For the final Bedlam Book Club episode, I start off by diving into the song 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' to examine an example of American folly, trauma, and what that means for imagining a better world. Then exploring how that intersects with the grim and racist origins of U.S. saneism and how this all relates to anti-labor propaganda.
CW: Trauma, saneism, colonialism, anti-black racism, substance use, and police violence
Book Rec:
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/the-wretched-of-the-earth/The%20Wretched%20Of%20The%20Earth.pdf
Clips:
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot : The Southern Four : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” Accessed April 20, 2025. https://archive.org/details/EDIS-SRP-0196-01.
https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197158Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. “Big Rock Candy Mountains.” Audio. Accessed April 20, 2025. https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197158/.
Steven Crowder Speaks on Fox about Occupy Wall Street, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Yi67Ic2DAoM.Make Mine Freedom, 1948. http://archive.org/details/MakeMine1948.
Sources:
Boster, Dea. African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860. Routledge, 2015.
Bailey, Moya, and Izetta Autumn Mobley. “Work in the Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework.” Gender & Society 33, no. 1 (February 2019): 19–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243218801523.
Alston, Ashanti. “Childhood & The Psychological Dimension of Revolution,” n.d.BARHOF. “Harry ‘Haywire Mac’ McClintock - KFRC Radio, San Francisco.” Bay Area Radio Museum & Hall of Fame. BARHOF, August 12, 2014.
https://bayarearadio.org/featured/mac.“Hobo, Tramp, Bum, or Gutter Punk,” March 19, 2016.
https://grammarist.com/interesting-words/hobo-tramp-bum-or-gutter-punk/.Porter, Roy. A Social History of Madness. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987.Pietikäinen, Petteri. Madness: A History. London: Routledge, 2015.Tyler, Dennis.
Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present. Crip : New Directions in Disability Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2022.Noel Ignatiev. How The Irish Became White, 1995. http://archive.org/details/HowTheIrishBecameWhite.
“Industrial Workers of the World.” Accessed April 20, 2025. https://www.iww.org/.
Metzl, Jonathan. “The Protest Psychosis,” n.d.
Harriet A. Washington Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present , New York: Broadway Books 2008
Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Gender and American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Oklahoma Historical Society | OHS. “Willis, ‘Uncle’ Wallace and ‘Aunt’ Minerva | The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.” Accessed April 20, 2025. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=WI018.
“Great Depression | Definition, History, Dates, Causes, Effects, & Facts | Britannica,” April 20, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Depression.
Contact:Instagram: @bedlambookclub
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