Podcasts about American Studies Association

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. This week, Emily features an interview with curator Ciara Ennis, director of the De Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University. Ciara discusses her evolution from painter to curator, her efforts to challenge traditional museum practices, and her initiatives aimed at fostering inclusivity and dialogue within the art community. Key programs highlighted include the Flat Files of Curiosity Initiative and the Project Room for South Bay artists. She shares insights into her curatorial philosophy, influenced by her studies and experiences, including her impactful first exhibition in London and admiration for artist Joseph Beuys. The episode underscores Ciara's commitment to making museums more accessible and dynamic spaces for diverse audiences.About Curator Ciara Ennis:As Director Professor of Practice in the Department of Art and Art History, Dr. Ennis is responsible for developing the vision, artistic direction, and strategic leadership for the museum including exhibitions, programming, permanent collection, academic integration, and public profile. Ennis oversees museum operations, staffing, finances, and fundraising, and serves as the primary liaison between the museum and Santa Clara University.Prior to directing the de Saisset Museum, Ennis served as Director and Curator of Pitzer College Art Galleries, transforming it into a significant center for contemporary art and discourse through intellectually provocative initiatives focused on diverse communities of artists exploring issues that define our times. A Museum Studies scholar, Ennis' research explores the appropriation of Wunderkammer strategies as a means for rethinking contemporary curatorial practice. Ennis has been a panelist and guest speaker for the College Arts Association, American Studies Association, the International Sculpture Conference, the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, the California Community Foundation, the Rijksakademie Amsterdam, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Ennis is a member of Prospect Art's Advisory Board and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly's Advisory Council. She has an MA (RCA) in Contemporary Curatorial Practice from the Royal College of Art, and a PhD in Cultural Studies/Museum Studies from Claremont Graduate University.For more on the exhibit, Maya Gurantz: The Plague Archives CLICK HERE. Follow Ciara on Instagram:  @CiaraEnnis5--About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women's Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWilFollow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast--CREDITS:Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson. Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 LicenseThe Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions. For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

The American Studies Association has boycotted Israeli academic institutions since 2013. The Association for the Advancement of Anthropology has refrained from formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions. And just this past summer, the American Association of University Professors opened the door to academic boycotts against Israel.  Enter: two scientists at MIT who see firsthand the consequences of academic boycotts and the damage it can cause to scholarship and scientific progress. To ensure Israeli scholars and their American colleagues can collaborate freely, and foster research and innovation that benefits all of humanity, they formed The Kalaniyot Foundation (pronounced Ka-la-nee-yought), named after Israel's national flower.  Hear from Drs. Or Hen and Ernest Fraenkel, co-founders of this initiative, on the impact of anti-Israel boycotts on academic collaboration with Israeli scholars, and what they're doing to rehabilitate the reputation of Israeli researchers in the eyes of the world.  Listen – AJC Podcasts: The Forgotten Exodus: with Hen Mazzig, Einat Admony, and more. People of the Pod:  U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff on Gaza Reconstruction, Israeli Security, and the Future of Middle East Diplomacy Why Germany's Antisemitic Far-Right Party is Thriving Instead of Disappearing Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. __ Transcript of Conversation with Drs. Or Hen and Ernest Fraenkel: Manya Brachear Pashman:   Since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023 many university campuses have been riven by anti-Israel protests, demonstrations, often unfortunately fueled by disinformation and rife with rhetoric that too often crosses the line into antisemitism. But even before October 7, Israeli scholarship had become a target of the boycott divestment sanctions movement.  The American Studies Association has boycotted Israeli academic institutions since 2013. The Association for the Advancement of Anthropology has refrained from formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions. Even study abroad programs that give students an opportunity to live and study in Israel have come under scrutiny. Enter: two scientists at MIT who see firsthand the consequences of academic boycotts and the damage it can cause to scholarship and scientific progress. To ensure Israeli scholars and their American colleagues can collaborate freely, foster research and innovation that benefits all of humanity, they formed The Kalaniyot Foundation, named after Israel's national flower. Dr. Or Hen and Ernest Fraenkel are with us now to discuss this initiative. Dr. Hen, Dr. Fraenkel, welcome to People of the Pod.  Ernest Fraenkel:   Thank you very much.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   So I want to work backward here a bit with a purpose. I want to start by sharing with our audience a little about your research. Dr Fraenkel, you work in health science, technology. What is the goal of your research and scholarship? Are there particular diseases you're trying to cure or treat? Ernest Fraenkel:   We are interested in the diseases that are the hardest to treat, ones like Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's, where we don't really know the root cause, and we believe that by gathering many different kinds of data about genes and molecules, about RNA and also about people's lived experience of these diseases, and using computational models, we can identify new targets for drugs and hopefully better therapies. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Have you collaborated with Israeli scientists on this?  Ernest Fraenkel:   Yes, we collaborate with quite a few scientists all over the world, including top researchers in Israel. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And Dr. Hen, you are a nuclear physicist, and you study the strongest force in nature, right? What is the goal of your research?  Or Hen:   So my research is very much on the fundamental curiosity driven science side of things, I am trying to understand how the fundamental building blocks of matter come about. We're building a new particle collider in the US called the electron hand collider. It's a $3 billion project funded by the Department of Energy, where we will try to understand why the proton and from that nucleus and all of us have mass. Trying to understand how we get the proton to a specific spin, which is the reason that we can go into an MRI machine and image ourselves. And I also try to understand things like, how do protons and neutrons interact with each other at extremely short distances, which tell us about exotic phenomena in the universe, like neutron stars. So trying to understand, really, the fundamental building blocks of matter and how they come about. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Wow. And is there promising scholarship in this realm in Israel? Or Hen:   Yes, there's quite a few groups working in this area. I did my own training in Israel. I am a graduate of the Hebrew University for undergrad and Tel Aviv University for grad school. And actually, ever since I came to MIT, I've still been collaborating with colleagues from Technion, Tel Aviv, Hebrew University, Weizmann, Ben Gurion. I've always had a strong collaboration with Israel, actually. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So after October 7, or maybe even leading up to it, what were you seeing when it came to support of Israeli scholarship and collaboration in your institutions, in your fields, in academia in general? Ernest Fraenkel:   I think before October 7, we were living in a bit of a bubble, because MIT is a special place which is very deeply immersed in science and technology. Where really, quite honestly, before October 7, I had no hint that there were biases against Israel, Israelis or Jews. I know that was not the experience in many other areas, especially in other fields. But things really turned 180 degrees on October 7, and what we've seen since then has been deeply disturbing. That some of the boycotts that have been bubbling for years in the humanities suddenly burst forth into the sciences and the engineering fields in ways that are both global and also very local. Seeing bias against individual researchers inside laboratories, as well as these kind of blanket attempts to boycott Israel. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And Dr Hen, did you see the same?  Or Hen:   Yes, definitely. I work with a lot of international collaborations, actually, within collaborations, because there's structured bodies with bylaws and rules, It was very hard for anyone to object the presence of Israeli researchers. But what we have observed in many places is peer to peer collaborations dying down. We've seen a very significant social tax being applied to people who continue to collaborate with Israelis, and honestly, maybe in contrast a bit to what we know from academic boycotts in other areas, but are very much politically driven, within the STEM, within exact sciences, biosciences, etc, the social taxing is actually much stronger because we are people who usually instead, people keep a very clear separation between the politics and then, you know what they view from the work in the lab, which is very clear and data driven, and not a lot of room for opinions. It's very much exact.  But on the other hand, the second that walking within Israel, and you know collaborating with Israel, is start costing other corporations, other people will now not work, then you get a problem. And that's what people really avoid and that's how an academic boycott within the STEM areas is progressing. It's a very deeply bound social tax that is just running in the air of the institutions. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So what is the Kalaniyot Foundation doing to promote these collaborations? Can you give us some specific examples, or projects or partnerships? Or Hen:   Yeah, so one of the things that we really believe in is that, at the end of the day, actually, what we see, also data shows, is, well, there is existing strong collaboration, that peer to peer, that person to person connection, is so strong that it's very hard to break that. You can go into my department and you can talk to people about Israel. And they know Or, and they know the person, right? And they might have a positive opinion about, you know, negative opinion about me. But whatever that opinion is, right, it's stronger than anything.  They will try to protest and say, Okay, maybe there's a political issue. But you know, we know the researcher. We know the scientists. We know our colleagues. So the approach of Kalaniyot is to actually bring in more Israelis to campus, to bring in brilliant people who are excellent researchers that will come and enrich the academic environment, first and foremost, through this quality, and second, by the people that they are. Maybe Ernest, you want to continue with this? Ernest Fraenkel:   So it's really this dual mission. We think that if we bring more top notch Israeli scholars to us campuses, it will normalize interaction with Israelis, humanize the Israeli, but there's a problem, right? Because if you just bring Israelis into campus environments that are hostile, they won't thrive. Many of them won't want to come, right? And so the other piece of it that's necessary is to build community, and that's something that we've been doing since October 7 of last year, trying to figure out how to do that, and what we found is face to face interaction is really critical.  And so at MIT, we've been having weekly lunches of the Israelis, Jews, allies, everybody who felt isolated and left out of society by all the protests that were taking place. And the beautiful thing is that that started as a reaction, right, a sort of a safe place to retreat to, and it's actually become a wonderful, positive place. And still, now, you know, so far into this crisis, people are coming, and actually the numbers are even growing. And so on a typical week, we get more than 100 people in person. We, of course, feed them lunch, and it's just a wonderful place where you can make friendships, develop academic collaborations, and Israelis realize that there is a community here that appreciates them and welcomes them and it helps them thrive. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Because, of course, food is a vital currency, both on college campuses as well in Jewish as in Jewish life. Food heals all. But I am curious, do you? In addition to building these thriving communities, are you also so that people are surrounded and comfortable but are you also trying to build bridges with people who perhaps do tend to throw the word Israeli around in a negative capacity, but you need to actually have some face to face contact. Or is that really not the purpose of Kalaniyot. Or Hen:   I mean, it's a yes and a no. We certainly have done that, right. So if you think about how it all started very soon after October 7, basically after the first protest on campus at MIT. We went to talk to our president, three Jewish Israeli faculty, and we asked her. We said, Look, we hear from the students about what's happening in the dorms, what they're experiencing. It's really bad, and it's very hard to handle through the existing mechanisms.  Please actually give us the budget. We'll get kosher food. I'm a Mizrahi, that's what I know how to do, feed people. Let's put everybody together, and let's make sure everybody feel welcome. And we also said, you know, we'll be your bridge. We'll help the students communicate with administration through our guidance, right? We'll be able to filter, to guide them, but also to pick up on the important things that you need to know. But then we said something else. We said, Look, this is going to become very tough, also for the students who are protesting out there right now. It was before Israel responded, but we knew exactly what happened in the kibbutzim, and we knew this is not going to be just another round with Gaza. This is going to be something different.  So we actually suggested to the President that alongside starting our group, we will start a parallel group of peers who we might disagree with politically and have different perspectives on the Middle East, but we know that they are reasonable people that we can talk to, that we can collaborate with, that we can work with, despite or alongside disagreements. And so the idea was to start our lunch, to start a second lunch, and slowly, through the faculty leadership, bring the groups together. Some of it has worked. Some of it didn't work.  We used to meet once a week as the faculty and say, students tell us that this and this is happening. Can you maybe walk with your students to tone that down, and they would tell us what's bothering them, etc. Getting the students to come together, that was a bigger lift, a challenging one. And there was another initiative that came about called the Third Space Lunch, that maybe Ernest can elaborate more on. Ernest Fraenkel:   So just to add a little bit to that. So the faculty leads from the other group came to speak to our students. Were very respectful to them. The faculty listened quietly to the concerns of the Jewish students. And I think we did see an attempt by many of the faculty to bridge the gaps. Obviously, faculty are an extremely, you know, diverse group. We have extremists, we've got centrists, we've got moderates. And not everybody was trying to help, but many, many were, and I think that was very encouraging, and I've seen that continue throughout this. There are hidden allies. Probaby the average faculty member probably doesn't really want to know too much about Israel or Palestine. Doesn't want to have to understand the conflicts. They just want to go about their daily lives, teach what they love to teach, do the research they love to do, and they are natural allies in trying to bring order back to campus. And the more that we can engage them, the better off it is. Or Hen:   But I think in terms of the formal program for Kalaniyot - Kalaniyot is really meant to bring in researchers and make sure that they have a supporting environment. And if people want to take that extra step of building bridges and building, that's all great, but it's not kind of a mandatory part of the program. Manya Brachear Pashman:   I get it. You really just want to foster academic research and progress and innovation, right? Put political strife aside. You've named this foundation Kalaniyot after Israel's national flower. Can you describe for our listeners that flower and why you chose that name for this initiative? Ernest Fraenkel:   The Kalaniyah looks a lot like a poppy. It's a red poppy, and during good times, there actually was an annual festival where Israelis would flock to the south in the area right around Gaza to see the bloom of this flower that would cover the otherwise fairly barren, quite honestly, countryside. And it was called the South Red, Darom Adom, and people would rush there to see it. And it was a symbol, which actually takes place right around the time we're recording. People have been sending us photos from from Israel the last few weeks of these flowers, the more they hear about the program.  And it's a sign that the winter is going to end and spring is going to come, and everything will be renewed. And so it was the South in red, in a sense, that was all positive. And we think the same sort of thing is possible here, that while Israel is right now a touch point for conflict on campus, we want to see a time when Israel, this is something like, Oh, of course. You know, everybody wants to have some connection to Israel. That's where the best researchers are in every field.  I often tell the story, when I was first on the faculty here, one of my first assignees as an undergraduate advisee was somebody from Hawaii, and he told me, asked him what he was going to do this summer, and he said he's going to Israel. So no, really, what's, what's your connection to Israel? He said, Oh, I don't have any I thought, maybe he's a strong Christian. I asked him about that. Said, no, no, I don't have any particular faith. I just heard it's startup nation, and I want to go and experience it.  And I just think, how many students today is their first association with Israel, startup nation? Probably not that many anymore, but we can get back to that and realize that it's more than startups, right? It's basic science, it's the arts, it's culture. And so there's much that Israel has to offer the world, and we want to get back to the point where that's the first thing people think about Israel. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So this initiative did start at MIT, but it appears to be sprouting, to use a pun, it appears to be sprouting on other campuses. Dartmouth is developing a chapter and Penn, right, the University of Pennsylvania. Are they being led by fellow scientists who have seen the consequence of this scholastic snub, for lack of a better word? Ernest Fraenkel:   So at each university, and there are several others in the works that are still working their way through the administration at each university, and by the way, this is not a renegade effort. At each university, the faculty form a faculty board, we encourage them to find a diverse group. So it's not all the sciences on our board. And on those boards, there seem to be many members of humanities departments. Not all Jews, not all Israelis.  And these diverse faculty boards are people who are allied with the goals, and we have bylaws. This is a program entirely about positivity. It's not attempting to suppress anybody else's speech. It's not attempting to make any political points. It's a purely academic program that will help restore the image of Israel as a place of academic excellence and help the United States maintain its academic edge through those collaborations. Or Hen:   And I think you're hitting on a very unique point, right? And that is that this is entirely faculty led program. When you think about the role of faculty in universities, especially faculty from STEM fields, right, we don't lead a lot of things in the academic world that are not our research, right? Honestly, that's kind of, why am I here and not in Google, right? I would probably make a much bigger salary for Google these days.  I'm here because I really care about my research, those open questions I really want to explore, and that's what I'm doing. So I'm teaching my class, and I'm focusing on my research. And me is everybody else around me, that's what we do. So there is a very high activation energy to get the faculty to do something that is not their research, their own research, but once you do that, faculty is a force of nature at the university. That's kind of what we're here to stay, right? We'll tenure, we're going to be at the retirement. We run the place eventually.  So it's both to activate the people who can really make an impact from within in a very strong way. That's number one, who have these decades of connections, right? Well before the challenge, you know, I've had my 10 years of collaborations here at MIT, and this has a lifetime of more than 10 years of collaborations here, right? And many of us and people remember those connections, right? Remember how we teach together, how I lent them something from my lab, and stuff like that, right? We have these personal connections.  So it is really the first and uniquely faculty led program that is very helping to come back, see faculty do that. There's a lot of power, and that's also why it's such an academically focused program, because that's what we know how to do. There's many other who can combat antisemitism and can give antisemitism training and title six and all that. And we don't do it, not because it's not important, just because we are not the people who bring in unique expertise in those areas, but when it comes to research collaboration, connections with Israel around those things, we are the ones who can really promote it from within in a way that's unpowered and parallel to anyone else. And that's the, I think the strongest point of Kalaniyot, the faculty leadership.  Manya Brachear Pashman:   In other words, you're not activists, you're not advocates. That's not what you set out to do. You are researchers, scientists who just want to do research in science. Or Hen:   And when I see everybody around us do the best research and science possible, which means engaging with the brightest minds anywhere in the world, and that includes Israel.  And we don't want to see that door shut down. There's no hiding it – Ernest and I are Zionists, we're not going to shy away from that. And we think that an academic boycott in the STEM is a risk to Israel. Israel doesn't have oil, right? What Israel has is the Jewish mind, and that mind is the thing that helps Israel, and that mind is the thing that helps the world. And we can go on and on about inventions and discoveries that came out of Israel and Israelis and Jews for the benefit of mankind. So both for the benefit of Israel and all of humanity, we don't want to see the Israeli Academy get isolated. It's going to be bad for all of us. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Now I know that there is a program at Indiana University called Olamot, focusing on the humanities. Does this only apply to STEM fields, or do you also have partnerships and collaborations developing across multiple disciplines? Ernest Fraenkel:   Yes, absolutely, this is a program that's open to all academic fields, and each university will craft a slightly different program, we're sure. At MIT, because we're STEM dominated, our Kalaniyot program is dominated by STEM, but it's not exclusively STEM here, either. We do have deep involvement with several of our board members in the humanities. Many of the people who come to our programming are in humanities. We're hoping that some of the scholars whom we will select in our first cohort of post doctoral and sabbatical visitors will be in the humanities, but that's going to be much a bigger component of it at other universities such as Dartmouth and Penn, where they have huge humanities programs. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And are you getting mostly support, or are you getting any pushback from faculty members?  Ernest Fraenkel:   So this is really fascinating. Early on, when we first started formulating this program, we wrote a memo explaining, a letter, explaining why we were doing this for something called the faculty newsletter, which is usually a place where people write fairly anti-Israel things, and we kind of braced ourselves for the pushback. And nothing came back. There was no pushback. Because if you believe in academic values in the United States, unless you're a hardcore BDS person, there's really nothing objectionable here.  Our goal is to bring brilliant scholars to campus and encourage them to be able to work broadly, without regard to nationality, religion, anything else, any other protective category. And so we were very pleased. And initially, you know, the administration was curious. They were interested. They wanted to review exactly what we're doing. The MIT administration went through everything we're doing, and they gave us the thumbs up, and they've now been helping us make connections and behind the scenes, I believe, I understand that, you know, some provosts and presidents occasionally talk about this when they meet and they, you know, tell each other it's not a bad thing to have at your University. Or Hen:   I remember when we kind of got people to know the program, we met with a very high ranking individual at MIT. And that person said, Look, MIT stands on three legs: research, education, and entrepreneurship. Israel excels in all three. Of course, we want those connections. Of course we want those collaborations. And who in the right mind can say that this is anything political, right? Now I'm sure that some people will try at some point. But like Ernest said, we've worked very hard on the language and the messaging to make sure that the language and messaging reflects the way we really see it, as a very strong academic program. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So, Dr. Hen, I do want to ask you a personal question. I have read that as a child, you navigated some pretty significant learning disabilities stemming from dysgraphia. You have difficulty translating your thoughts into written form, but the assessment to determine those disabilities also determined that you had a unique gift for abstract comprehension, the ability to conceptually pare down complex ideas to their fundamental core. So I wanted to ask you, in your opinion, what is at the fundamental core of these academic boycotts? Or Hen:   Honestly, I do believe that the academic boycotts come from antisemitism. That's the core. I do believe that there are a lot of people who engage in that, not understanding that is what they're doing. I'd like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I think that a lot of people do see a difference between anti-Zionism, anti-Israel, antisemitism, right, which I personally do not share. And that's a different point of view, which is allowed. But I think at the end of the day, trying to isolate Israel, eventually is from a top level, and attempt to bring down the country, because that's the core. Core of Israel is its academics. That's really where it all starts. And if we don't have academia, if we're attacking the Israeli Academy, you're attacking Israel. And any person who takes the time to learn about the Israeli Academy, who listens to speeches by the head of Tel Aviv University about the judicial reform in Israel. Who listens to the head of the Israeli National Academy about how he sees democracy and what he sees about the war, situation, you would learn that the Israeli Academy is really the hallmark of independent academia that stands by itself, as an independent body that really promotes research and good for the world. And anyone who attacks that either doesn't know or doesn't care to know, and I'd like to hope that most people don't know, and once they'll know and appreciate the people, they will see different people. There is a core that doesn't want to know, and okay, we need to make sure that that call remains as small as possible. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Dr. Fraenkel, do you agree? Ernest Fraenkel:   I'm by nature, a centrist and not a political person, and I also have learned over time that it's very hard to understand other people's motivations. But I do think that one of the paths to it, to solving the problem, is to re-humanize Israel and Israelis in the minds of the people who are currently protesting. And I think we'll have good results if we do that. Manya Brachear Pashman:   I'm curious, we've been talking a lot about Israeli research and innovation. Can you kind of share a piece of Israeli innovation that you've heard about recently, that maybe our audience has not and should know about? Ernest Fraenkel:   I was just at a conference yesterday, and one of the best talks yesterday, this was at a conference on ALS, was given by a researcher from the Weitzman Institute, Eran Hornstein. And he spoke about an entirely new way to analyze what goes on inside cells in the course of disease. He calls it organellealomics, I think. It's kind of a mouthful, but it was completely innovative. No one has anything similar. It allows you to get a wonderful view of all the different processes that are going on in the cell at a very high level, in a way that is experimentally very accessible. And I think it's really going to transform a lot of how we research diseases, and may lead to some rapid advances in some of these tough cases. Or Hen:   Yeah, I can add to that, you know, from the more industry side of things, right? We all have technology in our pockets, in our homes, in our offices, developed in Israel. The most advanced processors by Intel are built on architecture that was developed in Haifa. Apple has engineering centers in Israel. Facebook has engineering centers in Israel, Nvidia. All of us use Israeli technology day in and day out. We either know it or we don't. But there's not a single person in the western world that does not rely on Israeli technology sometime, someplace, some point in his day. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And when you were at that conference, Dr. Fraenkel, or Dr. Hen, consider that, when you pull out your phone and consider the many ways in which we use Israeli technology, does that further validate, does it affirm that what you are doing is the right thing to do, and that this will only benefit humanity at large? Ernest Fraenkel:   In biology, we often do these experiments where we delete a gene, we make it stop working, and we see what happens to the cell or to the animal that we're studying, right? And just do the thought experiment. What would happen to American science if it didn't have these strong collaborations with Israel? And be weaker in consumer electronics, and be weaker in AI, we would be weaker in all the underpinnings of all the technology that we're all walking around with every day.  We'd be weaker in healthcare. Think about the contribution that Israel made to understanding what was going on during the COVID pandemic, right? It's just shocking how much we would lose from this small country not being there.  And absolutely, when we think about that, it just drives us even more to try to get this program to spread across all the best universities in the United States, and hopefully we'll make inroads in Europe as well and really bring Israel back to the forefront in everybody's mind as a place where positive things are happening. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Well, thank you both for joining us so much and for sharing about this program. Really do appreciate it. It's fascinating and refreshing to learn that academics are supporting academics. Ernest Fraenkel:   Thank you very much. Real pleasure to speak with you.

