Free Thinking

Tariq Ali picks Pather Panchali and New Generation Thinker Sarah Jilani describes Jalsaghar or The Music Room. Rana Mitter presents this programme which looks at what marked out the directing of Satyajit Ray. The BFI has a season of his films screening across July and August and is re-releasing The Big City. Rana's other guests are the programme of the BFI season and herself a film-maker, Sangeeta Datta, and Professor Chandak Sengoopta from Birkbeck, University of London.

Sarah Jilani researches postcolonial film and literature at the University of Cambridge. She is a 2021 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year who use their research to make radio programmes.

Professor Chandook Sengoopta is writing on the historical, cultural and ideological contexts that shaped the work and impact of the film-maker, writer, designer and composer Satyajit Ray.

Sangeeta Datta is director of Baithak UK http://www.baithak.info/director-sangeeta-datta. You can find details of the season she has put together at BFI.org.uk

Tariq Ali has written more than 2 dozen books on world history, culture and politics https://www.versobooks.com/authors/63-tariq-ali

You can find a collection of Radio 3 programmes exploring film on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/FJbG166KXBn9xzLKPfrwpc/all-about-film-on-radio-3

Producer: Jayne Egerton

How does France look when viewed from different places and at different times? Graham Robb knows France well from his academic career and decades of travels and offers an alternative route through French history in his new book. Hannah Scott has looked at the role of low-brow music in forming an idea of ‘Britishness’ for the French at the height of cross-channel rivalry in the last century. Tash Aw has translated the latest work of biographical writing by Édouard Louis. Professor Ginette Vincendeau is currently co-editing a book on Paris in the cinema. They join Anne McElvoy to explore ideas of France and the French through it's history and culture.

Graham Robb has published widely on French literature and history and was a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. His latest book is France: An Adventure History

Hannah Scott is an academic track fellow at the University of Newcastle. She is the author of Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow 1870-1904

Ginette Vincendeau is a Professor in Film Studies at King's College, University of London. She is is currently co-editing a book on Paris in the cinema. She has recently published on ethnicity in contemporary French cinema and is researching popular French directors of the 1950s and 1960s.

A Woman's Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis (author)and translated by Tash Aw is out now.

Édouard Louis's earlier book Who Killed My Father has been adapted into a stage drama by Ivo Van Hove. You can see that at the Young Vic in London between 7th September and the 24th September and you can hear Édouard talking to Philip Dodd about street protest, gilets jaunes and his own upbringing in this episode of Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0704m92

Producer: Ruth Watts

Aethelflaed and Bertha are two of the figures discussed in the new history of women in the Middle Ages written by Janina Ramirez. Choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh has taken the heroine who fights Tancredi the crusading knight and reframed the story set to the music composed by Monteverdi's Il Combattimento. Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist who has tracked the way a Viking ‘Carnelian’ bead travelled to England from 8th-century Baghdad, with all that it tells us about women and power.

They join Shahidha Bari to discuss ideas about women as warriors and power brokers.

Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramirez is published July 21st 2022

Shobana Jeyasingh's new dance work Clorinda Agonistes premieres on July 13th and 14th at Grange Festival, Hampshire and then can be seen at Sadlers Wells Sept 9th and 10th, Snape Maltings October 8th, the Lowry Oct 18th and 19th, Oxford Playhouse 15th and 16th November.

River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads by Cat Jarman is out now.

Producer in Salford: Cecile Wright

You might be interested in another discussion about women fighting hearing from Maaza Mengiste, Christina Lamb, Julie Wheelwright https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000g4bz available on the Free Thinking programme website and to download as an Arts & Ideas podcast our our discussion about Vikings https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015582

and we have a whole collection called Women in the World https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p084ttwp

From Beyonce to Octavia Butler, from Chris Ofili to Jordan Peele, the speculative and the mythical have been used as powerful tools to shape Black art, film, music and writing. Ekow Eshun, who has curated a new exhibition on this theme at the Hayward Gallery, joins Shahidha Bari along with DJ/turntablist NikNak and New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike to discuss how this idea of the Black Fantastic relates to and in some ways challenges Afrofuturism.

In the Black Fantastic runs at the Hayward Gallery, London until 18th September 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a book and by a season of films at the BFI, including Djibril Diop Mambéty's 1973 film Touki Bouki which you can hear being discussed by Matthew Sweet and guests in another edition of Free Thinking available on BBC Sounds.

NikNak is touring the UK with Sankofa, her latest multi-media project and album, from 12th-18th July. Details can be found on the Sound UK website.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

How does money shape history and how do we write about it? Anne McElvoy discusses those questions with a finalist in the political writing category of the 2022 Orwell Prize. In Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire, Kojo Koram traces the some of the economic problems faced across the world today with wealth inequality, with sovereign debt, austerity, and precarious employment and how they are bound up in decolonisation. She also talks to leading UK economist Richard Davies about how Covid has had an impact on our understanding of economics. And John Ramsden is concerned with restoring the forgotten place of economics in poetry from Coleridge's interest in cycles of boom and bust to Jonathan Swift's fascination with trade sanctions. Dhruti Shah is a journalist and the author of Bear Markets and Beyond: A bestiary of business terms.

