Virtual Book Discussion

Please join Emily on Saturday, April 26 from 12-2pm EDT to discuss Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang. She will be organizing a fun and thought-provoking session that’s a bit more intensive than a book club, and accessible and welcoming to all. Come as you are—there’s no pressure here: you don’t have to be a literary person, or a bookworm; you don’t have to have a college degree or have excelled in high school English; you don’t have to be a native English speaker; you don’t have to be extroverted, nor will you have to say anything if you don’t want to. This space is truly for everyone. There is no judgment here.

There are no prerequisites. The only expectation is that you read or listen to the book.

The book is available at many libraries for free. If you purchase the book, consider supporting your local bookstore! (Emily also HIGHLY recommends the audiobook, if that’s your thing.)

Please register here.

This book is about a lot of things: how history is written and read, and how academia perpetuates power and maintains the status quo; it’s about access to and gatekeeping of knowledge, the value and devaluing of the humanities, the relationship between academia and capitalism and imperialism, and what we can (and ultimately must) do to change the course of history. We will discuss the meaning behind the adoption of the main character—a boy named Robin who must choose this English name because his given Chinese name, he is told, will not be comprehensible in British society—by a British professor after his mother dies of cholera in 1838 in Canton. On the precipice of British colonization of parts of China in the early 1940s, this piece of historical fiction meets fantasy asks the question, what would it take to stop the grinding machinery, grueling pace, and grisly consequences of Western imperialism.