BrownTown invites Rabbi Brant Rosen and Lesley Williams of Tzedek Chicago, a proudly anti-Zionist intentional Jewish congregation based on core values of justice, equity, and solidarity. In this installment, they discuss this current moment in the struggle to Free Palestine with special regards to Brant and Lesley's positionality as Jewish faith leaders and scholars. The gang distinguishes "anti-Zionism" from "anti-Semitism", discusses AIPAC's consistent meddling in US elections, the strategy behind ceasefire resolutions, the work of Palestinian and other scholars writing in solidarity, and more! Ultimately, BrownTown and guests uplift the work in the past 11 months (and beyond) while trying to answer what real solidarity looks like and how to reclaim Judaism from Zionism. #FreePalestine. Originally recorded August 12, 2024, a week before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. GUESTSBrant Rosen is the founding rabbi of the congregation Tzedek Chicago and the co-founder of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council. His writings have appeared in many journals and publications, including Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, The Nation, and Truthout. He is also the author of the popular Jewish social justice blog, Shalom Rav; his curated collection of blog posts and reader comments, Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path to Palestinian Solidarity was published by Just World Books in 2012 (updated in 2017). In 2020, he was named as a Topol Fellow in Conflict and Peace in the Religion, Conflict and Public Life Institute at Harvard Divinity School. Follow Brant on his blog, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.Lesley Williams has organized around anti-racism, Islamophobia and Palestinian rights for Jewish Voice for Peace in Chicago and served on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace Action. As part of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, Lesley participated in two solidarity and resistance West Bank delegations with Palestinian and Israeli peace activists and is on the CJNV strategies and values team. She has spoken on Islamophobia and antisemitism at the American Studies Association conference,  Democratic Socialists of America, the MAS-ICNA conference  the American Muslims for Palestine conference, and at several universities and church groups, and recently appeared on the Friends of Sabeel program: Countering Christian Zionism. She is a consultant and speaker for the PARCEO "Antisemitism From a Framework of Collective Liberation" curriculum. She reviews books on race, Islamophobia and Palestine for Booklist magazine, and her writing has appeared in Truthout, Mondoweiss and AWBC Magazine. Follow Lesley on her blog, Facebook, and Instagram.Follow Jewish Voice for Peace on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter;  Jewish Voice for Peace Action on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Follow Tzedek Chicago on Facebook and Instagram.--Writings by Lesley:To be Black and Jewish after CharlottesvilleThe Anti-Defamation League Kills the Black/Jewish AllianceWe Cannot Fight Anti-Semitism and Anti-Black Racism in IsolationWhite Jews: deal with your privilege and call out Jewish support for white supremacyMessage to my white Jewish friends: I feel no more fear and rage after Pittsburgh than I feel every day as a black person in this countryThis is NOT What America Looks LikeWritings by Brant:Zionism and the Quest for Peace in the Holy LandOn Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for JusticeReclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation. Op-ed in support of Chicago's Ceasefire ResolutionAmid Israel's Brutality in Gaza, It's Time to Commit to Anti-ZionismProtesting Genocide at the DNC in Chicago: Beyond “One Issue”Mentioned Topics & More Info: Ep. 102 - Palestinian Liberation: In This Moment ft. Muhammad SankariHoda Katebi on holding your institutions accountableDrop The ADL CampaignInternational Jewish Collective for Justice in Palestine - Webinar featuring Lesley and BrantPalestine Book AwardsBlack Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of ColorThe Message by Ta -Nehesi CoatesAIPAC be AIPAC'n (Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar)Gazans say "thank you" to American university encampmentsCeasefire Resolution in EvanstonJournalists Ghassan Kanafani and Ali Abunimah of the Electronic IntifadaWe Charge Genocide: 1951 and 2014--CREDITS: Intro soundbite from Brant Rosen at a Jewish Voice for Peace rally during the Democratic National Convention week. Outro song from Rap Street Palestine (Ard Kan3an & ana Palestine) cypher. Audio engineered by Kiera Battles.--Bourbon 'n BrownTownFacebook | Twitter | Instagram | Site | Linktree | PatreonSoapBox Productions and Organizing, 501(c)3Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Site | Linktree | Support

