WFHB

Today’s show focuses on the history of radio in Angola – as an instrument for Portuguese settlers, the colonial state, African nationalists, and the postcolonial state to project power and challenge empire. Marissa Moorman calls these distinct and sometimes overlapping interests Powerful Frequencies, the title of her new book, published by Ohio University Press. Its …

Today’s show focuses on the history of radio in Angola - as an instrument for Portuguese settlers, the colonial state, African nationalists, and the postcolonial state to project power and challenge empire.

Marissa Moorman calls these distinct and sometimes overlapping interests Powerful Frequencies, the title of her new book, published by Ohio University Press. Its subtitle is Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002. In her book Moorman narrates how early radio clubs by white settlers, clandestine broadcasts by guerrilla groups in Angola, and Portueguese counterinsurgency strategies during the Cold War era developed the independent state’s national and regional voice. It’s a history of canny listeners, committed professionals, and dissenting political movements as they used radio to transgress social, political, “physical,” and intellectual borders.

GUEST

Marissa Moorman is associate professor of African history and cinema and media studies at Indiana University. Her previous book is Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, 1945 to Recent Times. She is on the editorial board of Africa Is a Country, where she regularly writes about politics and culture.

RELATED

Cuba In Africa, or Castro’s Worldview (Interchange with Piero Gleijeses)

The long short history of Angola-Israel relations by Marissa Moorman

MUSIC

"Feno de Portugal" performed by Orquestra Dajos Béla Berlim

"Lemba" by Negoleiros do Ritmo

"Weya" by Manu Dibango

"Semba pra Luanda" by Paulo Flores

"Cuka" by Batida

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin

Executive Producer: Jar Turner

In the middle of complexity there is also simplicity – sometimes what is good and what is evil is evident. Today’s interview delves into the Turkish invasion into autonomously governed areas of Northeastern Syria and the history of the Kurdish resistance in this region. On October 6, the Trump administration announced it was withdrawing US …

In the middle of complexity there is also simplicity - sometimes what is good and what is evil is evident.

Today's interview delves into the Turkish invasion into autonomously governed areas of Northeastern Syria and the history of the Kurdish resistance in this region. On October 6, the Trump administration announced it was withdrawing US troops from northern Syria, essentially giving Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a green light to invade Kurdish autonomously-governed regions. The displacement and death tolls are rising. This is a major shift in U.S. foreign policy. Kurdish fighters have been partners with the US and have been hugely effective in helping overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein, battling al-Qaeda in Iraq, and ​ultimately ​pushing the Islamic State out of northern Iraq and Syria.

Our GUEST is David Romano Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University. He’s the author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement from Cambridge University Press in 2006, in addition to numerous articles on the Kurdish resistance, forced migration, globalization and politics in the Middle East. He writes a weekly political column for Rudaw, an Iraqi-Kurdish newspaper, and has spent several years living in and conducting research in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

MUSIC

Our one song today is “Kîne em?” by Şivan Perwer, a Kurdish poet, writer, singer, and musician. Perwer fled Turkey in 1976 due to the political tones of his music and has lived in exile for most of his life. “Kîne em?” means “Who Are We?”

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Episode Producer: Bella Bravo

Executive Producer: Jar Turner

It’s Fall Fund Drive at WFHB when we invite you to become contributing members. This is very literally YOUR community radio station when you become a contributing or sustaining member. We’ll talk more about this throughout the show, but let’s get to it. Today we’ll highlight four previous programs which focus on Climate Change, or …

It’s Fall Fund Drive at WFHB when we invite you to become contributing members. This is very literally YOUR community radio station when you become a contributing or sustaining member. We’ll talk more about this throughout the show, but let’s get to it.

Today we’ll highlight four previous programs which focus on Climate Change, or Climate Disruption. We’ll hear from atmospheric scientist Sara Pryor, journalists Dahr Jamail of Truthout and David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine, and Eduardo Brondizio, professor of Anthropology at Indiana University and the Co-Chair of the Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

We begin with Sara Pryor from December 3, 2013. Pryor also been a guest on Interchange in October of 2009, and by that pattern I should have followed up with her in 2017… And that brings me to an apology. Today’s climate shows skip from December 2013 to April 2019, about a five and a half year gap. That’s a lot of time to lapse after I spoke with Sara Pryor about urgency and needing citizens and policy-makers to PAY ATTENTION. It’s my commitment to you to do better. This is urgent and necessary and Interchange pledges to offer conversations in the future that help us all understand and mobilize for adaptation and mitigation.

Programs Excerpted:

Sara Pryor: Global Warming Is Unequivocal

Don’t Pull No Punches: Dahr Jamail on the End of Ice

The End of Normal: The All-Encompassing Threat of Climate Change

Unequal Suffering: Eduardo Brondizio On Biodiversity and Species Extinction

MUSIC

From Big Black Hole & the Little Baby Star by Sean Hayes (2006)

"Big Black Hole & the Little Baby Star"

“Politics”

"3 a.m."

