WFHB

WFHB's longest-running public affairs program, Interchange, wants to talk about everything, any topic, in a desire to make connections across the categorical. Our feelings and opinions about Macbeth, and college students, and guns, and dying, and movies, and Moby Dick...do speak to and for each other. Looking closely at one illuminates all the others also.

And in a like manner, crossing geographical borders also, show producer and host Doug Storm wants to find ways to bring Bloomington to the world and the world to Bloomington.

Tonight, for our 2016 Fall Fund Drive show, were highlighting Interchange programs where Bloomington is on display and sharing its wealth with the world.

Interchange investigates the arts, culture, and politics, always with an eye towards power inequalities. Power doesnt need our help or approval...it requires our critique. And power relationships are normative--you arent often able to even identify their effects.

Sitting in for Interchange Host Doug Storm are Rob Schoon and Jennifer Brooks.

SHOWS HIGHLIGHTED

Gownsburg: The Messy Child Born of a Dysfunctional Couple

On Police Force

King Lear In Original Pronunciation

Creating the Subject: Hildegard Keller’s Annemarie Mahler

Rhiannon Giddens

MUSIC

"You're the Best Around" by Joe Esposito (The Karate Kid Soundtrack)

"Hog Callin' Blues" by Charles Mingus (Oh Yeah)

"Everybody Wants Some" by Van Halen (Women and Children First)

CREDITS

Producer: Doug Storm

Co-hosts: Rob Schoon & Jennifer Brooks

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Just a moment of watching the daily activities of our national public life reveals that ‘performance’ is consequential — far beyond the confines of the playhouse.

In fact, ritual, performance, and theater foster and embody the myths of our culture, the assumptions we hold — often without even being aware of it — and have done so for longer than our country’s existence. What are these assumptions, and how did they come to ground the fundamental way we live our lives?

To find out, we must look back to the earliest stage of America, a stage on which the country’s myths were first performed, as well as critiqued through performance.

Our guest and guide for Staging the Nation is Doug Harvey, author of Theater of Empire: Frontier Performances in America. Harvey’s book is born out of academic research he came to as a kind of second life, garnering his doctorate at age fifty after being in the building trades and working in oil fields for fifteen years.

In his book, Harvey suggests performance culture was a vehicle for imperial transformation from the start, and in his reexamination of the history of the American frontier, sheds light on the differences between the theater of empire -- performances concerned only with transaction, often predatory -- and that of indigenous cultures -- performances centered around cultivating relationships with other humans, and “other-than-humans.”

SEGMENT ONE

We set out to pinpoint what theater of empire means, how it created a culture much different the culture that it dominated, destroyed, and eventually replaced in America. Along the way we discuss its imported and detached nature, and discover the assumptions about life and the land it instilled in American culture, which still drive the way we live our lives today. A quick example is a seeming benign cultural performance that popped up on Facebook today: The Shipshewana Corn Maze in Shipshewana Indiana, which was “created with the goal of quality family fun in the traditional American way...a safe and relaxing event for the whole family [that] gives the next generation an understanding of how corn is grown and used in our food today.”

SEGMENT TWO

From the cynical simulations of Native American rituals performed by pioneers to gain trust and eventually trick tribes out of their lands, to the first traveling circuses of the frontier, to stage plays of the time, we begin to see the differences between theater as genuine communication, as in the case of the “low-born” dancer John Durang, and performance as pure transaction, the elitist ‘punching-down’ M.O. of the high class actor and circus manager John Bernard. We also hear a bit from a play by the late 18th century writer Joseph Doddridge about Chief Logan an Iroquois leader who was a friend of European settlers until his entire family was killed in a massacre. The dialogue stands as a performance that both retells and refutes the assumptions and myths embodied in American frontier culture.

SEGMENT THREE

We continue with a discussion of the much more popular imperial myth of the time and one that continues today—that of the “Noble Savage.” Later we shift to other forms of early frontier performance, including the minstrel act, which paradoxically was a form of class resistance to American imperial culture, while also of course denigrating African Americans. Finally, we’ll wrap up looking at how the performances and portrayal of animals show the differences between the embodied myths of the indigenous culture, and the hollow, detached ones of the imported imperial lifestyle that replaced it.

