Stop, Look, and Listen #5
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week.
Utopias
Last week, I listened to Lyman Tower Sargent, a veteran scholar of the study of ideology, discuss utopianism on Oxford University Press’s A Very Short Introduction podcast. Utopias, Sargent argued, are distinct from ideologies, but can provide the basis of ideologies if they attract enough followers, as well as of the critique of existing dominant ideologies. Utopias are for this reason necessary, and yet rigid utopianism also potentially dangerous. I thought therefore I’d lead off this instalment of ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ with some very good articles and podcasts I’d read and listened to on the subject of political visions and experiments.
Sir Thomas More, who coined the term ‘Utopia’ as the title for his famous work of the same name, published in 1516, set his imagined society in the ‘New World’ of the Western Hemisphere that Europeans had only recently begun to encounter. There is indeed a strong connection between colonisation and utopianism, as settlers erased the pre-existing indigenous presence in their blueprints for new societal and political arrangements.
One example of this is The Federalist Papers: the series of articles written pseudonymously by Alexander Hamilton, James Maddison, and John Jay in 1787 and 1788 to advocate for a new federal constitution for the recently independent confederation of states along the east coast of North America. On the In Our Time podcast, Melvyn Bragg discussed The Federalist Papers at length with historians Frank Cogliano, Kathleen Burk, and Nicholas Guyatt. They covered the context of tensions between states and with imperial powers within which they were written; the classical roots but also originality of their vision of republican democracy; the tensions between their authors’ respective ideas; its influence upon the Constitution, its ratification, and subsequent interpretation; its lasting significance within American judicial thought; and its silences over the fates of indigenous and enslaved peoples.
A century later, white settlers in Australia were re-imagining their world and their place within it. On the New Books Network podcast, Miranda Melcher recently interviewed Wm. Matthew Kennedy about his new book The Imperial Commonwealth: Australia and the Project of Empire, 1867-1914, and the way they envisioned a new global racial order and pursued their own imperial projects, sometimes in contradiction of the objectives and priorities of the imperial state. Settler colonialism at this point also offered a prospect of escape from worsening impoverishment on a medieval settler colony, Iceland. One particularly prominent site of settlement was within Manitoba, where Icelanders were invited by the government of Canada to establish their own independent community in 1875. Erik Pomrenke recounted this history on the Iceland Review’s Deep North podcast, including the brutal conditions besetting the island that they escaped from, the new challenges they faced (such as weather conditions, disease, and the language barriers), and the contemporary legacies of this Icelandic-Canadian connection.
The decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union discredited Marxist-Leninist utopian claims in the eyes of left-wing Western audiences. Writing for Jacobin, Marzia Maccaferi examined the alternative briefly offered by Eurocommunism during the 1970s, the way it drew upon Gramscian thought to advance ideals of pluralism and freedom alongside socialism, and its eclipse in the face of ideological differences, inter-party splits, and the rise of the New Right. Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, political theorist Michael Albert and economist Robin Hahnel conceived of participatory economics as an alternative to both state-communist and capitalist models of economic organisation. Gil Morejón, Lillian Cicerchia, Owen Glyn-Williams, and William Paris discussed their ideas on the What’s Left of Philosophy podcast, praising the impressive work they did in outlining such a detailed vision, while also noting its potential limitations.
Religion, persecution, and liberation
Perhaps the most inspiring thing I listened to or read last week was Sudanese scholar Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, being interviewed by Daniel Voskoboynik for the The Fire These Times podcast. An-Na'im recounted his early life, education, and career, including his tutelage by the Islamic reformist scholar Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, executed by the Sudanese government for apostasy in 1985. Critiquing nationalism, imperialism, and intolerance, he articulated a vision of human rights strongly rooted in his own Muslim faith, and the way freedom of religion and the possibility of unbelief rendered the profundity of his belief possible. Religion’s potential as a source of both oppression and emancipation was a theme that I was also reminded of by some other articles and podcasts too.
I included some fairly extensive coverage of Mike Johnson’s elevation to the role of Speaker in the US House of Representatives, and the Christian nationalist underpinnings of his politics, in last week’s edition of ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’. Since then, Annika Brockschmidt has also written more extensively for Religion Dispatches about the obscure theological foundations of Johnson’s beliefs, and the political ramifications of their being put into practice. Seth Cotlar always does important work in highlighting the history of the intertwining of Christian fundamentalism and the American far right, including in its most bizarre forms. He did so again with this post for his Rightlandia newsletter on Jim Bisel: a homophobic, Christian conservative entertainer and Republican Party activist.
