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  • Interchange – Authority and U: On the Anti-Democratic Campus
    Today we engage with a masterpiece...literally: scholar Steve Volan’s Master’s thesis, Gownsburg: The Campus as Municipal Phenomenon. Volan has also been a City Council member in Bloomington, Indiana since 2004. In Gownsburg, the politician and the geographer seek common ground in order to describe what the University does well - but more importantly, to help us see how far afield that institution has strayed when it comes to democracy and civic engagement.

    Volan’s abstract for his thesis begins this way: "The American Residential college campus is a doppelgänger city, with its own idiosyncratic laws, governance, and economics. Two key facets distinguish the campus from a typical settlement: one, it is built by a central authority with a singular purpose for a narrow demographic; and two, it is built as remotely as possible, apart or away from existing cities, and strives to remain separate from any incorporated place even when surrounded by urbanity."

    In our conversation today we discuss the ways campuses were often designed by one controlling intelligence, to suit a specific ideology, and purpose-built to raise young men to become beacons of that design. To achieve this, the campus would be located in nature, away from the corrupting elements of city life - elements identified as women and alcohol.

    But we begin with the police and the Greek word Polis - as we try to understand the distinctions between the city and the state and how the governing powers of each are not well understood and at the very least not clear to the demos, the people under their authority.

    Our opening song is “Graduation” by Henry Flynt off of the 2001 release Graduation and Other New Country and Blues Music which collects material recorded between 1975 and 1979. Henry Flynt is an American philosopher, musician, writer, activist, and artist connected to the 1960s New York avant-garde.

    GUEST
    Steve Volan is the District VI Representative on the Bloomington, Indiana City Council (2004 - Present) and author of Gownsburg: The Campus as Municipal Phenomenon (unpublished Master's thesis).

    RELATED
    The Mask of the Public Good: What the University Costs Communities (Interchange with Davarian Baldwin)
    Gownsburg: The Messy Child Born of a Dysfunctional Couple (2016 Interchange with Steve Volan)
    These Hollowed Halls: Business Creep(s) in the University (Interchange with Michael Burawoy)

    MUSIC
    Henry Flynt - “Graduation”
    Talking Heads - “(Nothing But) Flowers”
    Compost - “Country Song”
    Henry Flynt - “Solo Virginia Trance”

    CREDITS
    Producer & Host: Doug Storm
    Executive Producer: Kade Young
    59 min
  • Interchange – The Mask of the Public Good: What the University Costs Communities
    The Checkerboard Lounge permanently closed its doors in 2015 - but these doors were not those of the storied blues shrine that had stood on 43rd Street since 1972. The demise of this cultural mainstay opens Davarian Baldwin’s new book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universites Are Plundering Our Cities. In 2003 the University of Chicago put together a plan to save what had become a dilapidated building by relocating the lounge from its original spot to a university-owned property inside the Hyde Park neighborhood’s Harper Court shopping district. As Baldwin writes, this outraged restoration advocates who charged the University with “cultural piracy.” The University claimed it was an act of historic preservation.

    All of our music today comes from the 1981 album Live at the Checkerboard Lounge which captured a visit by the Rolling Stones to a Muddy Waters concert at the famous venue in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. Our opening song is “Champagne and Reefer.”
    "It's a hedge fund that conducts classes."
    How universities make financial moves via their Real Estate offices is a major part of Baldwin’s book, yet it’s only one among many tactics of plunder employed by these seemingly community minded and benign entities that are nestled innocuously within city limits, but yet not at all beholden to the so-called will of the people. From property management and police forces, to research and development deals and labor exploitation, the University is a prime example of an engine of capital accumulation at the expense of community resources. Many examples are offered in the conversation that follows.

    GUEST
    Davarian Baldwin is a professor of American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, an urbanist, historian, and cultural critic whose work examines universities and urban development, the racial foundations of academic thought, intellectual and mass culture, Black radical thought and transnational social movements. Along with In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, published by Bold Type Books, he’s the author of Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (UNC 2007).

