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While today’s conversation centers on slavery’s influence during the forty years from the 1830s to the 1870s, we’re going to begin a bit prior to that with a journal entry by Benjamin Banneker who lived from 1731 to 1806 near Ellicott's Mills, Maryland (now known as Ellicott City). In that entry Banneker recalled a "great locust year" in 1749, a second in 1766 during which the insects appeared to be "full as numerous as the first", and then a third in 1783. He went on to predict that the insects "may be expected again in the year 1800 which is seventeen since their third appearance to me."

Of course the insects he’s speaking of are what we know as the Brood X cicadas. As Interchange is recorded in Bloomington, Indiana, where cicadas are profuse, these fascinating creatures make an appearance on today’s program as an ever-present background sound, a kind of electric undersong to the conversation.

Benjamin Banneker was a free African-American almanac author, surveyor, landowner and farmer who became known for assisting Major Andrew Ellicott in a survey that established the original borders of the District of Columbia. He also corresponded with Thomas Jefferson on the topics of slavery and racial equality.

In his new book, Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital published by the University of North Carolina Press, our guest, Zach Sell, writes that Jefferson “envisioned the future U. S. as a white racial ethno-state and was committed to Black removal and replacement by whites…” As part of that project the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 served as a place “to experiment with his vision of Black territorial diffusion...to decrease Black population density and therefore the possibility of Black revolution against slaveholders…”

Black slavery, Black revolution, and Black emancipation inform the imaginary of imperialism and white settler colonialism and its aftermath in the 19th century. While Britain outlawed slavery in 1833, slavery set the tone, and template, for imperial conquest by means of capitalist commodity production.

In our show today we follow the course of plantation ideology as an export - US plantation overseers were sent to India to manage attempts to transform the production of staples by the introduction of Carolina rice and the plantation methodologies of cotton in order to supply Britain with the resources that were embargoed during the U.S. Civil War. We also take a look at colonization projects which created new forms of dispossession and coercion to apply to emancipated former slaves as well those of Chinese indentured labor and unemployed Lancashire cotton manufacturers.

Even as so many of these projects resulted in failure, the legacy of the slavery imaginary continued to inform the hierarchical visions and violent practices of Empire.

Our opening song is “Jaipur” by Indian Jazz guitarist Amancio D’Silva off of the 1969 album Hum Dono which features Jamaican-born saxophonist Joe Harriott. All of today’s music is from D’Silva who was influenced by American jazz guitarists Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery.

GUEST

Zach Sell is visiting assistant professor of history at Drexel University. He is a scholar of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the nineteenth century, whose book, Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital examines the terrible convergence between the expansion of U.S. slavery and the growth of the British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century.

RELATED

To Thomas Jefferson from Benjamin Banneker, 19 August 1791

SOUTH AFRICA - CIRCA 1950: South African gold miners. (Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Today’s show offers a remix of a July 2016 interview with Alex Lichtenstein on the documentary photographs of Margaret Bourke-White, “Focus on Apartheid.” The conversation was recorded live in our WFHB studios.

All of our music for this remix comes from five albums by Johnny Dyani, South African double bassist and pianist. In the early 1960s, Dyani was a member of South Africa's first integrated jazz band, The Blue Notes. In 1964, the band fled South Africa to seek musical and political freedom. We’ll open with "Needle Children," off of the 1984 release, Afrika.

As a photographer for Life and Fortune magazines, Margaret Bourke-White traveled to Russia in the 1930s, photographed the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938, recorded the liberation of Buchenwald a the end of World War II, and documented “Calcutta streets strewn with putrefying corpses decaying in the heat and being consumed by bloated vultures” in the aftermath of the 1946 Muslim-Hindi communal riots. In 1949, Life magazine sent her to South Africa to take photographs in a country that was becoming racially polarized by white minority rule. Life published two photo essays highlighting Bourke-White’s photographs, but much of her South African work remained unpublished...that is, until our guest got his hands on it.

Men at "antipass" protest, near Johannesburg, 1950 Margaret Bourke-White/Time-Life/Getty Images

In Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid, published by Indiana University Press, Alex Lichtenstein and co-author Rick Halpern include two essays that explore Bourke-White's artistic and political formation and provide background material about the cultural, political, and economic circumstances that produced the rise and triumph of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa.

And a brief note from 2021 listening back on 2016 - it’s quite something to realize how much doing the work of producing this program has taught me. I say frequently that my ignorance appears to be limitless and so to the topics for Interchange conversations. Every program fills in a bit of what I’ve been missing and I hope you feel the same way.

