Podcasts about World literature

What does it mean for theory to be considered as a species of not just literature but world literature? Theory as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), edited by Jeffrey De Leo, offers a wide range of accounts of how the “worlding” of literature both problematizes the national categorizing of theory (e.g., French theory), and brings new meanings and challenges to the coming together of theory and literature. In sum, it presents theory as world literature as a viable alternative to more commonplace approaches to theory.Under such an approach to theory, what it means to be an African, American, or Asian “theorist” – let alone a French, German, or Spanish one – in the new millennium is as complicated (or simple) as what means to be “African,” “American,” or “Asian.” “Worlded” literature is not considered here as only the world literature of nations and nationalities. Rather, it is also the worlded literature of individuals crossing borders, mixing stories, and speaking in dialect. So too is it the worlded literature of the multinational corporate publishing industry wherein success in the global market is a major determinate of aesthetic and literary value.Offering accounts of what it means to consider theory as world literature, the authors in this pioneering collection explore the ways in which we might regard theory as connected and reconnected through global literary networks of increasing complexity and precarity. By approaching theory from this perspective, Theory as World Literature demonstrates how and why theory is more worldly now than ever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What does it mean for theory to be considered as a species of not just literature but world literature? Theory as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), edited by Jeffrey De Leo, offers a wide range of accounts of how the “worlding” of literature both problematizes the national categorizing of theory (e.g., French theory), and brings new meanings and challenges to the coming together of theory and literature. In sum, it presents theory as world literature as a viable alternative to more commonplace approaches to theory.Under such an approach to theory, what it means to be an African, American, or Asian “theorist” – let alone a French, German, or Spanish one – in the new millennium is as complicated (or simple) as what means to be “African,” “American,” or “Asian.” “Worlded” literature is not considered here as only the world literature of nations and nationalities. Rather, it is also the worlded literature of individuals crossing borders, mixing stories, and speaking in dialect. So too is it the worlded literature of the multinational corporate publishing industry wherein success in the global market is a major determinate of aesthetic and literary value.Offering accounts of what it means to consider theory as world literature, the authors in this pioneering collection explore the ways in which we might regard theory as connected and reconnected through global literary networks of increasing complexity and precarity. By approaching theory from this perspective, Theory as World Literature demonstrates how and why theory is more worldly now than ever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Waardeer je onze video's? Steun dan Café Weltschmerz, het podium voor het vrije woord: https://www.cafeweltschmerz.nl/doneren/Het is weer hip voor politici - die zelf nooit onder de wapenen vielen of zelfs maar in dienst zaten- om oorlog te hitsen. Daarom bespreken we vandaag twee klassiekers over hoe je als militair zo'n oorlog wint of juist verliest. Het 2500 jaar oude “De Kunst van het Oorlog voeren” van Sun Tzu en de klassieker van Carl von Clausewitz. (1831) In hun tijd kon je nog spreken van een ‘duel' tussen naties: de ‘absolute' oorlog was verschrikkelijk en dodelijk voor wie het treft, maar wel een gelijkwaardig treffen als in Martial Arts. Met moderne wapens en drones is toen gepromote ridderlijkheid onmogelijk geworden.Boeken van de week:Andrew W. Ziegler (vertaler) (2010): Sun Tzu's origional Art of War, Colors Network PublishingCarl von Clausewitz (1831, 1997) On War, Engelse vertaling Wordsworth classics of World LiteratureHoofdstuk 3 uit Liever dood dan Slaaf: “De Strijd om het Bestaan”Boek en StrijdT Bier bestellen viahttps://lieverdooddanslaaf.com/Volg Rypke ook dagelijks op https://www.interessantetijden.nl/ en wekelijks Interessante Tijden op Youtubehttps://www.youtube.com/@interessantetijden---Deze video is geproduceerd door Café Weltschmerz. Café Weltschmerz gelooft in de kracht van het gesprek en zendt interviews uit over actuele maatschappelijke thema's. Wij bieden een hoogwaardig alternatief voor de mainstream media. Café Weltschmerz is onafhankelijk en niet verbonden aan politieke, religieuze of commerciële partijen.Wil je meer video's bekijken en op de hoogte blijven via onze nieuwsbrief? Ga dan naar: https://www.cafeweltschmerz.nl/videos/Wil je op de hoogte worden gebracht van onze nieuwe video's? Klik dan op deze link: https://bit.ly/3XweTO0

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers', looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose's scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today? Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers', looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose's scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today? Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers', looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose's scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today? Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers', looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose's scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today? Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers', looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose's scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today? Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers', looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose's scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today? Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers', looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose's scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today? Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University

On April 15, The New York Public Library kicks off their annual World Literature & Arts Festival, with a series of events and author talks spotlighting excellent fiction from around the world. Plus, 12 translated titles will be available to borrow as e-copies immediately, in unlimited quantities. Erica Parker, the NYPL associate director of adult cultural programming, previews the festival, and the 12 novels available to borrow. Plus, listeners share their favorite translated works. Photo by Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Learn more at TheCityLife.org

Esra Akkaya und Onur Erdur sprechen über die Wiederentdeckung der Schriftstellerin Tezer Özlü (1943–1986) –und über existentielles Schreiben zwischen der Türkei und Deutschland, Istanbul und Berlin.