    RELATED
    Interview with Davarian Baldwin: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities
    How Does Tax-Exempt IU Contribute To Bloomington?
    Invisible Indianapolis: Race, Heritage and Community Memory in the Circle City
    Indiana Avenue construction met with controversy (IUPUI Campus)
    Why some neighbors are criticizing a plan for a $70M apartment complex on Indiana Avenue
    India Walton’s Blueprint for the Future of Progressive Politics (Buffalo, NY)

    MUSIC
    Live at the Checkerboard Lounge - Muddy Waters & The Rolling Stones
    "Champagne and Reefer"
    "Long Distance Call"
    "Got My Mojo Workin’"
    "Clouds in My Heart"
    "You Don’t Have to Go"

    CREDITS
    Producer & Host: Doug Storm
    Executive Producer: Kade Young
    59 min
  • Interchange – Purna’s Dream: The Universalism of Metaraga
    Our opening song is the opening track off of Metaraga, the 2020 release by the Purna Loka Ensemble for Origin Records. This is "Syzygy."

    In case you’d never heard that word (like me) I’ll offer the definition: A syzygy is the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies (such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse) in a gravitational system; it can also be applied to any two things, alike or not, that are yoked together in relation to one another.

    And according to today’s guest, Purna Bangere, this composition conveys the full force of metaraga.

    Metaraga is a systematic musical framework deeply inspired by ideas and concepts in Algebraic Geometry introduced by Alexander Grothendieck. The journey may start from any of the known genres, traverse into other musical worlds, and ultimately arrive in a “no man’s land,” i.e., music with no East or West.

    This framework combines the full range of Indian microtones and oscillations, such as meend and gamak in Hindustani music, and kampitam and sphuritam in Carnatic music, with Western-style key changes, or modulation, and polyphony, which is music containing two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody. Moreover, in the framework, blues-style melodies evocatively emerge as the best technical and aesthetic bridges between the Indian and Western genres.

    Most of Bangere’s current compositional work is in collaboration with multi-Grammy-winning director of Turtle Island String Quartet, David Balakrishnan. Joining them to complete the Purna Loka Ensemble are bass virtuoso Jeff Harshbarger from Kansas City, and the talented Amit Kavthekar from Boston on Tabla.

    Balakrishnan has said that Bangere "is finding a way to enter polyphony through the mathematics-based system and to change keys in a great, subtle way, without himself learning the Western system...He’s adding gamakas (oscillations) to known Western chord progressions, and nobody has done that to that level that I have heard.”

    If you will recall from our show "The Raga Role," on Carnatic music, or Indian Classical Music, Viren Murthy told us that raga was notoriously difficult to define. Today Bangere takes up the challenge on the way to describing how his system, the metaraga, expands the formal capacity of the raga.

    Our show takes us from Mysore, India to Lawrence, Kansas, by way of Boston, Massachusetts along the arc of the musical education of Purna Bangere.

    GUEST
    Purna Bangere is a professor of mathematics at the University of Kansas, a trained Carnatic violinist, and the leader of the Purna Loka Ensemble.

    RELATED
    The Raga Role: On Caste and Carnatic Music (Interchange)
    Indian American Math Professor Purnaprajna Bangere is Building Bridges Between Music and Math

    MUSIC by the Purna Loka Ensemble
    "Syzygy"
    "Triality I"
    "Triality II"
    "Alabama"
    "Fibration"
    "Triality III"
    "Abhogi Varnum" (ID underbed)

    We also play a bit of Aretha Franklin's 1972 "Amazing Grace."

    CREDITS
    Producer & Host: Doug Storm
    Executive Producer: Kade Young
    59 min
  • Interchange – The Cunning Figure of the Virus (Repeat)
    Today's show is a repeat from June 2, 2020. In the introduction we state that Louisiana had the highest rate of mortality from COVID-19 in the United States. That is no longer the case. Louisiana is now 7th on that list with the following states now having higher rates of mortality (deaths per 100,000): New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Mississippi, and Arizona.

    ***

    Episode producer Bella Bravo begins the interview asking about Povinelli’s most recent academic work, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. In 2017, Geontologies retheorized biopower and necropolitics in the age of climate change, and Povinelli’s theses about the shifting phases of capitalism are drawn from the observations of her indigenous collaborators in Northern Australia. The fact that the Virus is a symptom of capitalism seems like a simple conclusion, but Povinelli explains that the Virus reveals how historic modes of governance that regulate the distinction between Life and Nonlife don’t actually work. The Virus is both Life and Non-life, and the rhetorics of war and health don’t fix the danger of the structures that mark some people as worthy of health care, steady income and life, and others not so.

