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For today’s episode producer Bella Bravo spoke with poet Juliana Spahr about her book, Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment. This close study of how state interests have shaped contemporary U.S. literature was published by Harvard University Press in 2018. In Du Bois’s Telegram, Spahr investigates the relationship between politics and art. Her …

For today’s episode producer Bella Bravo spoke with poet Juliana Spahr about her book, Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment. This close study of how state interests have shaped contemporary U.S. literature was published by Harvard University Press in 2018.

In Du Bois’s Telegram, Spahr investigates the relationship between politics and art. Her research focuses on the institutional forces at work during three moments in US literature that sought to defy political orthodoxies through challenging linguistic conventions: first, the avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth century; second, the resistance-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s; and, finally, in the twenty-first century, the abundance of English-language works integrating languages other than English.

Though her research reveals how easily aesthetic resistance is captured, Spahr does not decide to wholly reject the revolutionary potential of literature. In the end, Du Bois’s Telegram leads her to ask three questions: Can literature escape the nation? Has art effectively supported social movements in the past? What is the revolutionary capacity of literature?

Printed in Presence Africaine in September 1956

“I am not present at your meeting today because the United States government will not grant me a passport for travel abroad. Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our state Department wishes the world to believe. The government especially objects to me because I am a Socialist and because I belief [sic] in peace with Communist states like the Soviet Union and their right to exist in security.

“Especially do I believe in socialism for Africa. The basic social history of the peoples of Africa is socialistic….It will be a fatal mistake if new Africa becomes the tool and cat's paw of the colonial powers and allows the vast power of the United States to mislead it into investment and exploitation of labor. I trust the black writers of the world will understand this and and will set themselves to lead Africa toward the light and nor backward toward a new colonialism where hand in hand with Britain, France and the United States, black capital enslaves black labor again….” W. E. B. Du Bois New York 30 August 1956

Juliana Spahr. Photo by Marissa Bell Toffoli (2010).

GUEST

Juliana Spahr is Professor of English at Mills College, and the author of eight volumes of poetry, including That Winter the Wolf Came, Well Then There Now, and Response, winner of the National Poetry Series Award. Spahr lives in the Bay Area, and following the Occupy Movement, the police shootings of Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown, and the 2009 California college tuition hike protests, she co-founded the communist poetry imprint Commune Editions.

MUSIC

With one exception our music today comes from Dizzy Gillespie. We’ll highlight Gillespie’s Band on tour for the State Department in 1956 and 1957. The band performed in South America, the Middle East, and Greece and Gillespie became known as the "Ambassador of Jazz." We’re featuring three songs arranged by trombonist and band member Melba Liston.

“Annie’s Dance”

“Stella by Starlight”

“My Reverie”

"Yesterdays" (plays under the reading of Du Bois's August 1956 telegram)

"Night in Tunisia" (plays under Spahr reading from "Transitory, Momentary")

“I’m Confessin’”

INTERLUDE

"Kenyatta Listening to Mozart" by LeRoi Jones (published in 1963) mixed into Ornette Coleman's "Embraceable You" off of This is Our Music.

RELATED

Juliana Spahr at PennSound

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Today we highlight exemplars: A. J. Muste, Mister Rogers, and Benjamin Lay. These were men who lived lives that challenged the expectations of their time and culture. These are peacemakers; but they bring the fire of justice in both word and deed. These men fought for the lives of the oppressed. Perhaps the parable of …

Today we highlight exemplars: A. J. Muste, Mister Rogers, and Benjamin Lay. These were men who lived lives that challenged the expectations of their time and culture. These are peacemakers; but they bring the fire of justice in both word and deed. These men fought for the lives of the oppressed.

Perhaps the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Christian Bible gives the clearest instruction - Be good to your neighbor. Help those who have been defined as enemies (not by your own reckoning, but by habit and culture). Truly, Neighbor describes us all.

