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Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

By: New Books Network
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 Interviews with Columbia University Press authors.New Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism Science World
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Episodes
  • James B. Haile III, "The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom" (Columbia UP, 2024)

    James B. Haile III, "The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    May 13 2025
    An ambitious genre-crossing exploration of Black speculative imagination, The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom (Columbia University Press 2024) combines fiction, historical accounts, and philosophical prose to unveil the extraordinary and the surreal in everyday Black life.In a series of stories and essays, James B. Haile, III, traces how Black speculative fiction responds to enslavement, racism, colonialism, and capitalism and how it reveals a life beyond social and political alienation. He re-envisions Black technologies of freedom through Henry Box Brown’s famed escape from slavery in a wooden crate, fashions an anticolonial “hollow earth theory” from the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and considers the octopus and its ability to camouflage itself as a model for Black survival strategies, among others. Looking at Black life through the lens of speculative fiction, this book transports readers to alternative worlds and spaces while remaining squarely rooted in present-day struggles. In so doing, it rethinks historical and contemporary Black experiences as well as figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Dumas, and Toni Morrison.Offering new ways to grasp the meanings and implications of Black freedom, The Dark Delight of Being Strange invites us to reimagine history and memory, time and space, our identities and ourselves. Winner, 2025 Hugh J. Silverman Book Prize, Association for Philosophy and Literature Finalist, 2025 PEN America Open Book Award James B. Haile III is a Professor of English & Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island. You can find him at the University of Rhode Island Philosophy Department website. You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Dr. Haile continue their conversation.
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    1 hr and 19 mins
  • Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018)

    Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018)
    Apr 23 2025
    Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced sex as an object of empirical knowledge, the rise of sexology in the 1920s, the discourse of “sex change” in the press from the 1920s to the 1940s, and a famous case of the “first” Chinese transsexual in 1950s Taiwan. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sexuality in China, and will be of special interest for readers who are interested in bringing Foucault-inspired analyses to the craft of history. Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.
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    1 hr and 13 mins
  • Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)

    Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    Apr 10 2025
    Chinese travelers first made their way to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean in the 14th century, looking for goods like coconuts, cowries, and ambergris. That started centuries of travel to the islands, including one trip by famed sailor Zheng He. Then, quickly, the Maldives—and the broader Indian Ocean—vanished as Ming China turned inward. Bin Yang writes about these linkages between China, the Maldives and the Indian Ocean in his recent book Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c 1100-1620 (Columbia University Press: 2024) Bin Yang is a professor of history at City University of Hong Kong. His books include Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Columbia University Press: 2008) and Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Columbia University Press: 2019). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Discovered But Forgotten. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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    42 mins

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