GUEST

Douglas S. Harvey, author of Theater of Empire: Frontier Performances in America, and adjunct instructor at Johnson County Community College in Kansas City, KS. He’s currently working on a biography of Herman Husband,

Our opening song is by Taylor Swift featuring The Civil Wars off of The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond. This is “Safe and Sound” which claims “Even if we're six feet underground, I know that we'll be safe and sound.” We’ll challenge even that “safety” for hunted girls in today’s program.

Kelly Oliver's recent book, Hunting Girls, takes Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the Hunt and Wild Animals (and virginity), as a kind of tutelary divinity.

Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games, Bella Swan of Twilight, Tris Prior of Divergent, and other strong and resourceful characters subvert the fairy tale archetype of the helpless girl waiting to be rescued. Giving as good as they get, these young women access reserves of aggression to liberate themselves—but who truly benefits? And by meeting violence with violence, do these depictions justify male retaliation, making victimization into entertainment?

Oliver examines how recent popular culture represents young women as predators and prey and the implication that violence—especially sexual violence—is an inevitable, perhaps even celebrated, part of a woman's maturity.

SEGMENT ONE

Hunting Girls uses fairy tale templates like Sleeping Beauty to show how deeply the idea of rape is engrained as a kind of entitlement for the princely class. It’s not rape, it’s true love’s kiss. Rape has even been linguistically defanged morphing into nonconsensual sex and moments of “action” that ought not to have onerous consequences for the poor boys who cry victim. Further complicating the psychological aftermath of being raped is the seeming immortality of "objects" on social media--and the existence of even gang rape in moving pictures posted and shared among "friends"--further challenges us as forms of public acceptance of these attacks: it’s just a media goof and the harmless acts of boys who must of course, be boys.

SEGMENT TWO

We talk about what seems a kind of blowback at elite college campuses against “informed consent” requirements for sex partners. This leads us logically to the prominence of “creepshots” or nonconsensual photography and bystander rape videos.

SEGMENT THREE

We take a closer look at the “princess-victim” that is the template for the films The Hunger Games, Divergent, and Twilight. We also look at the ways the female, once aligned with nature, friend of the animal, is now instead a hunter and killer in an unnatural techno-nightmare.

GUEST

Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Her many books include Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media (2007), Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (2009), Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films (2012), and Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (2015). And most recently the mystery novels Wolf and Coyote.

RELATED

Hunting Girls: Patriarchal Fantasy or Feminist Progress? by Kelly Oliver

MUSIC

"Safe and Sound" by Taylor Swift, featuring The Civil Wars

"Go All the Way (Into the Twilight)" by Perry Farrell

"Nothing to Remember" by Neko Case

"Daughters Lament" by The Carolina Chocolate Drops

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

We announced an interview with historian Douglas Harvey about his book Theater of Empire which juxtaposes the colonizing, mercantile worldview of the English invaders of the Americas with the embodied and ecological perspective of this land's indigenous cultures in the 18th and 19th century America via forms of performance like ritual ceremony, circuses, and minstrel shows. However due to some technical difficulties we’ve had to reschedule that conversation for a future date.

So for tonight’s show we’ll replay my interview with James Scott, author of Two Cheers for Anarchism, best-known for his 1987 classic Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Scott joined me in the studio in March of this year when he was in Bloomington delivering one of the Patten Lectures at Indiana University.

The original post is here: Great Heaps of Grain and People (and Diseases): On Being Domesticated by the State

MUSIC

“Cassava” by P Zed

“Taxman” by the Beatles

“The Trees” by Rush

“Ain’t Got No…I’ve Got Life” by Nina Simone

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

For "Unfounded America" we're joined by Nancy Isenberg author of the popular and provocative new book, White Trash: The 400-year Untold Story of Class in America.

Laura Miller writes of the book in Salon:

Tapping into scores of sources, Isenberg traces the emergence of the white-trash stereotype from its roots in British beliefs that the working class was truly a separate race from the middle and upper classes: congenitally stupid, lazy and shiftless—when they weren’t sly and conniving. Poverty, in the form of miserable living conditions, dirtiness, ignorance, illness, violence, and despair, was viewed as the inherited misfortune of blighted bloodlines. Isenberg shows how consistent this prejudice has been over the centuries, carrying on with only a few alterations right down to the present.

Segment One

We begin the program with the Simon Schama’s dictum that history ought to be depressing and that the historian should be and promote skepticism of neat narratives of the past. If the story is wrapped up and tied with a bow, there’s something wrong with it. But the gist of the segment is that the British made us do it--this country 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.