GUEST

Alex Lichtenstein is the Editor for the American Historical Review and Professor of History at Indiana University, where he teaches US and South African history. His research focuses on the intersection of labor history and the struggle for racial justice in societies shaped by white supremacy. His first book, Twice the Work of Free Labor, examined the role of convict leasing and chain gangs in the remaking of the American South in the half century after the Civil War. His most recent publication is Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Geography of American Memory, with his brother, photographer Andrew Lichtenstein.

RELATED

Photos in Black and White: Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid in South Africa

22 Pictures That Helped Define The 20th Century

Interchange – Focus on Apartheid: The Photojournalism of Margaret Bourke-White (July 19, 2016 - live version)

This Extended Version of "Captivating Animals" with Thalia Field includes a discussion of Émile Zola and his attempt to recreate in fiction the scientific methodology of the Positivists and Claude Bernard; a reading of a medical journal article on the “insanity” of antivivisectionists; the tragedy of Charles Darwin's "support" for vivisection.

Radio Version of Captivating Fictions

RELATED

Personhood (New Directions website)

“TURNS BEFORE THE BEFORE CURTAIN” by Thalia Field

A Conversation with Thalia Field, Author of Experimental Animals (January 15, 2017)

Thalia Field: The TNB Self-Interview (November 24, 2016)

Subjects of Captivity: Personhood Rights and Nonhuman Animals (Interchange with Jeff Sebo)

Ghosts, Dogs, and the Law: On Constructing Criminality and Negating Persons (Interchange with Colin Dayan)

GUEST

Thalia Field is 3rd generation from the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. She worked in theater as a writer, director, and producer before beginning to write books. Thalia has lived and worked in Paris, Berlin, and New York, as well as spending many summers in Juneau, Alaska where she helped to start a summer writing project. Thalia has been teaching fiction and multimedia and interdisciplinary creative/critical practice in the Literary Arts department at Brown University since 2000 where she is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing.

MUSIC

All of our music comes from Tim Berne, saxophonist, composer, and record label owner. We range across multiple albums and band lineups. The pieces come from Visitation Rites, Clause & Reflect, Diminutive Mysteries, Sacred Vowels, Sanctified Dreams, and Pre-Emptive Denial.

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Our guest today, Thalia Field, is an acclaimed experimental novelist, essayist and poet, modes of writing she often combines in one text. It’s also likely that historical figures, philosophers, or dog trainers, will walk onto the page to be the connective tissue between multiple distinct texts that span decades. In what follows, we’ll hear Field talk about one piece of her writing as a “braid” of texts or voices - and today Interchange attempts a kind of mimicry.

We’ll look at three books that form a trilogy of investigation and creation - Bird Lovers, Backyard (New Directions), Experimental Animals (Solid Objects), and most recently Personhood (New Directions). The first and third might be characterized as elastically essayistic and the middle text is a novel, though subtitled “reality fiction.”

Experimental Animals explores the origins of both experimental literature and modern experimental bio-medicine. Based on the marriage of Claude and Fanny Bernard, the novel also features women activists who have been overlooked in science history and focuses particularly on the living animal body in pain (vivisection) as foundational to the history of physiology.

All three books are connected by explorations on science, philosophy, and identity - and with the most recent, Personhood, the consideration of how beings as “selves” are entangled in ways that call into question the arbitrariness and cruelty of human classifications and value hierarchies.

The cast of characters we’ll meet include Claude Bernard, the French “father” of physiology and experimental medicine - vile practitioner of vivisection; Anna Kingsford, medical doctor and anti-vivisectionist; Konrad Lorenz, Austrian “father” of animal behaviorism and Nazi bird lover; Vicki Hearne, dog trainer and philosopher; Happy the Elephant; and Adam the Parrot.

Throughout we’ll hear excerpts from all three books read by the author.

The Extended Version includes a discussion of Émile Zola and his attempt to recreate in fiction the scientific methodology of the Positivists and Claude Bernard and a reading of a medical journal article on the "insanity" of antivivisectionists.

RELATED

Personhood (New Directions website)

“TURNS BEFORE THE BEFORE CURTAIN” by Thalia Field

A Conversation with Thalia Field, Author of Experimental Animals (January 15, 2017)

Thalia Field: The TNB Self-Interview (November 24, 2016)

Subjects of Captivity: Personhood Rights and Nonhuman Animals (Interchange with Jeff Sebo)

Ghosts, Dogs, and the Law: On Constructing Criminality and Negating Persons (Interchange with Colin Dayan)

GUEST

Thalia Field is 3rd generation from the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.

