss challenges the conventional wisdom about women’s group with new congressional hearing data. Rather than ebbing-and-flowing like waves, Goss suggests that the women’s groups have not always diminished in influence following a major policy success. The Paradox of Gender Equality should have a wide audience among interest group, gender studies, and social movement scholars.

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

Host Jonathan Judaken talks with author and professor Amy Wood about her book, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Wood discusses her book, the use of photography and media in the spectacle of lynching, religious justification for the practice, and the importance of honoring the legacies of anti-lynching Civil Rights Era leaders like Medgar Evers and Ida B. Wells.

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

Host Jonathan Judaken speaks with Xolela Mangcu, biographer of Anti-Apartheid leader Steve Biko, about the life and murder of Steve Biko, as well as the struggle for equality in South Africa under Apartheid rule, and how it relates to the Civil Rights Movement in America.

 

 

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

Robert Darnton, author of books, articles, and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. Darnton joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the future of libraries, the printed press, and his project – the Digital Public Library of America, or D.P.L.A. – which he hopes will foster a culture of “Open Access” to help promote the free communication of knowledge and sharing of intellectual wealth in order to create this “digital commonwealth.”

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

Patrick Burkart‘s Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Conflicts (MIT Press, 2014) considers the democratic potential and theoretical significance of groups espousing radical perspectives on intellectual property and cyber-liberty. Focusing on the Swedish Pirate Party, Burkart details the history of these movements, noting the ways in which they have impacted both the local politics of Europe and the international culture industries. Employing conceptual models drawn from both critical theory and new social movement theory, Burkart makes a compelling case that the politics of piracy must understood as a defense of common culture. Just as social movements have come together to protect the environment, pirate politics aim to keep the Internet a space in individual and communal rights are not overrun by the interests of governments and corporations.

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