Segment Two

For this segment we’ll examine the way animal husbandry and breeding extended to the early 20th century’s belief that the traits of those labeled White Trash, alleged to be laziness, criminality, insanity, epilepsy, alcoholism, pauperism, and so on, could be eliminated via the pseudoscience of Eugenics; then we’ll turn to Andrew Jackson and the way politics became the art of performance and democracy its theatrical mask.

Segment Three

For our final segment our focus is on the lie of Social Mobility and the truth that Class defines our future in America. But first we look at the way class is marked upon us by physical identifiers, from the way we dress and speak to the color of our skin.

Photo credit: Mindy Stricke

GUEST

Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor in American History at Louisiana State University. Among her books are Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, and her latest White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

RELATED

An Extended Interchange Conversation with Nancy Isenberg (81 minutes)

MUSIC

"Arkansas Traveller," Bill Monroe & the Bluegrass Boys

"Possum Up a Gum Stump," Snuffy Jenkins & the Hired Hands

"You Ain't Going Nowhere," The Byrds

"Worried Man Blues," The Carter Family (1927)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Special Reporting: Kacey Ross

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

Interchange offers a no-frills, 80-minute conversation with White Trash author Nancy Isenberg--just she and I talking on the telephone. In this extended episode you'll hear Isenberg's take on the Broadway sensation Hamilton as well as more about the necessity of education to "unfound" our national myths to create a citizen properly skeptical of political and cultural ideologies.

RELATED

Unfounded America: Taking Out the Myth with the Trash (edited for radio)

GUEST

Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor in American History at Louisiana State University. Among her books are Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, and her latest White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

In 2008 Susan Gubar was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer which means that the cancer had metastasized beyond the ovaries into the abdomen or nearby lymph nodes. The statistical prognosis for life expectancy when ovarian cancer is diagnosed in this stage is 3-5 years. In 2012, Gubar became a participant in a Phase One drug trial that she describes in our conversation as a miracle. She is now in what evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould termed, in his essay, “The Median Isn’t the Message,” the “right-skewed small tail” of those living with cancer beyond the median of prognosis.

On page 148 of Gubar's latest book, Reading & Writing Cancer: How Words Heal, published this May by W. W. Norton, she writes: “It seems unlikely that I will remain in a chemically induced remission for the year of production it will take for you to be holding this book in your hands.” The "unlikely" Susan Gubar joins us to discuss how we talk about our dying and the ways reading and writing about it can help us heal.

Our Music for this show, all songs by Jelly Roll Morton, was chosen by Susan Gubar’s husband, Don Gray, a Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University. Don Gray appeared on Interchange in 2014 to discuss the Lilly Library’s exhibition of the papers of Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of the novel Raintree County.

Segment One offers a brief summary of the path from diagnosis through the memoir and blog to this most recent book which Gubar describes as an attempt to make a start in surveying the lay of the land in the literary canon of cancer writing. We discuss the “tyranny of cheerfulness” and the way the language used to discuss cancer seems to blame the victim as if one should be held personally responsible for the disease.

For Segment Two, metaphor is our primary focus and we learn about some of Gubar’s favorite writing about cancer such as Lorrie Moore’s "People Like That Are the Only People Here," Tolstoy’s "The Death of Ivan Ilych," and Tillie Olsen’s "Tell Me a Riddle." We then turn to the way the literature of cancer often focuses on metaphors like “invasion” and colonization. Finally Susan Gubar, in her most comfortable mode as teacher, suggests ways to compose those “words that heal.”

And in Segment Three we discuss how Gubar put her lifelong practice of writing to work in the blogosphere. She became a contributor for the online New York Times "Well" Blog at the same time she began what she calls her “miracle” trial in August of 2012. The blog has served as a way to help others feel it’s okay, and perhaps even necessary, to feel free to express those aspects of disease’s effects on the body of which one might feel ashamed to reveal. We also talk about cancer memoirist Michael Korda’s analogy comparing African Americans and cancer patients as having to do with the visibility of side effects--an assertion that cancer patients are stigmatized and visible as an other much the way African American’s are conceived of as a visible other, or special group, different from a “quote unquote” norm. We close with the compassionate witnessing available to us through photography and painting, what Courtney Baker has called “humane insight,” in viewing the suffering of others.