In part two of the conversation, Elizabeth Kleinfeld and Julie Prebel discuss 'activist editing', the method that they and Sohui Lee used to edit the collection Disruptive stories: Amplifying voices from the writing center margins. About the authors Elizabeth Kleinfeld teaches rhetoric and writing theory and practice courses in the ⁠English department⁠, coordinates the new Disability Studies minor, and directs the ⁠Writing Center⁠ at ⁠Metropolitan State University of Denver⁠. She is writing a memoir about being her husband's caregiver and working on a scholarly project studying how the sex lives of disabled people are represented in memoirs. She is also a coach for the ⁠National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity⁠, an end-of-life doula, and a hospice volunteer.   Julie Prebel teaches courses in rhetorical theory, critical theory, and American cultural studies, and directs the ⁠Writing Center⁠ at ⁠Occidental College⁠. Along with ongoing research in rhet-comp, she is currently working on a manuscript focused on the racialization of sentiment in (seemingly) feminist representations of rights discourse in literature and popular media. She presents her work regularly at national conferences such as IWCA, CCCCs, and the American Studies Association.

Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Julie Prebel and Sohui Lee are the editors of the new book, Disruptive stories: Amplifying voices from the writing center margins, a collection of essays on challenging writing center narratives. In this episode, Professors Kleinfeld and Prebel explain what the two of them have learned and started applying from the book to question their own assumptions. Mentioned in the episode: Patricia Dunn's "⁠Chapter 4: Revising & Editing Myths, Metaphors, and Multisensory Strategies⁠" in ⁠Talking, Sketching, Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing⁠. Karen Moroski-Rigney's "⁠Chapter 9: Crippling Marginality: Disability and Directing a Writing Center⁠" in ⁠Disruptive Stories: Amplifying Voices from the Writing Center Margins.⁠ Episode 19: "Lucie Moussu on Poorly Designed Research Projects" Episode 26 "Decolonization and the Writing Center" with Nancy Henaku About the guests: Elizabeth Kleinfeld teaches rhetoric and writing theory and practice courses in the English department, coordinates the new Disability Studies minor, and directs the Writing Center at Metropolitan State University of Denver. She is writing a memoir about being her husband's caregiver and working on a scholarly project studying how the sex lives of disabled people are represented in memoirs. She is also a coach for the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, an end-of-life doula, and a hospice volunteer.   Julie Prebel teaches courses in rhetorical theory, critical theory, and American cultural studies, and directs the Writing Center at Occidental College. Along with ongoing research in rhet-comp, she is currently working on a manuscript focused on the racialization of sentiment in (seemingly) feminist representations of rights discourse in literature and popular media. She presents her work regularly at national conferences such as IWCA, CCCCs, and the American Studies Association.

In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE's incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison's A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett's films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives. Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association. She is also the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022. Callie Smith, PhD. is a museum educator and poet based in Louisiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE's incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison's A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett's films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives. Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association. She is also the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022. Callie Smith, PhD. is a museum educator and poet based in Louisiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE's incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison's A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett's films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives. Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association. She is also the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022. Callie Smith, PhD. is a museum educator and poet based in Louisiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE's incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison's A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett's films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives. Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association. She is also the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022. Callie Smith, PhD. is a museum educator and poet based in Louisiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE's incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison's A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett's films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives. Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association. She is also the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022. Callie Smith, PhD. is a museum educator and poet based in Louisiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE's incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison's A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett's films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives. Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association. She is also the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022. Callie Smith, PhD. is a museum educator and poet based in Louisiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE's incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison's A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett's films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives. Sharon P. Holland (she/her) is the President of the American Studies Association. She is also the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as Chair of the Department from July 2020- July 2022. Callie Smith, PhD. is a museum educator and poet based in Louisiana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/animal-studies

In this episode of All That's Jazz, we talk with Shana L. Redmond, professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race at Columbia University. She is past president of the American Studies Association and a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. Dr. Redmond is the album notes author for the critically acclaimed Verve Record's new release titled ‘Nina Simone: You've Got To Learn.'   Here's the backstory: On July 2, 1966, the Newport Jazz Festival witnessed a legendary six-song set by Nina Simone that has remained etched in the memory of music aficionados for over half a century. Now, this previously unknown and unreleased recording of the unforgettable concert is available for the world to hear.  Our conversation is centered on the backstory of Nina Simone's Newport set, but it is also wide-ranging discussion of the woman, songstress, and ardent activist who spoke truth to power for her generation.   We learned a lot. We know you will, too. 

Amy is joined by Dr. Maile Arvin to discuss her book, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai'i and Oceania and the intersections between settler colonialism and patriarchy on the Hawai'ian islands.Dr. Maile Arvin is an associate professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is a Native Hawaiian feminist scholar who works on issues of race, gender, science and colonialism in Hawai‘i and the broader Pacific. At the University of Utah, she is part of the leadership of the Pacific Islands Studies Initiative, which was awarded a Mellon Foundation grant to support ongoing efforts to develop Pacific Islands Studies curriculum, programming and student recruitment and support.Arvin's first book, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaiʻi and Oceania, was published with Duke University Press in 2019. In that book, she analyzes the nineteenth and early twentieth century history of social scientists declaring Polynesians “almost white.” The book argues that such scientific studies contributed to a settler colonial logic of possession through whiteness. In this logic, Indigenous Polynesians (the people) and Polynesia (the place) became the natural possessions of white settlers, since they reasoned that Europeans and Polynesians shared an ancient ancestry. The book also examines how Polynesians have long challenged this logic in ways that regenerate Indigenous ways of relating to each other. Her work has also been published in the journals Meridians, American Quarterly, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, The Scholar & Feminist, and Feminist Formations, as well as on the nonprofit independent news site Truthout.From 2015-17, Arvin was an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, in Ethnic Studies. She earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation won the American Studies Association's Ralph Henry Gabriel prize. She is also a former University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow, Charles Eastman Fellow in Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, and Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow.

In November 20, 2015, a resolution presented to the members of the American Anthropological Association for a boycott of Israeli institutions narrowly missed adoption (2,384 in favor and 2,423 opposed; 49.6% - 50.4%). Responding to the new petition members submitted on March 3, the American Anthropological Association has scheduled a vote on the boycott of Israeli academic institutions from June 15-July 14. In this episode of Speaking Out of Place we talk with two of the main scholar-activists involved in the campaign, who tell us why the American Anthropological Association must follow other academic organizations such as the American Studies Association in answering the call from Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli institutions.Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today. Sami Hermez is director of the Liberal Arts Program and Associate Professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar.  His forthcoming book will be released in February 2024 with Stanford University Press titled, My Brother, My Land: A Story From Palestine, which is a creative nonfiction that chronicles the life of a Palestinian family living through ongoing Israeli occupation and dispossession. His first book published with Penn Press, War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (2017), focused on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.  

On today's episode of Speaking Out of Place, we talk with Professor J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Professor Sunaina Maira, two people involved in the 2013 effort to get the American Studies Association in support for the academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions, called for by Palestinian civil society groups in 2004. Both Kauanui and Maira were named defendants in a lawsuit brought by pro-Israel members of the ASA. Recently, the court has exonerated the defendants of all charges. We hear about the lawsuit, and the organizing by scholars in the ASA and in the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) that led to the historic boycott resolution, the first by a major US academic association. We spend a great deal of the program talking about the significance of the struggle in solidarity with Palestinian academics and students, and the meaning of this legal victory.J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is Professor of American Studies and affiliate faculty in Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses in critical Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, critical race studies, and anarchist studies. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008); Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018); and editor of Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018). Kauanui is one of the six co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. And she is the recipient of the Western History Association's 2022 American Indian History Lifetime Achievement Award. Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis and a founding organizer of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI). She does research in Arab and South Asian American studies and is the author of several books related to the Palestine justice movement such as The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror and Boycott!: The Academy and Justice for Palestine. Her book based on ethnographic research in Palestine is Jil [Generation] Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement. Maira launched a section on West Asian American Studies in the Association for Asian American Studies has been faculty advisor of SJP and organizer with Faculty for Justice in Palestine.             

Episode 170 Notes and Links to Richard T. Rodriguez's Work       On Episode 170 of The Chills at Will Podcast, Pete welcomes  Richard T. Rodriguez, and the two discuss, among other things, Richard's childhood full of voracious reading and master wordsmiths in his family, books and media and music that spoke to him and speaks to him, evolving ideas of Chicanismo, masters of Chicanx literature and music and cultural studies, and the seven songs/chapters that constitute his stellar book and build upon ideas of “touch” and a “kiss across the ocean.”      Richard T. Rodríguez is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and English at the University of California, Riverside. He specializes in Latina/o/x literary and cultural studies, film and visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies, and holds additional interests in transnational cultural studies, popular music studies, and comparative ethnic studies. The author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 2009), which won the 2011 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award, and A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and U.S. Latinidad (Duke University Press, 2022), he is currently completing Undocumented Desires: Fantasies of Latino Male Sexuality. The 2019 recipient of the Richard A. Yarborough Mentoring Award, granted by the Minority Scholars' Committee of the American Studies Association, he is the co-principal investigator on a University of California MRPI grant titled "The Global Latinidades Project: Globalizing Latinx Studies for the Next Millennium." His show, "Dr. Ricky on the Radio," can be heard weekly on KUCR.  Buy A Kiss Across the Ocean:  Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and U.S. Latinidad   Richard T. Rodriguez's University of California at Riverside Page   Razorcake Review and Summary of A Kiss Across the Ocean     At about 8:00, Richard talks about growing up and his relationship with language and the written word, including the impacts from his parents, who were “wordsmiths” and bilingual    At about 9:45, Richard shouts out Phuc Tran's Sigh, Gone in describing his own reading and childhood experiences   At about 10:45, Richard discusses his college years at Cal Berkeley, and the huge impact June Jordan and Yusef  Komunyaaka had on him   At about 13:00, Richard responds to Pete's question about ideas of representation in what Richard read growing up-he points out Victor Villaseñor and Alfred Arteaga, among others   At about 14:40, Pete and Richard discuss the power of Villarreal's Pocho   At about 16:20, Pete asks Richard about evolving ideas/definitions for “Chicano”   At about 18:35, Richard responds to Pete asking about any “ ‘Eureka' moments” and how James Clifford in grad school helped him with a “reassessment of language”   At about 20:25, Richard talks about who and what he's teaching as a college professor, including work by Alex Espinoza, Phuc Tran, and James Spooner    At about 24:05, Pete lays out some of the power of the beginning of the book and asks Richard about how he “saw the world anew” through Boy George and other musicians; he mentions how the music informed his reading and art intake   At about 27:10, Richard describes what spoke to him about Johnny Rotten's quote about hanging out with Chicanos in SoCal   At about 28:30, Francesca Royster and Carl Stanley and others are referenced as Richard describes what was going on in the world and in his life as impetus for writing the book   At about 30:45, the two discuss teenage years and why they are such “prime” years for music celebration and exploration    At about 33:20, Melissa Mora Hidalgo, with Mozlandia, and Gustavo Arellano are shouted out as models for Richard's work   At about 35:50, Richard explains “post-punk” and “new-wave” and how he wanted to “reclaim ‘post-punk' ”   At about 38:15, Pete lays out the structure of the book, compliments its melding of academic and poetic writing, and asks about “goth”-its definition(s) and connections to the focus of Chapter One-Siouxsie and the Banshees   At about 41:40, Richard comments on Kid Congo Powers and his important connections to SoCal Chicano culture and to the Cramps/Siouxsie   At about 43:00, Pete asks Richard to explain his specific use of “touch” in the book   At about 45:20, Richard describes how Latinx writers have been touched by Siouxsie and the Banshees, often referencing the band in their work   At about 46:20, Richard describes his meeting with/touch by Siouxsie   At about 46:45, Richard describes Adam Ant and his connection to Chapter Two's “Prince Charming,” with both being “two-sided”   At about 49:40, Chapter Three, Bauhaus, and ideas and possibilities of “goth” as racially diverse; the two discuss Myriam Gurba's work on the general topic and Love and Rockets as a mutual   At about 54:15, Chapter Four is discussed with “Latina queer sensibilities” as a main focus and Marc Almond's connections to John Rechy's work   At about 59:10, The two talk about “othering” and exoticization that comes from    At about 1:01:00, Ideas of “secondhand” and history and zoot suits and masculinity are discussed, topics from the book's Chapter Five   At about 1:04:45, Richard examines conversations around cultural appropriation and Chris Sullivan's work with the zoot suit and “Latin” music   At about 1:07:05, The two talk about Chapter Six and Pete compliments Richard's melding of personal and cultural; the chapter deals with “Mexican Americanos” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, in addition to lead singer Holly Johnson's solo work   At about 1:12:30, Richard gives background on The Pet Shop Boys and their work with hip hop and freestyle music and the connections between freestyle music and Latinx artists   At about 1:15:50, Pete uses an example of “authenticity” that Richard analyzes so skillfully as an example of ignorance   At about 1:16:50, Richard speaks to the book's conclusion and the greatness possible through tribute bands in “translating” and “regenerating” music   At about 1:20:10, Richard calls attention to Orange County's Ghost Town   At about 1:21:45, Richard talks about future projects   At about 1:22:50, Tainted Love shoutout!   At about 1:23:45, Richard recommends LibroMobile, City Lights Bookstore, and other places to buy his book and gives his social media info      You can now subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and leave me a five-star review. You can also ask for the podcast by name using Alexa, and find the pod on Stitcher, Spotify, and on Amazon Music. Follow me on IG, where I'm @chillsatwillpodcast, or on Twitter, where I'm @chillsatwillpo1. You can watch other episodes on YouTube-watch and subscribe to The Chills at Will Podcast Channel. Please subscribe to both my YouTube Channel and my podcast while you're checking out this episode.    Sign up now for The Chills at Will Podcast Patreon: it can be found at patreon.com/chillsatwillpodcastpeterriehl     Check out the page that describes the benefits of a Patreon membership, including cool swag and bonus episodes. Thanks in advance for supporting my one-man show, my DIY podcast and my extensive reading, research, editing, and promoting to keep this independent podcast pumping out high-quality content!    NEW MERCH! You can browse and buy here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ChillsatWillPodcast    This is a passion project of mine, a DIY operation, and I'd love for your help in promoting what I'm convinced is a unique and spirited look at an often-ignored art form.    The intro song for The Chills at Will Podcast is “Wind Down” (Instrumental Version), and the other song played on this episode was “Hoops” (Instrumental)” by Matt Weidauer, and both songs are used through ArchesAudio.com.   Please tune in for Episode 171 with Danielle Prescod. Danielle is an author, content creator, and journalist. Danielle Prescod is a fifteen-year veteran of the beauty and fashion industry and a graduate of NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. A lifelong fashion obsessive, she was most recently the style director of BET.com. Her book, Token Black Girl, is part memoir, part narrative nonfiction and an exploration of the ways that modern media can influence one's self-esteem.    The episode will air on March 21.