In this episode, Dean Horswell chats with Rachel Harris about her recent research on the IDF archive and the early formation of Israeli film culture. Their conversation moves beyond the finished article to the process itself: what it means to actually undertake archival research, to work inside military and state archives, and to piece together a history from fragmentary, uneven, and sometimes resistant sources. They discuss the intellectual and methodological stakes of reading institutional archives critically, the challenges of access and interpretation, and how archival discoveries can reshape established narratives about cinema, nation-building, and cultural production. The episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how archival work happens—and why it matters.Rachel S. Harris occupies the Gimelstob Eminent Scholar Chair for Judaic Studies, and is a Professor of Film and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University where she also directs the Program in Jewish Studies. Prior to this, she was an Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature and The Program in Jewish Culture & Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2009-2022). She was also was the Shoshana Shrier Distinguished Visiting Professor at Toronto University. She is active in the Association for Jewish Studies where she served as the chair of the Women's Caucus (2017-2019) and the Association for Israel Studies where she served two terms on the board (2015-2019) and Chaired the 37th Association for Israel Studies Annual Conference "Pluralistic Israel: Women, Minorities and Diversity" in 2021. She has served on the committee for the Yonathan Shapiro Award for Best Book in Israel Studies (2019-2022) and as its chair (2021-2022).Harris is the author of Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (2017) and An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature (2014). She is the co-editor of Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema (2021) with Dan Chyutin which won The Janovics Center Best Book Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre Studies, 2021. She edited Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2019), and with Ranen Omer-Sherman she edited Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (2012).She is the editor in chief of the Journal of Jewish Identities.

In this episode, Dean Horswell chats with Rachel Harris about her recent research on the IDF archive and the early formation of Israeli film culture. Their conversation moves beyond the finished article to the process itself: what it means to actually undertake archival research, to work inside military and state archives, and to piece together a history from fragmentary, uneven, and sometimes resistant sources. They discuss the intellectual and methodological stakes of reading institutional archives critically, the challenges of access and interpretation, and how archival discoveries can reshape established narratives about cinema, nation-building, and cultural production. The episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how archival work happens—and why it matters.Rachel S. Harris occupies the Gimelstob Eminent Scholar Chair for Judaic Studies, and is a Professor of Film and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University where she also directs the Program in Jewish Studies. Prior to this, she was an Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature and The Program in Jewish Culture & Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2009-2022). She was also was the Shoshana Shrier Distinguished Visiting Professor at Toronto University. She is active in the Association for Jewish Studies where she served as the chair of the Women's Caucus (2017-2019) and the Association for Israel Studies where she served two terms on the board (2015-2019) and Chaired the 37th Association for Israel Studies Annual Conference "Pluralistic Israel: Women, Minorities and Diversity" in 2021. She has served on the committee for the Yonathan Shapiro Award for Best Book in Israel Studies (2019-2022) and as its chair (2021-2022).Harris is the author of Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (2017) and An Ideological Death: Suicide in Israeli Literature (2014). She is the co-editor of Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema (2021) with Dan Chyutin which won The Janovics Center Best Book Award for Outstanding Humanities Research in Transnational Film and Theatre Studies, 2021. She edited Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2019), and with Ranen Omer-Sherman she edited Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture (2012).She is the editor in chief of the Journal of Jewish Identities.

In the 47th episode of Podcastul Narativ, I am speaking with Will Evans, the founder and CEO of Deep Vellum Publishing, which has published Romanian writers like Mircea Cărtărescu (Solenoid and Theodoros, Translated by Sean Cotter) and Magda Cârneci and Will publish Tatiana Țîbuleac, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes (translated by Monica Cure).

While Shakespeare was reshaping English drama, a parallel theatrical revolution was unfolding in Spain. During the Spanish Golden Age, playwright Lope de Vega pioneered the comedia nueva, a bold new dramatic form that broke classical rules in favor of fast-paced plots, emotional intensity, and popular appeal. In this episode, scholar and translator Barbara Fuchs shares how the theatrical innovations of Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, and others, including a three-act structure, blended genres, and complex female roles, helped redefine early modern theater and influenced the kinds of stories told on the English stage. Fuchs traces the rich cultural exchange between Spain and England and the work that she is doing now with Diversifying the Classics to bring plays in Spanish from both sides of the Atlantic to new audiences. Fuchs also discusses her adaptation for young audiences of de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, a powerful story of collective resistance, whichwill be featured at the Folger's Reading Room Festival on Saturday, January 24. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published January 12, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Hamish Brown in Stirling, Scotland, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc. Barbara Fuchs, trained as a comparatist (English, Spanish, French, Italian), Professor Fuchs works on European cultural production from the late fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, with a special emphasis on literature and empire, and on theater and performance in transnational contexts. As part of her commitment to the public humanities and collaborative work, she directs the UCLA “Diversifying the Classics” initiative and edits the series “The Comedia in Translation and Performance” for Juan de la Cuesta. She is also director of LA Escena, Los Angeles' biennial festival of Hispanic classical theater, founded in 2018. Currently, Professor Fuchs serves as one of the articles editors for Renaissance Quarterly. Professor Fuchs' recent books include Knowing Fictions: Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Penn 2021); The Courage to Right a Woman's Wrongs (Juan de la Cuesta 2021), a collaborative translation of Ana Caro's Valor, agravio y mujer; and The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe (Toronto 2020), co-edited with Mercedes García-Arenal. She is also one of the editors for the Norton Anthology of World Literature (2012, 2018). Her Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a time of Pandemic, one of the first studies of how theater was transformed by COVID-19, was published by Methuen in September 2021. She is currently working on a translation and critical edition of Ginés Pérez de Hita's Las guerras civiles de Granada with Payton Phillips Quintanilla. In 2021, Professor Fuchs served as President of the Modern Language Association. She was recently awarded the inaugural “Premio Ñ” from the Instituto Cervantes, for the promotion of Spanish language and culture.

