New Books in Language and Translation

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Roderick P. Hart, “Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive” (Cambridge UP, 2018) May 24, 2018

Show notes

To find out what Americans really think about their government, University of Texas-Austin Professor Roderick P. Hart read and analyzed approximately 10,000 letters to the editor, from 12 “ordinary” cities, written between 1948 and the present. In Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Hart argues these letter writers are essential because “[c]reating and sustaining a culture of argument at the grassroots level” is what makes “democracy flourish.” Despite the sometimes cantankerous nature of letter writers, Hart praises their commitment to participating in a public dialogue. He notes the importance of sharing opinions in local newspapers in one’s own name, where neighbors can see them and respond to them, aiding communal understanding. But Hart also sees in his research a decline over the past several decades in “Oppositional Literacy,” the understanding of opposing views, possibly fed by “hyper-partisanship” in non-local online discourse. Nevertheless, “Civic Hope” is bound to make readers rethink the value of the letters page and the contributions of letter writers to democracy.

Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006.

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Ruth G. Millikan, “Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information” (Oxford UP, 2018) May 15, 2018

Show notes

Kant famously asked the question, how is knowledge possible? In her new book, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruth Garrett Millikan responds to this question from a naturalistic, and specifically evolutionary, perspective. Millikan, who is distinguished professor emerita at the University of Connecticut, has long been a leading figure in theorizing about language and thought. Her latest work considers the “clumpy” world that organisms confront and the problem of how we recognizing the same distal objects and properties again, as well as their kinds and categories. Our cognizing machinery includes unitrackers, whose job it is to track these items and channel information of the same item to one place, called a unicept. Although each of us has distinct unitrackers and unicepts, they can be attached to the same word in a public language, which itself is a lineage of reproduced signs.

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Walter N. Hakala, “Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia” (Columbia UP, 2016) May 02, 2018

Show notes

For many people language is a central characteristic of their social identity. In modern South Asia, the production of Urdu and Hindi as national languages was intricately tied to the hardening of religious identities. South Asian lexicographers, those folks who were most intimately working with language, were at the center of this political realignment. In Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia (Columbia University Press, 2016), Walter N. Hakala, Associate Professor of South Asian languages and literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, traces the long history of the construction of Urdu as a language of cultural and national identity. Dictionaries are the key source for understanding the changing social and political landscape of South Asia. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Negotiating Languages offers an episodic genealogy of the ideological underpinnings and political consequences of dictionary production. In our conversation we discuss South Asia’s multilingual premodern literature, linguistic authority, “Urdu’s oldest dictionary,” the influence of colonial knowledge production, the changing social and material challenges in 20th century lexicographical production, British lexicographers and their relationship with local linguists, Islamicized Urdu literary culture, and questions of whether non-Muslims could sufficiently produce Urdu dictionaries.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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Jeanine Kraybill, “Unconventional, Partisan, and Polarizing Rhetoric: How the 2016 Election Shaped the Way Candidates Strategize, Engage, and Communicate” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) Apr 03, 2018

Show notes

In Unconventional, Partisan, and Polarizing Rhetoric: How the 2016 Election Shaped the Way Candidates Strategize, Engage, and Communicate (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Jeanine Kraybill, assistant professor of political science at Cal State University, Bakersfield, has edited a timely book on the 2016 election. From all accounts, the 2016 election was unusual, and the role of political communication was no different.

Using a variety of methods, the chapter authors examine how rhetoric and political communication shaped the tone of campaigns and ultimate outcomes of the election. They study how candidates primed voters for an anti-establishment candidate. They also examine how political communication influenced key campaign issues such as climate change, immigration, national security, religion, and gender.

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Daniel J. Kapust, “Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art” (Cambridge UP, 2018) Mar 29, 2018

Show notes

Daniel Kapust‘s book, Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is a rich and fascinating exploration of political thought through the complex lens of the question or concept of flattery. The book traces this complicated concept through both many of the “expected” writers and thinkers in the western political theory canon while also integrating some unexpected thinkers. Kapust positions many of these thinkers in encounters with each other—exploring the kinds of conversations these thinkers might have with each other. The encounters between authors and texts tease out the differing understandings of flattery and the way that it can be used in political contexts as well as within the affective webs in which humans live and engage with one another on a personal level. Thus, Kapust situates flattery within politics, provides the reader with different definitions of flattery, and also teases out the differences between flattery and friendship. The book begins by posing the question as to why flattery is a worrisome political phenomenon and concludes with a brief exploration of the contemporary political dynamic in the United States on the eve of the 2016 election. But between these bookends, Kapust takes the reader through an extended exploration of works by Cicero, Smith, Machiavelli, the Federalist, and others who indeed wrestle with the idea of flattery in the public sphere and also within the context of political friendship and personal relationships.

