Recall This Book

By Elizabeth Ferry and John PlotzSociety & Culture Arts Books History

Recall This Book episodes

February 16, 2024123* Sheila Heti Speaks About Awe with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)
In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice.
Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Colour (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be” )–as well as the protagonist’s temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.”
if you enjoyed this Novel Dialogue crossover conversation, you might also check out earlier ones with Joshua Cohen, Charles Yu, Caryl Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner and Orhan Pamuk.
Mentioned in this Episode:
By Sheila Heti:
Pure Colour
How Should a Person Be?
Alphabetical Diaries
Ticknor
We Need a Horse (children’s book)
The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman)
Also mentioned:
Oulipo Group
Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard
Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star)
Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy
Willa Cather , The Professor’s House (overlap of reality and recollection): “When I look into the Æneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage–behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.”)
William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble.

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Transcript: 6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff

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41 min
February 01, 2024122 The Culture Trap, with Sociologist Derron Wallace (EF, JP)
In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of education and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores "ethnic expectations" for Caribbean schoolchildren in New York and London. His work starts with the basic puzzle that while black Caribbean schoolchildren in New York are often considered as "high-achieving," in London, they have been, conversely thought to be "chronically underachieving." Yet in each case the main cause -- of high achievement in New York and low achievement in London -- is said to be cultural. We discuss the concept of "ethnic expectations" and the ways it can have negative effects even when the expectations themselves are positive, and the dense intertwining of race, class, nation, colonial status, and gender, and the travels of the concept of culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Mentioned in the episode:
The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report [the Sewell Report] (2021)
The Moynihan Report (1965)
Georg Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" (1923)
Diane Reay, "What Would a Socially Just Educational System Look Like?" (2012)
Bernard Coard, How the Caribbean Child is made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System
Steve McQueen, Small Axe, "Education," (2020)
Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019)
B. Brian Forster, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020)
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Adieu Culture: A New Duty Arises" (2003)
David Simon's TV show The Wire (and also Lean on Me, and To Sir, with Love and with major props from Derron, Top Boy)
Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle (1994)

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44 min
January 18, 2024121* Ajantha Subramanian on "The Caste of Merit" ((EF,JP))
Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard UP, 2019). It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Ajantha talked to JP and EF about the language of “merit” and the ways in which it can conceal the continuing relevance of caste (and class, and race) privilege–in India, yes, but also in American and other meritocratic democracies as well.
The wide-ranging discussion explored how inequality gets reproduced, passed on and justified. Caste–often framed as a fundamentally “Eastern” form of difference–not only seems to have a lot in common with race, but also shares a history through colonial, plantation-based capitalism. This may explain some of the ways “merit” has also made race (and class) disparities invisible in the United States. This helps explain ways in which dominant groups excoriate the “identity politics” of those seeking greater access to privileged domains, and claim their own independence from “ascriptive” identities--while silently relying on the privilege and other hidden advantages of particular racial or caste-based forms of belonging.
The companion text for this episode--Privilege by Shamus Khan--addresses very similar issues in the elite high school where he was a student, teacher and sociological researcher, St. Paul’s School. Khan traces a shift over the past decades (we argued a bit about the time frame) from a conception of privilege defined by maintaining boundaries, to one based on the privileged person’s capacity to move with ease through all social contexts.
Discussed in this episode:
Ajantha Subramanian, Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India
Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor : How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students
Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test
John Carson, The Measure of Merit
Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn
Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions
Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India