In this episode Dylan Rodríguez returns to the podcast.  Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. His lifework focuses on liberationist, anticolonial, and abolitionist confrontations with the antiblack, colonial, and white supremacist violences that permeate the ongoing Civilization project. He was elected to serve as President of the American Studies Association in 2020-2021, and in 2020 was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars. Since 2021, he has served as Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society. Since the late-1990s, Dylan has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and the UCR Department of Black Study, among others. He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. In January of 2021 we published an episode with Rodríguez on his most recent book White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. In that conversation along with many of the other themes and topics from that book, Rodriguez began to frame out some thoughts with us on counterinsurgency. This past fall on Black Agenda Report, Dylan published an interview with Roberto Sirvent entitled "Insurgency and Counterinsurgency."  In this episode we pick up that conversation, talking about counterinsurgency as a totality, as a curriculum, and as epistemic. We get into various elements of what that means to Rodriguez, and about the composition of the counterinsurgent bloc. We also talk about how we recognize it, resist it and embrace beautiful revolutionary wildness. For this month our book for incarcerated readers is Walter Rodney's Decolonial Marxism. A big thank you to Verso Books for donating the copies. We do need to raise some money for shipping for those and there's a link in the show notes where you can pitch in to that effort over at Massive Bookshop. We also have a big goal for this month, we're hoping to add 40 patrons for the show. Despite meeting our goal in February, we actually had more non-renewals than new patrons for the month. So we are hoping we can make up for that in March. Our show is totally supported by listeners like you, we don't sell ads and we don't run on any grants. So if you appreciate our work and get something out of it, then become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism Links:  More of Dylan's books, edited collections, and writings (in collections) can be found at Massive Bookshop. Dylan Rodríguez can be reached on Twitter (@dylanrodriguez), Instagram (dylanrodriguez73), and Facebook.  

0:33 — Jonel Edwards, is Co-Executive Director at Dream Defenders. 0:40 — Shana L Redmond, Professor of English and Comparative Literature At Columbia, in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race; also president of the American Studies Association. She is the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. The post Florida's attack on AP African American Studies appeared first on KPFA.

Contemporary poetry finally makes its debut on Close Readings! Sarah Dowling joins the podcast to discuss a thrilling and powerful new poem by Liz Howard, "True Value."Sarah is the author of three poetry collections: Security Posture, Down, and Entering Sappho, which was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Her first scholarly book, Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, received an honorable mention for the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association. She's also working on another scholarly book, Figure & Ground. Sarah teaches in Victoria College and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. You can follow Sarah on Twitter here.Liz Howard is currently the Shaftesbury Writer in Residence at Victoria College. She is the author of two poetry collections: Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, which won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, which contains "True Value," and which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize in 2022. The recording of Howard reading "True Value" (apologies for its low volume in the episode!) can be found here. Follow Liz on Twitter here.As always, if you like what you hear, please remember to follow, rate, and review the podcast. And subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date on our plans.

In this solo episode, I chat all about how my fall semester turned out, from taking classes to teaching for the first time to quitting my barista job. I also discuss my experience presenting at the American Studies Association conference and at the big #musiccon (AMS/SEM/SMT 2022) in New Orleans. Finally, I reflect on achieving some of my goals of the past year and set a new yearly theme for 2023. Singing Like Germans by Kira Thurman Carefree Black Girls by Zeba Blay Black Opera by Naomi Andre A Taste For Brown Sugar by Mireille Miller-Young CGP Grey's video on yearly themes Get in touch with me at: hermusicacademia@gmail.com

Learn about non-fiction and mystery fiction in today's episode with established author Cecelia Tichi. Don't miss our chat about how to relate your writing to your target market and some snippets from her best-selling series, the “Val and Roddy DeVere Gilded Series.”Key Takeaways from This EpisodeThe correlation between non-fiction and mystery fictionChallenges to writing mystery fiction books and seriesHow to efficiently incorporate history in your fiction bookThe impact of literary theory in writing and readingWhy authors need to understand the real meaning of entertainmentResources Mentioned in This EpisodeThe Call of the Wild by Jack London | Paperback and KindleThe Devil in the White City by Erik Larson | Paperback and KindleHow to Write a Book That Sells You by Robin Colucci | Paperback and KindleOne Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss | Paperback and KindleAbout Cecelia TichiA native of Steel City, Pittsburgh, Cecelia Tichi is an award-winning author and faculty member at Vanderbilt University, where she is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies emerita. Her books span American literature and culture from colonial days to modern times, more recently focused on the 1870-1914 Gilded Age that prompted her book on Jack London and another on seven activists in that tumultuous era. Tichi's What Would Mrs. Astor Do? A Complete Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age (2018) segues to her new mystery series, the “Val and Roddy DeVere Gilded Series,” starting with A Gilded Death, together with Murder, Murder, Murder in Gilded Central Park, and A Fatal Gilded High Note—and this fall, A Deadly Gilded Free Fall. Cecelia is at work on a fifth historical mystery in the series, “A Gilded Drowning Pool.” She enjoys membership and posting in Facebook's The Gilded Age Society. Cecelia's books have been reviewed in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Publisher's Weekly, and elsewhere.Tichi is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University, a past president of the American Studies Association, and the Jay B. Hubbell Medal winner for lifetime achievement in American literature. She regularly talks at the American Studies Association annual meetings, colleges and universities, and book fairs. She has been interviewed on radio and television and has spoken to book clubs, church, and synagogue groups and audiences of well over one thousand persons. Listed in Who's Who, she held the honorific Chair of Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in 2005-07 and, in 2012, was named the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library (San Marino, California).Website: Cecelia TichiCecelia's Books: Author Cecelia Tichi Gilded Age BooksLove the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here's How » Join The Author's Corner Community today: Website: Robin ColucciLinkedIn: R Colucci, LLCFacebook: Robin ColucciTwitter: @Robin_ColucciRobin Colucci's Book: How to Write a Book That Sells You: Increase Your Credibility, Income, and Impact

Ian Power is a composer and performer in Baltimore, USA. Power's music is inscrutable, warm, insistent, and performer-driven, and has been performed by ensembles and soloists in the US, UK, Germany, Denmark, Israel, and New Zealand.He released two albums in 2020: Diligence on Edition Wandelweiser Records, featuring long solo works; and Maintenance Hums on Carrier Records, featuring chamber works. Dusted describes him as “a force guiding the rapid-fire development of instrumental syntax and its expressive components.”Power is Assistant Professor and Director of Arts Production & Management at the University of Baltimore, where he won the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2018. His writing on rhetoric in new music and reviews of CDs and performances are published in TEMPO, and he has lectured at the American Musicological Society, American Studies Association, and universities in the US, UK, and Turkey.Power studied primarily with Chaya Czernowin, as well as with Steven Takasugi, John Luther Adams, Antoine Beuger, Anthony Burr, Bob Morris, and Dana Wilson. He has degrees from Harvard University, UC San Diego, and Ithaca College. The Truth In This ArtThe Truth In This Art is a podcast interview series supporting vibrancy and development of Baltimore & beyond's arts and culture. Mentioned in this episode:Ian Power To find more amazing stories from the artist and entrepreneurial scenes in & around Baltimore, check out my episode directory. Stay in TouchNewsletter sign-upSupport my podcastShareable link to episode ★ Support this podcast ★

In conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika Ruth Wilson Gilmore is largely credited with creating carceral geography, the study of how the interplay between space, institutions, and political economies shape modern incarceration. The author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and several often-anthologized essays, she is the co-founder of several social justice organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance. She is a professor of earth and environmental sciences and American studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. Gilmore's many honors include the Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship from the American Studies Association and the Association of American Geographers' Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research. A collection of Gilmore's work from the last three decades, Abolition Geography offers scholars, activists, and all interested people a new way of reacting to the incarceration crisis. (recorded 9/22/2022)

In this episode we interview Dr. Mary Helen Washington. Mary Helen Washington is an accomplished African-American literary scholar and the editor and author of many books including Midnight Birds and Black-eyed Susans: Stories by and about Black Women, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860-1960, Memories of Kin, and the book we focus on in this discussion on The Other Blacklist: The African-American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. Mary Helen Washington is also a  Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She previously served as the president of the American Studies Association. Washington worked for many years developing Black Studies programs, including in Detroit where she has stated she was “part of the ground troops helping in the activities of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), an”I offshoot of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.” In this conversation we specifically focus on the work of Gwendolyn Brooks prior to her joining the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960's, within the Black cultural and literary left that Washington analyzes in The Other Blacklist.  Mary Helen Washington situates Brooks within this Black cultural milieu as a member of the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood and as someone who was connected and had relationships to Black communists, and other communists and progressives as well as to cultural institutions and magazines of the Popular Front. Washington highlights Brooks' attentiveness to working class concerns and critiques of racism both interpersonally and institutionally in her writing as far back as the 1940's. She also highlights Brooks' work in dialogue with critiques reflected by other communist and progressive Black women of her era, including Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry and Alice Childress. In doing so, Washington argues that Brooks' work offers early blueprints for Black Left Feminism operating within her poetry, essays and her novel Maud Martha. The discussion is also firmly attentive to the racial politics and the anticommunism of the 1950's, in which racially radical or progressive analyses were automatically cause for suspicion, surveillance, and potentially repression.  Additionally, Mary Helen Washington talks about other important figures from her book The Other Blacklist including other communist and leftwing Black figures of the 1950's including visual artist Charles White, and authors Lloyd Brown, Alice Childress, and Frank London Brown. We want to thank all of the patrons who support our show. We are funded solely by our listeners and patrons. You can become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month or 10.80 per year at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism.  

