WFHB

What is identity and why is it political? In the wake of gender identity politics what has happened to the political category of Woman?

**Gender says that men are inherently violent, aggressive, independent, assertive, and rational. Whereas women are inherently passive, delicate, nurturing, irrational and emotional. These ideas have been disproved thanks in large part to the Feminist Movement. Yet, today in creating an supporting the idea that one can have an internal gender identity, we are regressing. No one is born with a gender; we are born male or female and gender is then imposed on us through socialization. Women do not know they are women because they are born interested in high heels or the color pink. They know they are women because they are female. Treating gender as though it is either internal or a personal choice is dangerous and completely misunderstands how and why women are oppressed under patriarchy as a class of people. Patriarchy was invented to control women's reproductive capacity and gender was created in order to naturalize and reinforce that hierarchical system.**

- Meghan Murphy speaking in front of the Canadian Senate in opposition to (Bill C-16, 2016) An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. That bill added gender expression and gender identity as protected grounds to the Canadian Human Rights Act, and also to the Criminal Code provisions dealing with hate propaganda, incitement to genocide, and aggravating factors in sentencing. It became the law in Canada on June 19th 2017.

GUEST

Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist, and is the founder and editor of Feminist Current. She completed a Masters degree in the department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012. Murphy has been blogging about feminism since 2010. She is known for going against the grain and was the first to publish a critique of Slutwalk, back in 2011, and was one of the few popular feminist writers to publicly articulate both a radical feminist and socialist position against the sex industry, early on.

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Is the Ideology of the Transgender Movement Open to Debate? by Robert Jensen (Voice Male)

PODCAST: Heather Brunskell-Evans wants to talk about the idea of ‘trans kids’

MUSIC

“Rebel Rebel” David Bowie

“Personality Crisis” The New York Dolls

“Peek-a-boo” Siouxsie and the Banshees

"Man" Neko Case

“Androgynous” The Replacements

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

March 27 is our Spring Fund Drive show! We’ll ask you to show your support for Interchange and WFHB while we show our support for women. We’ll hear clips that highlight the fight for women’s rights in the country where 77% percent of women polled will not identify as feminist but believe men and women …

"[Burnett] really invites us, the viewer to, not take a position, but to say, this is what it is, do you wanna do anything about it?...In the banality of oppression, the every day reality of oppression, a toll, a profoundly tragic toll, is demanded of black people." - Michael Martin

"His filmmaking is so quiet. It's a deeply reflective cinema; it's cinema that focuses on characterization, that really gives characters the time and space to demonstrate their humanity. Sadly, that is rarely the way in which black characters are treated in film." - Jacqueline Stewart

We've packed this show to the brim. Last September Jim Naremore came on Interchange to discuss several films by Charles Burnett. Jim had just published his book Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge and Burnett had been awarded an honorary Oscar, or a Governor’s Award, by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Because so much that Burnett has made is so good, and so unseen, we present a part two. Jim starts us off with why Burnett is so important as an artist.

Then we're joined by Michael Martin, editor-in-chief of Black Camera: an International Film Journal, and professor in the Media School at Indiana University, who values Burnett as an artist who shows the banality of oppression. Michael is followed by Jacqueline Stewart, author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity and professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago; and then comes Jonathan Rosenbaum, long-time film critic for the Chicago Reader, now retired, and author of thirteen books, most recently, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition.

We'll end with a conversation with the artist himself, Charles Burnett.

Films covered tonight are:

"The Horse"

"Killer of Sheep"

"Glass Shield"

"When It Rains"

Our music is from John Handy’s Recorded Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival, released in 1966. Its three tracks run underneath the whole program with the exception of a bit of conversation with Burnett regarding Paul Robeson, for which we used Robeson's The House I Live In.

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The Troublesome Films of Charles Burnett - Interview with James Naremore

Burnett's Governors Award acceptance speech

Ava DuVernay honors Charles Burnett at the 2017 Governors Awards

Milestone: Killer of Sheep

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin

Executive Engineer: Wes Martin

Our guest is the founding headmaster of The Boston Arts Academy, Boston’s first public high school for the visual and performing arts, Linda Nathan. Nathan has written When Grit Isn’t Enough, a strong critique of the concept of inculcating “grit” in education as well as of its proselytizers and proponents. It’s published by Beacon Press.

Our music throughout also comes from Massachusetts by way of the Berkshires. We’ll be hearing selections from The Lenox School of Jazz Concert of 1959 performed at the Berkshire Music Barn in Lenox. Prominent among the jazz greats there was Indiana University’s late distinguished professor of music, trombonist David Baker.

