8/13 Artist Adan Gonzalez, El Teocolote, Emiliano Echeverria and more by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

Why is that when a loved one dies, grief seems inescapable--and then diminishes? The brilliant Edinburgh philosopher Berislav Marusic's "Do Reasons Expire? An Essay on Grief" begins with his grief for the unexpected and early loss of his mother: "I stopped grieving or at least the grief diminished, yet the reason didn't really change. It's not like…

This June 2020 episode, originally part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book's first exploration of police brutality, systemic and personal racism and Black Lives Matter. Elizabeth and John were lucky to be joined by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham, two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades. Many of the mechanisms …

Ni Aqui Ni Alla Film and Our Mision Statement Exhibit at MCCLA by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

For Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the black nationalist, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the Jews was liberalism. Shaul Magid, Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue, is a celebrated and brilliant scholar of radical and dissident Jud…

Psyched Radio, El Tecolote report on RV communities in SF by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

#news #bayarea #kpfa #mccla #latin #chile #cubaAv Cronicas de la Raza

Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial …

#news #latin #kpfa #bayarea #cumbiaAv Cronicas de la Raza

Flor y Canto Festival, La Pena's 49th Anniversary by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

Los Cenzontles by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year’s War, though it isn’t usually thought of that way. In the first few days of the quarantine and our current geopolitical and epidemiological shitshow, John and Elizabeth spoke with Vincent Brown, who recently published Tacky…

We debut a new feature: Recall This Story, in which a contemporary writer picks out a bygone story to read and to analyze. Surely there is no better novelist to begin with than RTB' shouse sage, Steve McCauley. And not just because he's got the pipes to power through a whole fantabulous John Cheever story. "The Five-Forty-Eight" (published in The N…

Featuring important community leader Olga Talamante and Third Gender Celebration in SF! by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

MCCLA, Precita Eyes, San Francisco International Arts Fest, Nancy Morejon by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories--how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf …

A Spotlight on Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo and Music from Nicaragua by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

In this episode, Elizabeth talks with Steven Gonzalez, anthropologist and author of speculative fiction under the pen name E.G. Condé. They discuss the entanglement of politics, Taíno animism, and weather events in the form of a hurricane named Teddy. Steve describes the suffusion of sound he has experienced in Puerto Rico and the soundlessness at …

Nacrotrafficing Trial Recap of ex-Honduran President and the music of Omar Sosa by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

Artista Isis Rodriguez and exploring ancestral Mesoamerican instruments! by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

In Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023) In this Recall This Book conversation from 2021, poets David Ferry and Roger Reeves talk about lyric, epic, and the underworld. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down fo…

Conversation with Rapper Chhoti Maa and more by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford UP, 2023), begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word “equality” get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, to be replaced by “educability, plasticity”? She and John sit do…

In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice. Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny …

Interview with Poet and Artist Adrian Arias and a spotlight on a film set in the meatpacking world by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of education and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap, which explores "ethnic expectations" for Caribbean schoolchildren in New York and London. His work starts with the basic puzzle that while black Caribbean schoolchildren in New York are often considered…

Traffic Violence in the Bay and Revisiting Standing Rock by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

Deep Dive on Hip Hop in Argentina! by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with Elizabeth and John to discuss The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard UP, 2019). It is much more than simply an historical and ethnographic study of the elite Indian Institutes of Te…

Asylum Deterrence Overview with Carlos Martinez, Silivio Rodriguez, Esoterica Tropical y mas by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian (episode 1) and Israeli (episode 2) ethnonationalism. The three friends discuss commonalities between Balmurli Natrajan’s charting of the "slippery slope towards a multiculturalism of caste" and Nata…

2023 end of year music wrap up show by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

Natasha Roth-Rowland is a writer and researcher at Diaspora Alliance, a former editor at +972 Magazine, and an expert on the Jewish far right. She joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian midway through a three-part RTB series, "Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism." Listen to episode 1 here. The three discuss the…

"The Slippery Slope to a Multiculturalism of Caste" Professor Balmurli Natrajan has long studied questions of caste, nationalism and fascism in the Indian context: his many works include a 2011 book, The Culturalization of Caste in India. He joins anthropologists Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian to kick off a three-part RTB series, "Violent Major…

11/28/2023- Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernandez, Martha Rodriguez Salazar, La Mezcla by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John spoke back in 2020 with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence (U Chicago Press, 2020). The book relates the decades-long history in which hundreds of people (mostly Black men) were tortured by the Chicago Police. Fascinatingly, i…

Recall This Book listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Anthology, and author of many prizewinning books) from that fabulous RTB episode about his “deep history” of literature and literacy, The Written World. And you know his feelings about Wodehouse from his…

#Latin #music #news #kpfaAv Cronicas de la Raza

John Plotz of Recall This Book spoke in 2020 with Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar about his marvelous new book on that grumpiest of Nobel laureates, V. S Naipaul’s Journeys. Krishnan sees the “contrarian and unsentimental” Trinidad-born but globe-trotting novelist and essayist as early and brilliant at notici…

Interview on Malaquías Montoya, Water for Life film and SF Latino Film Festival by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

John Guillory (NYU English author of the pathbreaking Cultural Capital) is here to discuss his amazing new Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (U Chicago Press, 2022) He speaks with John and with Nick Dames, co-editor of Public Books, Professor of Humanities at Columbia and most recently author of The Chapter: A Segme…

09/12/2023- 50th Anniversary of Chile Coup, Rodrigo Reyes by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

Recall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, 2021, he came back for this conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Somethi…

To mark the publication of John's book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press (2023), John and Elizabeth take to the airways to share their love of Le Guin's "speculative anthropology," gender politics, and goats. And we share a delight we've been holding back for just this occasion, a series of clips from John's inter…

08/29/2023- Juana Alicia, Psyched Radio SF by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

08/22/2023- Latinos con Soul Fest, Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, new music by Novalima and Alex Anwandter by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre. Reading him means leav…

El Tecolote, Accion Latina Anniversary and Nina Serrano discusses her time in Cuba in the 1960s by Cronicas de la RazaAv Cronicas de la Raza

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby Americ…

Is Thomas Piketty the world’s most famous economic historian ? A superstar enemy of plutocratic capitalism who wrote a pathbreaking bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century? Or simply a debonair and generous French intellectual happy to talk redistributive justice? Join this 2020 conversation with John and Adaner Usmani (star of RTB’s episode 44: Ra…