Book Club: December 2, 2024, 2-4pm, – Fellows and External Fellows

Harvard literary historian Martin Puchner demonstrates that culture is never, as we too often assume, a possession, differentiated and marked by geographic boundaries, rooted in clearly delineated histories of inheritance and influence, arrayed in hierarchical canons. Instead, it is “a vast recycling project in which small fragments from the past are retrieved to generate new and surprising ways of meaning-making”. Or, as Ismail Muhammed suggests in his New York Times review, “a centuries-long game of telephone, as ideas resound through time and spread across continents”. Martin Puchner elegantly relates these messy stories of transmission, appropriation, and (mis)interpretation to confront and recover the past, reminding us of the enduring human tendency to steal and claim. He is not afraid to wander into the thickets of imperialism, and calls the reader to embrace “syncretism as the only way to reinvigorate both the study of cultural history and the creation of more culture”. (Available in all formats; 400 pages