Art and work: things we do with our bodies, our hands, our mouths, our ears. Linda Nathan’s educational focus is on ways we are active learners. An arts education has much in common with a vocational education, an education designed to put learners in direct contact with the life of work and the work of life.

Grit has its place in how our children have to deal with inequality in every aspect of their lives--if they didn’t already have grit, how could they even get up in the morning to open their eyes on their government-sponsored, banking-enforced poverty?

The game is rigged as Nathan shows throughout her book: even the best, the brightest, grittiest students can forget to fill out a form, or miss an email alerting them to a loan deadline, and find themselves worse off than they began being now saddled with debt and nothing to show for it. On the heels of Black History Month we discover the continuity of systemic poverty and racism in the US made active in the bureaucratic processes of education funding.

GUEST

Linda Nathan is the first executive director of the Center for Artistry and Scholarship and has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for fifteen years. Dr. Nathan served as founding headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy (BAA), Boston’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts. Nathan is the author of The Hardest Questions Aren’t on the Test.

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Our opening song is "Inflated Tear" by Roland Kirk performed in Prague in 1967...a prelude of sorts of what was to come.

Roland Kirk. Prague, 1967

Across the globe it was a year of countless uprisings. In the US it was the year of police violence against protesters at the Chicago Democratic Convention; it saw the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the COINTELPRO infiltration of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords. And in Bloomington, Indiana, along with numerous anti-Vietnam War student protests, Ku Klux Klan members firebombed the African-American-run Black Market on Kirkwood. Inside this whirlwind of violence and upheaval the artist and the activist merged to leave a remarkable record of the radicalism of 1968.

Here is William Burroughs from “The Coming of the Purple Better One," Esquire, published in November 1968.

The youth rebellion is a worldwide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I do not believe they will calm down and be ad execs at thirty as the Establishment would like us to believe. Millions of young people all over the world are fed up with shallow unworthy authority running on a platform of bullshit.

And yet five decades after the civil rights movement, American society remains hierarchical, exclusionary, and stubbornly resistant to change. Five decades after the so-called Second Wave of feminism pornography is a primary entertainment industry in this country. Five decades have elapsed and millions of young people in this country did indeed become ad execs and millions more like to watch television ABOUT ad execs and their poor lost tiny souls…

Drawing attention to these upheavals in the arts and in politics is Wounded Galaxies.

Wounded Galaxies: 1968 – Beneath the Paving Stones, the Beach is a festival and symposium produced by The Burroughs Century Ltd., welcoming scholars, writers, artists, archivists, filmmakers, performers, and others interested in exploring the intellectual and aesthetic legacy of 1968, during its 50th Anniversary year. Programs focus on the events that occurred in Paris, Chicago, and Prague of ’68 and examine their relationship to, and resonance with current struggles in the US and around the world.

The festival subtitle is a translation of the French slogan “Sous les pavés, la plage!,” a popular resistance graffiti in France Mai ’68 that refers to both the sand beneath cobblestones lifted by students to hurl at police as well as the ‘Situationist’ conviction that the streets–the expression of capital and consumption–could be rediscovered by abandoning a regimented life.

FEBRUARY 6, 2018—FEBRUARY 11, 2018

WOUNDED GALAXIES

1968: Paris, Prague, Chicago

FESTIVAL + SYMPOSIUM

GUEST

Joan Hawkins is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the IU Media School. She has written extensively on experimental and avant-garde cultures. Her most recent book is Downtown Film and TV Culture 1975-2001 (Intellect Press, 2015). She is a member of The Writers Guild at Bloomington and The Burroughs Century.

RELATED

Wounded Galaxies 1968: Beneath the Paving Stones, the Beach

1968 Black Market Fire

MUSIC

"Inflated Tear" by Roland Kirk

"Compared to What" by Less McCann & Eddie Harris

"Volunteered Slavery" by Roland Kirk

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin

Today we discuss the ideology of market egalitarianism and versions of libertarianism from the Levellers in 17th century England through Adam Smith’s "Invisible Hand" and Tom Paine’s Rights of Man and on to Lincoln’s political argument to poor whites that wage labor was slave labor and a man should instead stand on his own two feet on his own plot of land. As rhetoric this has all proven quite influential and persuasive. As reality it has kept most of us under the thumb of a boss and subject to the totalitarian state of the workplace.