Offering a fresh comparative lens, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions (U Alberta Press, 2025) demonstrates how postcolonial writers have transformed the Bildungsroman from an eighteenth-century European genre meant to express local concerns around childhood development into one of the most cosmopolitan literary mediums for communicating overlapping concerns about global modernity. If literature is the crucial site where people find the language to convey their social experiences, this book reveals how the Bildungsroman now functions in the global world of letters to capture and bear witness to young people's varied interactions and responses to both local and global forces enveloping and shaping their lives. Chapters explore identity, sexuality, human rights, the climate crisis, neoliberal globalization, and a host of other issues in work from a wide range of postcolonial locations across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Forging productive scholarly engagements between narratology and genre theory, the volume documents the aesthetic and thematic shifts that have accompanied the Bildungsroman in the past two centuries, particularly in the context of anticolonial, liberationist, and self-determination struggles from the mid-twentieth century onwards in the global south. With a very diverse array of essays from multiple continents, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman makes a crucial intervention to the existing scholarship on this influential genre and a unique contribution to the study of world literature. Contributors: David Babcock, Sarah Brouillette, Gregory Byala, Deena Dinat, Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, José-Santiago Fernández-Vázquez, Ericka A. Hoagland, Elizabeth Jackson, Feroza Jussawala, Andrew David King, Aruna Krishnamurthy, Simone Puleo, Peter Ribic, Arnab Dutta Roy, Craig Smith, Antonette Talaue-Arogo, Paul Ugor, Julieann, Veronica Ulin, Rachel Ann Walsh, Maria Su Wang, Bethany Williamson, Helena Wu, Julia Wurr. Arnab Dutta Roy is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. His research lies at the intersection of postcolonialism, human rights theory, and modern South Asian literature, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Review, Comparatist, Genre, New Literary History, and others. He is the co-editor of two books on the postcolonial Bildungsroman: The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions (University of Alberta Press, 2025) and The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place (forthcoming with University of Nebraska Press, January 2026). In addition, he has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of World Literature titled Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature. He is currently working on a monograph titled Universalisms in South Asian Literature that draws on interdisciplinary work in postcolonial theory and human rights to analyze literary responses to colonialism from South Asia. At FGCU, he teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses on world literature and postcolonial theory. Gargi Binju is a PhD scholar at the University of Tuebingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Offering a fresh comparative lens, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions (U Alberta Press, 2025) demonstrates how postcolonial writers have transformed the Bildungsroman from an eighteenth-century European genre meant to express local concerns around childhood development into one of the most cosmopolitan literary mediums for communicating overlapping concerns about global modernity. If literature is the crucial site where people find the language to convey their social experiences, this book reveals how the Bildungsroman now functions in the global world of letters to capture and bear witness to young people's varied interactions and responses to both local and global forces enveloping and shaping their lives. Chapters explore identity, sexuality, human rights, the climate crisis, neoliberal globalization, and a host of other issues in work from a wide range of postcolonial locations across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Forging productive scholarly engagements between narratology and genre theory, the volume documents the aesthetic and thematic shifts that have accompanied the Bildungsroman in the past two centuries, particularly in the context of anticolonial, liberationist, and self-determination struggles from the mid-twentieth century onwards in the global south. With a very diverse array of essays from multiple continents, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman makes a crucial intervention to the existing scholarship on this influential genre and a unique contribution to the study of world literature. Contributors: David Babcock, Sarah Brouillette, Gregory Byala, Deena Dinat, Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey, José-Santiago Fernández-Vázquez, Ericka A. Hoagland, Elizabeth Jackson, Feroza Jussawala, Andrew David King, Aruna Krishnamurthy, Simone Puleo, Peter Ribic, Arnab Dutta Roy, Craig Smith, Antonette Talaue-Arogo, Paul Ugor, Julieann, Veronica Ulin, Rachel Ann Walsh, Maria Su Wang, Bethany Williamson, Helena Wu, Julia Wurr. Arnab Dutta Roy is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. His research lies at the intersection of postcolonialism, human rights theory, and modern South Asian literature, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Review, Comparatist, Genre, New Literary History, and others. He is the co-editor of two books on the postcolonial Bildungsroman: The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions (University of Alberta Press, 2025) and The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place (forthcoming with University of Nebraska Press, January 2026). In addition, he has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of World Literature titled Constructing the Other: Narrative Empathy and the Ethics of Border-Crossing in World Literature. He is currently working on a monograph titled Universalisms in South Asian Literature that draws on interdisciplinary work in postcolonial theory and human rights to analyze literary responses to colonialism from South Asia. At FGCU, he teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses on world literature and postcolonial theory. Gargi Binju is a PhD scholar at the University of Tuebingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Send us a text A polished, front-to-back performance by David Pickering of Avram Davidson's masterwork on Sinbad: a lyrical, scholarly, and funny voyage that charts the blurred edge where sailors' yarns become maps.  • From Baghdad to Basra and out across monsoon routes • Kabil/Kasil and the “drums” of hollow rocks; giants with barge-long ears • Diamond valleys, sea-horses, and why travelers fib (beautifully) • Roc feathers, Raphia palms, and the spoor of real geography inside fable • How “Serendip” gave us serendipity  Hashtags:  #audiobook #AvramDavidson #sinbad #Unhistory #folklore #worldliterature #arabiannights #exploration #maritimehistory #mythology #storytelling  @LocusMagazine  @tordotcom  @Bookshop_org_TV  @davidpickering8483 