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Cynthia Baker, “Jew” (Rutgers UP, 2017) Mar 07, 2018

Show notes

What is the significance of Jew? How has this word come to have such varied and charged meanings? Who has (and has not) used it, and why? Cynthia Baker explores these questions and more in her new book Jew, part of the “Key Words in Jewish Studies” series at Rutgers University Press.

In a set of absorbing case studies, Baker tracks the history of the word Jew from antiquity to the present. Among other topics, she writes about the debates concerning the terms Jews, Ioudaioi, and Judeans; the uses of yid in Yiddish; the emerging discourses about new Jews; and the genealogics of the twentiethcentury. In the course of her study, Baker exposes a number of problems that pertain to this key word, including the troubled relation between ethnicity and religion, the implications and impasses of translation, and the responsibility of the scholar in the face of the complex and often painful history of Jew. A compelling intervention in Jewish Studies, the book also opens provocative new avenues for research across the humanities and social sciences.

For more information about Jew, a collection of fascinating responses can be read in the Marginalia Forum organized by Shaul Magid and Annette Yoshiko Reed for the LA Review of Books.

Cynthia M. Baker is Professor of Religious Studies at Bates College, where she is also Chair of the Religious Studies Department. In addition to Jew, she is the author of Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity (Stanford University Press, 2002).

Mendel Kranz is a PhD student in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Matthew Johnson is a PhD student in Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago

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Kathryn Woolard, “Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia” (Oxford UP, 2016) Mar 06, 2018

Show notes

Kathryn Woolard is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She has authored seminal works on language ideology and the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia, including the present book Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia (Oxford University Press, 2016) which won the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize. Bringing together two of her longstanding areas of research interest in this book, Woolard develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and applies it to the evolving political situation in Catalonia.

In this interview, Woolard discusses the key theoretical and contextual elements of the book, broadly following its three-part structure. First, the concepts of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, sociolinguistic naturalism are introduced, and Woolard sets out the changing ideological grounding of linguistic authority there over the course of twenty years of fieldwork in Catalonia. Next, Woolard’s theoretical framework is applied to the case of a popular satirical television program which catalyzed the sociolinguistic rehabilitation of a Catalonian president whose Castilian Spanish was better than his Catalan. Finally, Woolard discusses her early and recent fieldwork in a Catalan-medium high school, and her experiences of following up on research informants first interviewed twenty years ago.

This is a typically rich and fascinating volume from a pioneer of linguistic anthropology. Positioned as a corrective against the banal nationalism of mainstream media discourse about Spain and Catalonia, the book calls on us to rethink our ideologies of language, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, which have become so polarized in the West in recent years.

Kathryn Woolard wrote a post for Indiana University’s Communication, Media and Performance Anthropology blog (08/14/2017) in which she discusses ideas we talked about in the podcast. You can find it here.

John Weston is an Yliopistonopettaja (Associate Lecturer) at the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyvaskyla. His research focuses on the relationships between language variation, knowledge and ethics. He can be reached at j.weston@qmul.ac.uk.

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Karen Neander, “A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics” (MIT Press, 2017) Feb 15, 2018

Show notes

The two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The first doesn’t require introduction. The latter is the problem of how we can have thoughts and perceptions that about other things for example, a thought about a tree, or a perception of a tree. How can mental states be about other things? A naturalistic theory of intentionality is one that explains intentionality using just those resources available from the natural sciences, such as causal relationships or elements of evolutionary theory. In A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics (MIT Press, 2017), Karen Neander synthesizes a number of such elements into a causal-informational version of teleosemantics to explain sensory-perceptual content: for example, the content of a toad’s perception when it perceives what we would call a fly. Neander is a leader in the philosophy of mind, and this accessible yet precisely written book is the culmination of much of her work to date on the theory of intentionality.

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Public Debate and Respectful Engagement with John Corvino Jan 25, 2018

Show notes

John Corvino is Professor of Philosophy at the Wayne State University in Detroit. His academic work focuses on topics in moral, social, and legal philosophy surrounding sexuality, gender, marriage, religious conviction, and discrimination. But John is also an active public philosopher who frequently participates in public debates over these topics. He produces and appears in a popular YouTube series of short videos devoted to the philosophical discussion of controversial topics. He is the author of What’s Wrong with Homosexuality?, co-author (with Maggie Ghallagher) of Debating Same Sex Marriage, and.co-author (with Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis) of Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination, all published with Oxford University Press.

The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

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Testimony and Anonymity with Sandy Goldberg Dec 28, 2017

Show notes

Sandy Goldberg is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He specializes in epistemology and philosophy of language, with particular interest in the social aspects of knowledge and speech; these foci converge in his ongoing work on testimony. Sandy has written several books including Relying on Others (Oxford 2010) and, more recently, Assertion (Oxford 2015); his forthcoming book is titled To the Best of Our Knowledge, and is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

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