Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

Just east of the Norwich-New London Turnpike in Uncasville, Connecticut, stands the Mohegan Congregational Church. By most accounts, it’s little different than the thousands of white-steepled structures dotting the New England landscape: the same high-backed wooden chairs, high ceilings, images of lordly white men. To the careful observer, there is one notable distinction. Just above a traditional cross near the front entrance hangs a single, perfect eagle feather.

The juxtaposition might be startling for some. But as Brown historian Linford D. Fisher beautifully illuminates in The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America(Oxford University Press, 2012), Native cultures in New England – and, indeed, most everywhere – are highly incorporative, blending elements of Christian religious practice with their own.

This was never more the case than during the eighteenth century evangelical revival known to scholars as the First Great Awakening. A significant turning point in American spiritual life, Native peoples of New England are often left out of the narrative. When they’re included, it’s as passive targets of conversion. Fisher tells a dramatically different story.

(Many thanks to New Books in American Studies host Benjamin Smith for composing our new intro music!)

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This month in a very special edition, we’re celebrating that most English of novelists Jane Austen.

It’s two hundred years this month since the publication of Pride and Prejudice and we’ve invited bestselling British novelist and Jane Austen aficionado PD James, along with Anglo-Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin, also a great Austen fan and from Australia Susannah Fullerton, President of the Australian Jane Austen Society, all here to share with us their passion for this much loved classic English novel.

We’ll also be hearing from other writers from around the world – AS Byatt, Colm Toibin, Nii Parkes, Kamila Shamsie, to name a few, why the razor-sharp wit of Elizabeth Bennet and the cool hauteur of the gorgeous Mr Darcy are still drawing in more readers than ever across the globe in the twenty-first century.

Susannah Fullerton is the author of Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Image: Jane Austen, Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Slate critics Dan Kois, Hanna Rosin, and Emily Bazelon discuss Katherine Boo’s National Book Award-winning story of life in a Mumbai slum.

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Despite what you may have learned in undergraduate surveys or high school textbooks, the nineteenth century was not one long and inexorable march toward Indian dispossession — the real story is far more tragic. As historian Joseph Genetin-Pilawa masterfully relates in his new book Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Native and non-Native reformers developed a host of viable policy alternatives to allotment and forced assimilation in the post-Civil War years.

Seizing the ferment of Reconstruction, dynamic figures like Ely Parker — briefly featured in Speilberg’s Lincoln — attempted to harness the power of a growing federal government to protect indigenous nations from rapacious land loss and cultural genocide, only to be outmaneuvered by elite “humanitarian” forces who equated dispossession with progress. Adeptly synthesizing the study of American political development with post-colonial thought, and demonstrating an keen attentiveness to human agency within the limitations of larger structures, Genetin-Pilawa excavates the “repressed alternatives” of late nineteenth century Indian policy, destabilizing a narrative too often presented as inevitable.

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In this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert talks to one of New Zealand's greatest living writers, CK Stead, about his prize-winning novel My Name Was Judas.

With this playful re-writing of the life and death of Jesus, CK Stead poses some profound and thought-provoking questions on the nature of belief and divinity itself.

Judas's name has become synonymous with 'betrayer', but in this witty, and controversial retelling, some 40 years after the death of Jesus, Judas finally puts forward his story as he remembers it.

Looking back on his childhood and youth from an old age the gospel writers denied him, Judas recalls his friendship with Jesus; their schooling together; the 12 disciples and their stories; their journeys together and their dealings with the powers of Rome and the Jewish clerics.

(Image: CK Stead)

Slate critics Dan Kois, Hanna Rosin, and David Haglund discuss Zadie Smith’s novel about four Londoners from the same council estate.

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“Museums can be very painful sites for Native peoples,” writes Amy Lonetree, associate professor of history at UC-Santa Cruz and a citizen of the Ho Chunk Nation, “as they are intimately tied to the colonization process.”

Such a contention appears incongruous to most; museums are supposed to be places of wonder and learning, after all, pillars of our democratic culture. But consider the history. From the wholesale plunder of cultural artifacts and human remains — “If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up in prison,” Walter Eco-Hawk puts it, “but desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D.” — to racist representations of disappearance and primitivity, museums are deeply implicated in colonialism.

Yet as Lonetree powerfully proposes in Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), it doesn’t need to be that way. Assessing new efforts of collaboration, accountability, and control at Mille Lacs Indian Museum, The National Museum of the American Indian, and The Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture & Lifeways, Lonetree lays out a path toward decolonization, putting these once aloof institutions to the task of sovereignty, survivance, and the telling of hard truths. This work is not only politically vital, but ultimately makes for a better museum.

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On this month's World Book Club, Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling American writer Paul Auster about his acclaimed work The New York Trilogy.

In three brilliant variations on the classic detective story, Auster makes the well-traversed terrain of New York City his own.

Each interconnected tale exploits the elements of standard detective fiction to achieve an entirely new genre that was ground-breaking when it was published three decades ago.

In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of identity and what it means to be human.

Hear what readers made of Paul and his novel and what happened when another Paul Auster stood up to introduce himself to the Paul Auster on the stage.

Dan Kois, Emily Bazelon, and Meghan O'Rourke discuss David Mitchell's epic novel.

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This month's World Book Club is brought to you from the Institute of Cervantes in London where Harriett Gilbert will be talking to bestselling Spanish writer Javier Marias about his prize-winning work A Heart So White.

This acclaimed novel explores profoundly disturbing questions about the nature of knowledge, curiosity and truth itself.

When the narrator Juan marries his sweetheart Luisa he is haunted by family secrets that cast their long shadow over his contentment and ponders the nature of secrecy – its convenience, its price – does he even want to know the truth he asks himself.

In the company of a lively group of readers at the Spanish Cultural Centre Marias also playfully dispenses his wisdom on how to keep a marriage together and why pen and paper beats technology.