Join Donna Murch and Barbara Ransby for a conversation about state violence, racial capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives. This is a book launch event for Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives by Donna Murch, available at Haymarketbooks.org. Drawing its title from one of America's foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration. “Donna Murch is one of the sharpest, most incisive, and elegant writers on racism, radicalism, and struggle today. In this collection of essays assessing the current contours of the contemporary movement against racism in the United States, Murch combines a historian's rigor with a cultural critic's insights and the passionate expression of someone deeply engaged with the politics, debates, and key questions confronting activists and organizers today. This is a smart and sophisticated book that should be read and studied by everyone in search of answers to the profound crises that continue to confront this country.”—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation Get Assata Taught Me at Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1650-assata-taught-me ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Donna Murch is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and is the president of the New Brunswick chapter of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT. She is the author of Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives, and Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Barbara Ransby is a widely acclaimed historian of the Black Freedom Movement, award-winning author, and longtime activist. She is the John D. MacArthur Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Black Studies, Gender and Women's Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also directs the Social Justice Initiative, which promotes connections between academics and community organizers working on social justice. A founding member of Scholars for Social Justice, she works closely with activists in the Movement for Black Lives and The Rising Majority. She is an elected fellow in the Society of American Historians, as well as a recipient of the Angela Y. Davis Prize for public scholarship from the American Studies Association. Ransby is the author of multiple books, including the award-winning Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/iInE0_B3Rqk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Dr. Barbara Ransby and Dr. Lynette Jackson for a conversation celebrating the release of Ransby's new memoir, Eslanda. Eslanda "Essie" Cardozo Goode Robeson lived a colorful and amazing life. Her career and commitments took her many places: colonial Africa in 1936, the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, the founding meeting of the United Nations, Nazi-occupied Berlin, Stalin's Russia, and China two months after Mao's revolution. She was a woman of unusual accomplishment—an anthropologist, a prolific journalist, a tireless advocate of women's rights, an outspoken anti-colonial and antiracist activist, and an internationally sought-after speaker. Yet historians for the most part have confined Essie to the role of Mrs. Paul Robeson, a wife hidden in the large shadow cast by her famous husband. In this masterful book, biographer Dr. Barbara Ransby refocuses attention on Essie, one of the most important and fascinating Black women of the twentieth century. Join us for a limited-capacity in-person book launch event and discussion with Dr. Barbara Ransby and Dr. Lynette Jackson on the extraordinary life of Eslanda Robeson and the implications of her work on freedom struggles today. Masks and proof of vaccination are required for those attending in person. For those attending in-person doors will open at 6 PM. The event will also be livestreamed for those unable to attend in-person. Closed captioning will be available for the livestream. Order your copy of Eslanda here. --------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Dr. Barbara Ransby is a widely acclaimed historian of the Black Freedom Movement, award-winning author, and longtime activist. She is the John D. MacArthur Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Black Studies, Gender and Women's Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also directs the Social Justice Initiative, which promotes connections between academics and community organizers working on social justice. A founding member of Scholars for Social Justice, she works closely with activists in the Movement for Black Lives and The Rising Majority. She is an elected fellow in the Society of American Historians, as well as a recipient of the Angela Y. Davis Prize for public scholarship from the American Studies Association. Ransby is the author of multiple books, including the award-winning Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. Dr. Lynette Jackson is an associate professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Black Studies at UIC. She received her PhD in African History from Columbia University in 1997. Dr. Jackson is the author of Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe and numerous other articles and book chapters on topics relating to women, the state and medical and public health discourses in colonial and postcolonial Africa, particularly having to do with the regulation of African women's sexuality. Dr. Jackson's current research explores the history of child refugee diasporas from Southern Sudan, particularly focusing on two streams of unaccompanied children: The Lost Boys and Girls and the Cuban 600. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/s4xq5KpOZZI Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

With 2.1 million incarcerated people, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. But America's prison system is part of a larger social apparatus that predominantly targets, criminalizes, and polices poor people and people of color. As the monstrous reach of our carceral system extends further into our daily lives, so too have forms of resistance grown in communities around the country and beyond. At this moment in history, what creative possibilities exist for revolting against these institutionalized forms of capture, policing, and criminalization?In 2021, TRNN Executive Producer and host of Rattling the Bars Eddie Conway joined a blockbuster panel of scholars and activists for the American Studies Association (ASA) to discuss these very questions. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, with permission from the ASA and the panel participants, we are publishing the video recording of this panel, which is entitled “Revolt Against the Carceral World” and is hosted by Professor Dylan Rodríguez.Dylan Rodríguez (host) is Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars in 2020 and is President of the American Studies Association (2020-2021). Rodríguez is a founding member of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association and Critical Resistance, a national carceral abolitionist organization, and he is the author of three books.See the transcript and full episode details: https://therealnews.com/revolt-against-the-carceral-worldPre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron GranadinoHelp us continue producing Rattling the Bars by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-rtbSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-pod-rtbGet Rattling the Bars updates: https://therealnews.com/up-pod-rtbLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnews

With 2.1 million incarcerated people, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. But America's prison system is part of a larger social apparatus that predominantly targets, criminalizes, and polices poor people and people of color. As the monstrous reach of our carceral system extends further into our daily lives, so too have forms of resistance grown in communities around the country and beyond. At this moment in history, what creative possibilities exist for revolting against these institutionalized forms of capture, policing, and criminalization?In 2021, TRNN Executive Producer and host of Rattling the Bars Eddie Conway joined a blockbuster panel of scholars and activists for the American Studies Association (ASA) to discuss these very questions. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, with permission from the ASA and the panel participants, we are publishing the video recording of this panel, which is entitled “Revolt Against the Carceral World” and is hosted by Professor Dylan Rodríguez.Dylan Rodríguez (host) is Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars in 2020 and is President of the American Studies Association (2020-2021). Rodríguez is a founding member of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association and Critical Resistance, a national carceral abolitionist organization, and he is the author of three books.See the transcript and full episode details: https://therealnews.com/revolt-against-the-carceral-worldPre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron GranadinoHelp us continue producing Rattling the Bars by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-rtbSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-pod-rtbGet Rattling the Bars updates: https://therealnews.com/up-pod-rtbLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnews

Songs for Justice: A Series Exploring Music in Social Justice Movements 2022 Annual MLK Birthday Celebration in partnership with Community Music Center of Houston In 2022, the Rothko Chapel presents Songs for Justice, a series of concerts and conversations exploring the role that music plays to further social justice movements, addressing today's inequities and injustices. Coinciding with the Chapel's annual observance of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday on January 15, the series opened with a performance of and discussion about music central to the US Civil Rights Movement. The Community Music Center of Houston Scott Joplin Chamber Orchestra conducted by Dr. Anne Lundy shared a selection of music central to Dr. King's transformative leadership and Black Americans' historic and contemporary struggles for equity. Dr. Shana Redmond, scholar of music, race and politics, discussed the broader history surrounding the relationship between music and activism in the U.S., the importance of music in Rev. King's life, and the strategic use of music within the Civil Rights Movement. Buy Shana Redmond's book Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. Listen to Anthem: The Mixtape, compiled by Shana Redmond & The Dreadstar Movement. The Rothko Chapel started the annual MLK Birthday Celebration in 1979 to connect the contemporary implications of Dr. King's legacy to the ongoing struggle for civil and human rights, captured by artist Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk. This sculpture, located on the plaza adjacent to the Chapel, is dedicated to Dr. King. Learn more about upcoming programs in the Songs for Justice series. About the presenters Community Music Center of Houston (CMCH), formerly the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, was founded in 1979. In 1983 CMCH formed the Scott Joplin Chamber Orchestra (SJCO), a 40 member predominantly Black community orchestra in response to the lack of opportunity for Black classically trained musicians in the world of symphony orchestras. Today SJCO is the nation's second oldest predominantly Black chamber orchestra actively performing. Dr. Anne Lundy, CMCH Music Director, Conductor, Violinist, Educator and Ethno-musicologist, began her musical studies on the violin. She received a Bachelor of Music Education in 1977 from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Master of Music in Conducting from the University of Houston in 1979. Dr. Lundy received her Doctor of Musical Arts from University of Houston's Moores School of Music in 2015. She has lectured extensively throughout the United States. In addition, Dr. Lundy has published articles on finding and performing music written by African American composers. In 1989, she is the first African American woman to conduct the Houston Symphony at Miller Outdoor Theater in Houston, TX. She founded and currently conducts the CMCH Scott Joplin Chamber Orchestra, the William Grant Still String Quartet, and teaches violin and viola. Shana L. Redmond, Ph.D. (she|her) is a scholar and author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (NYU, 2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke, 2020), which received a 2021 American Book Award. She has written widely for public audiences, including the critical liner essay for the vinyl soundtrack release of Jordan Peele's film, Us (Waxwork Records, 2019). She is President-Elect of the American Studies Association and Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity & Race at Columbia University.

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), [Insert link] has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It's easy to see why. At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right. For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method. In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway's method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes' technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021). This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It's easy to see why. At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right. For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method. In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway's method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes' technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021). This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), [Insert link] has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It's easy to see why. At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right. For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method. In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway's method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes' technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021). This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), [Insert link] has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It's easy to see why. At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right. For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method. In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway's method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes' technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021). This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), [Insert link] has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It's easy to see why. At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right. For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method. In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway's method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes' technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021). This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), [Insert link] has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It's easy to see why. At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right. For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method. In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway's method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes' technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021). This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (NYU Press, 2017), by Professor Britt Rusert (UMass-Amherst), [Insert link] has already earned accolades from the American Studies Association and the MLA following its publication in 2017. Now book is also getting traction in the fields of STS, history of science, and history of medicine. It's easy to see why. At the level of documentation, the book chronicles the empirical work, rhetorical strategies, and material worlds of Black and African American scientists (avant la lettre) during the US antebellum period. The book connects a lineage of Black naturalists, ethnologist, and physicians who were creating and circulating empirical evidence of the moral and political equality of Black Americans relative to White people to argue against the institution of slavery, racist discrimination and violent dispossession. And they were pursuing their own empirical research questions—not only working in response to White racist science—about the pasts and potential emancipatory futures of Black Americans. The documentary work of the book is indispensable it its own right. For scholars in STS and in history of science and medicine the book is important for anyone interested in speculative methods and speculative histories; anyone who takes seriously theories of history and wants to—or already is—practicing transformative justice through their own narrative craft. The book models one way of creating an anticolonial, antiracist “counter-archive” through an intentionally magpie accrual of material culture and through the rigorous use of imagination as interpretive method. In the interview we also talk about Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation, Donna Haraway's method of critical speculation, and Marissa Fuentes' technique of “reading with the archive bias” – as well as why HBCUs are the places where transformative fugitive science is happening in the present day. Rusert also published with Whitney Battle-Baptiste W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America – another important book for STS scholars and historians of science and medicine, enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Review of Books (Aug 2021). This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and STS scholars at Vanderbilt University: Kaelee Belleto, Hannah Crook, Aaron Hunt, Will Krause, Dionne Lucas, Esther Park, Grace Smith, McKenzie Yates, and Jaehyeong Yu. Please email Laura Stark with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Professor Alan C. Braddock and Dr. Lindsay Garcia discuss art, pedagogy, and environmental justice. How can art history join the posthumanist conversation? How can works of art attune us to our relationships across the lines of species? Note: This conversation was recorded in autumn 2020. Alan Braddock is the Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies at the College of William & Mary. His teaching and research explores the history of American and global art, ecology, environmental justice, and animal studies. He has authored and edited numerous books, including the landmark 2009 anthology A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, which he co-edited with Christoph Irmscher, and the catalogue accompanying the 2018 travelling exhibition Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment, which he co-curated with Karl Kusserow. Most recently, he was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute, where he was developing a new book entitled Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History, under contract from Yale University Press. Lindsay Garcia is an artist and interdisciplinary scholar whose work engages with visual studies, social and racial justice, queer praxis, and the environmental humanities. She received her PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary, and she is a Visiting Instructor in Literature and Media Studies at the Ringling College of Art and Design. Her work has been published in journals including Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and she is preparing chapters for several upcoming publications. She is the Junior Liaison to the Environment & Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association and is organizing a panel on the Architectures of Exclusion and Spaces of Racial and Queer Resistance for their annual conference, which was just deferred until next November in Puerto Rico. Her video and performance art has been included in numerous exhibitions, and she is a co-founder of the social practice projects Queer Apocalypse Solutions and Feminist Pest Control.

