Stop, Look, and Listen #38
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers can access my full archive of posts at any time, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.
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.
Content warnings: Antisemitism.
Five things to look at:
In this post for her North Sea Nexus newsletter, Hannah Booth discussed the importance of Flanders as a hub of Catholic networks at the outset of the seventeenth century, and its centrality therefore to the political and intellectual development of the men involved in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot.
Adrian Daub has written this piece for his Dreams in the Which House newsletter about Smokey and the Bandit and the broader trucker film cycle of the 1970s, their celebration of an unconstrained Southern masculinity, and the complex and ambiguous politics underpinning this vision.
Writing for Religion Dispatches, Shane Burley has argued that while antisemitism is indeed on the rise in the United States, the Anti-Defamation League’s focus on left-wing and pro-Palestinian movements defies evidence, including its own statistics, of its greater virulence, centrality, and violent potential on the right.
Selim Koru considered the parallels and contrasts between Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in this post for his Kültürkampf newsletter, highlighting their shared revivalism, executive centralism, and extractivism, as well as their differing managerial styles, religious outlooks, and attitudes towards immigration.
In this article for London Review of Books, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite explored the ideological trajectories of both the left and right of Britain’s Labour Party through the biographies of some of their principal standard bearers of recent years, including Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, and Keir Starmer.
Five things to listen to:
Alexander Sergeant and Christopher Holliday meditated upon Farah Mendelson’s Rhetorics of Fantasy in this ‘Footnote’ episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, applying her classifications of intrusive, immersive, portal quest, and liminal fantasy stories to analyse the worldbuilding and narrative rules of fantasy films.
Adam Smith revisited the 2008 US Presidential Election with Bruce Schulman and Dan Rowe on the The Last Best Hope podcast, including Barack Obama beating Hilary Clinton to the Democratic nomination, the coalescence of a new electoral coalition around him, and the racist backlash his victory provoked.
On New Books Network, Morteza Hajizadeh interviewed Eric Helleiner about his book The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History, the heterogenous roots of neomercantilism as a response to increasingly globalised trade, and the spread and separate genesis of neomercantilist ideas in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Matt Seybold discussed historically Black colleges and universities with Dominique Baker, Andrew Douglas, Jelani Favors, Jared Loggins, and Crystal Sanders on the The American Vandal podcast, including their centrality as a crucible of radical activism and their continued appeal to Black students today.
On the On the Nose podcast, Aparna Gopalan, Mari Cohen, E. Tammy Kim, and Prachi Patankar explored the Anti-Defamation League’s influence on the Hindu American Foundation’s laundering of ethnonationalism as Hindu rights advocacy, and on the Asian American Foundation’s establishmentarian response to racism.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, you can also show your appreciation by sharing it more widely, recommending the newsletter to a friend, and if you’d like, by buying me a coffee.