    The novel coronavirus is “a virus pulled out of its habit and habitats by routes and worlds that hold and enhance extractive capitalism, she says in an essay accompanying excerpts from her forthcoming book. Tentatively entitled The Inheritance, this more personal work brings visuals to print in a new form for Povinelli. The book juxtaposes hand-drawn and montage images with memoir to investigate the social infrastructures that differentially define our individual and collective experience, past and future. The book follows Povinelli’s ancestral story beginning at the turn of the century on the violent frontier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Italian peninsula in the midst of national unification, up to her childhood in Louisiana during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of renewed struggle against white supremacy. But the effects of late liberalism and its twin late capitalism threaten once again to overwhelm as Louisiana has the highest rate of mortality from COVID-19 in the United States and black people in Louisiana make up 70 percent of the deaths.

    GUEST
    Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and the author of, most recently, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism and Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism, published by Duke University Press.

    RELATED
    The Virus: Figure and Infrastructure by Elizabeth Povinelli
    Geontologies of the Otherwise by Elizabeth Povinelli
    Inheritance, Part 1 by Elizabeth Povinelli
    The Infrastructures of Inheritance by Elizabeth Povinelli
    59 min
  • Interchange – The Raga Role: On Caste and Carnatic Music
    TM Krishna receiving The Ramon Magsaysay Award at Manila, Phillipines (2016)For today’s show we welcome two guests - returning to Interchange is Viren Murthy, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and also joining us is Annapurna Mamidipudi who is currently a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. They’ve co-authored a paper titled “Raga and the Problem of Ownership: Knowledge and Culture in Carnatic Music” which explores the evolution of what we might call the modernism of the classical in South Indian music and the ways the production of this form of music traces the lines of reformism within the Brahmin caste. By accepting some changes to a tradition, a hierarchy of social class can be maintained - but we’ll also discover that changes in the practice of that music from within can also challenge the exclusivity enforced by institutional structures.

    One example comes from the performer of our opening song. R. Vedavalli's practice has been to return to classical texts to reconstruct ragas through the compositions as they were sung before the twentieth century. By singing ragas in an older form and going against the grain of contemporary practice a sense of strangeness is elicited which might cause listeners to question what they understand as knowing Carnatic music.

    Throughout the conversation that follows our guests focus on two primary difficulties - the constant confrontation between the so-called West and its intellectual influence on social practices and knowledge production; and the liberal progressive critique on all things ordered along caste lines. And perhaps one more problem - the pressure of technological change is ever-present.

    And at the center of all this is the raga, and although there is a shared understanding of the basic framework of a raga, it changes by being constantly reproduced through practice.

    Annapurna Mamidipudi

    Today, beyond opening with Vedavalli and the old sung so as to seem new, we’ll also hear performances from Jon Higgins, MS Subbulakshmi, GN Balasubramanyum, and TM Krishna - and while raga is a form centered on voice, we’ll also hear one performed on a saxophone, an instrument that goes against the grain of tradition.

    GUESTS
    Annapurna Mamidipudi, Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany.

    Viren Murthy

    Viren Murthy, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

    RELATED
    Becoming African in America: The Radical Politics of Fela Kuti (Interchange with Rasul Mowatt)
    Revolutionary Parallels: Zhang Taiyan and Anti-Imperialism (Interchange with Viren Murthy)

    MUSIC
    R. Vedavalli, "Seetamma Mayamma"
    Jon B. Higgins, "Darini Telusukonti"
    M.S. Subbulakshmi, "Giridhara Gopala"
    Kadri Gopalnath, "Valachi Vachi"
    G.N.Balasubramanyum, “Shree Subramanyaya Namasthe”
    T M Krishna, "Poromboke"

    CREDITS
    Producer & Host: Doug Storm
    Executive Producer: Kade Young
    59 min
  • Interchange – José Martí and Cuban-Mindedness
    José Martí, Jorge Arche, 1943, From the collection of: The Bronx Museum of the Arts.