Dog—the U.S. debut of Israeli writer Yishay Ishi Ron—delivers an honest and unflinching portrait of a veteran battling trauma and addiction.The story follows Geller, a former Israeli commando officer whose life unravels the aftermath of war. Now adrift in Tel Aviv, he struggles with PTSD, addiction, and the disorienting pull of memory. On the margins of society, Geller forges tentative connections—with Doris, a woman whose loyalty offers both comfort and challenge, and with a stray dog who becomes his unlikely companion but emotional anchor.Written originally in Hebrew and long-listed for the Sapir Prize, one of Israel's most prestigious literary awards, the novel now reaches English-speaking readers in a translation that preserves both its intensity and lyricism.Ishi, is not only the author but also a survivor of PTSD, having served in an elite IDF combat unit. His writing channels lived experience into fiction, and it shows how storytelling can give shape to pain, reshape it, and transcend beyond it. Joining him is Yardenne Greenspan, a Tel Aviv–born writer and translator. Yardenne is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program in fiction and literary translation, and definitely has brought some of the most urgent voices in Hebrew literature into English.Recommended Reading:DOGAuthor's facebook --> https://www.facebook.com/yishay.ron.1Author's Instagram --> https://www.instagram.com/yishayron/Author's Twitter--> https://x.com/IshiRon1Author's Linkedin--> https://www.linkedin.com/in/yishay-ishi-ron-b2090594/Comment and interact with our hostsSupport the showOfficial website Tiktok Facebook Twitter Instagram Linkedin

What truly makes Anna Karenina so significant—as an epitome of world literature—is that it is far more than a tale of love and tragedy. Tolstoy offers us a mirror of the common human condition and suffering—his characters are as alive today, with all their emotional turmoil, just as they were in the 19th century. Today, we're truly honored to welcome back Professor. Julia Titus from Yale University, to guide us into Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece Anna Karenina. Prof. Titus is the author of Dostoevsky as a Translator of Balzac (2022).  Recommended Reading:Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878)Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, a professional conference platform for podcasting.Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!Start for FREEDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Comment and interact with our hostsSupport the showOfficial website Tiktok Facebook Twitter Instagram Linkedin

Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style (Fordham UP, 2025) analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law's colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common lawsuits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine. Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy's challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre.Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature's generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style (Fordham UP, 2025) analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law's colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common lawsuits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine. Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy's challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre.Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature's generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style (Fordham UP, 2025) analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law's colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common lawsuits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine. Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy's challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre.Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature's generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies

Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style (Fordham UP, 2025) analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law's colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common lawsuits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine. Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy's challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre.Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature's generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

 “I think one must frame what happened in Iran recently in the context of what is happening in the larger Middle East, which is that Israel and the United States principally are orchestrating a kind of regional shift in their power that can only be seen in light of what happened, and it continues to happen in Gaza and the wider Palestinian Territories, which is that Israel is, by virtue of signaling an aggressive move towards Iran, suggesting that it will continue unabated to exercise its will throughout the region, and that it also is interested in destroying Iranian support for Palestinian rights in the region.”Today on Speaking Out of Place with David Palumbo-Liu, we have a special episode on Israeli attacks on Iran that resulted in 12 days of bombings and culminated with the US dropping bunker bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities. Scholars and activists Persis Karim and Manijeh Moradian discuss both the Iranian national issues involved as well as the regional context, connecting this war with the genocide in Gaza and Israel's extensive wars elsewhere. At stake is both Iranian sovereignty and the calls for so-called “regime change.” We question the use of that term, delve into how the struggle for liberation in Iran rejects both the repressive Islamic state and the US/Israeli war machine. Our discussion draws the frightening parallels between Iran's stifling of dissent and imprisonment of political enemies and others with our own government's. Finally, we recall the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and build hope for international solidarity with groups working for liberation in Iran, Palestine, and elsewhere, and insist liberation will never be achieved by dropping bombs.Persis Karim is the director emeritus of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies and a professor in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers.Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, was published by Duke University Press in December 2022.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

