120 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) ethnonational...
4 Jan 202447min
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, "Decolonizing Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
In his extensive body of work, Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim challenges both historical interpretations of Islamic Sharia and neo-colonial understanding of human rights. To advance the rationale o...
3 Jan 20241h 1min
Robert R. Janes, "Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat" (Routledge, 2023)
Who do you turn to at the brink of the apocalypse? What might help us to mitigate the financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural collapse for which we may be heading? Museums and Societal ...
2 Jan 202457min
Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
Suspicious of what he called the spectator's "sticky" adherence to the screen, Roland Barthes had a cautious attitude towards cinema. Falling into a hypnotic trance, the philosopher warned, an audienc...
1 Jan 20241h 15min
Jason Read, "The Politics of Transindividuality" (Haymarket Books, 2017)
Many major political questions today revolve around questions of human nature; what sort of people we are and what sort of people we're capable of being constitute both the goals and limits of the sor...
31 Des 20231h 15min
Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press, 2020)
Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from al...
31 Des 20231h 15min
Hongwei Bao, “Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China” (NIAS Press, 2018)
Hongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which means “comrade” and in more recent decades has bee...
31 Des 202344min
Annie McClanahan, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture" (Stanford UP, 2016)
When teaching a public course called “The Age of Debt” this winter break, I had the strange realization that one of the the most successful readings in that course, the one which most clearly explaine...
28 Des 202359min
