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New Books Network
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Dalit Studies with Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana and Sanal Mohan
3d ago01:07:52Summary readyThis episode featured a conversation with Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and Sanal Mohan, three scholars in the burgeoning field of Dalit Studies. We began with the significance of the 1990s as a point of departure for new work in this field and segued to the interventions made by their two edited volumes published in 2016 and 2025. We discussed the paths opened up by earlier radical historiographical paradigms, such as Subaltern Studies, which nonetheless failed to address the caste question. The guests noted three key emphases of contemporary Dalit Studies: one, centering Dalit historical agency and intellectual production; two, decentering the binary of colonialism and nationalism, and illuminating the colonial period as a complex terrain of maneuver; and three, foregrounding the importance of “the Dalit social” as a field of variegated power irreducible to the state. We ended with a discussion of the heterogeneity of Dalit sociopolitical formations, what makes “Dalit” cohere as a category, and future directions for the field of Dalit Studies. Read the transcript here References Ramnarayan Rawat and K. Satyanarayana eds. Dalit Studies (Duke University Press, 2016) Ramnarayan Rawat, K. Satyanarayana, and Sanal Mohan eds. Dalit Journeys for Dignity: Religion, Freedom, and Caste (SUNY Press, 2025) Rajni Kothari, “Rise of the Dalits and the Renewed Debate on Caste.” In State and Politics in India, edited by Partha Chatterjee, 439–58 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). Gopal Guru, “The Language of Dalit-Bahujan Political Discourse.” In Dalit Identity and Politics, edited by Ghanshyam Shah, 96–107 (New Delhi: Sage, 2001). Baburao Bagul, Dalit Sahitya ajache Kranti Vidynana (Nagpur: Buddhist Publishing House, 1978). Belcchi: village in Patna district of Bihar where eight Dalits and three Backward Caste men were killed by members of the landowning Kurmi caste in 1977. Keezhvenmani: hamlet in Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu where upper caste landlords burnt alive 44 Dalit agricultural laborers in 1968. Karamchedu: village in Bapatla district of Andhra Pradesh where members of the Kamma landholding caste murdered six Dalit men, raped three Dalit women, and displaced hundreds of Dalit families in 1985. Vempenta: village in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh where, in response to the killing of a village official by the People’s War Group, landholders killed more than thirty Dalits and burned more than 100 of their houses in 1998. Chundur: village in Bapatla district of Andhra Pradesh where members of the Reddy landholding caste killed eight Dalit men in 1991. Mandal Commission: Divya Cherian, Merchants of Virtue B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste Phule: Jyotirao Phule was an anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra. NTR: Indian actor and politician who served as the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh for four terms between 1983 and 1995. Mahad Satyagraha: mass mobilization by B.R. Ambedkar to claim Dalit access to a public water tank in Mahad, Maharashtra. Ayyankali: Indian social reformer and lawmaker who worked for the advancemetnt of Dalits in the princely state of Travancore. Ad Dharm: an anticaste movement in the 1920s that claimed a distinct identity for Dalits separate from Hinduism and Sikhism. Adi Hindu Mahasabha: sociopolitical organization founded in 1923 by Dalit leader Swami Achhutanand in Uttar Pradesh that claimed for Dalits the identity of originary Hindus. IITs: the Indian Institutes of Technology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
SummaryChristopher Campo-Bowen, "Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera" (Oxford UP, 2025)
3d ago01:10:07Summary readyThe Bartered Bride, a comic opera by Bedrich Smetana, premiered in Prague on March 30, 1866. Its pastoral love story and setting in a rural Czech village eventually became an enduring symbol of Czech nationalism. In Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera (Oxford University Press, 2025), Christopher Campo-Bowen examines how a particular image of the rural village in a set of Czech operas written between 1866 and 1904 became a powerful signifier for Czech ethnoracial and nationalist identity. He follows this conception of Czech identity and its entanglement with opera through the political changes in the years when the Czech lands were ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the upheaval that followed when the Empire collapsed in 1918 and the First Czechoslovak Republic was founded. In addition to composers and their operas, Campo-Bowen investigates the output of critics, administrators, and other urban intellectuals to understand the impact of village operas on public discourse. By setting his analysis within a discussion of how race was understood in nineteenth-century Europe, Campo-Bowen shows that this seemingly straightforward nationalist discourse was shot through with racialized essentialism and ideas about gender that were connected with larger political realities. He ends the book with a discussion of the resonances of this nineteenth-century conception of Czech identity in the current Czech Republic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
SummaryNaomi Kanakia, "What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) (Princeton UP, 2026)