“Boom Boom Goes the Day”

“All Things”

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Jar Turner

Our conversation with Jasper Bernes, recorded in May of last year, might be called a delayed Part II or even Part III as it features a previous guest extending the parameters of a previous conversation and begins with a consideration of the artist, activist, and social and political critic, photographer and filmmaker, Allan Sekula, who …

Our conversation with Jasper Bernes, recorded in May of last year, might be called a delayed Part II or even Part III as it features a previous guest extending the parameters of a previous conversation and begins with a consideration of the artist, activist, and social and political critic, photographer and filmmaker, Allan Sekula, who was the subject of another Interchange conversation. Sekula was a critic of capitalism and an influential theorist of documentary photography and photojournalism. The links to these shows are below.

The discussion ranges from Sekula political art to the Oakland Port Blockades and Occupy Oakland of which Bernes was an integral organizer, facing the question of how to initiate a general strike in a moment in which Organized Labor is not the power it once was. Bernes' work seeks to understand the best ways to disrupt the distribution systems that supply us with products to consume while describing the inefficiencies and waste of resources (human and material) that spring from the singular efficiency of reducing shipping costs for capitalists. Yes, I promise we’ll unpack all that in the show.

We begin with Allan Sekula’s documentary/essay film, made with Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space, which examines the world surrounding and supporting the capital flows via containerization of product distribution by oceans and seas and through harbors and ports.

What one sees in a harbor is the concrete movement of goods. This movement can be explained in its totality only through recourse to abstraction. Marx tells us this, even if no one is listening anymore. If the stock market is the site in which the abstract character of money rules, the harbor is the site in which material goods appear in bulk, in the very flux of exchange. Use values slide by in the channel; the Ark is no longer a bestiary but an encyclopedia of trade and industry. - Allan Sekula, from "Loaves and Fishes" in Fish Story

GUEST

Jasper Bernes is Managing Editor of Commune magazine and the author of The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, 2017) and two books of poetry: We Are Nothing and So Can You, and Starsdown.

MUSIC

Our only song today is John Coltrane’s “Transition” from the album of the same name, recorded in 1965 but released posthumously in 1970. Transition is surely a theme for our economic, ecological, and geopolitical future.

RELATED

Shooting the Gulf: Allan Sekula In the American Grain

Capital’s (Hidden) Art of War and the Belly of Revolution

The Future Cannot Be Capitalist: Michael Yates on the Working Class

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Audio Editor: Sean Milligan

In the liner notes to the album Pithecanthropus Erectus, Charles Mingus calls the title song “his conception of the modern counterpart of the first man to stand erect – how proud he was, considering himself the “first” to ascend from all fours, pounding his chest and preaching his superiority over the animals still in a …

In the liner notes to the album Pithecanthropus Erectus, Charles Mingus calls the title song "his conception of the modern counterpart of the first man to stand erect – how proud he was, considering himself the “first" to ascend from all fours, pounding his chest and preaching his superiority over the animals still in a prone position. Overcome with self-esteem, he goes out to rule the world, if not the universe, but both his own failure to realize the inevitable emancipation of those he sought to enslave, and his greed in attempting to stand on a false security, deny him not only the right of ever being a man, but finally destroy him completely."

And so here we are.

It is difficult to encapsulate all one means to say or wishes to have said over the course of years of work. I at least have recourse to all the wonderful and wise things that others have said and written, and sung, and played, and acted, to assist in trying to share understanding. Of course, as Mingus also said that "it is amazing how many ways a four-bar phrase of four beats per measure can be interpreted!”

Charles Mingus has accompanied Interchange on at least 14 programs over the last six years. Perhaps he and Henry Thoreau are its tutelary divinities. At least they both seem comparably cantankerous, honest, and dedicated to conversation, to making a world in their art that is not only beautiful and architecturally intricate, but significant and instructive. We only need openness and patience. A tall order these days.

Today Laura Dassow Walls will tell us about how a man, in seeking the best way to be fully alive, gave his life to his neighbors, and the world. In her biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Walls shows us a man deeply engaged with friends, relatives and neighbors, a man thoroughly of his time and place, but in a way that still finds him out ahead of us. In every way we need Henry Thoreau’s work to ring in our ears. We need to front life deliberately and not come to the end of our days knowing that we have not lived.

And further, let me just say, you could do much worse, and many of us have in our university classes, than spending many hours reading and studying just two of Thoreau’s great essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” The first, influential for a non-violent response to tyranny, the second, recognizing the necessity of violence in response to the quotidian and incessant violent institutions of capitalist America.

GUEST

Laura Dassow Walls is William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America and Henry David Thoreau: A Life, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

RELATED

The Radical Democracy of Henry David Thoreau: A Conversation with Branka Arsic’

Against Complacency: Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (Christoph Irmscher)

How Thoreau’s 19th-Century Observations Are Helping Shape Science Today

Thoreau at 200 (book review) by Randall Fuller