Interchange – WFHB

Here are the opening paragraphs of an article in the Guardian from March 30 of this year: Thousands of graduate student workers around the US at private and public universities have gone on strike over the past few years, from Ivy League institutions like Harvard University and Columbia University to public state universities in California. …

Today we present Part 2 of the Producer's Choice Awards – The Poetry Show. Poetry – Many might turn away at even the mention of the word, but to do so would miss out on work that reveals humans grappling with the great questions of their moments. Today we feature four poets who help us …

Today we'll hear four clips from four shows that weave together ideas of slavery, imperialism, and ideological and environmental pollution. Each clip is about ten minutes long. Those shows are: Slavery's Imperial Skein: Knitting Together the Capitalist Empire with guest Zach Sell Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People, …

Last week, the Indiana Grad Workers Coalition announced preparations for a strike vote in early April.  This step was provoked by IU administrators, who have stonewalled recognition of a grad workers union, despite the supermajority of IU grad workers who have signed union cards.  This sequence, including recent grad workers' protests at the IU Board …

When Rasul Mowatt first shared his work on this book with me I immediately thought of it as “The Book of Interchange.” Its investigative breadth seemed to run on a parallel track to this program, and in fact, many of the books and authors cited by Rasul have appeared on the program. Of course, this …

In his 1923 book, Towards a New Architecture, French architect Le Corbusier wrote, The machinery of Society, profoundly out of gear, oscillates between an amelioration, of historical importance, and a catastrophe. The primordial instinct of every human being is to assure himself of a shelter. The various classes of workers in society to-day no longer …

Marie Louise Berneri's Journey Through Utopia, written in 1950, opens with a dissection of the reactionary authoritarianism of Plato's Republic in which the State must create a mythology of divinity and purity in its Guardian class to mystify the masses. Berneri writes: “Throughout history one sees that the existence of a State implies the division …

In his new book, The Writer's Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five, author Tom Roston examines the connection between Kurt Vonnegut's life and his anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Roston spent some time researching his subject here in Bloomington, where the Lilly Library at Indiana University houses the Kurt Vonnegut Manuscript Archives. Did Vonnegut …

Today much of the history of American radicalism, including the work of cartoonist Art Young, languishes in obscurity just when it is needed most. But be cheered, along with Michael Mark Cohen's website, Cartooning Capitalism: Art Young and the Cartoons of American Radicalism, there are now two collections of Young's work in print, both out …

When will you come, O Hidden One Portuguese dream of every age, To make me more than the faint breath Of an ardent God-created yearning? Ah, when at last will you, Returning, turn my hope into love? In the aftermath of the death of his father (by tuberculosis) and in the face of losing his …

This is the first of two shows on Fernando Pessoa, perhaps the greatest modern Portuguese poet, who proclaimed himself greater than Luís Vaz de Camões, author of The Lusiads, an epic fantasy of the adventuring, marauding, slaving, nation published in 1572. And in a like manner, Pessoa strives to better, or at least equal, another …

Our rising awareness that we have destroyed our planet has simultaneously provided us not with remorse or resolve but with a new fantasy: that the Anthropocene delivers an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. Today’s guest says “No!” in thunder. In The Unconstructable Earth (Fordham) Frédéric Neyrat proposes an …

Today we repeat our May 25th episode with poet, dramatist, essayist, and novelist, Thalia Field. This Extended Version of “Captivating Animals” with Thalia Field includes a discussion of Émile Zola and his attempt to recreate in fiction the scientific methodology of the Positivists and Claude Bernard; a reading of a medical journal article on the …

In this episode of Interchange we welcome back Holly Buck whose new book is Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough, published by Verso. And as we did in our previous show with Buck, which was called “Capturing the Carbon Imaginary,” we'll feature music from Polish jazz pianist and composer Krzysztof Komeda. Komeda …

Our topic today is a modernizing, industrializing, Japan, and the life and thought of Tanaka Shozo, the the late 19th and early 20th century Japanese peasant, politician, land speculator, liberal parliamentarian, transgressor against the Emperor, and environmental rights activist. But, we are, in the end, talking about liberal modernity and industrial capitalism across the globe. …

Today’s show is a repeat from June 25, 2019. In her book, Carceral Capitalism, poet and scholar Jackie Wang confronts mass incarceration in the US by delving into the processes that feed into and maintain the prison system: anti-black racism, predatory lending, algorithmic policing, privatized prisons, credit scams, data analytics and histories of exclusion. The …