 “I think one must frame what happened in Iran recently in the context of what is happening in the larger Middle East, which is that Israel and the United States principally are orchestrating a kind of regional shift in their power that can only be seen in light of what happened, and it continues to happen in Gaza and the wider Palestinian Territories, which is that Israel is, by virtue of signaling an aggressive move towards Iran, suggesting that it will continue unabated to exercise its will throughout the region, and that it also is interested in destroying Iranian support for Palestinian rights in the region.”Today on Speaking Out of Place with David Palumbo-Liu, we have a special episode on Israeli attacks on Iran that resulted in 12 days of bombings and culminated with the US dropping bunker bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities. Scholars and activists Persis Karim and Manijeh Moradian discuss both the Iranian national issues involved as well as the regional context, connecting this war with the genocide in Gaza and Israel's extensive wars elsewhere. At stake is both Iranian sovereignty and the calls for so-called “regime change.” We question the use of that term, delve into how the struggle for liberation in Iran rejects both the repressive Islamic state and the US/Israeli war machine. Our discussion draws the frightening parallels between Iran's stifling of dissent and imprisonment of political enemies and others with our own government's. Finally, we recall the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and build hope for international solidarity with groups working for liberation in Iran, Palestine, and elsewhere, and insist liberation will never be achieved by dropping bombs.Persis Karim is the director emeritus of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies and a professor in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers.Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, was published by Duke University Press in December 2022.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

 “I think one must frame what happened in Iran recently in the context of what is happening in the larger Middle East, which is that Israel and the United States principally are orchestrating a kind of regional shift in their power that can only be seen in light of what happened, and it continues to happen in Gaza and the wider Palestinian Territories, which is that Israel is, by virtue of signaling an aggressive move towards Iran, suggesting that it will continue unabated to exercise its will throughout the region, and that it also is interested in destroying Iranian support for Palestinian rights in the region.”Today on Speaking Out of Place with David Palumbo-Liu, we have a special episode on Israeli attacks on Iran that resulted in 12 days of bombings and culminated with the US dropping bunker bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities. Scholars and activists Persis Karim and Manijeh Moradian discuss both the Iranian national issues involved as well as the regional context, connecting this war with the genocide in Gaza and Israel's extensive wars elsewhere. At stake is both Iranian sovereignty and the calls for so-called “regime change.” We question the use of that term, delve into how the struggle for liberation in Iran rejects both the repressive Islamic state and the US/Israeli war machine. Our discussion draws the frightening parallels between Iran's stifling of dissent and imprisonment of political enemies and others with our own government's. Finally, we recall the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and build hope for international solidarity with groups working for liberation in Iran, Palestine, and elsewhere, and insist liberation will never be achieved by dropping bombs.Persis Karim is the director emeritus of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies and a professor in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers.Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, was published by Duke University Press in December 2022.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

Today on Speaking Out of Place we have a special episode on the war in Iran. Scholars and activists Persis Karim and Manijeh Moradian discuss both the Iranian national issues involved as well as the regional context, connecting this war with the genocide in Gaza and Israel's extensive wars elsewhere. At stake is both Iranian sovereignty and the calls for so-called “regime change.” We question the use of that term, delve into how the struggle for liberation in Iran rejects both the repressive Islamic state and the US/Israeli war machine.  Our discussion draws the frightening parallels between Iran's stifling of dissent and imprisonment of political enemies and others with our own government's.  Finally, we recall the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and build hope for international solidarity with groups working for liberation in Iran, Palestine, and elsewhere, and insist liberation will never be achieved by dropping bombs.                Persis Karim teaches in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University. She was the creator and director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies during its entire existence there. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers. Before coming to San Francisco State, she was a professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State where she was the founder and director of the Persian Studies program, and coordinator of the Middle East Studies Minor. She has published numerous articles about Iranian diaspora literature and culture for academic publications including Iranian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asian, African and Middle East Studies (CSSAMES), and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. “The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life,” is her first film project (co-directed and co-produced with Soumyaa Behrens). She received her Master's in Middle East Studies and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. She is also a poet.Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, was published by Duke University Press in December 2022.  She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Scholar & Feminist online, and Women's Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and on the editorial board of the Jadaliyya.com Iran Page. 

Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy.As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father's friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve's childhood—his parents' legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend. Each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father's past, another insight into his disappearance. Yet with every revelation, his father becomes more difficult to recognize. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life.Rich in atmosphere, and with a stunningly sure-footed emotional compass, The Imagined Life: A Novel (Knopf, 2025) is a probing, nostalgic novel about the impossibility of understanding one's parents, about first loves and failures, about lost innocence, about the unbreakable bonds between a father and a son. Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collections The Disappeared and The Theory of Light and Matter and a previous novel, In Between Days. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Narrative, and elsewhere. He currently teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Recommended Books: Paul. Lisicky, Songs So Wild and Blue Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, Elita Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy.As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father's friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve's childhood—his parents' legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend. Each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father's past, another insight into his disappearance. Yet with every revelation, his father becomes more difficult to recognize. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life.Rich in atmosphere, and with a stunningly sure-footed emotional compass, The Imagined Life: A Novel (Knopf, 2025) is a probing, nostalgic novel about the impossibility of understanding one's parents, about first loves and failures, about lost innocence, about the unbreakable bonds between a father and a son. Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collections The Disappeared and The Theory of Light and Matter and a previous novel, In Between Days. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Narrative, and elsewhere. He currently teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Recommended Books: Paul. Lisicky, Songs So Wild and Blue Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, Elita Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy.As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father's friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve's childhood—his parents' legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend. Each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father's past, another insight into his disappearance. Yet with every revelation, his father becomes more difficult to recognize. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life.Rich in atmosphere, and with a stunningly sure-footed emotional compass, The Imagined Life: A Novel (Knopf, 2025) is a probing, nostalgic novel about the impossibility of understanding one's parents, about first loves and failures, about lost innocence, about the unbreakable bonds between a father and a son. Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collections The Disappeared and The Theory of Light and Matter and a previous novel, In Between Days. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Narrative, and elsewhere. He currently teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Recommended Books: Paul. Lisicky, Songs So Wild and Blue Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, Elita Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal's traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British colonization marked a transition from the older, multifaith folk world of traditional ghosts to newer and more frightening specters. These "modern" Bengali ghosts, borne out of a new rationality, were homogeneous specters amenable to "scientific" speculation and invoked at séance sessions in elite drawing rooms. Reading literature alongside the colonial archive, Bhattacharya uncovers a new reordering of science and faith from the middle of the nineteenth century. She argues that these shifts cemented the authority of a rising upper-caste colonial elite who expelled the older ghosts in order to recast Hinduism as the conscience of the Indian nation. In so doing, Bhattacharya reveals how capitalism necessarily reshaped Bengal as part of the global colonial project. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal's traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British colonization marked a transition from the older, multifaith folk world of traditional ghosts to newer and more frightening specters. These "modern" Bengali ghosts, borne out of a new rationality, were homogeneous specters amenable to "scientific" speculation and invoked at séance sessions in elite drawing rooms. Reading literature alongside the colonial archive, Bhattacharya uncovers a new reordering of science and faith from the middle of the nineteenth century. She argues that these shifts cemented the authority of a rising upper-caste colonial elite who expelled the older ghosts in order to recast Hinduism as the conscience of the Indian nation. In so doing, Bhattacharya reveals how capitalism necessarily reshaped Bengal as part of the global colonial project. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal's traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British colonization marked a transition from the older, multifaith folk world of traditional ghosts to newer and more frightening specters. These "modern" Bengali ghosts, borne out of a new rationality, were homogeneous specters amenable to "scientific" speculation and invoked at séance sessions in elite drawing rooms. Reading literature alongside the colonial archive, Bhattacharya uncovers a new reordering of science and faith from the middle of the nineteenth century. She argues that these shifts cemented the authority of a rising upper-caste colonial elite who expelled the older ghosts in order to recast Hinduism as the conscience of the Indian nation. In so doing, Bhattacharya reveals how capitalism necessarily reshaped Bengal as part of the global colonial project. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal's traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British colonization marked a transition from the older, multifaith folk world of traditional ghosts to newer and more frightening specters. These "modern" Bengali ghosts, borne out of a new rationality, were homogeneous specters amenable to "scientific" speculation and invoked at séance sessions in elite drawing rooms. Reading literature alongside the colonial archive, Bhattacharya uncovers a new reordering of science and faith from the middle of the nineteenth century. She argues that these shifts cemented the authority of a rising upper-caste colonial elite who expelled the older ghosts in order to recast Hinduism as the conscience of the Indian nation. In so doing, Bhattacharya reveals how capitalism necessarily reshaped Bengal as part of the global colonial project. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal's traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British colonization marked a transition from the older, multifaith folk world of traditional ghosts to newer and more frightening specters. These "modern" Bengali ghosts, borne out of a new rationality, were homogeneous specters amenable to "scientific" speculation and invoked at séance sessions in elite drawing rooms. Reading literature alongside the colonial archive, Bhattacharya uncovers a new reordering of science and faith from the middle of the nineteenth century. She argues that these shifts cemented the authority of a rising upper-caste colonial elite who expelled the older ghosts in order to recast Hinduism as the conscience of the Indian nation. In so doing, Bhattacharya reveals how capitalism necessarily reshaped Bengal as part of the global colonial project. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Today I talked to Ben Baer and Smaran Dayal about About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain.  Pioneering Indian Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote speculative fiction, manifestoes, radical reportage, and incisive essays that transformed her experience of enforced segregation into unique interventions against gender oppression everywhere. Her radical imagination links the realities of living in a British colony to the technological and scientific breakthroughs of her time, the effects of hauntingly pervasive systems of sexual domination, and collective dreams of the future, forging a visionary, experimental body of work. Alongside Rokeya's pathbreaking feminist science fiction story “Sultana's Dream,” this volume features fresh and exciting new translations of her key Bengali writings and a superbly informative introduction to her life and work. If her contemporary B. R. Ambedkar urged the “annihilation of caste,” Rokeya demands nothing less than the annihilation of sexism, with education as the primary instrument of this revolution. Her brilliant wit and creativity reflect profoundly on the complexities of undoing deep-seated gender supremacy and summon her readers to imagine hitherto undreamed freedoms. ROKEYA SAKHAWAT HOSSAIN (1880–1932) was born in present-day Bangladesh, then part of colonial India. Despite being deprived of formal education, she became a prominent writer, activist, and educator. The web of her life spanned from the minutiae of running a girls' school in Kolkata to struggles for women's emancipation on the national and world stage. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today I talked to Ben Baer and Smaran Dayal about About Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain.  Pioneering Indian Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote speculative fiction, manifestoes, radical reportage, and incisive essays that transformed her experience of enforced segregation into unique interventions against gender oppression everywhere. Her radical imagination links the realities of living in a British colony to the technological and scientific breakthroughs of her time, the effects of hauntingly pervasive systems of sexual domination, and collective dreams of the future, forging a visionary, experimental body of work. Alongside Rokeya's pathbreaking feminist science fiction story “Sultana's Dream,” this volume features fresh and exciting new translations of her key Bengali writings and a superbly informative introduction to her life and work. If her contemporary B. R. Ambedkar urged the “annihilation of caste,” Rokeya demands nothing less than the annihilation of sexism, with education as the primary instrument of this revolution. Her brilliant wit and creativity reflect profoundly on the complexities of undoing deep-seated gender supremacy and summon her readers to imagine hitherto undreamed freedoms. ROKEYA SAKHAWAT HOSSAIN (1880–1932) was born in present-day Bangladesh, then part of colonial India. Despite being deprived of formal education, she became a prominent writer, activist, and educator. The web of her life spanned from the minutiae of running a girls' school in Kolkata to struggles for women's emancipation on the national and world stage. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro's fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them. By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited. Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the host of the literary interview podcast, Burned by Books, and he is host and co-producer on Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society of Novel Studies, both of which are New Books Network partners. His most recent essays appear in NOVEL, MFS, Critique, and Public Books. Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author most recently of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro's fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them. By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited. Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the host of the literary interview podcast, Burned by Books, and he is host and co-producer on Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society of Novel Studies, both of which are New Books Network partners. His most recent essays appear in NOVEL, MFS, Critique, and Public Books. Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author most recently of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro's fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them. By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited. Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the host of the literary interview podcast, Burned by Books, and he is host and co-producer on Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society of Novel Studies, both of which are New Books Network partners. His most recent essays appear in NOVEL, MFS, Critique, and Public Books. Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author most recently of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Professor Persis Karim, co-producer and co-director of a new documentary film, The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life. She is joined by Roya Ahmadi, a student at Stanford who interned at the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University and was part of the production team for the film. The film captures the lives of young Iranian-Americans who come to the San Francisco Bay Area around the time of the Iranian Revolution, and find themselves involved with, and helping to shape, a vibrant, international culture of politics and art. We talk about both the similarities and differences between those days and today—especially with regard to diasporic identity formation in different historical times, and the persistent need to resist racism and bigotry and act in solidarity with others. Persis Karim is the director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University, where she also teaches in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers. Before coming to San Francisco State, she was a professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State where she was the founder and director of the Persian Studies program, and coordinator of the Middle East Studies Minor. She has published numerous articles about Iranian diaspora literature and culture for academic publications including Iranian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asian, African and Middle East Studies (CSSAMES), and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. “The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life,” is her first film project (co-directed and co-produced with Soumyaa Behrens). She received her Master's in Middle East Studies and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. She is also a poet.Roya Ahmadi is a senior at Stanford University studying Human Biology with a self-designed concentration in Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Women's Health and a minor in Interdisciplinary Arts. She is interested in Muslim and SWANA women's sexual and reproductive health and culturally/religiously sensitive pregnancy care. Roya is a co-chair for the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts Undergraduate Fellowship and a video and sound installation artist who has presented work in group shows across the US. Roya interned for the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at SFSU for two summers when she was in high school; the Center has had a deep impact on her artwork and her identity as an Iranian-American.Trailer:https://vimeo.com/1002914645