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48 min
January 04, 2024120 A Roundup Conversation About Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism
Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2) ethnonationalism. The three friends discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the "slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste" and Natasha Roth-Rowland's description of the "territorial maximalism" that has been central to Zionism. The role of overseas communities loomed large, as did the roots of ethnonationalism in the fascism of the 1920s, which survived, transmuted or merely masked over the subsequent bloody century, as other ideologies (Communism and perhaps cosmopolitan liberalism among them) waxed before waning.
The conversation also examines the current-day shared playbook of the long-distance far-right ideologies of Zionism and Hindutva. And it concludes with a reflection on the suitability of the term fascism to describe such organizations and their historical forebears as well as other contemporary movements.
Mentioned in the episode
Snigdha Poonam’s recent book Dreamers investigates the “angry young men” engaged in Hindutvite attacks, including those who are economically and educationally marginalized, as well as those who resent what they see as their wrongful decline from privilege.
Yuval Abraham’s “The IDF unit turning ‘Hilltop Youth” Settlers into Soldiers” is an investigation into how Israeli settlers from violent outposts are being inducted into a new military unit responsible for severe abuses of Palestinians across the West Bank. (However, in describing Israel’s “hilltop youth” as coming from “lower rungs,” Lori feels she may have overstated their marginalization. Although one report describes Israel’s hilltop youth as young men recruited from unstable homes, others point to the Israeli state’s unwillingness to stop them.)
Daniel Kupfert Heller, Jabotinsky's Children, on the rise of the transnational youth movement, Betar. A correction: Jabotinsky was from Odessa (modern Ukraine), but much of his support was in Poland.
RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) as the first institutionalization of the Hindutva project and a living remnant of 1920s fascism.
The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) arises as the political wing of the RSS and comes to prominence around the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque.
Lori's interview with Zachary Lockman in MERIP about historical changes in American Jewish attitudes towards Zionism.
Ajantha refers to the argument in Natasha Roth-Rowland's recent dissertation ("'Not One Inch of Retreat': The Transnational Jewish Far Right, 1929-1996"), that the turn towards Zionism is linked in the US with a turn away from Communism as another transnational movement, waning as Zionism was waxing.
Lori mentions the grim effects of the redefinition of anti-Semitism put forward in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA), one response to which is the 2020 Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.
Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands discusses Zionist support of Hindutva activism and lobbying in the US. One group that has modelled its congressional activism on that of the American Jewish Committee and AIPAC is the Hindu American Foundation.
Ajantha mentions Hindutvites repurposing their online Islamophobia in support of Israel after Hamas’s October 7th military operation.
Alberto Toscano, “The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism” discusses radical Black thinkers who have argued that racial slavery was a form of American fascism.
Robert Paxton’s “The Five Stages of Fascism” makes the case that the KKK may be the earliest fascist organization.
Recallable Books
Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingard, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism.
Joshua Cohen The Netanyahus (John spoke with Cohen about the novel in Recall This Book 110)
Susan Bayly's Saints, Goddesses and Kings.
Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi's India.
Read transcript here.

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46 min
December 14, 2023119 Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 2
Natasha Roth-Rowland is a writer and researcher at Diaspora Alliance, a former editor at +972 Magazine, and an expert on the Jewish far right. She joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian midway through a three-part RTB series, "Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism." Listen to episode 1 here.
The three discuss the transnational formation of the Jewish far right over the 20th and 21st centuries, the gradual movement of far right actors into the heart of the Israeli state, and the shared investment in territorial maximalism, racial supremacy, and natalism across the Zionist ideological spectrum.
Coming up next in RTB 120: Lori and Ajantha sit down with John to synthesize what Murli and Natasha had to say about Ethnonationalism in Indian and in Israel.
Mentioned in the episode
Ben Shitrit, Lihi. Righteous Transgressions: Women’s Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
El-Or, Tamar, and Gideon Aran. “Giving Birth to a Settlement: Maternal Thinking and Political Action of Jewish Women on the West Bank.” Gender and Society 9, no. 1 (February 1995): 60-78.
Neuman, Tamara. “Maternal ‘Anti-Politics’ in the Formation of Hebron’s Jewish Enclave.”
Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 51-70.
Neuman, Tamara. Settling Hebron: Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Krampf, Arie. The Israeli Path to Neoliberalism: The State, Continuity, and Change. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.

Read and Listen here.

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47 min
December 07, 2023 118 Violent Majorities, Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism. Episode 1
"The Slippery Slope to a Multiculturalism of Caste"
Professor Balmurli Natrajan has long studied questions of caste, nationalism and fascism in the Indian context: his many works include a 2011 book, The Culturalization of Caste in India. He joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian to kick off a three-part RTB series, "Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism."
The three discuss the ideological bases of Indian ethnonationalism, including its historical links to European fascism, the role of caste as both a conduit and impediment to suturing a Hindu majority, the overlaps and differences between the mobilization work of the Hindu Right in India and the U.S., and possibilities for countering India's slide towards fascism.
Mentioned in the episode:
-B. R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste, Verso, 2014 [1936].
-Zaheer Baber, "Religious nationalism, violence and the Hindutva movement in India," Dialectical Anthropology 25(1): 61–76, 2000.
-Meera Nanda, The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu, NYU Press, 2011.
-Christophe Jaffrelot on Radikaal podcast, August 28, 2022.
-Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, Columbia University Press, 1996.
-Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021.
-Jairus Banaji, "Fascism as a Mass-Movement: Translator's Introduction," Historical Materialism 20.1, 2012: 133-143.
-Arthur Rosenberg, "Fascism as a Mass Movement," Historical Materialism 20.1 (2012) [1934]: 144-189.
-Stuart Hall, "The Great Moving Right Show," Marxism Today, January 1979.
-Snigdha Poonam, Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing the World, Harvard University Press, 2018.
-Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton University Press, 2001. (edited)
Read and Listen to the episode here

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49 min
November 16, 2023117* Laurence Ralph Reckons With Police Violence (EF, JP)
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)

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45 Global Policing 3 Laurence Ralph: Reckoning with Police Violence

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40 min
November 02, 2023116 "We are all latecomers": Martin Puchner's "Culture" (JP, EF)
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.

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50 min
October 19, 2023115* Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the Formation (JP)
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

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43 Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the Formation

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39 min
October 05, 2023114 John Guillory Professes Criticism (JP, Nick Dames)
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)

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39 min