Join Sam Futrell as she interviews professors Dr. Mark Herlihy and Dr. Elizabeth Matelski about the historical implications of the Salem Witch Trials. Together, we explore the social, cultural, and political causes of the Salem Witch Trials (SWT), discuss the major players in the SWT and seventeenth-century Puritanism. We'll also talk about the significant effects of the SWT, including how the SWT serves as an archetype for mob mentality and the oppression of marginalized groups in both literature and history. And of course, we'll share ideas/strategies for how educators can use/teach the Salem Witch Trials in their classrooms Dr. Mark Herlihy started at Endicott in 2001 as an Assistant Professor of History. He teaches "Salem Witch Trials," "Boston History," "Public History," and "American Suburbia," among other courses. He has presented papers at meetings of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and at the Massachusetts Historical Society's Boston Immigration and Urban History Seminar. He is completing a book on the history of Revere Beach. Dr. Herlihy has been very active in the New England Historical Association and served a term as President of the organization. A native of Winchester, Massachusetts, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English at Tufts University and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in American Civilization at Brown University. Dr. Matelski is a New England transplant from the upper Midwest. Her teaching interests include American multiculturalism, popular culture, and incorporating digital technologies into the history classroom. In addition to teaching American history, she also created the Public History concentration for Endicott`s history majors. She is currently editing a book chapter on global beauty culture and conducting research for a book on Robin Mingo, an enslaved Black man after whom Mingo Beach is named. Resources: UVA: http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/home.html Margo Burns: http://www.17thc.us/ Peabody Essex Museum: https://www.pem.org/the-salem-witch-trials-1692-past NEH Summer Seminars: https://www.neh.gov/divisions/education/summer-programs

In this episode, Nathan draws from a recent discussion at the American Studies Association to lay out his conception of the coercive conditions that frame participation and resistance in college sport. Derek and Johanna respond with their own meditations on the future of college sport and the challenges that continue to confront campus athletic workers. Check out our recent Guardian piece on why NIL doesn't address the fundamentally exploitative plantation dynamics of college sport.   For a transcription of this episode, please click here. (Updated semi-regularly Credit @punkademic) Research Assistance for The End of Sport provided by Abigail Bomba. __________________________________________________________________________ If you are interested, you can support the show via our Patreon! As always, please like, share, and rate us on your favorite podcast app, and give follow us on Twitter or Instagram. www.TheEndofSport.com

Garland Nixon, co-host of The Critical Hour on Radio Sputnik and host of News Views with Garland Nixon on WPFW, talks to us about the situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban keeps gaining ground as the U.S. withdraws from the country, and reports of increasing violence against the civilian population after failed peace talks between the Taliban and the government. We also talk about Iran officially inaugurating its new president, Ebrahim Raisi, and whether we will see a change in Iran/U.S. relations.Christine Hong, chair of critical race & ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz and board member of the Korea Policy Institute, and Monica Kim, William Appleman Williams Chair in US, international & diplomatic history at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, talk to us about the American Studies Association announcing its support for a resolution calling for an end to the Korean War, the importance and role academic institutions play in demanding peace on the peninsula, and the challenge of reaching Americans on this issue. Ron Hampton, DC representative for Blacks in Law Enforcement of America and former executive director of the National Black Police Association and a retired twenty-three veteran of the DC Metropolitan Police Department, talks to us about a new study by the American Psychological Association revealing that police officers speak to Black drivers in a more disrespectful tone during traffic stops than the way they speak to white drivers, federal efforts to monitor police departments, and whether these initiatives have yielded positive results.Nick Cruse, co-founder of Fred Hampton Leftists and citizen journalist focusing on state violence, the class war & foreign policy, and Sean Michael Love, founder and editor-in-chief of Black House News, talk to us about The Washington Post's retelling of how the eviction moratorium was extended, how leftists got fooled once again by the Democratic Party as Nina Turner takes the loss in Ohio's congressional primary, Mexico suing US gun manufacturers over trafficked guns in their country, and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser doubling down after being caught not following the renewed mask mandate.

Intro - 0:00Tune called Planxty Sir Festus Burke | Randal Bays/fiddle, Chris Smith/tenor banjo, Roger Landes/bouzouki | composition by Turlough O'Carolan, from the album “Coyote Banjo” by Chris SmithPart I, Path to the Electric Guitar in Academia  - 01:10Part II, Research into Amplification  - 21:03Part III, Current Projects & Scholarship - 25:30Part IV, Talking About Bill Hanley  - 28:15Part V, New Technology in Live Performances  - 32:34Part VI,  Perceptions of the Electric Guitar - 44:34Part VII, The Electric Guitar in American Culture Conference - 52:38Outro - 01:01:07Planxty Sir Festus Burke Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith CollegeScholar of U.S. popular music and popular culture, with particular specialty in the study of live music, music genres, music technology and musical instruments (especially the guitar).Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999) This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009)Contributor to the Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop and Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the WorldKeynote speaker at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's American Music Masters event honoring the legacy of musician and inventor Les Paul. In 1998 Waksman's dissertation on the electric guitar won the Ralph Henry Gabriel prize awarded by the American Studies Association.New project:  Live Music in America: A History, 1850–2000  Full Playlist for EP 18VVMC Book ClubVVMC: Friends & Voices, a Collaborative PlaylistVoices from the Vernacular Music Center

Join Rashida Tlaib, Danny Glover, and Maya Soetoro-Ng for a conversation on how we combat anti-Asian racism. The national wave of anti-Asian violence and attacks has sparked an upsurge in activism and critical conversations about cross-racial solidarity. Join us as we discuss these issues in tribute to James and Grace Lee Boggs on the anniversary of the death of Vincent Chin. Speakers: Danny Glover is an award-winning actor, producer and humanitarian with a performance career that spans more than 30 years. Off-screen, Glover has gained respect for his wide-reaching community activism and philanthropic efforts. Internationally, Glover has served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Program, focusing on issues of poverty, disease and economic development in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. He currently serves as UNICEF Ambassador. Rashida Tlaib is a well-known progressive warrior and, in her own words, “a mother working for justice for all.” Rashida made history in 2008 by becoming the first Muslim woman to ever serve in the Michigan Legislature. She is beloved by residents for the transformative constituent services she provided, and for successfully fighting the billionaires and corporations that tried to pollute her district. She is currently the Congresswoman for Michigan's 13th Congressional District, which includes the city of Detroit and many surrounding communities. Maya Soetoro-Ng serves as a consultant to the Obama Foundation, working closely with their international team to develop programming in the Asia Pacific region. Prior to her work with the Obama Foundation, she was the Director of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa where, in addition to leading outreach and development initiatives, she also taught Leadership for Social Change, History of Peace Movements, Peace Education, and Conflict Management for Educators. Maya has published a number of book contributions as well as a picture book entitled Ladder to the Moon and is currently under contract to write a Young Adult novel entitled Yellowwood. Maya sits on many voluntary boards and is the co-founder of the nonprofit Ceeds of Peace, which creates peacebuilding action plan workshops for educators, families and community leaders and is the co-founder of the Institute for Climate and Peace which advances effective and inclusive processes to build peaceful and climate-conscious futures for the wellbeing of all. Scott Kurashige (moderator) is professor and chair in the Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at TCU, president of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Foundation, and past-president of the American Studies Association. He is the author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles and co-wrote the The Next American Revolution with Grace Lee Boggs. ---------------------------------------------------- This event is sponsored by the James and Grace Lee Boggs Foundation and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/pu_N1hfn0j0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Watch On-Demand Video   Watch On-Demand Video Throughout their history, Asians in America have faced massive racial discrimination from indentured servitude to exclusion laws through internment during World War II. Asian Americans continue to face ongoing discrimination in myriad ways. The Atlanta spa murders, while a grotesque manifestation of this history, is sadly not an isolated event. Join Michael Zeldin in his conversation with Jennifer Ho, President of the Association for Asian American Studies, Director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder in a discussion of what it means to be an Asian American and especially an Asian American woman. Guest Jennifer Ho Professor, Ethnic Studies Director, Center for Humanities & the Arts University of Colorado Boulder President, Association for Asian American Studies The daughter of a refugee father from China and an immigrant mother from Jamaica, Jennifer Ho is a professor in the department of Ethnic Studies and the director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Ho received her BA in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1992) and her PhD in English from Boston University (2003) and had a faculty appointment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2004-2019, where she taught courses in Asian American literature, contemporary multiethnic American literature, critical race studies, and intersectionality. Ho is the author of three books: Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (Routledge Press, 2005), Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which won the 2016 South Atlantic Modern Languages Association award for best monograph, and Understanding Gish Jen (University of South Carolina Press, 2015). She is co-editor of a collection of essays on race and narratology, Race, Ethnicity, and Narrative in the United States (OSU Press, 2017) and a series of teaching essays on Asian American literature, Teaching Approaches to Asian American Literature (forthcoming MLA). She has published in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Journal for Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, The Global South and has also presented at conferences such as the International Society for the Study of Narrative, American Studies Association, Modern Language Association, American Literature Association, and the Association of Asian American Studies, where she has just been elected as the incoming President, effective April 2020. Two of her current book projects are a breast cancer memoir and a family autobiography that will consider Asian Americans in the global south through the narrative of her maternal family's immigration from Hong Kong to Jamaica to North America. In addition to her academic work, Ho is active in community engagement around issues of race and intersectionality, leading workshops on anti-racism and how to talk about race in our current political climate. Books Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Edited along with James Donahue (SUNY Potsdam) & Shaun Morgan (Tennessee Wesleyan College). Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017. Understanding Gish Jen. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2015. Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels. New York: Routledge Press, 2005.   Host Michael Zeldin Michael Zeldin is a well-known and highly-regarded TV and radio analyst/commentator. He has covered many high-profile matters, including the Clinton impeachment proceedings, the Gore v. Bush court challenges, Special Counsel Robert Muller's investigation of interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the Trump impeachment proceedings.  In 2019,

Watch On-Demand Video   Watch On-Demand Video Throughout their history, Asians in America have faced massive racial discrimination from indentured servitude to exclusion laws through internment during World War II. Asian Americans continue to face ongoing discrimination in myriad ways. The Atlanta spa murders, while a grotesque manifestation of this history, is sadly not an isolated event. Join Michael Zeldin in his conversation with Jennifer Ho, President of the Association for Asian American Studies, Director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder in a discussion of what it means to be an Asian American and especially an Asian American woman. Guest Jennifer Ho Professor, Ethnic Studies Director, Center for Humanities & the Arts University of Colorado Boulder President, Association for Asian American Studies The daughter of a refugee father from China and an immigrant mother from Jamaica, Jennifer Ho is a professor in the department of Ethnic Studies and the director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Ho received her BA in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1992) and her PhD in English from Boston University (2003) and had a faculty appointment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2004-2019, where she taught courses in Asian American literature, contemporary multiethnic American literature, critical race studies, and intersectionality. Ho is the author of three books: Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (Routledge Press, 2005), Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which won the 2016 South Atlantic Modern Languages Association award for best monograph, and Understanding Gish Jen (University of South Carolina Press, 2015). She is co-editor of a collection of essays on race and narratology, Race, Ethnicity, and Narrative in the United States (OSU Press, 2017) and a series of teaching essays on Asian American literature, Teaching Approaches to Asian American Literature (forthcoming MLA). She has published in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Journal for Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, The Global South and has also presented at conferences such as the International Society for the Study of Narrative, American Studies Association, Modern Language Association, American Literature Association, and the Association of Asian American Studies, where she has just been elected as the incoming President, effective April 2020. Two of her current book projects are a breast cancer memoir and a family autobiography that will consider Asian Americans in the global south through the narrative of her maternal family's immigration from Hong Kong to Jamaica to North America. In addition to her academic work, Ho is active in community engagement around issues of race and intersectionality, leading workshops on anti-racism and how to talk about race in our current political climate. Books Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Edited along with James Donahue (SUNY Potsdam) & Shaun Morgan (Tennessee Wesleyan College). Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017. Understanding Gish Jen. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2015. Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels. New York: Routledge Press, 2005.   Host Michael Zeldin Michael Zeldin is a well-known and highly-regarded TV and radio analyst/commentator. He has covered many high-profile matters, including the Clinton impeachment proceedings, the Gore v. Bush court challenges, Special Counsel Robert Muller's investigation of interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the Trump impeachment proceedings.  In 2019, Michael was a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he taught a study group on Independent Investigations of Presidents. Previously, Michael was a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. He also served as Deputy Independent/ Independent Counsel, investigating allegations of tampering with presidential candidate Bill Clinton's passport files, and as Deputy Chief Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Foreign Affairs Committee, October Surprise Task Force, investigating the handling of the American hostage situation in Iran. Michael is a prolific writer and has published Op-ed pieces for CNN.com, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Hill, The Washington Times, and The Washington Post.

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the first in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists' playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood's incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Performing Innocence: Belated Abstract: Why did terms like innocence, naïveté, and artlessness have currency for US artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris? This lecture examines the language employed by artists and critics that applied these terms to Franco-American art exchange. Professor Burns traces the concepts' emergence and expansion at the end of the US Civil War. Linking the mass exodus to France for study to attempts at cultural rejuvenation, innocence reveals a culture triggered by the realities of war, failed Reconstruction, divisive financial interests, and imperial ambition. The impossibility of innocence gave the myth its urgency and paradox. Engaging with artists from Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri to writers Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton, as well as journalists, the lecture frames the definitions and stakes of claiming to be innocent and naïve in Paris. In performing these characteristics, these artists and writers built an idea that American culture was belated compared with Europe; the lecture contextualizes this idea of strategic belatedness alongside similar projections in other emergent national contexts. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Peter Gibian teaches American literature and culture in the English Department at McGill University (Montréal, Canada), where he has won four teaching awards. His publications include Mass Culture and Everyday Life (editor and contributor, Routledge 1997) and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge UP 2001; awarded the Best Book Prize in 2001-02 by NEASA, the New England branch of the American Studies Association) as well as essays on Whitman, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Dr. Holmes, Justice Holmes, Bayard Taylor, Washington Irving, G. W. Cable, Edward Everett Hale, Wharton and James, John Singer Sargent, Michael Snow and shopping mall spectacle, the experience of flânerie in 19th-century shopping arcades, and cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century American literature. He is currently at work on two book projects: one exploring the influence of two competing speech models—oratory and conversation—on Whitman's writing and his notions of public life; the other tracing the emergence of a “cosmopolitan tradition” in American culture over the course of the long nineteenth century.

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the first in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Performing Innocence: Belated Abstract: Why did terms like innocence, naïveté, and artlessness have currency for US artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris? This lecture examines the language employed by artists and critics that applied these terms to Franco-American art exchange. Professor Burns traces the concepts’ emergence and expansion at the end of the US Civil War. Linking the mass exodus to France for study to attempts at cultural rejuvenation, innocence reveals a culture triggered by the realities of war, failed Reconstruction, divisive financial interests, and imperial ambition. The impossibility of innocence gave the myth its urgency and paradox. Engaging with artists from Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri to writers Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton, as well as journalists, the lecture frames the definitions and stakes of claiming to be innocent and naïve in Paris. In performing these characteristics, these artists and writers built an idea that American culture was belated compared with Europe; the lecture contextualizes this idea of strategic belatedness alongside similar projections in other emergent national contexts. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Peter Gibian teaches American literature and culture in the English Department at McGill University (Montréal, Canada), where he has won four teaching awards. His publications include Mass Culture and Everyday Life (editor and contributor, Routledge 1997) and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge UP 2001; awarded the Best Book Prize in 2001-02 by NEASA, the New England branch of the American Studies Association) as well as essays on Whitman, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Dr. Holmes, Justice Holmes, Bayard Taylor, Washington Irving, G. W. Cable, Edward Everett Hale, Wharton and James, John Singer Sargent, Michael Snow and shopping mall spectacle, the experience of flânerie in 19th-century shopping arcades, and cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century American literature. He is currently at work on two book projects: one exploring the influence of two competing speech models—oratory and conversation—on Whitman’s writing and his notions of public life; the other tracing the emergence of a “cosmopolitan tradition” in American culture over the course of the long nineteenth century.