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Professor Persis Karim, co-producer and co-director of a new documentary film, The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life. She is joined by Roya Ahmadi, a student at Stanford who interned at the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University and was part of the production team for the film. The film captures the lives of young Iranian-Americans who come to the San Francisco Bay Area around the time of the Iranian Revolution, and find themselves involved with, and helping to shape, a vibrant, international culture of politics and art. We talk about both the similarities and differences between those days and today—especially with regard to diasporic identity formation in different historical times, and the persistent need to resist racism and bigotry and act in solidarity with others.Persis Karim is the director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University, where she also teaches in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers. Before coming to San Francisco State, she was a professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State where she was the founder and director of the Persian Studies program, and coordinator of the Middle East Studies Minor. She has published numerous articles about Iranian diaspora literature and culture for academic publications including Iranian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asian, African and Middle East Studies (CSSAMES), and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. “The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life,” is her first film project (co-directed and co-produced with Soumyaa Behrens). She received her Master's in Middle East Studies and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. She is also a poet.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Professor Persis Karim, co-producer and co-director of a new documentary film, The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life. She is joined by Roya Ahmadi, a student at Stanford who interned at the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University and was part of the production team for the film. The film captures the lives of young Iranian-Americans who come to the San Francisco Bay Area around the time of the Iranian Revolution, and find themselves involved with, and helping to shape, a vibrant, international culture of politics and art. We talk about both the similarities and differences between those days and today—especially with regard to diasporic identity formation in different historical times, and the persistent need to resist racism and bigotry and act in solidarity with others.Persis Karim is the director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University, where she also teaches in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers. Before coming to San Francisco State, she was a professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State where she was the founder and director of the Persian Studies program, and coordinator of the Middle East Studies Minor. She has published numerous articles about Iranian diaspora literature and culture for academic publications including Iranian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asian, African and Middle East Studies (CSSAMES), and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. “The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life,” is her first film project (co-directed and co-produced with Soumyaa Behrens). She received her Master's in Middle East Studies and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. She is also a poet.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Professor Persis Karim, co-producer and co-director of a new documentary film, The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life. She is joined by Roya Ahmadi, a student at Stanford who interned at the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University and was part of the production team for the film. The film captures the lives of young Iranian-Americans who come to the San Francisco Bay Area around the time of the Iranian Revolution, and find themselves involved with, and helping to shape, a vibrant, international culture of politics and art. We talk about both the similarities and differences between those days and today—especially with regard to diasporic identity formation in different historical times, and the persistent need to resist racism and bigotry and act in solidarity with others.Persis Karim is the director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University, where she also teaches in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers. Before coming to San Francisco State, she was a professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State where she was the founder and director of the Persian Studies program, and coordinator of the Middle East Studies Minor. She has published numerous articles about Iranian diaspora literature and culture for academic publications including Iranian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asian, African and Middle East Studies (CSSAMES), and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. “The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life,” is her first film project (co-directed and co-produced with Soumyaa Behrens). She received her Master's in Middle East Studies and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. She is also a poet.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