In an English romantic novel from 1796, the title character and hero, Marchmont, exclaims “is it possible that for a small sum, such as it is likely such people as these can owe, their creditor has a right to shut them up from the common air, and use of their limbs, by which alone there …

Today we begin a conversation with Rasul Mowatt about his book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence which will take us on an historical tour of the use of the City as the locus of State power – where the State is given form, we might say embodied, in things like city …

In this repeat from March 13, 2018, we're joined by noted film scholar, Jim Naremore, author of Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge; Michael Martin, editor-in-chief of Black Camera: an International Film Journal, and professor in the Media School at Indiana University, who values Burnett as an artist who shows the banality of oppression; …

Today we discuss the work of the late Noel Ignatiev using the memoir that has just been published by Charles H. Kerr. It's called Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World. That steel mill is the Gary Works of US Steel which was indeed the largest steel mill in the world …

Today we engage with a masterpiece…literally: scholar Steve Volan's Master's thesis, Gownsburg: The Campus as Municipal Phenomenon. Volan has also been a City Council member in Bloomington, Indiana since 2004. In Gownsburg, the politician and the geographer seek common ground in order to describe what the University does well – but more importantly, to help …

The Checkerboard Lounge permanently closed its doors in 2015 – but these doors were not those of the storied blues shrine that had stood on 43rd Street since 1972. The demise of this cultural mainstay opens Davarian Baldwin's new book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universites Are Plundering Our Cities. In 2003 …

Our opening song is the opening track off of Metaraga, the 2020 release by the Purna Loka Ensemble for Origin Records. This is “Syzygy.” In case you'd never heard that word (like me) I'll offer the definition: A syzygy is the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies (such as the sun, moon, and earth …

Today’s show is a repeat from June 2, 2020. In the introduction we state that Louisiana had the highest rate of mortality from COVID-19 in the United States. That is no longer the case. Louisiana is now 7th on that list with the following states now having higher rates of mortality (deaths per 100,000): New …

For today's show we welcome two guests – returning to Interchange is Viren Murthy, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and also joining us is Annapurna Mamidipudi who is currently a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. They've co-authored …

Original air date August 22, 2017. Philosopher, poet, and revolutionary, José Martí, believed that knowledge and understanding do not originate within us, but come to us through our cultural institutions and that what is expressed when you “express yourself” is a collective mind and so if your culture is imperial, slave-holding, and expansionist, what kind …

Today’s show is a repeat of “Roll Jim Crow” (April 30, 2019) about the very intentional practice of white supremacy by the corporate managers of the American Tobacco Company and how, via corporate imperialism, that same racial project found expression in countries all over the world, most notably China. Some of the topics covered are: …

How can one expect the revolutionary struggles in Qing China at the turn of the 20th century to matter to humans in the United States? In the wake of celebrating the outcome of the American Revolution in 1776 we might turn our attention to revolutionary parallels. The great globe has been settled, divided, conquered, and …

Our opening song is “Cherokee” from Count Basie, featuring Buck Clayton, which is, I promise, oddly apropos for a show which centers on narco trafficking in East Asia. The music for this program features two men who likely had some measure of influence on each other's future work: American Jazz Trumpeter Buck Clayton and Chinese …

Last week's show with Zach Sell was about how US Slavery troubled the imperial imaginary, asking if US plantation overseers could translate the brutal practices of slavery's violent efficiencies onto Britain's colonial empire in India and the West Indies in the mid-19th century. Next week's show with Mark Driscoll again centers on Imperial Britain and …

While today's conversation centers on slavery's influence during the forty years from the 1830s to the 1870s, we're going to begin a bit prior to that with a journal entry by Benjamin Banneker who lived from 1731 to 1806 near Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland (now known as Ellicott City). In that entry Banneker recalled a “great …

Today's show offers a remix of a July 2016 interview with Alex Lichtenstein on the documentary photographs of Margaret Bourke-White, “Focus on Apartheid.” The conversation was recorded live in our WFHB studios. All of our music for this remix comes from five albums by Johnny Dyani, South African double bassist and pianist. In the early …

This Extended Version of “Captivating Animals” with Thalia Field includes a discussion of Émile Zola and his attempt to recreate in fiction the scientific methodology of the Positivists and Claude Bernard; a reading of a medical journal article on the “insanity” of antivivisectionists; the tragedy of Charles Darwin’s “support” for vivisection. Radio Version of Captivating …

Our guest today, Thalia Field, is an acclaimed experimental novelist, essayist and poet, modes of writing she often combines in one text. It’s also likely that historical figures, philosophers, or dog trainers, will walk onto the page to be the connective tissue between multiple distinct texts that span decades. In what follows, we’ll hear Field …