3d ago00:48:29Summary readyWriter Naomi Kanakia has spent her adult life reading the so-called “great books,” those classic works of literature which are–depending who you ask–either deeply unfashionable, or a time-honored testament to human accomplishment. With What’s So Great About the Great Books: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It May Destroy You) (Princeton UP, 2026) Kanakia, a devoted lay reader, unpacks popular anxieties surrounding classic writers like Milton, Tolstoy, and Proust. Using the unpretentious approach she has cultivated on her popular Substack, Woman of Letters, Kanakia addresses common reservations about the great books, questions about why we should bother with literature with dated politics, or books exceedingly difficult to read. For plenty of readers, particularly those who came of age in the last decade, the answers may not be clear. Kanakia offers an intriguing reminder to challenge ourselves, to look beyond the walls of the ideology we have constructed for ourselves. (Just don’t ask her about “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes.) “What’s So Great about the Great Books” is out now with Princeton University Press. Megan Peck Shub (AKA Galley Hag) is a writer, journalist, and a producer who has won Emmy and Peabody awards for her work on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. She previously worked on Finding Your Roots with Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the PBS history docuseries. Megan’s eclectic slate runs the gamut from literature to pop culture to politics, with a particular focus where those topics intersect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
SummaryMarco Pompili, "Public Housing in Japan: The Dōjunkai Apartments One Hundred Years On" (Brill, 2026)
3d ago00:57:14Summary readyPublic Housing in Japan: The Dōjunkai Apartments One Hundred Years On (Brill, 2026) is the first comprehensive English-language examination of the Dōjunkai Foundation (1924-2024). Compiled and edited by Dr. Marco Pompili through interviews and studies, it is a must-read for anyone interested in modern Japanese architecture. The Dōjunkai Apartments (1924-1934), the Foundation's best-known work, introduced apartment living to Japan in response to crucial historical and social challenges such as urban reconstruction after the devastating earthquake of 1923 and the emergence of new working and middle classes. The book's texts, by prominent scholars and architects, as well as a series of original drawings and photographs from the period, bring the work of the Dōjunkai Foundation back to life 100 years after its founding. While the Dōjunkai Apartments have unfortunately been lost in the rapid changes and greedy redevelopment typical of Japanese metropolises, this book seeks to contribute to the preservation of their memory and their significance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
SummaryTsering Döndrup, "The Red Wind Howls" (Columbia UP, 2025)
3d ago00:46:15Summary readyThe Red Wind Howls (Columbia UP, 2025) is an unsettling, gripping, and darkly funny novel by Tsering Döndrup, one of modern Tibet’s most celebrated writers. First self-published in 2006 after no publisher was willing to take the political risk, the novel traces Tibetan experiences under Mao Zedong’s rule, from the 1958 Amdo uprising and the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. Through a nonsequential narrative that moves back and forth between characters and events, The Red Wind Howls weaves together experiences of labor camps, unrelenting hunger, environmental devastation, and the destruction of language into a powerful exploration of twentieth-century Tibetan history. In this episode, I speak with the novel’s translator, Christopher Peacock, about the challenges of translating a work that weaves together oral storytelling and history. We discuss the recurring character Alak Drong, the novel’s striking use of dark humor, the ways its characters navigate famine, labor camps, political campaigns, and shifting systems of survival, and above all the importance of reading literature by Tibetan authors. Listeners should also seek out Chris’s translation of Tsering Döndrup’s short story collection, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories, and his article on the use of language in Tsering Döndrup’s fiction, here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
SummaryDaniel Majchrowicz, "A Journey to Mecca and London: The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910" (Indiana UP, 2025)
3d ago01:01:30Summary readyDescended from Mughal nobility, Akhtar al-Nisa Begum Nawab Sarbuland Jung grew up in Hyderabad in southern India, where she lived a quiet, private, and privileged life at the heart of the state's royal court. In 1896, at the age of 20, she married Nawab Muhammad Hamidullah Khan Sarbuland Jung, a prominent lawyer and the scion of a leading Muslim reformist movement. In 1909, the wealthy couple embarked on a four-month journey through the Middle East and Europe, performing the hajj in Mecca and sitting for tea with the future king and queen of England. A Journey to Mecca and London : The Travels of an Indian Muslim Woman, 1909–1910 (Indiana University Press, 2025) provides the first full English translation of Begum Sarbuland's Urdu travel diary from this journey, of which only three original copies remain. Originally intended for circulation among friends and family and later published, her informal entries not only reveal the everyday practices of an Indian woman of her time, but also detail her impressions and reactions as she explored the world alongside her husband. As Begum Sarbuland encountered other women and Muslims during her travels, those encounters shaped her reassessment of her own identity as a Muslim woman. Her observations hold continued significance for readers interested in critical questions about gender, Islam, and identity. Daniel Majchrowicz has thoroughly annotated his translation and paired it with rich appendices, including a biographical sketch of Begum Sarbuland and excerpts from Hamidullah Khan's own accounts of their journey. Engagingly written and enriched with years of original research, archival work, and family interviews, A Journey to Mecca and London restores the nearly forgotten narrative of one of India's first Muslim women travel writers to its rightful place in Indian and Islamic history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
SummaryMarisa Karyl Franz, "Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums" (Cornell UP, 2026)