Elizabeth Anderson joins us to talk about her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It). In many workplaces, employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners, leaving them with little privacy and few other rights. And employers often extend their authority to workers' off-duty lives. Workers can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern.

From the ideal of free labor for white men, born of westward expansion (at the uncounted cost of genocide and slavery), we end up at the much diminished claim that liberty resides in our unfettered ability to enter into a contract and then to exit from that contract. It’s exit that we’re left with...If you don’t like it, you can leave it...and go where, and do what? And eat what? And sleep where? It turns out you are free to suffer and your one true exit might be through the door feet first.

We begin with the concept of Egalitarianism.

GUEST

Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Imperative of Integration (Princeton) and Value in Ethics and Economics. She joined us via Skype.

RELATED

The Master Class on the Make by Andrew Hartman

What is the point of equality? by Elizabeth Anderson (Ethics, January 1999)

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MUSIC

From R.E.M.'s Document

"Finest Worksong"

"Exhuming McCarthy"

"Disturbance at the Heron House"

"Fireplace"

"Strange"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

“You have done nothing wrong -- though to be honest perhaps that’s a matter of perspective. You marched in a demonstration, or you attended a meeting, or you wrote an essay that appeared in an underground journal, or you merely possessed a copy of that journal. Or maybe you really did break the law. You planted a bomb, carried a weapon, plotted an assassination, managed secret funds, advocated revolution--but you know this was in the service of a just cause, a struggle so that others could live more freely and have the rights they deserve. Perhaps you were just a sympathetic bystander, or perhaps an officeholder who became a victim of regime change. Regardless, what you did or did not do had political meaning and a higher purpose. Surely that puts your deeds, your words, and your allegiances in a different light. One thing is for sure: you aren’t a criminal...And yet you are fingerprinted, examined, interrogated and stripped by armed officers. Perhaps you are beaten, tortured, bound. You have lost mastery of your life...you do not control your fate….On the other hand, you can’t be surprised...Objectively, you could say that the state is acting in accordance with its established principles. These are the terms of political conflict. And you are a political prisoner.”

This is how Padraic Kenney opens his new book, Dance in Chains, where he finally asks “is there any figure in the contemporary world who inspires greater respect than the political prisoner?” But surely the state intends the opposite effect--And the reason why most states have abandoned the practice, the US being one glaring exception. In his book, Kenney reveals the ways prisoners transform and make use of their incarceration in countering states’ efforts to control them.

Dance in Chains, traces the history of modern political imprisonment from its origins in the mid-nineteenth century and draws on examples from regimes ranging from communist and fascist to colonial and democratic, including Ireland, the United Kingdom, Poland, and South Africa. While considering the international movements that have sought to publicize the plight of political prisoners, Kenney examines the actions of the prisoners themselves to find universal answers to questions about the meaning and purpose of their imprisonment.

GUEST

Padraic Kenney is Professor of History and International Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe since 1989, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989, and Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950. He has served as president of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

RELATED

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Music of survival in Mandela's prison (Al Jazeera)

Freedom songs: Chile’s sounds of resistance ring out again (The Guardian)

The State of Terror: Guantanamo Diary (Interchange)

MUSIC

"Death Before Revenge" by Pangur Ban

"Black Bread and Black Coffee" by Strachy Na Lachy

"Kure Kure Kwa Ndinobva" by The Robben Island Singers

"Bonny Mary of Argyle" performed by John McCormack

"Employment" by Thee Faction

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

EXTENDED TAKE (Radio Cut below)

Today’s show is Storied States and is something of “counter-companion” to last week’s program, Storied Into Being, with Anthology Editor and Literature professor Martin Puchner. That show followed the stories which accompanied writing technology on its roughly 5,000 year journey from the accountants of ancient Mesopotamia (which means between two rivers) to the entrepreneurship of Benjamin Franklin. And what should be no surprise, we saw how literature runs a parallel course with state power and class domination--even old Franklin saw fit to become postmaster general of the United States to facilitate his business interests.

In Storied States, we come to find out just why that is by means of examining the shift in how humans lived, moving from hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers. And contrary to official narrative it wasn’t because humans couldn’t wait to give up the so-called arduous life of necessary mobility and settle down. In fact the opposite appears to be true. Humans had to be compelled into lives of drudgery, normally lived in the shackled service of a non-producing elite--priests, kings, scribes...the very classes of people who end up writing and propagating our canonical literary and sacred texts.