We begin with some "Happy" news...last week the New York Court of Appeals—one of the most influential state courts in the United States—agreed to hear the habeas corpus case Happy the elephant - an autonomous and cognitively complex nonhuman animal who has been imprisoned at the Bronx Zoo for over four decades. This marks the first time in history that the highest court of any English-speaking jurisdiction will hear a habeas corpus case brought on behalf of someone other than a human being.

Nonhuman animals - are they subjects or objects, persons or things? Currently, those are the only options available in the legal system; you’re either a person, and so have attendant basic and legal rights, or you’re a thing to be used (and abused and wasted and eradicated) by those deemed persons. A change in the legal status of nonhuman animals from “thing” to “person” or even perhaps to some new third category, might be the way humans begin to address their role as the great exterminator of living beings on the planet.

GUEST

With us today to discuss personhood and other political rights for nonhuman animals is Jeff Sebo, Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, and Philosophy, and Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program at New York University. His research focuses on bioethics, animal ethics, and environmental ethics, and topics such as food, animals, and the environment; agency, well-being, and moral status; and the ethics of activism, advocacy, and philanthropy. He has co-authored two books, Chimpanzee Rights, and Food, Animals, and the Environment.

This is a return visit to Interchange for Jeff Sebo who joined us in January of 2020 for our show Beast’s Burdens: On Climate Change and Nonhuman Animals. In that show it was made plain how the human animal, homo sapiens, is simply a catastrophe considered from the perspective of the nonhuman animal. We breed and kill at least 100 billion animals per year for food and at least 115 million per year for research. Fishing kills 1-3 trillion animals per year. Deforestation destroys animal habitats and on and on it goes.

Segment One - the case of Happy the Elephant and the Nonhuman Rights Project.

Segment Two - how does the law define "person" - and how does it exclude beings that fit those definitions?

Segment Three - Autonomy, Speciesism, Capacities...

Segment Four - The ugly truth - the industrial food system makes "persons" to be fed to humans. What can we expect of this reality when it comes to recognizing nonhuman animal rights?

RELATED

Should Chimpanzees Be Considered ‘Persons’? by Jeff Sebo

First elephant to pass mirror self-recognition test; held alone at the Bronx Zoo

The Need for Chimpanzee Rights

MUSIC

Open - "Anonanimal" - Andrew Bird

Break 1: "Nellie the Elephant" - Mandy Miller (1956)

Break 2 - "Monkey to the Moon" - The Coral

Break 3 - "A Reflection" - The Thermals

Close - "Caribou" - the Pixies

ID bed - "Hunting Bears" - Radiohead

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today’s show is about the life and work of Edward Said, author, literary critic, teacher, musician, public intellectual, and Palestinian American.

And all our music today comes from Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, a favorite of Edward Said’s and the subject of several of Said’s essays. Notably, “Glenn Gould, the Virtuoso as Intellectual” and “The Music Itself: Glenn Gould’s Contrapuntal Vision.” The pieces we’ll hear were chosen by Gould for use in the soundtrack to the 1972 movie of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the hero of which, Billy Pilgrim, had come unstuck in time.

Edward Said, is perhaps best known as the author of Orientalism, the 1978 book that argues that Western scholarship about the Eastern World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, and so is knowledge produced as an exercise in power and domination.

Said has been described as "the figure of an exile that is torn between loyalties to one’s nation and to the fellow humans whom the nation-state subjugates, and often domesticates. In 'Reflections on Exile,' he notes that 'the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s dialectic of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other.' Said argues in the essay that exilic consciousness affects not only the exiles who are actually fleeing poverty and persecution but also those who do not feel at home in their own homes."*

This sounds something of a lament, but near the end of Said’s book, Culture and Imperialism, he cites Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth century monk from Saxony:

It is therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.

He goes on to explain that

the “strong” or “perfect” person achieves independence and detachment by working through attachments, not by rejecting them. Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and a real bond with one’s native place; the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss. Regard experiences then as if they were about to disappear: what is it about them that anchors or roots them in reality? What would you save of them, what would you give up, what would you recover?

We might say, following Said, following Hugo of St. Victor, that the art of biography practices a form of exile.

GUEST

Timothy Brennan is professor of comparative literature, cultural studies, and English at the University of Minnesota. His books include At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of the Left and Right, and the new book, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, an intellectual biography published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

RELATED

Arabs, Islam and the Dogmas of the West by Edward W. Said (NYT, Oct. 31, 1976)

In the Chair - Edward Said (LRB - review of two books, one on Glenn Gould)

Polit...

