Word Up welcomes anthropologist Anand Pandian to discuss his new book Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, a first-hand look at the deep social and political divides in American society, and collective strategies that can overcome them. Pandian will be joined in conversation by Kessie Alexandre of New York University and Kaya Williams of Barnard College.

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket with 30 max attendees. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees for this event must wear a mask inside.

Word Up Community Bookshop is located at 2113 Amsterdam Ave. (& 165th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 168th St and the A/C train to 163rd or 168th  St.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump’s harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States, the appeal of that politics of anger and fear. In the years that followed, he crisscrossed the country–from Fargo, North Dakota to Denton, Texas, from southern California to upstate New York–seeking out fellow Americans with markedly different social and political commitments, trying to understand the forces that have hardened our suspicions of others. The result is Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, a groundbreaking and ultimately hopeful exploration of the ruptures in our social fabric, and courageous efforts to rebuild a collective life beyond them.

The stakes of disconnection have never been higher. From the plight of migrants and refugees to the climate crisis and the recent pandemic, so much turns on the care and concern we can muster for lives and circumstances beyond our own. But as Pandian discovers, such empathy is often thwarted by the infrastructure of everyday American life: fortified homes and neighborhoods, bulked-up cars and trucks, visions of the body as an armored fortress, and media that shut out contrary views. Home and road, body and mind: these interlocking walls sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it difficult to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.

Through vivid encounters with Americans of many kinds–including salesmen, truck drivers, police officers, urban planners, and activists for women’s rights and environmental justice–Pandian shares tools to think beyond the twists and turns of our bracing present. While our impasses draw from deep American histories of isolation and segregation, he reveals how strategies of mutual aid and communal caretaking can help to surface more radical visions for a life in common with others, ways of meeting strangers in this land as potential kin.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND PARTICIPANTS

Anand Pandian is a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times (2019) and Ayya’s Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern India (2014). He serves as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective, a community for radical ecological imagination and collaboration. He lives with his family in Baltimore, Maryland.

Kessie Alexandre is a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. Her first book project, Floods and Fountains, is an ethnography of Black environmental organizing against urban water insecurity in Newark, NJ. She is also developing a project on climate migration with a focus on ecological vulnerability and displacement from the Caribbean.

Kaya Williams is a professor of anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. She is interested in the seeming intractability of the laws, institutions, and bureaucratic structures underpinning mass incarceration in the United States and the social construction of race and mental illness. She is currently working on a book-length study of New Orleans’ path toward the construction of a “mental health jail.”