Our three kings, or three wise men, can offer us some aid when it comes to living lives in the service of all life. Modeled on the Biblical Magi of Christian tradition, these men brought gifts to a child said to be a once and future king. Their three gifts are described generally as gold symbolizing virtue, frankincense symbolizing prayer, and myrrh symbolizing suffering.

SEGMENT ONE

Leilah DanielsonA. J. Muste: bearing the Gold of Virtue to us. A. J. Muste was referred to throughout the world as the “American Gandhi,” and he’s probably best known for his leadership of the peace movement in the postwar era but before that he was one of the most influential of labor organizers of the early 20th century. For this episode I spoke with Leilah Danielson, a professor of History at Northern Arizona University, and author of American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century.

SEGMENT TWO

Michael LongFred Rogers: bearing Frankincense, the symbol of the prayerful life. For this show we spoke with Michael Long, associate professor of Religious Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and author of Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers. Fred Rogers was a complex iconoclast: a television host who hated most television, a soft-spoken Presbyterian minister who purposefully addressed thorny topics others wouldn’t touch, a broadcaster who insisted on speaking as if to a single child watching in his living room. Rogers’ style was subtle, but his politics were radical.

SEGMENT THREE

Marcus Rediker

Benjamin Lay: bearing Myrrh as a symbol of suffering. Lay was an Englishman, Quaker, cobbler, sailor, cultural shock firebrand, cave dweller, autodidact, animal liberationist, and outspoken critic of the hypocrisy of slave-owning Quakers in 18th century Pennsylvania. When you need an example of a person who walks the talk, look no further. Our guest is historian Marcus Rediker author of The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist.

EPISODES

Blessed Are the Peacemakers: The Radical Pacifism of A. J. Muste

What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love, and Mister Rogers?

Walking the Talk: The Revolutionary Abolitionist Benjamin Lay

MUSIC

"Wise One" John Coltrane

"We Three Kings" (Wynton Marsalis, Jimmy Smith, Dave Brubeck)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today Bruce Franklin will be trying to connect lots of dots. He’lll argue, among other things, that we need to learn what three particular dead white guys are still trying to teach us. Two were bombardiers in WWII: Joseph Heller and Howard Zinn. One was bombed in WWII: Kurt Vonnegut. All three raised this question: …

Today Bruce Franklin will be trying to connect lots of dots. He’lll argue, among other things, that we need to learn what three particular dead white guys are still trying to teach us. Two were bombardiers in WWII: Joseph Heller and Howard Zinn. One was bombed in WWII: Kurt Vonnegut. All three raised this question: Who won that so-called Good War? The definitive answer may come in November 2020. We are close to repeating what happened in Germany in the 1930s. Germany was a small almost landlocked nation in the middle of Europe. It could be defeated, but not without the combined forces of the Soviet Union and United States. If next year America votes to become a white nationalist global empire, who or what can save our species from the result?

GUEST

H. Bruce Franklin was once a tugboat mate and then an Air Force navigator and intelligence officer. He is now and has been for more than half a century a progressive activist and renowned historian and author. His nineteen books and hundreds of articles have won him top awards for lifetime achievement in fields as diverse as American studies, science fiction, prison literature, and marine ecology. He retired in 2016 from a 30 year career as a professor at Rutgers University in Newark. His latest book is Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War published by Rutgers University Press. It is memoir, history, and analysis artfully woven together in the service of revelation.

RELATED

Undoing the Falsifications of History: A Crash Course with H. Bruce Franklin

How the U.S. Used Jazz as a Cold War Secret Weapon

MUSIC

“When Johnny Comes Marching Home” Jimmy Smith, Crazy Baby! (1960)

“Yankee Doodle Never Went to Town” Billie Holiday (1935)

“Nightmare” Artie Shaw (V-Disc, 1943)

“Not In Our Name” Charlie Haden and the Liberation Music Orchestra (2005)

“Star Spangled Banner” Louis Armstrong (1960)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Studio Engineer: Dan Withered

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Starting with real estate reforms in the 1970s supposedly instituted to open a path to the American Dream for Black citizens, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s new book, Race for Profit, a study of Black home ownership, argues that the turn from exclusion to inclusion was just another, less explicit, but equally damaging form of systemic racism. By …

Starting with real estate reforms in the 1970s supposedly instituted to open a path to the American Dream for Black citizens, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s new book, Race for Profit, a study of Black home ownership, argues that the turn from exclusion to inclusion was just another, less explicit, but equally damaging form of systemic racism.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion.