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art, gives the first in the series of The Terra Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914. Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting? Performing Innocence: Belated Abstract: Why did terms like innocence, naïveté, and artlessness have currency for US artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris? This lecture examines the language employed by artists and critics that applied these terms to Franco-American art exchange. Professor Burns traces the concepts’ emergence and expansion at the end of the US Civil War. Linking the mass exodus to France for study to attempts at cultural rejuvenation, innocence reveals a culture triggered by the realities of war, failed Reconstruction, divisive financial interests, and imperial ambition. The impossibility of innocence gave the myth its urgency and paradox. Engaging with artists from Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri to writers Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton, as well as journalists, the lecture frames the definitions and stakes of claiming to be innocent and naïve in Paris. In performing these characteristics, these artists and writers built an idea that American culture was belated compared with Europe; the lecture contextualizes this idea of strategic belatedness alongside similar projections in other emergent national contexts. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native American, and European art history. Her publications include a book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations of the American West in France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Peter Gibian teaches American literature and culture in the English Department at McGill University (Montréal, Canada), where he has won four teaching awards. His publications include Mass Culture and Everyday Life (editor and contributor, Routledge 1997) and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge UP 2001; awarded the Best Book Prize in 2001-02 by NEASA, the New England branch of the American Studies Association) as well as essays on Whitman, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Dr. Holmes, Justice Holmes, Bayard Taylor, Washington Irving, G. W. Cable, Edward Everett Hale, Wharton and James, John Singer Sargent, Michael Snow and shopping mall spectacle, the experience of flânerie in 19th-century shopping arcades, and cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century American literature. He is currently at work on two book projects: one exploring the influence of two competing speech models—oratory and conversation—on Whitman’s writing and his notions of public life; the other tracing the emergence of a “cosmopolitan tradition” in American culture over the course of the long nineteenth century.

In light of the unwarranted firing of Garrett Felber from the University of Mississippi despite his scholarship and contributions to dismantling the carceral state, a panel of activist academics discuss the implications of the situation and the relationship between the university and social movements. ---------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Garrett Felber was recently fired by the University of Mississippi despite his incredible work in the study of the racist American carceral state and his activism with the Study and Struggle project that organizes against incarceration and criminalization in Mississippi. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, she has two books forthcoming in 2021: Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition and Abolition Geography. Elizabeth Hinton is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University and Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States. Robin D.G. Kelley is the Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA and author of numerous books on the history of social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa; Black intellectuals; music and visual culture. Kiese Laymon is the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi and the author of the bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, which won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Her most recent book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership , was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. The event will also feature solidarity statements from supporters including Dylan Rodríguez, President of American Studies Association, Sherie Randolph, and more. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/olbnwpV4B38 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A discussion in commemoration of Attica Day about its continued significance and the movement demanding prisoner labor rights. —————————————————————————— The forced labor of incarcerated people is a vestige of slavery still protected by the 13th Amendment today. On September 9th, 1971, nearly 1,300 men incarcerated at the Attica Correctional Facility led an insurrection against the prison — an institution undergirded by systemic oppression, racism, and violence. The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto rooted the uprising in collective principled struggle: “In our peaceful efforts to assemble in dissent...we are in turn murdered, brutalized, and framed...because we seek the rights and privileges of all American People.” The State used brutal and deadly force to silence the rebellion. And yet, the vision for collective liberation forged during the Attica Uprising continues to shape demands of incarcerated people throughout the world. Join us on September 13th to commemorate Attica Day and discuss its continued significance, unfulfilled demands, and the movement to bring those demands to bear. Speakers: Orisanmi Burton is an Assistant Professor of anthropology at American University and a 2020 – 2021 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Burton's research, which focuses on Black radical politics and state repression in the US, has been published in North American Dialogue, The Black Scholar, and Cultural Anthropology. He is an active member of the Critical Prison Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association and the Abolition Collective and is completing a book manuscript titled The Tip of the Spear: Black Revolutionary Organizing and Prison Pacification in the Empire State that analyzes the prison as a domain of domestic warfare. Darren Mack is an activist, advocate, and organizer based in New York. Darren served 20 years in New York State's prison system where he was politicized. Upon his release he became a member of the Education From the Inside Out coalition working to remove statutory and practical educational barriers for individuals impacted by the punishment system. In 2016, he became one of the outspoken advocates for the #CLOSErikers campaign. Robin McGinty is a PhD candidate (ABD) at the CUNY Graduate Center's Earth and Environmental Sciences Doctoral Program in Geography. Robin McGinty's research study “A Labor of Livingness: Oral Histories of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women” considers a re-imagination of the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated Black women and the production of an explicit political subjectivity that attends to the ways of knowing and living the world. Foregrounding the oral histories of formerly incarcerated Black women, the term ‘a labor of livingness' is articulated as an expression of resistance to the prison as a site of living death, and its structural afterlives. Emani Davis is the CREATE(HER) of The Omowale Project, established to respond to the syndemic epidemics of COVID-19 and the racial violence targeting Black men and women. The project is designed to provide direct support to BIPOC-led organizations and the battle-scarred and emerging leaders who are at the helm of the national movement for racial justice. While reducing trauma and building resilience, The Project operates at the intersection of brain science, Ancestral wisdom and the healing arts. —————————————————————————— This event is cosponsored by Haymarket Books and 13th Forward. 13th Forward is a campaign led by a coalition of workers' rights advocates, criminal justice activists, grassroots organizers, and directly impacted individuals to end the forced labor and wage theft of incarcerated workers in New York. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/7ePHL7_Gpho Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

The East Side Freedom Library and the Ramsey County Historical Society invite you to a special session of our “History Revealed” series. This event will be archived on on the library's Facebook page and on our YouTube channel with closed captioning enabled: https://www.youtube.com/eastsidefreedomlibraryorg. “Middle class” is an ideologically shaped and deployed term in American culture and politics. Activist-scholar David Roediger makes clear in his pointed and persuasive polemic, this obsession with the middle-class is relatively new in US politics. It began with the attempt to win back so-called “Reagan Democrats” by Bill Clinton and it was accompanied by a pandering to racism and a shying away from meaningful wealth redistribution that continues to this day. Drawing on rich traditions of radical social thought, Roediger disavows the thinly sourced idea that the United States was, for much of its history, a “middle-class” nation and the still more indefensible position that it is one now. The increasing immiseration of large swathes of middle-income America, only accelerated by the current pandemic, nails a fallacy that is a major obstacle to progressives. David Roediger taught in the 1990s at the University of Minnesota and now teaches American Studies at the University of Kansas. His books include Seizing Freedom, The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness and Working toward Whiteness. His book The Production of Difference (with Elizabeth Esch) recently won the International Labor History Association Book Prize. He is past president of the American Studies Association and of the Working-Class Studies Association. Professor Roediger will be joined in conversation by: August Nimtz, Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at the University of Minnesota. August has been an activist in progressive movements in the Twin Cities (and beyond) since the 1970s with a particular emphasis on solidarity with the people of Cuba. Kieran Knutson, President of Communications Workers of America Local 7250 (Minnesota AT&T). Kieran has been a long time activist at the intersection of the racial justice and labor movements. Megan Brown, Assistant Professor in the Masters in Advocacy and Political Leadership (MAPL) program at Metropolitan State University. A geographer by training and trade, Megan has recently found her way to St. Paul.

1. Garth Baxter – From the Heart: Three American Womenhttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/7k9n3QWkHSYQ5e5TGProGb2. Jennifer Jolley – Prisoner of Consciencehttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kAYkFmqvLvBeFVeKL8Zx43. Gleb Kanasevich – your fortresshttps://youtu.be/V1l141q9_VAPanelists:Soprano Katie Procell has been praised throughout the Baltimore area for her “golden tone and arresting stage presence” (Peter Dayton). Her musical curiosity includes the avant-garde and she has performed Pierrot Lunaire, Ginastera’s third String Quartet, Messiaen’s Harawi, Berio Sequenza III, even Kurtàg’s Attila Fragments. Procell’s past opera credits include Giselle, Jenny, Mel 2, and various roles in the two-woman collection of short new operas called Elevator (ENA Ensemble); Lisa ( La Sonnambula; Opera Alchemy); Susanna ( Le nozze di Figaro; Peabody Conservatory); Giulietta ( I Capuleti e i Montecchi; Alchemy); Krysia (understudy, Out of Darkness; Peabody); Rosina ( Il barbiere di Siviglia; James Madison University); and more. She studies with Elizabeth Futral and has studied with Phyllis Bryn-Julson and Kevin McMillan. Procell has trained at Opera Roanoke (Apprentice Artist), Centre for Opera Studies in Italy, and SongFest. She works closely with composer Peter Dayton and has premiered several of his works and is collaborating with both Dayton and Baxter on upcoming recording projects.Award-winning conductor Jordan Randall Smith is the Music Director of Symphony Number One and Assistant Conductor of Hopkins Symphony Orchestra. Smith was recently named Visiting Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Orchestras at Susquehanna University. Smith was formerly Co-founder and Artistic Director of the Dallas Festival of Modern Music and Assistant Conductor of the Peabody Opera Theatre. Smith was lauded for being “an attentive partner” by the Baltimore Sun. His leadership of Mahler’s fourth symphony was praised by the Sun’s Tim Smith: “The third movement, in particular, was quite sensitively molded.” Conductor Alan Gilbert called Jordan’s conducting of Boulez’ Le Marteau sans Maître, “impressive.” An active supporter of new music, Jordan has a discography spanning four commercial releases and a history of commissions, leading over 50 world premieres. Jordan is also a Creative Director of the International Florence Price Festival. Smith was named to the Executive Council for the Institute for Composer Diversity at SUNY-Fredonia in January 2020.Ian Power is a composer, performer, and Director of Integrated Arts at the University of Baltimore. Ian’s music is inscrutable, warm, insistent, and performer-driven, and has been performed by ensembles and soloists in the US, UK, Germany, Denmark, and Israel. His writing on rhetoric in new music and reviews of CDs and performances are published in TEMPO, and he has lectured at the American Musicological Society, American Studies Association, and universities in the US, UK, and Turkey. Ian studied with Chaya Czernowin, Steven Takasugi, and John Luther Adams. Ian’s first CD, Diligence, featuring long solo pieces, is out on Edition Wandelweiser Records (Germany) in June 2020. His CD Maintenance Hums, featuring chamber works, is out on Carrier Records (New York) in September 2020. He is writing an orchestra piece for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, to be premiered at the TECTONICS festival in Glasgow in May 2022.More information at pauseandlisten.com. Pause and Listen was created by host John T.K. Scherch and co-creator/marketing manager Michele Mengel Scherch.