    Original air date August 22, 2017.

    Philosopher, poet, and revolutionary, José Martí, believed that knowledge and understanding do not originate within us, but come to us through our cultural institutions and that what is expressed when you “express yourself” is a collective mind and so if your culture is imperial, slave-holding, and expansionist, what kind of self will you express?

    From "Amor de Ciudad Grande" by José Martí
    Times of gorge and rush are these:
    Voices fly like light: lightning,
    like a ship hurled upon dread quicksand,
    plunges down the high rod, and in delicate craft
    man, as if winged, cleaves the air.
    And love, without splendor or mystery,
    dies when newly born, of glut.
    The city is a cage of dead doves
    and avid hunters! If men’s bosoms
    were to open and their torn flesh
    fall to the earth, inside would be
    nothing but a scatter of small, crushed fruit!
    I asked our guest, Susan Babbitt, for suggestions on what to read regarding Cuba and Castro and she recommended the book Fidel and Religion which contains conversations on Marxism and liberation. It gives the intellectual history of the revolution and the reference to religion, as Einstein noted, is most sensibly thought of as a capacity for wonder, which takes humility. Something directly opposed to an imperial insistence on power and material accumulation.

    GUEST
    Susan Babbitt is an associate professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, author of Humanism and Embodiment: From Cause and Effect to Secularism, and most recently of José Martí, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Global Development Ethics. She’s also a frequent contributor to Counterpunch.

    RELATED
    Articles in Counterpunch by Susan Babbitt
    Don’t Raise Liberalism From the Dead (If It is Dead, Which It’s Not)
    Cuba’s “Battle for Ideas” Affects Us All, or Could, and Should
    Invisible in Life, Invisible in Death: How Information Becomes Useless
    Cuba’s Nobel Nomination and Baldwin’s Call to “Begin Again” by Susan Babbitt (July 29, 2020)

    MUSIC
    Songs by Pablo Milanés from Versos Sencillos De José Martí (1973)
    “Yo Soy Hombre Sincero”
    “Vierte Corazon Tu Pena”
    “Banquete de Tiranos”
    “Mi Verso Es Como un Puñal”
    “Amor de Ciudad Grande”
    ID - "Poetica"

    CREDITS
    Producer & Host: Doug Storm
    Executive Producer: Kade Young
    59 min
  • Interchange – Exporting Jim Crow: Big Tobacco and Sharecropping in China
    Today's show is a repeat of "Roll Jim Crow" (April 30, 2019) about the very intentional practice of white supremacy by the corporate managers of the American Tobacco Company and how, via corporate imperialism, that same racial project found expression in countries all over the world, most notably China.

    Some of the topics covered are:

    * James Duke and debunking the myth of the brilliant innovator disrupting industrial practices and what that myth actually hides - the manipulations of corporate law.
    * The intentional structure of the Jim Crow corporation
    * How Black employees still found ways to be proud of their labor and identify with the corporation which is a community identity too.
    * Bright Leaf tobacco in China and how the British American Tobacco company created a kind of Jim Crow culture of debt and sharecropping.

    GUEST
    Nan Enstad is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the current Director of the UW Food Studies Network. Enstad is the author of Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Popular Culture and Labor Politics at the turn of the Twentieth Century, which appeared from Columbia University Press in 1999.

    I interviewed Nan Enstad in Madison, Wisconsin at the studios of community radio station WORT. Many thanks for their hospitality.

    RELATED
    Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy by Nan Enstad (Boston Review)
    How Jim Crow Went to China in the Making of Big Tobacco (Interview with Nan Enstad in Truthout)
    Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People
    Slavery’s Imperial Skein: Knitting Together the Capitalist Empire
    United Slaughterhouse of America: Josh Specht on the Cattle-Beef Complex

    MUSIC
    “Lucky Day” performed by Judy Garland
    “Nicotine Stain” by Siouxsie and the Banshees
    “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” by Tex Williams
    “Last Cigarette” by Dramarama
    “Cigarette” by The Smithereens

    CREDITS
    Producer & Host: Doug Storm
    Executive Producer: Kade Young
    59 min
  • Interchange – Revolutionary Parallels: Zhang Taiyan and Anti-Imperialism
    Zhang Taiyan

    How can one expect the revolutionary struggles in Qing China at the turn of the 20th century to matter to humans in the United States? In the wake of celebrating the outcome of the American Revolution in 1776 we might turn our attention to revolutionary parallels.

