Hold That Thought

In her forthcoming book, Routes of Terror: Gender, Health and Power in the Eighteenth Century Middle Passage, assistant professor Sowande' Mustakeem reveals the forgotten world of 18th century slave ships. In today's podcast, she shares the story of one enslaved woman and discusses why it's so important for Americans to confront this foundational, brutal chapter of history. Mustakeem's research focuses on the experiences of those most frequently left out of the history of the Middle Passage - women, children, the elderly, and the diseased.

Miley Cyrus' recent twerking incident aside, young actresses have been struggling with how to grow up in Hollywood since the silent film star Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart," first arrived on the silver screen. As they transition from childhood to adulthood, how can young actresses prove their womanhood on screen? And why do they need to? Gaylyn Studlar, the director of the film and media studies program at Washington University in St. Louis, takes us back to classical Hollywood cinema of the 1910s to the 1950s to examine representations of girlhood by stars like Shirley Temple, Elizabeth Taylor, and Audrey Hepburn. Studlar examines how each of these actresses confronted their age both on and off the screen.

In her collection Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, author Eula Biss asserts that "nothing is innocent." As explained in the essay "Time and Distance Overcome," even telephone poles are marked by the history of slavery and colonization in the United States. Biss pairs the personal and the political in her writing, and in Notes from No Man's Land, she offers candid reflections on the role of race in her own life and in American history. Biss teaches writing at Northwestern University.

“Music is too important to be left to the musicians,” ethnomusicologist Christopher Small wrote in 1977. A decade earlier, the experimental rock band the Godz seemed to agree. As associate professor Patrick Burke reveals, musicians in the 1960s resisted predetermined categories or simplistic musical identities. Instead, bands like the Godz chose to blend genres, adopt the musical styles of different racial and ethnic groups, and resist the idea that only competent musicians should be heard. In this interview, Burke describes the role of ethnomusicology in dispelling the myth of "authentic" American music.

In his upcoming book Who Should Sing "Ol' Man River"?: The Life of an American Song, Todd Decker, associate professor of musicology at Washington University in St. Louis, reveals how one song has been shaped and reshaped over time. From Paul Robeson to Frank Sinatra - from the era of big bands to the civil rights movement - every performance of "Ol' Man River" has a political dimension involving the evolution of race relations in the United States. Whether performed as a dance ditty or a means of protest, the seemingly endless malleability of this 1927 Broadway tune provides a window onto the many ways that American music has been used to express both personal and cultural identity.

In July of 1863, James Pennington, a prominent African American minister and former slave, saw his neighborhood destroyed in a violent episode now known as the New York draft riots. How did this chapter of Civil War history shape Pennington's identity and those of the primarily Irish rioters? And what does it reveal about the identity of the country as a whole? Iver Bernstein, director of the American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis, shares Pennington's story and discusses the tension between the idea of American unity and the diverse experiences that make up the past and present of American culture.

Bernstein's upcoming book, Stripes & Scars: Race, The Revitalization of America, and The Origins of the Civil War, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Kathryn Davis, novelist and the Hurst Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis, reads from her novel Duplex, which will be released September 2013 by Graywolf Press.

For thousands of years, writers and philosophers have wondered about the animating spirit, or the soul. Many believe it is the part of a human being that lives eternally, that connects us with all other life. However, in this age, when we have access to scientific innovations like cloning and organs grown in labs, new questions arise. Is there an invisible thread that connects humans to all life around us? In this episode, Kathryn Davis, novelist and the Hurst Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis, explores what animates us and how the fantastical world she creates in her new novel, Duplex, isn't as far from reality as it first appears.

In Virginia Woolf's essay, A Room of One's Own, she writes: "For most of history, Anonymous was a woman." That is to say, that for most of history women did not have the education, the support of society, or the means to write and claim her own work. However, in contemporary society, we have moved past that—or have we? In 2010, VIDA—Women in Literary Arts—found that between 3 to 5 men were being published or reviewed for every one woman that appeared in leading magazines, such as Harpers, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. Danielle Dutton, fiction writer and founder of Dorothy, a publishing project, discusses what these numbers mean to her and the poetics of suburbia in her novel, SPRAWL. In the second half of the episode, Vincent Sherry, the Howard Nemerov Professor of Letters at Washington University, explores the life and literary opinions of Virginia Woolf.

In addition to the interview, you hear a reading selection from SPRAWL in a second podcast.

Danielle Dutton, writer, publisher, and assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, reads from her novel, SPRAWL, which was published in 2010 by Siglio Press.