We begin with some “Happy” news…last week the New York Court of Appeals—one of the most influential state courts in the United States—agreed to hear the habeas corpus case Happy the elephant – an autonomous and cognitively complex nonhuman animal who has been imprisoned at the Bronx Zoo for over four decades. This marks the …

Today’s show is about the life and work of Edward Said, author, literary critic, teacher, musician, public intellectual, and Palestinian American. And all our music today comes from Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, a favorite of Edward Said’s and the subject of several of Said’s essays. Notably, “Glenn Gould, the Virtuoso as Intellectual” and “The Music …

Our show today selects segments from four recent programs that highlight Colonial Mentality…and of course I’m stealing that phrase from the great Fela Kuti – whose song of the same name opens this show. Our music throughout the show comes from each of the original programs. We’ll begin with our show on the revolutionary life …

Today we’ll revisit our interview with historian Nancy Isenberg about her book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. But there’s a twist – I’ve re-edited the program to make use of a broader musical perspective, feeling like I had betrayed the spirit of the program in my original choices. Isenberg’s 2016 …

Because I want to use this introduction to correct a gap in the show today – entirely of my doing – I’ll have to rush a bit to tell you what you will hear about. Here we go: Booker T. Washington and Racial Conservatism Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and his “machine politics” W. E. B. Du …

Angels: what do we really know about them? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive? Today’s guest, Eliot Weinberger, has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into his new book, Angels & Saints. And when you’re trying to find out about angels, it’s …

Born in poverty in rural Vermont, the Pennsylvania politician, Thaddeus Stevens, was among the first to see the Civil War as an opportunity for a second American revolution—a chance to remake the country as a true democracy which meant equal suffrage for all and more importantly the necessity of being a landowner. One of the …

Today’s show is a somewhat altered version of a program that first aired on November 3rd, 2015, called Tracking Subversives with the noted scholar of the “literary Left,” Alan Wald. According to Wald, the aim of the literary radical is “to endow history with meaning.” Wald has published a trilogy of books brought out by …

(Original air date: May 19, 2020) In the United States of the 1950s there was a struggle over the very idea of what it would mean to be an American. After World War II, an American could ride high on military power and new technologies. But the Cold War and Nuclear Anxiety undermined the very …

Our opening song is “Stardust,” a song written by Indiana native Hoagy Carmichael and here performed by Dave Brubeck off the live album Jazz at Oberlin recorded in May of 1953. In June of that same year Sylvia Plath would find herself in New York as an intern at Mademoiselle magazine. In August she would …

Part One of “The Automation Ruse” aired on February 9th and featured author Jason E. Smith whose new book, Smart Machines and Service Work, is subtitled “Automation in an Age of Stagnation,” and it’s that crisis of stagnation that propels us into today’s conversation with Aaron Benanav, a researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin and …

We open the show with “The Purest Kind of Guy,” performed by Paul Robeson, a song from Marc Blitzstein’s 1941 opera No For An Answer which concerns the life and fate of members of a social club of Greek-American waiters, hotel-workers, restaurant-workers, chefs, laundresses, chambermaids, taxi-drivers, who are out-of-work. In 1958, Blitzstein was subpoenaed to …

In our previous conversation with Eileen Hunt Botting (April 2020) as the pandemic began to deceptively settle into our routines we focused on Mary Shelley’s post-apocalypse novel, The Last Man – a book which explored loss in its most extreme form in order to find a more humane way to live and love, and create …

We’ll open with “Powerhouse” performed here by Don Byron off of Bug Music from 1996. Composed by Raymond Scott in 1937, “Powerhouse” was featured in over 40 Warner Bros. cartoons and perhaps best known for its use in the 1946 Looney Tunes cartoon “Baby Bottleneck” which stars Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. 1946 is also …

Today’s show is a “repackaging” of a program from August 2015 about service sector workers and the future of unions with a focus on the question can there be a labor movement with any strength in the service sector? Perhaps that movement needs to find new forms of organization to stay relevant. In the coming …

Today we feature the radical work of Muriel Rukeyser, whose poetics treatise, The Life of Poetry, first published in 1949, can be called an anti-Fascist manifesto. We struggle at times to place Rukeyser inside our understanding of politics and poetry as she herself struggled to not be placed – like Thoreau, she did not wish …

It’s January 19, 2021, the day after the nation’s official sanction of a narrow understanding of the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the day before the country “swears in” a new president, the representative of one of only two parties allowed to compete for the style of window dressing in this House of …