25,000 NBN Interviews!
Featuring an interview with Ato Quayson, our new segment "Alternative Angles," exciting news from the University of California Press, and a Book of the Day round-up
25,000 Interviews
We are beyond happy to share that our interview library now has more than 25,000 podcast episodes. That means more than 25,000 conversations facilitated between scholars and authors that have been listened to more than 130,000,000 times! Thank you for being a part of our community!
Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast
University press books are the lifeblood of New Books Network. We’re thrilled to announce a new partnership with the University of California Press. The podcast series features a feed of UC Press interviews— an excellent publisher known for its deeply researched books in film studies, global literature, climate science, and public policy. Subscribe below:
Alternative Angles: Animals
This new segment of the NBN newsletter highlights episodes, new and old, that explore the same topic from different angles. In the first edition of Alternative Angles, we present interviews with four academics: a philosopher, a legal scholar, a bioethicist, and a historian who interrogate the subjectivity of animals and how we understand the human-animal divide.
In his recent interview with our partner channel, Recall This Book, philosopher David Peña-Guzmán discusses his book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness. Peña-Guzmán investigates dreams as a window into consciousness, and explores the social and moral implications of the fact that other animals dream.
Legal scholar Maneesha Deckha examines how the legal system in Canada and other countries construct the human-animal divide and categorizes animals as property in her compelling book, Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders. She aims to bring animal law and theorizations of animals closer together through her scholarship. In doing so, she combines and compares feminist theories of embodiment and relationality, animal care, postcolonial studies, and critical animal studies.
Bioethicist Jessica Pierce questions the ethics of keeping animals as pets, and whether or not certain species are more or less suited to being pets. In Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets, Pierce draws on a mix of personal reflections, philosophical musings, and animal behavior studies, allowing a broad audience to consider the relationship that humans have to animals as pets.
In this episode with our partner channel, High Theory, intellectual historian Mackenzie Cooley posits that animal breeding and the politics of making life are integral to understanding the history of race as a concept that emerged in the early modern world. In her book, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance, Cooley teases out this argument, demonstrating that early theories and practices of animal breeding were foundational to the development of the concept of race that was eventually applied to humans.
Scholarly Sources
Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Professor of English and Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University.
Ato’s recent book, Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022 and won the Warren-Brooks Prize in Literary Criticism.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: I am currently re-reading Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate to prepare an episode for my YouTube channel, Critic.Reading.Writing. After that I am going to read Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck, which is an Australian Sci-Fi shipwreck novel I only recently heard of but which I am looking forward to reading very much.
Q: What is your favorite book or essay to assign or give to people and why?
A: Out of my own publications, I would have to say Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism. It is an introduction to the city in which I grew up from the perspective of a single street – the Oxford Street of the title – which I deploy as an urban key to gain access to different aspects of the city’s history. I trace Accra from its beginning as a fishing settlement in the mid-17th century, through its phases of colonial and post-colonial urban planning, through its youth culture of salsa and body building, and finally to the idea of the street as an archive of architectural forms and variant cultural expressions. Most people that have read it seem to like it, even if they come from cities quite different from Accra.
In terms of other scholars’ material, I like to recommend Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness,” and Stuart Hall’s, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” They are both multi-generative, in the sense that once you read them you find there are so many other thoughts and ideas they instigate in your mind. They are always worth re-reading.
Q: Is there a book you read as a student that had a particularly profound impact on your trajectory as a scholar?
A: Yes, Aristotle’s Poetics and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. It was Freud who taught me how to be a close reader of texts (I read the book as a novel), while Aristotle showed me how to link content to form. The Poetics was also fundamental in getting me immersed in literary tragedy, something I have a deep interest in to this day and analyzed in my own book, Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature.
Q: Which deceased writer(s) would you most like to meet and why?
A: Toni Morrison and Shakespeare. I often wonder what it would be like to have Hamlet and Pilate (from Morrison’s Song of Solomon) stranded at a bus stop waiting for the delayed bus 77 and chatting about the state of the world, starting with the shitty bus service. It would make for a really fascinating conversation, I think.
Q: What's the best book you've read in the past year?
A: That is a really hard question, since I read so many books. But I would venture to say Arash Azizi’s The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the U.S., and Iran's Global Ambitions. It was an eye-opener not just about Iran, but the complicated politics of the entire region.
(Read Arash Azizi’s recent profile in NBN’s Scholarly Sources here.)
Q: Have you seen any films, exhibits, or lectures that left an impression on you recently?
A: Well, my family and I are currently re-watching The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is proving very fascinating for its storytelling. I first read the book, along with The Hobbit, when I was about 13 years old in Ghana. But it is only now that I am coming to appreciate the complexities of the story. For example, it now strikes me that the Orcs are really a species of cognitively disabled people. And why are they depicted as so incredibly ugly. Plus, they also come across as slaves of various masters who use them as canon fodder to achieve their evil objectives. It would be interesting to teach Tolkien’s novels from these perspectives.
Q: What do you plan on reading next?
A: I already mentioned Rawson’s book. There are many new works by African writers that have come out in the last few years that I am not fully caught up on, but would like to read.
Q: In your introduction to Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, you mentioned that your 2007 book, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, is its progenitor. Can you talk more about how you see these works as linked in addition to your intellectual journey?
