Madison BookBeat

Stu Levitan welcomes UW history professor Stephen Kantrowitz, whose new book should be of special interest to those of us here in Teejop, it’s Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the 19th Century United States from the good people at the University of North Carolina Press.

If you are like most Americans with an immigrant background, you probably think citizenship is a good thing, because it confers rights and privileges. But for Native Americans in the 19th century, it was something quite different – it was a way to destroy their collectivist culture and ultimately steal their land. Until some Native peoples – notably the Ho-Chunk – figured out how to use citizenship and private property rights to reclaim land and preserve their identity. The Ho-Chunk story in the Removal Era is one of both settler/colonial violence and conquest, but also one of Ho-Chunk resistance, persistence, and return.

It is a story Stephen Kantrowitz is very qualified to tell. He is the Plaenert-Bascom and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also an affiliate faculty member in American Indian Studies and Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison, where he teaches courses on race, indigeneity, politics, and citizenship. His previous books are More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin, 2012) and Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press, 2000). And of particular interest to me, he co-chaired with Dr Floyd Rose, president of 100 Black Men of Madison, the chancellor’s committee in 2018 that produced a very knowledgeable and nuanced report on KKK on campus.

It's a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat UW Professor Stephen Kantrowitz.

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Cole Erickson interviews author Alison Townsend.  Alison is an award-winning author of two poetry collections, The Blue Dress & Persephone in America, and a volume of prose, The Persistence of Rivers. She is also a professor emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

She joined us in the studio to discuss her latest book of memoir-in-essays titled The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2022. The Green Hour can be described as a collection of sparkling lyrical prose that moves effortlessly through time like a red-winged blackbird. Inspired by five beloved settings—eastern Pennsylvania, Vermont, California, western Oregon, and the spot atop the Wisconsin hill where she now resides—Townsend considers the role that Place plays in shaping the self. Through her attentiveness to nature, she reveals the ways that a fresh perspective or new experience in any environment can incite wonder, build unexpected connections, and provide solace and salvation.

On Madison Book Beat, we aim to highlight local authors and book events. And sometimes, we hope that you just might learn about the next book on your to-read pile.

On this pledge drive edition of Madison Book Beat, we flip the table, asking YOU: what’re you reading? What book should we add to our reading list? David Ahrens hosts today’s open line.

Books mentioned by callers and by hosts in this episode include…

Also recommended in today’s episode is Libby, an app that lets patrons use their library card to check out and read eBooks or listen to eAudiobooks.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with musician and scholar Jérôme Camal on his monography Creolized Aurality: Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics (2019, University of Chicago Press).

Jérôme Camal is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his research and teaching focus on music, dance, and postcoloniality across the French Atlantic world. Broadly speaking, he investigates how postcolonial ways of knowing and ways of being are created and transmitted through the body. In Creolized Aurality, Camal details how the practice and sounds of gwoka—Guadeloupe’s secular drumming tradition—illuminate the somewhat contradictory demands for sovereignty and citizenship that inherently accompany Guadeloupeans’ position as French citizens at the margins of the nation-state. While gwoka has been associated with anticolonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. Charting the entangled interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation in gwoka, Camal theorizes “creolized auralities”–that is, expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality.

Image courtesy of Jérôme Camal

Stu Levitan welcomes to Madison BookBeat one of our greatest living writers, perhaps the preeminent American writer, Joyce Carol Oates. She holds a master’s degree and an honorary doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, but of greater immediate interest is that she’s coming back to Madison for an appearance at the Wisconsin Book Festival this Thursday evening the 28th to talk about her new collection, Zero-Sum. That’s at 7 o’clock in the Madison Central Library.

To call Joyce Carol Oates prolific is something of an understatement; her statistics are staggering. By one account, 62 novels, 47 short-story collections, 16 collections of nonfiction, 9 collections of poetry, plays and books for children and young adults. And the quality of her work is just as impressive as the quantity -- she received the National Book Award for Fiction in 1970 for the novel them, Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal in 2010, and she’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize six times over a 45-year period. And those are just the highlights. She also maintains a very active presence on the social media site formerly known as Twitter. It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Joyce Carol Oates

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Cole Erickson interviews author Ben Pladek about his debut novel Dry Land. It is 1917, and a young forester in the north woods of Wisconsin has just discovered he has a magical gift: his touch can grow any plant in minutes. Through this thought-provoking novel, Pladek brings us on a eloquent journey that explores the possibility that such a magical gift could actually be a curse, testing and uprooting the character’s beliefs of nature, love, and self-sacrifice.

Ben Pladek is a literature scholar and writer based in Milwaukee, as well as Associate Professor of English at Marquette University.   He has published short fiction in Strange Horizons, Slate Future Tense Fiction, PodCastle, and elsewhere. 

Dry Land comes out this month (September 2023) from the University of Wisconsin Press.  

This week on Madison Book Beat, host David Ahrens speaks with Jonathan Melrod, a prominent radical, political activist, labor organizer, human rights lawyer and pancreatic cancer survivor, now out with a memoir: "Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War" (September 2022, PM Press).