Taylor draws on extensive archival evidence to show that the programs encouraging African Americans to invest in real estate were targeted at those most likely to default on payments and slip into foreclosure. Race for Profit goes right to the heart of the perhaps unique mix of Racism and Capitalism in the US by showing that the urban core, which is to say, where Black Americans were living, was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

Homeownership didn’t result in the fulfillment of a dream but instead became a nightmare--and, to quote Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, “a horror story of racial capitalism."

GUEST

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her books include From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016, and the edited volume How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018.

RELATED

How Real Estate Segregated America by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Race for profits: Taylor’s research on ’70s urban housing crisis exposes a familiar history

How Would Lenin Solve the Housing Crisis?

Pred Ed: For-Profit Colleges and Universities (Interchange)

MUSIC

The music for our show comes from Donaldson Toussaint L'Ouverture Byrd II, better known as American trumpeter Donald Byrd.

“Exhibit A” (New Formulas from the Jazz Lab - recorded in 1957, released in 1982)

“Places and Spaces” (1975, Places and Spaces)

“The Loud Minority” (1971, Kofi)

“Design a Nation” (1975, Stepping Into Tomorrow)

“Where Are We Going” (1973, Black Byrd)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Studio Engineer: Dan Withered

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Since the 1970’s, environmentalists have framed our epoch as the “Anthropocene,” a period defined by man’s — and often specifically men’s — unidirectional impact on a quickly heating planet Earth. The so-called Anthropocene continues to be caused by only a small portion of the people on the planet, following hierarchies of race, gender, class, and …

Since the 1970’s, environmentalists have framed our epoch as the “Anthropocene,” a period defined by man’s -- and often specifically men’s -- unidirectional impact on a quickly heating planet Earth. The so-called Anthropocene continues to be caused by only a small portion of the people on the planet, following hierarchies of race, gender, class, and the artificial division of Man and Nature. To call it the “Anthropocene”, however, obscures the underlying dynamics of power that got us to our current planetary crisis.

On this week’s episode of Interchange, show producer Bradi Heaberlin joins Jason Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, in the WFHB studio to untangle the reflexes of the trappings of an Anthropocentric view of the planetary crisis and help us locate ourselves in the Capitalocene. They ask, and begin to answer, the questions: who caused the the climate crisis? Are we in an anthropocene, a period defined by the earth’s people, or a capitalocene? Moore argues that the relationship between people and the web of life is fundamentally about the ways in which capitalist power, exploitation, and appropriation move through nature and the ways nature moves through the confines of capitalist social and economic relations on earth.

GUEST

Jason W. Moore teaches World History and World-Ecology at Binghamton University and is Coordinator of the World-Ecology Research Network. He is the author of several books, including Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, and of numerous award-winning essays in environmental history, political economy, and social theory.

RELATED

Capitalism in the Web of Life: an Interview with Jason W. Moore

Jason W. Moore and Kamil Ahsan September 28, 2015

The End of Cheap Nature? — Jason W. Moore, Omar Dahbour, Ashley Dawson, and Cindi Katz

Pathways to Planetary Sovereignty – Joel Wainwright on Climate Leviathan (Interchange)

Planetary Factory: Jasper Bernes on Logistics and the Violence of Market Competition (Interchange)

Storied States: James Scott’s Against the Grain (Interchange)

MUSIC

Cecil Taylor - Looking Ahead!

"Excursion on a Wobbly Rail"

"Toll"

"Of What"

"Wallering"

"Luyah! The Glorious Step"

CREDITS

Host: Doug Storm

Episode Producer: Bradi Heaberlin

Editor: Doug Storm

Produced by the Interchange Collective

Executive Producer: Kade Young