Our show today selects segments from four recent programs that highlight Colonial Mentality...and of course I’m stealing that phrase from the great Fela Kuti - whose song of the same name opens this show. Our music throughout the show comes from each of the original programs.

We'll begin with our show on the revolutionary life of James Baldwin with author and scholar Bill Mullen whose book shows how Baldwin’s life is “a bracing testimonial to being the first African-American radical to make his sexuality an integral aspect of his public attack of racism, sexism, homophobia, and more generally, the matrix of repressive American power both domestically and internationally.”

Then we’ll hear a selection from part two of our conversation with Walter Johnson about his book The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. Our focus is on the twinning of civilization and barbarism captured in the white supremacist phrase that you can kill the Indian and save the man. That pedagogy is at the liberal heart of dispossession and debt.

After that, The Jakarta Method, with Vincent Bevins. The "Jakarta Method" is the anticommunist playbook concocted by the CIA and employed to great success (the nearly overnight erasure of the largest unarmed socialist party in the world) and prompting replication in several other countries in South America and Latin America.

And we’ll close with Yannick Marshall and our show "The Plantation on Fire," about liberalism as a white supremacist ideology and topics such as white settler culture, anti-blackness, and patriotism as racist ideology.

Full Progam Links:

From Another Country: Bill Mullen on James Baldwin’s Revolutionary Life (August 4, 2020)

St. Louis: Patterns of Segregation and Alibis for Abandonment (December 15, 2020)

The Communists Made Us Do It: The Cold War Cover for Mass Murder (October 6, 2020)

The Plantation On Fire: Yannick Marshall on Liberalism and Anti-Colonialism (August 11, 2020)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today we’ll revisit our interview with historian Nancy Isenberg about her book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. But there’s a twist - I’ve re-edited the program to make use of a broader musical perspective, feeling like I had betrayed the spirit of the program in my original choices.

Isenberg’s 2016 book dissects the stereotype “white trash” by discovering its inherited roots in the nation’s class-oriented founders - really, simply put, the British made us do it. That’s a gross simplification but it’s the right place to start. The United States of America is founded on a class hierarchy brought to these shores by its colonizers and is an unremitting element in our social organization, our culture, and our politics. You gotta be able to say you’re better than someone or you’re no one.

And speaking of becoming better than...we’ll examine the way animal husbandry and breeding extended to the early 20th century’s belief that the traits of those labeled waste people, alleged to be laziness, criminality, insanity, epilepsy, alcoholism, pauperism, and so on, could be eliminated via the pseudoscience of Eugenics. A quick aside: here in Bloomington at Indiana University there have been some core faculty very supportive of eugenics - notably Alfred Kinsey and Hermann Muller. Muller was a Nobel Prize winning geneticist who was a professor at IU from 1945 to his retirement in 1964. Muller liked to use the term "voluntary" eugenics.*

The idea of shaping the great unwashed via so-called science was accompanied by what Isenberg calls “horizontal mobility” - you wouldn’t move up in the world, but you could move West, for a time. And as a “waste” person, it didn’t matter how that worked out for you. But that’s about the extent of actual mobility for all us trash. Upward mobility is a proven fiction - empirically, your economic class at birth defines your economic future in America.

This history of how this nation was built - its laws and criminal codes (vagrancy, anyone) - make plain that the fix is to be rendered through the manipulation of people branded lesser than, not by developing equitable material conditions for all people.

To begin we’ll introduce something from our extended conversation that didn’t make the first radio edit - Isenberg’s response to a recent myth-making apparatus about race and class (and empire) - the smash hit Broadway musical Hamilton.

*"Biology and Culture: Science and Society in the Eugenic Thought of H. J. Muller." Garland E. Allen. BioScience, Mar. 15, 1970, Vol. 20, No. 6 (Mar. 15, 1970), pp. 346-353. Oxford University Press

Guest

Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor in American History at Louisiana State University. Among her other books is Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr. She joined me via telephone long before the ubiquity of Zoom.

RELATED

An Extended Interchange Conversation with Nancy Isenberg (81 minutes)

Interchange – Dynamite Has No Politics: The Anarchism of Lucy Parsons

Interchange – Freedom to Exit: The Libertarian Use of Market Ideology

Virginia's Racial In...