    The great globe has been settled, divided, conquered, and ruled by humans for thousands of years. And once modes of travel advanced, the land and sea became a kind of geopolitical construct. People once called pirates become explorers and conquistadors become discoverers. And as we learned last week, marauders in the form of Western or European imperialists leap and skip across great swaths of terrain they bring their worldview with them - not to mention the ships, guns, drugs, and so-called culture.

    While it can be startling to find that the grandfather of a US president was an extremely violent narco-trafficker in East Asia, it can be just as startling to find a 1903 pamphlet proposing the overthrow of the Manchu government citing Western thinkers like Rousseau, Washington, and Walt Whitman. (Startling also to find Washington described as a thinker, but perhaps that’s something lost in translation.)

    That nationalist pamphlet urging the creation of the Chinese Republic was called The Revolutionary Army and it was written by Zou Rong with a preface written by Zhang Taiyan. Both were imprisoned for this act, where Zou Rong died at the age of 20. Zhang was released in 1906 and even more prepared to foment the revolution which would come to a head in 1911.

    Much of the turmoil in China was the result of foreign invasion, both military and ideological, and both might be called “progressive” interventions bolstered by the Enlightenment ideas of so-called Western superiority. Illustrative of this, but impossible to detail here, is the Boxer Rebellion of 1911, an armed insurrection against those “progressive” invaders that was first supported but then opposed by the Qing Government led by the Manchu minority. This was a defining event for Zhang Taiyan who cut off his queue (or what is often called a pig tail) in defiance, an act for which he might have lost his head.

    In the conversation that follows references are made to Cuba’s revolutionary and poet José Martí, to W. E. B. Du Bois and his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, to the German idealist philosopher Hegel, the central figure of Western imperialist philosophy, to the Yogachara Buddhism of India, and so much more that likely is unknown to most of us in the U.S. Thankfully there are books to consult on these subjects! One such is by today’s guest, Viren Murthy.

    GUEST
    Viren Murthy is an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He's the author of The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia (Brill, 2014) and The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011).

    RELATED
    Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People (Interchange with Mark Driscoll)
    José Martí: The Whole Revolution (Interchange with Susan Babbitt)
    W. E. B. Du Bois and the Wages of Whiteness (Interchange with Bill Mullen)

    59 min
  • Interchange – Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People
    Our opening song is “Cherokee” from Count Basie, featuring Buck Clayton, which is, I promise, oddly apropos for a show which centers on narco trafficking in East Asia.

    The music for this program features two men who likely had some measure of influence on each other’s future work: American Jazz Trumpeter Buck Clayton and Chinese scholar, composer and songwriter Li Jinhui.

    While the music we’ll hear is far removed from the historical context of today’s show - the period of the Opium Wars in China (or what our guest calls "The Wars for Drugs") in the mid-19th century - it does seem to me to fairly illustrate the unreliability of official histories (state and corporate propaganda) even as it is demonstrative of hegemonic realities on the ground.

    From 1934 or 1935 to 1937, Kansas native, Buck Clayton, was a leader of the jazz group the "Harlem Gentlemen" in Shanghai at the Canidrome Ballroom. Clayton would play a number of songs that were composed by Li Jinhui, adopting the Chinese music scale into the American scale. While there is much to say about this period and about this musical relationship - there is not much time here. One perspective is that Li learned much from Clayton and because of that transculturation came to be known as the "Father of Chinese popular music.” This music came to be considered “Yellow Music” and was classed with pornography as a corrupter of public morals. It was wildly popular.

    As there are no recordings of Clayton available to us from this period we’ll play songs from his work with Count Basie from the Original American Decca Collection spanning the years 1937 to 1939. And we’ll hear one song written by Li Jinhui - titled "Drizzle" - sung by his daughter Li Minghui, recorded in 1932.