Yet we might also recall the way Christianity in America has also served as a resource for the downtrodden and marginalised to articulate their own visions of social and political transformation. On the Anarchist Essays podcast, William Marling examined how the twentieth-century American anarchist, Ammon Hennacy, drew upon Christian ideals in his rhetoric, and his commitment to speaking truth unto power. Moreover, writing for the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives blog, Tejai Beluah Howard introduced the topic of womanist theology, developed by African-American women from the 1980s as a means of expressing their religious principles and putting them into practice in the face of erasure by both Black male and White feminist theologies.
Shifting focus from Christianity to Hinduism, the New Books Network’s Nordic Asia podcast series dedicated an episode to the poetry of Narendra Modi, written before he became prime minister of India, but published afterwards, with his sanction. Kenneth Bo Nielsen spoke with Niladri Chatterjee, Deva Nandan Harikrishnan, Arild Engelsen Ruud, and Guro Samuelsen about the relationship between its literary and religious themes and Modi’s own subsequent brand of Hindu nationalist populism. It was striking to think of this in contrast with postcolonial version of Hinduism practiced in Trinidad (and beyond) by members of its Indian diaspora. Prea Persaud discussed her research into this topic on the Classical Ideas podcast with Greg Soden, including the way Trinidadian Hindus have come to centre their religious beliefs primarily upon Trinidad as their homeland, rather than India itself.
Culture, realism, fantasy, and value
Another recurring theme in my reading and listening last week was the value placed upon authenticity in culture. On the Eurasian Knot podcast, literary studies scholar Ilya Vinitsky, in discussion with Sean Guillory, used a quote widely misattributed to Fyodor Dostoyevsky as a window into the story of Ivan Norodny, the Russian-Estonian who made a career for himself as a conman in early 20th-century America. This connected with Vinitsky’s earlier scholarship, which he also touched upon, on the tradition of ‘bad poetry’ and its place within the Russian literary canon.
I do not think it is a coincidence that the franchise films held up as the nadir of contemporary film have a strong fantasy element to them. Writing for Variety about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Owen Gleiberman noted that critics’ hopes for it eclipse were often rooted in an ahistorical nostalgia for a superior era of cinema that also resulted in misjudgement about what would come next:
The real problem isn’t, and never has been, “the junk that Hollywood makes” (as if we were all being force-fed). It’s the junk that Hollywood makes because audiences vote for those movies with their ticket dollars. That’s the way that movies have always worked, never more so than in the era of zappy populist escapism ushered in by [George] Lucas and [Steven] Spielberg. That legacy was fully in place when the MCU was just a gleam in Kevin Feige’s eye. It will still be in place when the MCU fades. The question is: Can movies back off not just from comic books but from the narcotic lure of compulsive fantasy, and return to something that looks more like the real world? Can moviegoers vote for that? If not, we’re all but fated to replace superhero spectacle with something that’s equally lacking in nourishment.
Moreover, in a post for his Everything Is Horrible newsletter, Noah Berlatsky noted that the snobbishness of many critics towards aspects of contemporary popular culture is nothing new, although the forms they have denounced as low-brow have changed over time, highlighting the opprobrium directed at some overly loose Shakespeare adaptations in nineteeth-century America.
The importance of realism to films that do get venerated as great cinema, and the inevitably limited nature of what that realism entails, was also nicely illustrated in some other very good analyses of films I read and listened to last week. Vaughn Joy, in a post for her Review Roulette newsletter, examined the unflinching, lengthy portrayal of the physical, psychological, and material consequences of war for returning American veterans in the 1946 film, The Best Years of Our Lives, which in many ways epitomised the ideals of realism espoused at the time by the influential French film critic, André Bazin.
Meanwhile, on the Slate Money Goes to the Movies podcast, Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spires, Emily Peck, and Jordan Weissman discussed Michael Mann’s 1999 film The Insider. The episode covered the film’s representation of the ethics of investigative journalism, and its (legally necessary) fidelity to the real-life expose of American big tobacco it was based upon, which also contributed to its own lengthiness. Yet as they also emphasised, the film’s multifaceted, detailed storylines still granted only limited representation to female characters. On their In Front of Ira podcast, Sabrina Mittermeier and Torsten Kathke discussed another 1999 film, the Richard Curtis-written romantic comedy Notting Hill. Existing at the intersection between American and British film culture, particularly in the identity of its leads – Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant – the film’s depiction of West London leant more towards fantasy than realism, emphasised in its lack of racial and social diversity. Taken together, the two films are a reminder that genre always curtails whatever reality presented to the audience, and who is properly included within that reality.