A: Well, I can say that I have gone through about four major intellectual paradigm shifts in my career. The first was Tragedy, which colored almost everything that I wrote up to and including Aesthetic Nervousness. The second was Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies, which dominated my thinking while I was at the University of Toronto and out of which came Oxford Street, Accra. The third was Urban Studies, which was an off-shoot of diaspora and transnationalism studies. The fourth is Global Black Studies, which I think of in comparative terms that gets me to focus not just on African and African American Studies, but also on the variant historical articulations of Blackness in different parts of the world, such as Brazil (very important), Black Europe (London, Paris, Berlin), and Asia (most fascinatingly in China), among other places. Aesthetic Nervousness was clearly part of the Tragedy phase, as I mentioned a moment ago, but in it the idea of the tragic was not fully worked out, and I used figures of disability from various writers as surrogates for the question of tragedy proper.
Q: You open Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature reflecting on the violence of Sani Abacha’s Nigerian government. Can you share more about what motivates you as a scholar?
A: Lots of things motivate me as a scholar. The first is the complexity of the aesthetic domain and how it sometimes frustrates the articulation of a clear ethical viewpoint. I have long tried to separate the examination of the aesthetic domain from happenings in the political or social world outside the literary text, but I now find that the outside world frequently intrudes or violates the literary/aesthetic and political/social domains, so that keeping them separate is often quite futile. I am the kind of scholar who pays acute attention to complexity. Even in advocating for particular political positions, I think it is very important not to simplify their complexity.
Q: You said that your primary aim for this book was to “establish a comparative framework for exploring tragedy from a simultaneously postcolonial and western perspective,” can you expand on this a bit? Who should read Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature and why?
A: The first thing to bear in mind is that one cannot say anything intelligent or useful about Tragedy without first having a good grasp of the Western tradition of writing and critiquing tragedy in its many forms. But the Western tradition does not have the monopoly of wisdom on the matter. For example, it is well known that classical tragedy centered primarily on the lives and choices of the nobility. This really meant that the focus was heavily placed on the consequences of their ethical choices and the reversals of fortune that they suffered from these decisions. Shakespeare opened up a new chapter on tragedy, but still focused primarily on the doings of royals, generals, and emperors. Western tragedy also tends to be mainly interested in the individual rather than the collective. It thus has an in-built bias against representations of collective malaise and alienation. And yet this is exactly what colonialism produced in many parts of the world, and out of which came all forms of collective and individual tragic suffering.
The question of the effects of suffering are also very fascinating. For suffering is not just emotional or indeed physical in its effects, but rather, ultimately involves, firstly the atrophying of the capacity to undertake ethically salient choices, and secondly, the discombobulation of the self. It is experienced somehow like a form of self-dissolution and the loss of self-integrity that is attended by great emotional pain and distress. Depending on the community in which the protagonist is enveloped, this also leads to a form of contamination of the community in general. This is what I try to convey in the concept of musuo that I try to convey in the book.
Musuo is Akan concept typically translated as “taboo”. But among the Akan it means much more than that, and can include the ways that the entire community experiences the musuo of the individual as a challenge to their most cherished values. You find something of musuo even in Greek tragedy, for example when Oedipus comes out from Jocasta’s chamber at the end of Sophocles’ play with his eyes streaming blood, the Chorus respond to the terrible sight with their own declarations of horror and self-doubt, as if afflicted by a deeply unsettling existential crisis. Musuo also defines both Agamemnon’s killing of his daughter Iphigenia in Aeschylus’s eponymous play, but also how the Chorus react to it, at least in hindsight. Something of this is also found in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. This is what I meant to track in the book by setting up a dialogue between Western and postcolonial tragedies.
(Watch Quayson’s break down and analysis of Death and the King’s Horseman on his YouTube Channel, Critic.Reading.Writing)
Q: You have the YouTube channel, Critic.Reading.Writing. What do you explore in this channel, and what are your goals? Who is the intended audience for this channel?
A: Critic.Reading.Writing is a channel I started with my wife during the COVID-19 pandemic. It grew in my frustration with not being to do anything meaningful in the face of the killing of George Floyd. So, I decided to show that not all Black people were simply criminals or sportspeople or jazz players, but that there were also intellectuals among us. In a way this was and is a moot point, but given the level of ignorance that many people express toward Black people, I thought it was important at the time to change views, even if extremely slowly. So, I set out in C.R.W. to put out episodes discussing literature, urban studies, interdisciplinarity, and postcolonialism, among other things. The episodes are all aimed for adoption in the classroom, whether in high school or at university. I try to make the episodes accessible but also not overly simplified so that my audience can feel stimulated to go and find out more. After posting around 42 episodes and a hiatus of some 2 years following a return to in-person teaching, I have now relaunched the channel beginning with episodes on Magical Realism. I will include episodes on the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Ben Okri, Junot Diaz, and many others. I will likely continue with episodes drawing on disability studies, medical humanities, literary theory and related issues.
Listen to Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee’s January discussion of the the book they co-edited, Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, on the NBN.
Book of the Day Round Up
Interested in learning about a mix of new topics? Subscribe to the NBN Book of the Day channel! Every week we publish interviews with scholars whose work is at the cutting edge of their field. Highlights from the past week include episodes about the genre of horror, the Algerian war of independence, Sondheim, and the Paris Climate Agreement.