Because I want to use this introduction to correct a gap in the show today - entirely of my doing - I’ll have to rush a bit to tell you what you will hear about. Here we go:

* Booker T. Washington and Racial Conservatism

* Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and his “machine politics”

* W. E. B. Du Bois and the Niagara Movement

* The 1908 white riot in Springfield, Illinois

* The NAACP as the creation of white liberal philanthropists

* Woodrow Wilson, supported by the Black community

* D. W. Griffith’s anti-black propaganda film Birth of a Nation

* Woodrow Wilson hated by the Black community

* Militant radicals Marcus Garvey and Hubert Harrison

* Cyril Briggs and the African Blood Brotherhood

* The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

At or near the center of all of these stands William Monroe Trotter, the most important Black radical journalist and agitator you’ve never heard of - co-owner and editor of The Boston Guardian from 1901 until his death in 1934. He was 62 years old.

What you won’t hear about in what follows is the Crumpacker Resolution, but the strategy of this recurs in the book many times over about a one hundred page span, and at its heart is the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.

Here’s a shortened version of the 14th amendment’s second section:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers.... But when the right to vote at any election... is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in...proportion…

Recall from our show on Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican who pushed Lincoln to the left politically, that the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments are called the "Reconstruction amendments" as they abolished slavery and guaranteed equal protection of the laws and the right to vote in the wake of the US Civil War. Ensuring that these amendments were in force was a major part of Monroe Trotter’s purpose in life. Adopted in 1868, the 14th amendment is still being flouted by white politicians today, as state legislatures introduce legislation that restrict the opportunity to vote and disproportionately affect Black citizens.

The Crumpacker Resolution, named for a U.S. Representative from Indiana, was introduced on January 3, 1901, in response to wide-spread white violence against black voters across the South in clear and constant violation of the 14th amendment. The most glaring and terrible example is the 1898 coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, where a group of the state's white Southern Democrats and hundreds of white businessmen, all heavily armed, stoked mob violence in order to overturn the legitimately elected local Fusionist biracial government. Black-owned property and businesses were destroyed and as many as three hundred people were killed and an estimated two thousand residents were displaced.

It’s perhaps little in the way of justice, but the Crumpacker Resolution would diminish the representative power of states perpetrating these acts. Monroe Trotter’s Guardian promoted the resolution and sponsored a rally in support of it.The resolution was defeated handily in January and then again in June, 1901, though this was a government firmly in the hands of the so-called “party of Lincoln”.

Guest

Kerri K. Greenidge, author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter published by Liveright, an assistant professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University.

RELATED

Angels: what do we really know about them? Where do they come from, what are they made of, how do they communicate and perceive? Today’s guest, Eliot Weinberger, has mined and deconstructed, resurrected and distilled centuries of theology into his new book, Angels & Saints. And when you’re trying to find out about angels, it’s hard to avoid the topic of saints.

In his book Weinberger offers saints’ lives retold in a series of vibrant and playful capsule biographies - and we’ll hear one of these read by Weinberger, that of Columba of Ireland who died in the year 597.

And our guide to the divine and earthly orders takes things one step farther - a speculation on the Afterlife!

Angels & Saints is published by Christine Burgin and New Directions.

But we’ll begin with politics - as Weinberger has just won the Bremerhaven Citizens' Prize for Literature, given biannually to writers who "set an example against injustice and violence, against hatred and intolerance."

In 2004 in the London Review of Books, Weinberger published his now famous essay, “What I Heard About Iraq,” a montage of facts, sound bites, and testimonies, that were spouted out of the mouths of the agents and cheerleaders of war. This piece launched a career he’s better known for in Europe and Latin America than in the US, that of a commentator highly critical of US politics and foreign policy. We’ll hear a selection from a more recent piece - “Advice to Washington from Ancient China,” also from the London Review of Books, from February of 2018.

We’ll close the show with a backwards glance at the child who is father to the artist and essayist and author of many collections including The Ghosts of Birds, An Elemental Thing, Oranges & Peanuts for Sale, and Works on Paper, to name only a handful... all of which are published by New Directions.

GUEST

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, political commentator, translator, and editor. His books of avant-gardist literary essays include Karmic Traces and An Elemental Thing (named by the Village Voice as one of the “20 Best Books of the Year”). His political articles are collected in What I Heard About Iraq—called by the Guardian the one antiwar “classic” of the Iraq war—and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is the translator of the poetry of Bei Dao, and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. Among his translations of Latin American poetry and prose are the Collected Poems 1957–1987 of Octavio Paz, Vicente Huidbro’s Altazor, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions, which received the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. He was born in New York City, where he still lives.

RELATED

The World at Large: Eliot Weinberger On Everything (Interchange)

Advice to Washington from Ancient China by Eliot Weinberger (London Review of Books)

From Angels & Saints by Eliot Weinberger (BOMB)

Medieval Pattern Po...