    In his new book, The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven (Duke), Mark Driscoll examines nineteenth-century Western imperialism in Asia and the devastating effects of what he calls "climate caucasianism"—the white West's pursuit of rapacious extraction at the expense of natural environments and people of color conflated with them.

    Driscoll reframes the Opium Wars as "wars for drugs" and demonstrates that these wars to unleash narco- and human traffickers kickstarted the most important event of the Anthropocene: the military substitution of Qing China's world-leading carbon-neutral economy for an unsustainable Anglo-American capitalism powered by coal.

    Today we track US and British drug smugglers like Warren Delano, Jr., the grandfather of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a partner in the firm Russell & Company which decorated it’s ship masts in the murdered bodies of Chinese men who refused the opportunity to be business associates. Another partner at Russell & Co, John Murray Forbes, was the great grand Uncle of US Senator John Kerry. And yes, those Forbes. We’ll also travel from Vera Cruz, Mexico to Yokohama, Japan aboard Commodore Matthew Perry’s ship, the Powhatan accompanied by a minstrel troupe. Oh the places white Christian men will go to sell drugs and guns and people.

    GUEST
    Mark Driscoll, associate professor of East Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina, whose new book is The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection published by Duke University Press.

    RELATED
    Extra-Acting and Extracting Whiteness: Mark Driscoll
    59 min
  • Interchange – Babo In the Sunshine: Herman Melville and the Tryal Rebellion
    Last week’s show with Zach Sell was about how US Slavery troubled the imperial imaginary, asking if US plantation overseers could translate the brutal practices of slavery’s violent efficiencies onto Britain’s colonial empire in India and the West Indies in the mid-19th century.

    Next week’s show with Mark Driscoll again centers on Imperial Britain and the ecological disaster of capitalism inscribed onto the land via narco- and human trafficking in China and Japan in the 19th century as all of nature is reduced to material resource through warfare, lawfare and rawfare.

    To travel from India to China we’ll board the seal-hunting ship the Bachelor’s Delight, captained by Amasa Delano of Duxbury, Massachusetts. En route we’ll encounter a distressed ship in calmed waters, the Spanish “slaver” the San Dominick, captained by Benito Cereno.

    Which is to say, today we revisit the great novella of Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” serialized in 1855 in Putnam’s Magazine. Written with the US Civil War on the horizon, Melville cast a backwards stare into the bright light of the Haitian Revolution, turning The Tryal Rebellion of 1805, a shipboard slave uprising in the South Pacific off the coast of Chile, into a staged drama exposing the so-called master race as ignorant and deluded by an optimism born of unrestrained violence.

    The Haitian Revolution extended from 1791 to 1804 when Haiti won its independence from France. Melville sets his shipboard revolution in 1799 clearly intending his US readers be reminded of that world-historical event.

    For today’s show two previous conversations about the novella have been combined: one with Jonathan Elmer from the 2013 first episode of WFHB's The Custom House, called "Babo's Razor"; and one with Maisha Wester and Christopher Freeburg, from the 2015 Interchange episode, "Shadows Are Black." And at one point we’ll hear a bit of an audio production of the story by WFHB’s Books Unbound program.

    Our music today comes from Charles Mingus who I consider the Melville of Jazz, an ever unfolding artist of oceanic genius - this is the title track from the 1961 Tonight at Noon - which might be interpreted as “darkness visible.”

    GUESTS
    Maisha Wester, author of African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places; Christopher Freeburg, author of Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century America; and Jonathan Elmer, author of Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World.

    RELATED
    Babo's Razor (Episode 1 of The Custom House)
    Shadows Are Black: Slavery's Long Setting (Interchange)
    Confronting Black Jacobins (on the Haitian Revolution, with Gerald Horne)
    The Legacy of C.L.R. James (Interchange)

    MUSIC - Charles Mingus
    "Tonight at Noon" (Tonight at Noon)
    "Prayer for Passive Resistance" (Pre-Bird)
    "Eclipse" (Pre-Bird)
    "Weird Nightmare" (Pre-Bird)
    "Things Ain’t What They Used to Be" (Mingus Dynasty)

    CREDITS
    Producer & Host: Doug Storm
    Executive Producer: Kade Young
    1 hr

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