New Books Network

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sunny Dhillon about his book, Hide & Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025). In 2018, Sunny Dhillon resigned as a journalist with the Globe and Mail. His blog post announcing his departure went unexpectedly viral. It was a decision that had been long brewing and Dhillon posted the piece with the hope that it would lead to “meaningful reflection on the lack of diversity in Canadian journalism and the problems therein.” But he was not optimistic.

In this sharply funny memoir, shaped as a series of letters to his daughter, Dhillon explains why he was not hopeful. From his earliest memories, his experience of being Canadian was shaped by race, and as a child he’d often found himself confused by what he should do when the fact he was “different” was raised. His first reaction was to hide – from his skin colour, from his native tongue and even from his name. Until he realized he didn’t feel the need to hide anymore, that he didn’t want to hide anymore. With warmth, honesty and lots of humour, Dhillon shares his journey so that his daughter will not have to struggle through the lessons he took too long to learn, so that she will know who she is and be proud.

Sunny Dhillon is a former news reporter whose viral essay “Journalism While Brown and When to Walk Away” highlighted the significant challenges that journalists of colour can face. Sunny worked as a print reporter for ten years. He has also appeared on television and radio and has spoken at conferences. He is passionate about racial justice and continues to write on that theme. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of British Columbia. He and his young family now live in Ontario, where Sunny attends law school. This is his first book.
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Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It collectively fosters new transoceanic modes of thinking to reframe postcolonial debates and reveal the interconnected dialogues led by women from former French colonies and post-contact island territories. Thus, the volume unsettles the male agenda (captains, missionaries, mariners, ethnographers), and pays attention to the ways in which artists, writers, and activists have theorized or poetized women and the seas, reclaimed agency and created transformative possibilities. To critically map out a gendered conversation with the ocean, the contributors explore activisms and feminisms, intersectional praxes of care, ecological and health impacts of nuclear radiation and chlordecone contamination, queerness, decolonizing dance, the unsettling of official archives and female tidalectical corporeality and embodiments, Mā'ohi epistemologies and ontologies, silence as empowerment against colonial violence, forced migration and vulnerability. The volume's overarching approach belongs to a "politics of refusal" which brings forth formerly discarded archives and discredited sites of knowledge to counter ideologies and doctrinal apparatus that promote forgetting or erasure among non-sovereign populations. In exploring transoceanic feminine spaces as vital sites of knowledge production, this interdisciplinary collaboration aims to ensure that readers actively engage with feminine praxes, understanding their significance not only as theoretical constructs but as lived experiences (re)occupying, (re)appropriating and transcending patriarchal and postcolonial spaces.

Jacqueline Couti is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French in the Department of Modern & Classical Literatures & Cultures at Rice University and the author of 2016’s Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897 and 2021’s Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924–1948, as well as editing several critical editions and special journal issues, and authoring numerous articles and book chapters. 

Anny-Dominique Curtius is Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa, and has published two monographs : Symbioses d’une mémoire: Manifestations religieuses et littératures de la Caraibe in 2006 and Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d’une mémoire empêchée in 2020. She has also co-edited a special issue of Esprit Créateur on “Francophonies of the Early Modern,” and published extensively in academic journals and edited volumes.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.
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Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States. Most of these artifacts were cataloged as ornamental art objects, which erased their intended functions, and the removal of these objects often had catastrophic consequences for the original structures. Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage (Princeton UP, 2025) traces the history of the collection and distribution of African architectural fragments, documenting the brutality of the colonial regimes that looted Africa’s buildings and addressing the ethical questions surrounding the display of these objects.Dr. Itohan Osayimwese ranges across the whole of Africa, from Egypt in the north to Zimbabwe in the south, and spanning the western, central, and eastern regions of the continent. She describes how collectors employed violent means to remove elements such as columns and door panels from buildings, and how these methods differentiated architectural collecting from conventional collecting. She shows how Western collectors mischaracterized building components as ornament, erasing their architectural character and concealing the evidence of their theft. Dr. Osayimwese discusses how the very act of displacing building parts like floor tiles and woven screen walls has resulted in a loss of knowledge about their original function and argues that because of these removals, scholars have yet to fully grasp the variety and character of African architecture.Richly illustrated, Africa’s Buildings uncovers the vast scale of cultural displacement perpetrated by the West and proposes a new role for museums in this history, one in which they champion the repatriation of Africa’s architectural heritage and restitution for African communities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Friction, the force that resists motion, is synonymous with difficulty and complication. If you’ve ever replaced tires worn smooth by the road or reached for a can of WD-40 to fix a creaking door hinge, then you know the headache this force can cause.

In Friction: a Biography (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. Jennifer Vail reveals beneath the difficulty and complication a force as enigmatic and intriguing as it is central to the human story. She traces how, from the moment we first harnessed the power of fire to the Industrial Revolution and beyond, the quest to manipulate friction has driven innovation, culture, and even our own evolution. Today, as scientists study friction in the most unexpected of places, they’re learning why some viruses lie dormant for years while others devastate our cells immediately; where elusive dark matter might be found; and how the climate crisis ought finally be addressed. And yet, for all they’ve learned, scientists still haven’t cracked the greatest mystery of all: how to bridge the distinct laws that govern friction at its largest and smallest scales.

Connecting the discoveries of historical luminaries like Newton, da Vinci, and the Wright brothers to the latest breakthroughs in engineering, Friction is a captivating biography of this unsung hero of the physical world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Janet Kintner survived a difficult father and several assaults, but she didn’t let any of it stop her from pursuing law school as one of three women at the University of Arizona. And she didn’t let anything stop her from pursuing justice for her clients as a new lawyer, regardless of their ability to pay, their gender, race or religion. Despite learning that men dominated the legal system, she became a prosecutor who specialized in consumer fraud. As she continued to help everyone she could, sometimes pro bono, she was elected as the third woman to ever sit on the County Bar Association board of directors. In 1976, pregnant with her second child, she was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to be San Diego’s 3rd female judge, and two years later she was challenged by a lying lawyer whose only goal was to unseat her.

Janet Kintner overcame great odds to become one of the early rare female lawyers and judges in America. Before maternity leave came into being, she gave birth to three children and missed only the three weeks of vacation due to her each year. Her second son was born in the middle of a grueling election campaign to save her judgeship, and her third child was born a few years later. Her children grew up and later gave her four lovely grandchildren, while Janet continued to work, teach other judges, and travel the world. After retiring from the bench, Janet volunteered her legal expertise and married her second husband, a high school teacher and commercial fisherman in Canada. She wrote her memoir A Judge’s Tale: A Trailblazer Fights for her Place on the Bench (She Writes Press, 2025) and learned how to fish and run a boat off the west coast of British Columbia, where she lives part of each year with Robert.
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