Melrod's memoir highlights his time as a student radical on the UW-Madison campus, during the peak of anti-war upheaval in the 1960s. But unlike the vast majority of protesters, after the demonstrations ended, Melrod committed himself to organizing the industrial working class for revolution.

What follows is an account of his thirteen years organizing workers in Milwaukee, and then Kenosha, where he takes on the managers of the AMC plant -- while at the same time challenging the sclerotic UAW local to focus on the interests of its members, and fending off attacks from the FBI and local police "red squads."

Melrod describes a balancing of beliefs and interests, short-term and long-term strategies as he deals with the day-to-day problems of speed-ups on the line, discrimination and sex and race harassment, while also focusing on his long-term goals of building a working-class capable of fighting for revolution.

Madison Book Beat host David Ahrens talks with Jon Melrod about his evolution as an organizer and revolutionary, prior to several appearances in Madison:

• On Wednesday, September 27, Melrod will return to the UW-Madison campus for a talk through the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice. The talk, titled "A Radical's Journey from Campus to the Shop Floor in 1970s Wisconsin," will take place at 12:30 at the Havens Wright Center Seminar Room in the Sewell Social Science Building at 1180 Observatory Drive. Registration is required, but a virtual option is available. Register here.

• On Thursday, September 28, Melrod will speak at A Room of One's Own Bookstore at 6pm, in conversation with local labor leader Bill Franks. Find more information here.

Find more about Jonathan Melrod at his website, jonathanmelrod.com, or follow him on Twitter @JonathanMelrod.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with novelist, poet and playwright Quan Barry about her novel When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East (2022, Vintage) and her forthcoming collection of poetry Auction (2023, University of Pittsburgh Press).

“Why do we need to believe our lives must add up to some grand narrative, and what happens when we stop believing this?” asks the narrator of When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East. Set in the vast steppes of Mongolia, the novel follows two brothers on their quest to find the reincarnation of a great lama. There’s sheep stealing, telepathy, and a terrifying sand storm in the Gobi. There’s religious renunciation and epiphany. Death, birth, sacrifice, time passing, time standing still. There is the certainty of impermanence, suffering, and love’s capacity to endure beyond space and time. Barry deftly weaves these themes into delicate, meditative episodes that demand being savored over multiple re-readings.

Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s Northshore, Quan Barry is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Barry is now the author of nine books of fiction, poetry, and drama, and is currently Forward Theater’s first ever Writer-in-Residence. Her play, The Mytilenean Debate, had its world premiere in spring of 2022. Barry is a member of the Dramatists Guild, and samples of her plays can be found at NewPlayExchange.org. In addition to several awards including a 2021 Alex Award from the American Library Association, Barry is one of a select group of writers who have received NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction.

You can find out more about her at quanbarry.com.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Thomas

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Cole Erickson interviews poet Deshawn McKinney. The Milwaukee poet is out with his debut chapbook father forgive me (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2021). It’s a collection described as “an acerbic hip hop hymnal” filled with “fearless, wounding and tender” poems.

About the guest: 

Deshawn McKinney is a writer and poet out of Milwaukee and currently lives in Madison. His poetry has appeared in multiple journals, including River Heron Review as a poetry prize-winner.

He’s a graduate of UW-Madison, where he earned a degree in creative writing while participating in the First Wave hip-hop arts community there.

He also holds a Masters in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Master in Creative Writing – Poetry from the University of East Anglia.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Nicole Fox about her monograph, After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda (2021, The University of Wisconsin Press Press).

How does a society move forward after the mass violence of genocide? What role do public memorials play in creating healing narratives ? Whose experiences get told and re-told, and whose experiences get marginalized as years go by? 2024 marks thirty years since the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and scholar Nicole Fox provides insight into these questions based on years of interviews with survivors who now dedicate their time to working at and maintaining public memorials. Fox makes a powerful argument for conceptualizing memorials "as a form of restorative justice through their ability to provide information on past atrocities, facilitate localized reconciliation and educational programs, and give survivors a sense of hope for the future."

Nicole Fox is an associate professor of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento where she teaches about atrocity crimes, mass incarceration, global criminology and law. Her research centers on how racial and ethnic contention impacts communities, including how remembrances of adversity shape social change, collective memory and present-day social movements. Her book we’re discussing today, After Genocide, focuses on how physical memorials to past atrocity shape healing, community development and reconciliation for survivors of genocide and genocidal rape. Her most recent project examines bystander intervention, with an emphasis on individuals who conducted acts of rescue during times of social unrest and political violence. Her scholarship has been published in Social Problems, Signs, Social Forces, Deviant Behavior, the Journal for Scientific Study of Religion, Sociological Forum, and Societies Without Borders, among others. Her work has generously been supported by numerous national grants, and she also serves on the United Nations Economic and Social Council and contributes to the UN Commission for the Status of Women held annually at the UN headquarters.

You can find out more about Nicole Fox at http://nicolefoxphd.com.

Cover photo courtesy of The University of Wisconsin Press.