At the center of it all, facilitating indenture and servitude, is grain: rice, wheat, and corn in particular. All turn out to be wonderful tools of the taxman and the military campaign.

Returning to Interchange to continue the work of unsettling us is James Scott. He’s author of many books including the classic Seeing Like a State, his most recent is Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. It might almost be called In Praise of Collapse, or Better Living Through Barbarity.

Our music throughout is by New York Art Quartet off of the album Old Stuff, comprised of live recordings from 1965 but first released in 2010 on Cuneiform Records.

RADIO CUT

GUEST

James C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and founding director of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Moral Economy of the Peasant (Yale University Press, 1976), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press, 1980), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998), The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2008), Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton University Press, 2012)

RELATED

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Barbarian Virtues by Samuel Moyn

Paleo Politics by Jedediah Purdy

The Beginning of Elites, Tax, Slavery by Barry Cunliffe

MUSIC

New York Art Quartet, Old Stuff

"På Tirsdag" (Norwegian,

From Alexander the Great's "pillow book" (The Iliad) to the Mayan Popul Vuh; from Gilgamesh to Harry Potter by way of Goethe and the notion of “world literature”--tonight we contemplate The Written World.

World Literature is a concept first expressed by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1827:

If we Germans do not look beyond the narrow circle of our own environment, we all too easily fall into…pedantic arrogance. Therefore I like to look around in foreign nations and advise everyone to do the same on his part. National literature means little these days; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everybody must endeavor to hasten its coming.

But perhaps it is not so much literature but the mode of production that matters here. And it’s interesting that Goethe speaks as if the Kingdom of Heaven was nigh.

Martin Puchner’s new book The Written World (Random House) is subtitled The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization--and it is very much in the spirit of Goethe’s concept. Further, there is a kind of teleology at work here...something inherent in “the word” that does more than shape the human. It speaks us.

GUEST

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His writings range from philosophy and theater to world literature. He is the author of Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes and The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy among several others. He is the General Editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature and creator of the HarvardX MOOC Masterpieces of World Literature.

RELATED

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MUSIC

"A Meticulous Analysis of History" by Pinky and the Brain (Season 2 - Episode 12)

"Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" by The Four Lads

"7 Chinese Bros." by R.E.M.

"The Boston Tea Party" by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band

"The Visitors" by ABBA

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Today we’ll excerpt a 1999 Interchange episode in which host Shana Ritter interviews Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, and Hazel Bryan Massery, the white student made infamous in photographs which capture her hatefully screaming at Eckford. The two are joined by the man who took those photos, Will Counts.

Will Counts

Captured in Count's photo, which is one of the Associated Press's 100 top news photos of the century, a frightened Eckford is followed by a crowd of segregationists. Massery is right behind her, face twisted in anger. Eckford and Massery were in Bloomington on October 25th, 1999, "as part an effort to educate young people about the pain of racial strife and the promise of racial healing." ("Photos Capture More Than a Moment" by Steve Hinnefeld)

2017 was the 60th anniversary of that moment. It’s certainly debatable if the country has changed at all when White Supremacists continue marching in our streets and we are witnesses to the hate-filled among us drive into peaceful public demonstrations attempting, and succeeding, to kill those gathered there.

Our opening song is The "Original Faubus Fables," by Charles Mingus, a direct response to this landmark crisis of Civil Rights. The nine students selected to integrate Little Rock Central High School were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, then Governor of Arkansas.

Mingus and drummer Dannie Richmond sing:

Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us!

Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us! Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us!

Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!

Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie.

Governor Faubus!

Why is he so sick and ridiculous?

He won't permit integrated schools.

Then he's a fool! Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists!

Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

Mingus will accompany us throughout--we’ll select from his 1963 album The Black Saint and Sinner Lady which has been called "one of the greatest achievements in orchestration by any composer in jazz history.” (Steve Huey, AllMusic) This album "seems to state that the black man is not alone but all mankind must unite in revolution against any society that restricts freedom and human rights." (Liner Notes)

We take part of the program's title from the 1958 poem "Little Rock" by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, which reads in part:

The blues weep their musical tears

In the fine morning.

The White South shakes

Its whip and lashes out. Flanked by pedagogical rifles

The black children walk

To their school of terror....

In that Faubus world,

Under that adamant Faubus sky...

(Trs by Teresa Labarta De Chaves)

RELATED

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Will Counts: Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame

Unfounded America: Taking Out the Myth with the Trash

We, the Shackled: Democracy in Chains

The Wages of Whiteness: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Color Line