The Intellectual

Do video games help explore war? An exhibition at the Imperial War Museum includes Sniper Elite 5, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and a military training simulator. For the 2022 discussion about how we look at warfare past and present Anne McElvoy is joined by writer & broadcaster Louise Blain, retired Colonel Lincoln Jopp, game designer Florent Maurin and IWM curator Chris Cooper.

War Games runs at IWM London until May 2023 and is a free exhibition.

You can find previous discussions available on BBC Sounds and downloadable as the Arts & Ideas podcast:

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

The wines of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand are widely consumed around the world, especially in the UK, the heart of the former British empire. And that’s no coincidence. The British imperial project was central to the cultivation and distribution of wine from its colonies, for reasons both ideological and economic. Historian Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre discusses three centuries of imperial wine production and consumption, once primarily reserved for the elite, then later consumed by the lower classes.

Resources:

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World UC Press, 2022

The post The Wines of Empire appeared first on KPFA.

Are we right to abandon objective truth?

Looking for a link we mentioned? It's here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimes

It has been forty years since postmodernism swept through the academy changing the character of the arts and social sciences, impacting everything from literary criticism to anthropology, art history to sociology. Soon after it invaded culture generally and technical terms such as 'deconstruction' became widespread. Yet now its critics, including members of the British Cabinet, argue it ushered in an era of tribal conflict, woke culture, and populist deception and is at the source of a pernicious decline in reason and objective truth.

Should we seek to reverse the changes that postmodernism brought about and overturn its attack on the intellectual tradition of the West? Or was postmodernism a progressive force whose insights were largely correct? Or, do we need a new radical approach altogether?

Co-founder and editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine Julian Baggini, award-winning journalist Minna Salami, radical philosopher Hilary Lawson and boundary pushing feminist Julie Bindel line up as prosecution and defence with postmodernism in the dock. Hosted by journalist and author David Aaronovitch.

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For this conversation we welcome Winston James to the podcast. Winston James is the author of A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay's Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion, The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer 1799-1851, and Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twenty Century America. James has held a number of teaching positions, most recently as a professor of history at UC Irvine.

James joins us to talk about his latest work, Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik. The book examines McKay's life from his early years in Jamaica to his years at Tuskegee and Kansas State University and his time in Harlem, to his life in London. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay's life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him. The work also locates McKay's closest interlocutors, and those he debated with, as well as McKay's experiences as a worker and within communist and anarcho-syndicalist organizations like the Worker's Socialist Federation and the IWW.

In part 1 of the conversation, we focus on McKay's early years in Jamaica up through the Red Summer of 1919. James begins with a discussion of McKay's family, his life in Jamaica, his brief stint as a constable in Kingston, his early poetry and his influence on the Negritude movement. James also discusses the appeal of the Russian Revolution and of the Third International to Black people in this era, and contextualizes the terror of white vigilante violence in the post war period in the US and how Black people fought back against it. As a content notice some of this discussion is a brief but explicit examination of the abhorrent character of anti-black violence of the period. We close part 1 of the conversation with a discussion of McKay's "If We Must Die," the context of armed self-defense, the context of fighting back, from which it emerged and its global resonance with the emerging Black radicalism of the period and with radical movements decades after its release.

In part two - which will come out in the next couple of days - we will focus on McKay's debates, positions, and activism within the spaces of revolutionary Black Nationalism and the Communist left of the period.

We will include a link to the book in the show notes. We both highly recommend it.

If you would like to purchase Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik by Winston James consider picking it up from the good folks at Massive Bookshop.

As for our current campaign, we have 8 days left this month and we are working towards our goal of adding 50 patrons this month in recognition of 5 years of doing Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. So far this month we have added 34 patrons so if we can add 2 or more patrons daily for the rest of the month we'll hit that goal. You can join up all the wonderful people who make this show possible by contributing as little as $1 per month or $10.80 per year at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

Author Maggie Nelson discusses her book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, with writer Eula Biss.

Maggie Nelson is a writer working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, history, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson received a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. Nelson has written several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, including the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California.

Eula Biss is the author of four books and has been recognized with a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. Biss’ books have been translated into a dozen languages. As a 2023 National Fellow at New America, she is at work on a collection of essays about how private property has shaped our world. She currently teaches nonfiction for the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Sinclair McKay traces the history of the German city through the lives of its inhabitants, and how they weathered the tumult of the 20th century – from the wild hedonism of the Weimar years cut short by Nazism, to the fall of the famed wall that divided East and West.

(Ad) Sinclair McKay is the author of Berlin: Life and Loss in the City That Shaped the Century (Penguin, 2022). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://go.skimresources.com?id=71026X1535947&xcust=historyextra-social-histipad&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fberlin%2Fsinclair-mckay%2F9780241503171

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