At a New Delhi conference, an Assamese writer is interrogated on why he writes about magical folktales instead of the insurgencies. A mother splashes around in the village lake to mask the lovemaking sounds of her son with another man. A newly arrived graduate student in Minnesota navigates living arrangements with his white roommate, Mike, and Mike's Indian girlfriend. In agile and frank prose, The Way You Want to Be Loved: Short Stories (Gaudy Boy, 2024) tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India's Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village sorcerer, army soldier or local politician, homeward-bound son or dutiful daughter-in-law. They wrestle with diasporic melancholia, the social pressures of familial duty, and the search for their own personhood, even as they live in a world where personhood is continually compromised and reshaped under oppressive forces larger than themselves. Aruni Kashyap offers up a powerful critique of the malfunctioning democracies of India and the US, deftly balancing devastation and tragedy with a darkly humorous tone that has readers questioning their laughter. At its core, The Way You Want to Be Loved explores what it means to love, desire, and long for life under the duress of everyday and state-sanctioned violence and discrimination. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Professor Persis Karim, co-producer and co-director of a new documentary film, The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life. She is joined by Roya Ahmadi, a student at Stanford who interned at the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University and was part of the production team for the film. The film captures the lives of young Iranian-Americans who come to the San Francisco Bay Area around the time of the Iranian Revolution, and find themselves involved with, and helping to shape, a vibrant, international culture of politics and art. We talk about both the similarities and differences between those days and today—especially with regard to diasporic identity formation in different historical times, and the persistent need to resist racism and bigotry and act in solidarity with others.Persis Karim is the director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University, where she also teaches in the Department of Humanities and Comparative and World Literature. Since 1999, she has been actively working to expand the field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, beginning with the first anthology of Iranian writing she co-edited, A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans. She is the editor of two other anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers. Before coming to San Francisco State, she was a professor of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State where she was the founder and director of the Persian Studies program, and coordinator of the Middle East Studies Minor. She has published numerous articles about Iranian diaspora literature and culture for academic publications including Iranian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asian, African and Middle East Studies (CSSAMES), and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. “The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life,” is her first film project (co-directed and co-produced with Soumyaa Behrens). She received her Master's in Middle East Studies and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UT Austin. She is also a poet.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

Margaret Ziolkowski's Mega-Dams in World Literature: Literary Responses to Twentieth-Century Dam Building (University of Wyoming Press, 2022) reveals the varied effects of large dams on people and their environments as expressed in literary works, focusing on the shifting attitudes toward large dams that emerged over the course of the twentieth century. Ziolkowski covers the enthusiasm for large-dam construction that took place during the mid-twentieth-century heyday of mega-dams, the increasing number of people displaced by dams, the troubling environmental effects they incur, and the types of destruction and protest to which they may be subject.  Using North American, Native American, Russian, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese novels and poems, Ziolkowski explores the supposed progress that these structures bring. The book asks how the human urge to exploit and control waterways has affected our relationships to nature and the environment and argues that the high modernism of the twentieth century, along with its preoccupation with development, casts the hydroelectric dam as a central symbol of domination over nature and the power of the nation state. Beyond examining the exultation of large dams as symbols of progress, Mega-Dams in World Literature takes a broad international and cultural approach that humanizes and personalizes the major issues associated with large dams through nuanced analyses, paying particular attention to issues engendered by high modernism and settler colonialism. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Margaret Ziolkowski about the symbolism of mega-dams, the environmental and social consequences of dam building, as well as the role of literature in critiquing those consequences. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network