Professor, author, and abolitionist scholar Dr. Dylan Rodríguez joins Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein on an episode of the Beyond Prisons podcast.  This is the first part of a two part conversation. In Part 1, Dr. Rodríguez explains his belief that abolition is our obligation, touching on the development of anti-Black algorithms used to keep people in prison, what it means to be vulnerable in the context of doing this work and how vulnerability is the starting point for an abolitionist practice, and the profound impact that Robert Allen’s book Black Awakening in Capitalist America had on shaping Dylan’s own thinking.  We also talk about how academia declares institutional solidarity with white supremacy, and how some academics are the planners and architects of domestic war. Dr. Rodríguez reminds us that terror is not a thing that you can fix with training and he shares some of the conditions he places on conversations about prison reform.  Dylan Rodríguez is President of the American Studies Association (2020-2021). He served as the faculty-elected Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate (2016-2020) and a Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He spent the first sixteen years of his career in the Department of Ethnic Studies (serving as Chair from 2009-2016) and joined the Department of Media and Cultural Studies in 2017. Dylan’s thinking, writing, teaching, and scholarly activist labors address the complexity and normalized proliferation of historical regimes and logics of anti-Black and racial-colonial violence in everyday state, cultural, and social formations.  His work raises the question of how insurgent communities of people inhabit oppressive regimes and logics in ways that enable the collective genius of rebellion, survival, abolition, and radical futurity. What forms of shared creativity emerge from conditions of duress, and how do these insurgencies envision—and practice—transformations of power and community?   In addition to co-editing the field-shaping anthology Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016), Dylan is the author of two books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His next book, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press in Fall 2020 and will be followed in 2021 by White Reconstruction II.  Follow Dylan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dylanrodriguez Support Beyond Prisons Support our show and join us on Patreon. Check out our other donation options as well. Please listen, subscribe, and rate/review our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and on Google Play Visit our website at beyond-prisons.com Join our mailing list for updates on new episodes, events, and more Send tips, comments, and questions to beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com Kim Wilson is available for speaking engagements and to facilitate workshops. Please contact beyondprisonspodcast@gmail.com for more information Twitter: @Beyond_Prison Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beyondprisonspodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondprisons/

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti employed some questionable, unethical methods to dispossess African communities of their cultural and religious artifacts and artwork. In his capacity as secretary-archivist, Leiris recorded the events, actions and observations of the mission in great detail, in a daily journal that would become L’Afrique fantome. Leiris was both critical of and to an extent complicit in the exploitative encounter between French ethnographers and the colonized people they sought to study. His journal reveals the tensions between Europe’s claims about the superiority of its civilization and the violence and barbarity of colonialism on the ground. It also bears witness to the process by which some of the holdings in the Quai Branly museum in Paris today, were taken as booty (or in Leiris’ words, “butin”) from the African continent in the early twentieth century. Brent Edward’s Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017) makes L’Afrique fantome available to English-speaking readers in its entirety for the first time. This translation presents an important and invaluable archive that documents the makings of ethnography as a field of study, as well its imbrication with colonial conquest and imperialism. In a thoughtful introduction that examines the historical context of Leiris’ journey, his personal motivations, his use of language, his triumphs and frustrations, Edwards clearly lays out the importance of this text for readers interested in anthropology, literary studies and the history of colonial encounters. Brent Hayes Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Phantom Africa. He is also the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. OMeally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti employed some questionable, unethical methods to dispossess African communities of their cultural and religious artifacts and artwork. In his capacity as secretary-archivist, Leiris recorded the events, actions and observations of the mission in great detail, in a daily journal that would become L’Afrique fantome. Leiris was both critical of and to an extent complicit in the exploitative encounter between French ethnographers and the colonized people they sought to study. His journal reveals the tensions between Europe’s claims about the superiority of its civilization and the violence and barbarity of colonialism on the ground. It also bears witness to the process by which some of the holdings in the Quai Branly museum in Paris today, were taken as booty (or in Leiris’ words, “butin”) from the African continent in the early twentieth century. Brent Edward’s Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017) makes L’Afrique fantome available to English-speaking readers in its entirety for the first time. This translation presents an important and invaluable archive that documents the makings of ethnography as a field of study, as well its imbrication with colonial conquest and imperialism. In a thoughtful introduction that examines the historical context of Leiris’ journey, his personal motivations, his use of language, his triumphs and frustrations, Edwards clearly lays out the importance of this text for readers interested in anthropology, literary studies and the history of colonial encounters. Brent Hayes Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Phantom Africa. He is also the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. OMeally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti employed some questionable, unethical methods to dispossess African communities of their cultural and religious artifacts and artwork. In his capacity as secretary-archivist, Leiris recorded the events, actions and observations of the mission in great detail, in a daily journal that would become L’Afrique fantome. Leiris was both critical of and to an extent complicit in the exploitative encounter between French ethnographers and the colonized people they sought to study. His journal reveals the tensions between Europe’s claims about the superiority of its civilization and the violence and barbarity of colonialism on the ground. It also bears witness to the process by which some of the holdings in the Quai Branly museum in Paris today, were taken as booty (or in Leiris’ words, “butin”) from the African continent in the early twentieth century. Brent Edward’s Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017) makes L’Afrique fantome available to English-speaking readers in its entirety for the first time. This translation presents an important and invaluable archive that documents the makings of ethnography as a field of study, as well its imbrication with colonial conquest and imperialism. In a thoughtful introduction that examines the historical context of Leiris’ journey, his personal motivations, his use of language, his triumphs and frustrations, Edwards clearly lays out the importance of this text for readers interested in anthropology, literary studies and the history of colonial encounters. Brent Hayes Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Phantom Africa. He is also the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. OMeally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti employed some questionable, unethical methods to dispossess African communities of their cultural and religious artifacts and artwork. In his capacity as secretary-archivist, Leiris recorded the events, actions and observations of the mission in great detail, in a daily journal that would become L’Afrique fantome. Leiris was both critical of and to an extent complicit in the exploitative encounter between French ethnographers and the colonized people they sought to study. His journal reveals the tensions between Europe’s claims about the superiority of its civilization and the violence and barbarity of colonialism on the ground. It also bears witness to the process by which some of the holdings in the Quai Branly museum in Paris today, were taken as booty (or in Leiris’ words, “butin”) from the African continent in the early twentieth century. Brent Edward’s Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017) makes L’Afrique fantome available to English-speaking readers in its entirety for the first time. This translation presents an important and invaluable archive that documents the makings of ethnography as a field of study, as well its imbrication with colonial conquest and imperialism. In a thoughtful introduction that examines the historical context of Leiris’ journey, his personal motivations, his use of language, his triumphs and frustrations, Edwards clearly lays out the importance of this text for readers interested in anthropology, literary studies and the history of colonial encounters. Brent Hayes Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Phantom Africa. He is also the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. OMeally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti employed some questionable, unethical methods to dispossess African communities of their cultural and religious artifacts and artwork. In his capacity as secretary-archivist, Leiris recorded the events, actions and observations of the mission in great detail, in a daily journal that would become L’Afrique fantome. Leiris was both critical of and to an extent complicit in the exploitative encounter between French ethnographers and the colonized people they sought to study. His journal reveals the tensions between Europe’s claims about the superiority of its civilization and the violence and barbarity of colonialism on the ground. It also bears witness to the process by which some of the holdings in the Quai Branly museum in Paris today, were taken as booty (or in Leiris’ words, “butin”) from the African continent in the early twentieth century. Brent Edward’s Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017) makes L’Afrique fantome available to English-speaking readers in its entirety for the first time. This translation presents an important and invaluable archive that documents the makings of ethnography as a field of study, as well its imbrication with colonial conquest and imperialism. In a thoughtful introduction that examines the historical context of Leiris’ journey, his personal motivations, his use of language, his triumphs and frustrations, Edwards clearly lays out the importance of this text for readers interested in anthropology, literary studies and the history of colonial encounters. Brent Hayes Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Phantom Africa. He is also the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. OMeally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 1931 and 1933, French writer Michel Leiris participated in a state-sponsored expedition to document the cultural practices of people in west and east Africa. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti employed some questionable, unethical methods to dispossess African communities of their cultural and religious artifacts and artwork. In his capacity as secretary-archivist, Leiris recorded the events, actions and observations of the mission in great detail, in a daily journal that would become L’Afrique fantome. Leiris was both critical of and to an extent complicit in the exploitative encounter between French ethnographers and the colonized people they sought to study. His journal reveals the tensions between Europe’s claims about the superiority of its civilization and the violence and barbarity of colonialism on the ground. It also bears witness to the process by which some of the holdings in the Quai Branly museum in Paris today, were taken as booty (or in Leiris’ words, “butin”) from the African continent in the early twentieth century. Brent Edward’s Phantom Africa (Seagull Books, 2017) makes L’Afrique fantome available to English-speaking readers in its entirety for the first time. This translation presents an important and invaluable archive that documents the makings of ethnography as a field of study, as well its imbrication with colonial conquest and imperialism. In a thoughtful introduction that examines the historical context of Leiris’ journey, his personal motivations, his use of language, his triumphs and frustrations, Edwards clearly lays out the importance of this text for readers interested in anthropology, literary studies and the history of colonial encounters. Brent Hayes Edwards was awarded a 2012 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Phantom Africa. He is also the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. With Robert G. OMeally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Race is messy, literally and figuratively, as Professor Brigitte Fielder (Wisconsin-Madison) argues in her project on the non-linear transferability of race in nineteenth-century America. Shakespeare's Othello in America became a minstrel play warning against the dangers of miscegenation -- what does it mean with Othello's blackface makeup begrimes Desdemona? At the 2017 conference of the American Studies Association, PhDiva Xine chats with Brigitte about anti-racist mentoring, pedagogy, and colleagueship in higher ed and their discipline as a dynamic entity. How can we change a field of study and whose shoulders do we stand upon? (Shoutout to work in early Black studies, like the the Just Teach One-Early African American Print Project: http://jtoaa.common-place.org/ and the Colored Conventions project: coloredconventions.org/) More on Brigitte Fielder's work: http://www.brigfield.org/

This week on StoryWeb: Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “I Had To Go Down.” Gloria Anzaldúa was a groundbreaking, perhaps even groundclaiming theorist and poet. She is by far best known for her 1987 book, Borderlands/La Frontera. It is much easier to identify it as her most influential and enduring work than it is to place it into a genre. Is it theory? History? Poetry? Memoir? It is all this – and more. Anzaldúa’s work can be challenging. It is a dense text with complex concepts, and some readers find it hard to understand. And it can be unsettling, especially to white (male) readers who might find their notions of privilege and status being called into question. This difficulty – this textual, psychological, social difficulty – is quite deliberate on Anzaldúa’s part. She confronts her readers as she upends dominant views of race, language, white privilege, gender and sexuality, and “ownership” of contested land between the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. In short, Borderlands/La Frontera is not an easy read nor is it intended to be. Despite the challenges the book presents, there are so many wonderful sections and aspects to this multilayered, multifaceted book. Anzaldúa talks a lot about language shifting, new linguistic moves as part of what she calls the New Mestiza Consciousness. “At the confluence of two or more genetic streams,” she says, “with chromosomes constantly ‘crossing over,’ this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in the making – a new mestiza consciousness. . . . It is a consciousness of the Borderlands.” On one hand, she captures the New Mestiza through her hybrid use of language – as she fluidly moves “from English to Castillian Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl,” often within the same work. It is quite a linguistic feat. But Anzaldúa also demonstrates the New Mestiza Consciousness through her radical mixing of genres. The first half of the book features heady, theoretical essays, geographical history, and personal autobiography. The second half of the book is comprised of powerful and sometimes intensely personal poems. Theory and poetry – two seemingly opposed discourses placed right up against each other in one volume. Self-described as a “chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist,” Anzaldúa creates a new approach to embody the many aspects of her self, of her creativity and consciousness. Perhaps my favorite poem is “I Had To Go Down.” Reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” this poem tells of a narrator slowly going down into a dank, dark cellar. She’s put off the trip to the basement as long as she can – “I hardly ever set foot on the floors below,” she says. But finally, needing to do her laundry, she decides to take the plunge, saying “I should have waited till morning.” As she opens the door to the basement, the narrator discovers that “[t]he steps down had disappeared. . . . / I would have to lower myself / and then drop. . . .” An explorer of sorts, the narrator makes her way into the basement, the moist, dark, musty cellar underneath a house. Basements and cellars are spooky, unsettling, creepy. The narrator encounters spider webs that “[shroud] the narrow windows,” crumbled bricks, old “bedsprings and headboards,” “a broken chair,” and a faded dress. Most pervasive is the dirt – rich, pungent, loamy earth. The narrator says, “A rank earth smell thickened the air in the cavernous room.” But a cellar is also often a place of nourishment – as jars of canned preserves often line the walls. In this poem, what springs to life “into the belly of the house” is “[a] gnarled root,” “a shoot [that] had sprung in the darkness.” “[N]ow a young tree was growing,” the narrator says, “nourished by a nightsun.” The trip downstairs into the dank heart of the house is frightening, but it is the only way the narrator can find this sign of new life. Numerous theories have been offered for this poem. Going down is a metaphor for the writing process, some say. Anzaldúa hints at this meaning when she writes earlier in the book, “Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.” Others point to the psychological journey the narrator is on as she delves into the space underneath her house. Our society has “strict taboos against this kind of inner knowledge,” says Anzaldúa. “It fears what [Carl] Jung calls the Shadow, the unsavory aspects of ourselves.” Later in the book, she writes, “Our greatest disappointments and painful experiences – if we can make meaning out of them – can lead us toward becoming more of who we are.” Going down into the basement, in the psychological reading, takes us down into the depths of who we are, brings us face to face with the gnarled root of new life pushing up through the dirt floor. As she claims a rich Chicana identity and a robust Chicano language, Anzaldúa says, “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue – my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.” To experience firsthand how Anzaldúa broke the silence, get a copy of Borderlands/La Frontera and dive in. Be forewarned: this is not an easy read. It’s technically challenging, and it will make you question what you thought you knew about race, place, language, gender, sexuality, history, and more. But if you go down into the basement with Anzaldúa, you just might find “a young tree” growing in your own consciousness. To learn more about Anzaldúa, you can read a short biography and overview of her work. Emory University places her work in a postcolonial context, and Ms. Magazine offers a retrospective of her career and her impact. Be sure to visit the website for the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Foundation. Those who want to teach Anzaldúa’s work will find Annenberg Learner’s resources very helpful. The National Council of Teachers of English offers the Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award, while the American Studies Association has the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Award. To go even further, check out the landmark anthology Anzaldúa edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and look also at another volume she edited: Making Face, Making Soul/Hacienda Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Also worth a read is the University of Texas Press anthology Bridging: How Gloria Anzaldúa’s Life and Work Transformed Our Own, featuring 32 writers paying homage to Anzaldúa. And to delve into all of her writing, look no further than The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, published by Duke University Press. Encountering Gloria Anzaldúa for the first time can be energizing and challenging, as she calls us to look at the voices from the deep, loamy earth. Start with “I Had to Go Down” in Borderlands/La Frontera, and then consider exploring more of her work. Reading Anzaldúa takes work, but it is effort that is amply rewarded. Visit thestoryweb.com/anzaldua for links to all these resources and to listen to a rare recording of Gloria Anzaldúa reading from unpublished work in 1991 at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.