The war on Gaza in historical and transnational context
Current popular discussions around the historical roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict rarely seem to make any reference to the legacy of Ottoman rule in the region – a rather striking omission, given that it lasted for four centuries. Louis Fishman’s recent talk on Israel, Palestine, and Türkiye as part of a post-Ottoman space, recorded for the Jerusalem Unplugged podcast, was therefore a welcome corrective. His wide-ranging analysis covered the normalisation of population transfers and ethnic cleansing in the Empire’s final years and collapse; Erdoğan and Netanyahu as populist leaders; the parallels between Kemalism and Zionism (and their limitations as a basis for opposition to those leaders); comparison between treatment of Kurds and Palestinians as minorities within Türkiye and Israel respectively; and Türkiye’s historical relations with both Israel and Palestine, and the implications of October 7th for those relationships. Relatedly, writing for Jacobin, Matt Broomfield highlighted the paradox facing Kurds in responding to the Israel-Palestine conflict, as they recognise parallels both between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with Türkiye’s treatment of them, and between Hamas’s violence on October 7th and their own experience of Islamist attacks on their civilians. Broomfield argued that this situation raises questions as to what anti-colonial resistance ought to look like in a post-Cold War world, and what self-determination might look like beyond the nation state.
The war continues to also have significant effects for Jews, Arabs, and Muslims in the West, not to mention politics there more broadly. Both Yasseen Al-Sheikh, in Jacobin, and Joshua P. Hill, in his New Means newsletter, have highlighted the impact of the pro-Palestinian movement on American politics, and the divisions it has manifested both between popular politics and elites, and between generations, as well as its creation of cross-racial solidarities. Such divisions are evident in the case of the much-esteemed Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Writing for Jewish Currents, Mari Cohen discussed the centre’s uncertain future, given that its parent organisation narrowing of the terms of critique of Israel it’s willing to brook, has placed it increasingly at odds with the liberal-left artists it has frequently hosted.
Yet David Feldman and Brendan McGeever also emphasise the possibilities for alliances against racist persecution to be forged, in response to rising antisemitism. In an article for Vashti Media, they note how Jewish and Black intellectuals historically saw analogies in each other’s experiences of persecution, concluding:
While bringing an end to the immediate crisis falls to politicians and diplomats, for the rest of us the task remains to build a politics of human freedom fit for the 21st century; one that is clear sighted about racism in its multiple forms, including when it rises to the surface among those whom it also claims as its victims. This may seem a distant prospect in the current moment, but the alternative is already before us.
Money and technology
To finish up, I wanted to mention a couple of very good podcasts I’d listened to relating to Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency billionaire recently convicted for fraud and conspiracy in the US, and what his case tells us about the intersections between money, technology, industry, ideology, and the law:
This episode of the Guardian’s Audio Long Reads podcast, written by Samanth Subramanian, examined the career of author Michael Lewis, his series of books covering far-sighted mavericks in finance, technology, and sport, and why his latest book, Going Infinite, about Bankman-Fried, highlights the shortcomings in his heroizing approach.
On the London Review of Books podcast, Thomas Jones talked to John Lanchester about Bankman-Fried’s meteoric career and downfall, his influence by effective altruism (and its discrepancy with the libertarianism that fuels enthusiasm for cryptocurrency), and the American legal system’s punitive approach to fraud.
Sam Bankman-Fried and Bill Clinton at Crypto Bahamas conference in Nassau in 2022 (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk).
If you are interested in the relationship between money and technology, I would also strongly recommend listening to Miranda Melcher interviewing Jordan Frith, for the New Book Network, about his new entry in Bloomsbury’s ‘Object Lessons’ book series, Barcode, and how this technology became enduringly embedded in everyday life from the 1970s, as well as the opposition it provoked from both consumers and Evangelical Christians.
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And as ever, a grand list 👏
Intrigued about the barcode causing consumers and Evangelical Christians concern. I'll have a listen!