Kojo Koram teaches at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London, and writes on issues of law, race and empire. He is the editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line and author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire.

Richard Davies is the author of Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future Limits for the World’s Economies. A former adviser at the Bank of England and HM Treasury, he now runs the UK’s Economics Observatory.

John Ramsden is a former career diplomat and ambassador. He is the author of The Poets’ Guide to Economics

Dhruti Shah is a journalist and the author of Bear Markets and Beyond: A bestiary of business terms.

The Orwell Festival of Political Writing, held across Bloomsbury and online from 22nd June to 14th July, when the winners are announced: https://www.orwellfestival.co.uk/

Producer: Ruth Watts

Whether it’s Jane Eyre transported to India, childrens masks used for political protests or film posters that trigger memories, there are endless fascinating stories nestled amongst archives that researchers are diligently bringing to the fore. Dr Naomi Paxton meets three researchers who work in archives that focus on Indian culture and history to find out more about some of the unexpected stories hiding amongst the books, prints and film paraphernalia.

Dr Monia Acciaria is Associate professor in Film and Television History at DeMontfort University and Associate Director of the UK Asian Film Festival. You can explore the Creative Archives of Indian Cinema YouTube channel here https://youtube.com/channel/UCN-wV7Jl9YeR3pGzJaP7-mw

Dr Pragya Dhital is the curator of ‘Crafting Subversion: DIY and Decolonial Print’. Her research focuses on paper crafts and communications in modern India. The exhibition ‘Crafting Subversion: DIY and Colonial Print’ is on until 3rd September 2022 at the SOAS Brunei Gallery https://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/crafting-subversions/

Olivia Majumdar is project curator of ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ project at the British Library and specialises in novels in translation in Colonial India. Explore ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ at the British Library online here https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books Olivia’s article on the Tarakeswar Affair is here https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books/articles/notes-on-a-scandal

This episode was made in partnership with the AHRC, part of UKRI.

You can find more conversations about New Research in a playlist on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

Producer: Sofie Vilcins

Varney the Vampire was a blood soaked gothic horror story serialised in cheap print over the course of a couple of years in the nineteenth century. The resulting "penny dreadful" tale spilled out of a large volume when it was finally published in book form. In spite of his comfort with crosses, daylight and garlic, Varney's capacity to reflect on his actions made him an early model for Dracula. Matthew Sweet explores why a work, so often overlooked, was so important to the development of the vampire genre.

Roger Luckhurst is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Gothic: an illustrated history and editor of The Cambridge companion to Dracula.

Joan Passey is a lecturer at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Cornish Gothic and editor of Cornish Horrors. And, she is a 2022 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio.

Sam George is an Associate Professor at the University of Hertfordshire and is the convener of the Open Graves, Open Minds Gothic research project. Her books include: In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves, and Wild Children and Open Graves, Open Minds, Representations of the Vampire from the Enlightenment to the Present Day.

Producer: Ruth Watts

David Chalmers is credited with setting the terms for much of the work done in the philosophy of mind today when he posed the 'hard problem' of consciousness: how does matter, which is fundamentally inanimate, give rise to or interact with consciousness, which is qualitative and phenomenal - always a 'what it's like'?

Iain McGilchrist is a literary scholar turned psychiatrist whose 2009 book The Master And His Emissary developed the 'two hemisphere' model of the brain and cognition according to which the left hemisphere is rational, precise, but limited, and the right hemisphere is intuitive, creative, and expansive. Starting with this model, McGilchrist went on to analyse nothing less than the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of the interplay between these two aspects of human nature. His new book The Matter With Things goes even further, developing the hemisphere model into a means for explaining our basic relationship with reality - and suggesting ways it could be improved.

David Chalmers and Iain McGilchrist expound, explain and defend their work to Christopher Harding.

Produced by Luke Mulhall

For evolutionary scientists studying religion, it's more fruitful to examine what people do in religious contexts, rather than listen to what they say they believe. There's a new recognition that as well as looking at behaviour, people studying religion must take account of the religious experience of believers. But how do you do that? And what does doing it tell us? Rana Mitter is joined by an evolutionary psychologist, an anthropologist, a historian and a poet to discuss.

Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary psychologist who’s written a book called Why Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures.

Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist whose book is called Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

Anna Della Subin has investigated people who have been declared divine in her book Accidental Gods

Poet Kaveh Akbar is editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

Geoff Dyer, Dame Sheila Hancock and Rachel Stott join Matthew Sweet to discuss the work and performance of writers, artists, athletes and musicians near the end of their careers.

Old Rage by Sheila Hancock is out now.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod