Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

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New Books in Native American Studies - Edward E. Andrews, “Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World” (Harvard UP, 2013)

Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E. Andrews challenges this view. Through his careful research, skilled use of anecdotes, and compelling narrative. Dr. Andrews shows how it was Native Americans and people of African descent themselves who did much of the heavy lifting when it came to mission work. Moreover, Dr. Andrews not only explores the complex relationship between these diverse groups of people within the Protestant churches he studies (primarily Puritan, Anglican, and Moravian), the meeting of Protestant Christianity and indigenous religious beliefs, and the relationship between culture and religion, he also shows how white, black, and Native American missionaries cooperated (and argued with) each other. This book is a fascinating read and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of the Atlantic World or missions.

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World Book Club - Herman Koch

This month World Book Club talks to bestselling Dutch writer Herman Koch whose hugely controversial and entertaining novel The Dinner took the literary world by storm five years ago. Since then, it has not left the bestseller lists in its native Holland.

The Dinner explores a contemporary moral dilemma when two couples meet in a fashionable restaurant to discuss their children’s involvement in a horrendous crime. How far will a parent go to protect their son? The answer that gradually emerges seems to be very far indeed.

Hear Herman Koch, Harriett Gilbert and readers in the studio in London and around the world discuss The Dinner - and confess what they might have done in similar circumstances!

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New Books in Native American Studies - Claudio Saunt, “West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776” (W.W. Norton, 2014)

Few years in U.S. history call to mind such immediate stock images as 1776. Powdered wigs. Founding fathers. Red coats. And if asked to place this assembly of objects and people, a few cities stand out: Boston. Philadelphia. Williamsburg, perhaps.

This is the small world conjured by the Revolutionary era; the remainder of the continent, some 96% percent of the landmass exclusive of the original thirteen colonies that called themselves Continental, conceived of as a blank slate, awaiting inevitable expansion.

Claudio Saunt wants to change this.

Richard B. Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia and co-director of the Center for Virtual History, Saunt’s new book, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (W.W. Norton, 2014), explores nine American places and the diverse peoples who populated them in that fateful year, from the Aleutian Islands to San Diego, the Florida Gulf Coast to the Saskatchewan River.

By illustrating complicated webs of trade and exchange, competing empires and diverse Indigenous responses, Saunt makes the case that the stories of people like the Aleuts in the Aleutian archipelago, Miwoks and Costanoans of northern California, Creek Indians of the Deep South and numerous others deserve our historical attention as fully and richly as musket-bearing minutemen.

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World Book Club - Kathy Reichs – Deja Dead

World Book Club talks to award-winning American writer and forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, about the first in her Temperance Brennan detective series, Deja Dead.

A nerve-jangling thriller that took the literary scene by storm when it was published in 1997, Deja Dead was the most successful crime-fiction debut ever. In it Kathy Reichs launches her intrepid heroine, a fearless forensic anthropologist and wannabe detective, Temperance Brennan. When the remains of a dismembered body of a woman, bagged and discarded, are discovered near an ancient burial ground Brennan suspects the work of a serial killer.

The police disagree, but Brennan sticks to her guns despite, or perhaps because of, her dark forebodings.

Picture: Kathy Reichs, Credit: Ben Mark Holzberg

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World Book Club - Pat Barker – Regeneration

This week, as part of the continuing global commemorations of the First World War, World Book Club is in sombre mood with another timely chance to hear multi-award-winning British writer Pat Barker.

She talks about her internationally renowned novel Regeneration, the first in the trilogy of novels which culminated in the Booker Prize winner The Ghost Road.

Also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and now recognised twenty-two years after its publication as a modern war classic, Regeneration is a part historical, part fictional exploration of how the traumas of the so-called Great War brutalised a generation of young men.

Picture: WW1 patients recuperating in hospital in 1918. Credit: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Mark Rifkin, “Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

In Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance  (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Mark Rifkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and incoming president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, explores three of the most canonical authors in the American literary awakening–Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville–demonstrating how even as their texts mount queer critiques of the state, they take for granted–even depend upon–conceptions of place, politics and personhood normalized in the settler-state’s engagement with Indigenous peoples.

Rifkin’s exegesis is relevant far beyond nineteenth-century literary studies. As “settler colonialism” gains currency in left and academic circles as a descriptor of the present reality in the United States, Canada, Israel and elsewhere, there is a tendency to identify its workings only in the encounter between the colonizers and the colonized, the state and Indigenous peoples.

This is a mistake, Rifkin warns. None of the novels he interrogates deal specifically with Native people. Yet colonialism is not, he writes, a dynamic that inheres only Native bodies. Rather, it’s a persistent “phenomenon that shapes nonnative subjectivities, intimacies, articulations and sensations separate from whether or not something recognizably Indian comes into view.”

Colonialism is thus a common sense.

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