4d ago00:56:11Summary readyNear and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums (Cornell University Press, 2026) reveals nineteenth-century Siberian museums, built on Indigenous land and increasingly populated by political exiles, as active sites of ethnographic knowledge-making and centers of scientific research, regional identity, and colonial authority. Rather than collecting from distant colonies, these institutions concentrated on surrounding communities, their tools, beliefs, and everyday lives, to configure ideas about what counted as legitimate knowledge. Dr. Marisa Karyl Franz traces how Siberian museums helped construct shamanism as an ethnographic category. Shamans, while familiar and embedded in local space, were recast as icons of cultural otherness or representatives of an imagined primitive past. Through the evolving languages of science, anthropology, and empire, the local was abstracted and exported, feeding global museum networks and shaping modern anthropology. Yet, the museums held onto the intimacy of place, preserving tensions between familiarity and spectacle, documentation and desire. By placing Siberia at the center of a broader intellectual and political history, Near and Desired Things challenges assumptions about where modern knowledge is made and redefines provincial spaces as sites of innovation and as forces that reshape the terms of empire. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
SummaryBeyond Free Speech: Why AI Governance Demands Freedom of Thought
4d ago00:58:04Summary readyAre we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond traditional debates about data privacy, Albrecht warns of a near future where the state and corporate partners bypass human speech entirely, relying instead on "sentiment detection" to ascribe thoughts and make decisions that impact our physical lives. Together, they trace the historical trajectory of control—from early fingerprinting and eugenics to modern biometrics and neural implants—and challenge the modern illusion of state efficiency at the expense of human agency.Tune in for a deep dive into the two fundamental rights required to safeguard the future of democracy: absolute transparency over our data, and an evolving, radical defense of our collective freedom of thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
SummaryChad Wellmon, "After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work" (JHU Press, 2026)
4d ago00:58:02Summary readyWhat is a university for? Is it a sanctuary for disciplined study, or has it become something else entirely? In After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work (JHU Press, 2026), Chad Wellmon traces the long and often uneasy relationship between higher learning and the institutions that claim to protect it. Moving from the guilds of medieval Paris and the knowledge factories of Enlightenment-era Göttingen to the research empires of Berlin and Berkeley, Wellmon shows how the modern university has repeatedly reshaped itself to serve shifting social and political demands. Across centuries, the goods of disciplined study—the joy of reading, the virtues of intellectual rigor, and the possibility of self-formation—have been overshadowed by the pursuit of external rewards such as money, prestige, and power. Part institutional history and part philosophical reflection, After the University examines how today's institutions defend themselves not in the name of learning but in the language of productivity, innovation, and economic utility. Drawing on his experiences as a scholar, teacher, administrator, and witness to crises such as white supremacist marches and the COVID-19 pandemic, Wellmon illustrates how universities justify themselves through the outputs of graduates, research discoveries, and workforce training while leaving unmentioned the very practices that once defined them. Despite this transformation, Wellmon argues that the university's current state of turmoil exposes a new, enticing possibility: recognizing the practices of disciplined study as goods worth valuing in and of themselves rather than simply as means to other ends. With insight and urgency, After the University asks whether our institutions can still nurture intellectual desire—or whether we must find new homes for the life of the mind. Soumyadeep Guha is a fourth-year PhD student in the History Department at Binghamton University, New York. He is interested in historical research focusing on themes such as Agrarian/Environmental History, History of Science and Tech, Global History, and their intersections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
SummaryStefan Al, "Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home" (Norton, 2026)
4d ago00:30:50Summary readyA sweeping history of humanity’s most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves. Americans spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely and fascinating work, architect and urban-planning scholar Stefan Al deftly weaves together archaeology, engineering, social history, and environmental science to explain how our homes have developed through the ages and in turn shaped civilization and the planet itself. From tiny pit-houses in the Levant and Mesoamerica thousands of years ago to soaring skyscrapers in Dubai, New York, and Shanghai today, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) takes readers on a swift and absorbing tour of the evolution of human habitation. Whisking readers from ancient Pompeii to contemporary Hong Kong, industrial-age Liverpool to postwar Levittown, Al shows how our choices in housing have both reflected and affected ideas about gender roles, privacy, and comfort. Discover how seemingly mundane elements―like door-knockers and corridors―have altered everyday interactions, and how material choices have remade the planet’s surface. He also confronts the darker side of domesticity, exposing the unintended consequences of our architectural choices across millennia, including smoke-filled Neolithic dwellings, deadly fires in crowded Roman apartment buildings, and worsening social isolation in car-dependent suburbs. Finally, he examines the myths and reality of future housing, including 3D-printed homes and space architecture built by robots. Drawing from personal experiences across global cities and professional insights, Al illuminates how our choices in housing continue to influence everything from social relationships to climate change, ultimately arguing that understanding this rich history is crucial for building a more sustainable future. With billions more people needing housing in the coming decades, Dwelling on Earth reveals how we might transform humanity’s defining challenge into our greatest opportunity. HOST BIO: Alex Hallbom is an urban planner and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
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