GUEST

© Donald J. Gray

Susan Gubar is a distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University. She is the author of Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, and for the online New York Times “Well” blog, she writes the column “Living with Cancer.” She is also, as she alluded to in her self-introduction at the top of the show, a literary scholar, and one of great influence, co-authoring, with Sandra Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, published in 1979. This has been called a the foundational work in the field of feminist literary criticism.

Courtney Baker on the double-edged power of images of black suffering and death.

For "Lynchings on Loop" Courtney Baker, author of Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death joins us to talk about the history of images of black pain, the malleable and incomplete nature of the image, and how to proceed in our current media-saturated environment.

We are often confronted with televised images of black lives destroyed by the overreaches of the criminal justice system, most often taking the form of violent police force, and those images are replayed and retweeted on a seemingly endless loop of social media.

The proliferation of these images prompt questions about moral responsibility: should we look, should we share them, or is that a kind of voyeurism, or worse, an approbation? If we do look, how should we respond? Is there an ethics of response?

Still worse, there are those who condone and collaborate with this violence and with the sharing of these images proclaim the actions depicted in them justified.

Since publishing her book, Courtney Baker has written two articles she considers appendices, titled “Sandra Bland’s Face” and most recently “The E-Snuff of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.” (links below)

We start there, discussing why those images -- any images for that matter -- cannot inherently speak any particular narrative -- and how the mass media environment, as she recently writes, “carelessly circulate these images for titillation or profit or some bad faith interpretation of the exposé.”

GUEST

Courtney Baker is an associate professor of American Studies at Occidental College

ABOUT

Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death (University of Illinois Press):

In the history of black America, the image of the mortal, wounded, and dead black body has long been looked at by others from a safe distance. Courtney Baker questions the relationship between the spectator and victim and urges viewers to move beyond the safety of the "gaze" to cultivate a capacity for humane insight toward representations of human suffering. Utilizing the visual studies concept termed the "look," Baker interrogates how the notion of humanity was articulated and recognized in oft-referenced moments within the African American experience: the graphic brutality of the 1834 Lalaurie affair; the photographic exhibition of lynching, Without Sanctuary; Emmett Till's murder and funeral; and the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Contemplating these and other episodes, Baker traces how proponents of black freedom and dignity used the visual display of violence against the black body to galvanize action against racial injustice.

An innovative cultural study that connects visual theory to African American history, Humane Insight asserts the importance of ethics in our analysis of race and visual culture, and reveals how representations of pain can become the currency of black liberation from injustice.

RELATED

“The E-Snuff of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile”

“Sandra Bland’s Face”

MUSIC

"Alabama" by John Coltrane

"Strange Fruit" performed by Billie Holiday

"Fables of Faubus" by Charles Mingus

"John Brown's Body" by the Oscar Peterson Trio, featuring Milt Jackson.

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jonathan Richardson

Modern Mechanix, March 1937

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 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...until tonight’s guest got his hands on it…

GUEST

Alex Lichtenstein is an associate professor in the Department of History at Indiana University. His work centers on the intersection of labor history and the struggle for racial justice in societies shaped by white supremacy, particularly the U.S. South (1865-1954) and 20th-century South Africa. He is the author of Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South, and along with Rick Halpern, of Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid (Indiana University Press).

RELATED

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

Portrait of Myself

MUSIC

Intro: Kyle Shepherd Trio, "Dream State"

Break One: The Mgababa Queens, "Maphuthi"

Break Two: Kwela Tebza, "Kwela Roots"

Outro: Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi, "Yakhal' Inkomo"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks

Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

The law is a kind of haunting. In single words the history of slavery and denigration can be discovered. And it's through these words, through the retention of their meaning in their original application, through that first life where they did their original work, that they haunt us.

Our program is a conversation with Colin Dayan, author most recently of two lauded books, With Dogs at the Edge of Life and The Law Is a White Dog. She’s at work on a memoir now, called Animal Quintet, and several pieces which will find their way into this in some form have appeared now in places like the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Yale Review.

Colin Dayan joined me from her home in Nashville, Tennessee, via Skype (please forgive us a few audio anomalies throughout).

SEGMENT ONE

As much of Dayan’s work centers on the way the law has been written to serve the White Master...we begin with a discussion of the recent police executions of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile--killings I’ve heard called “extrajudicial” (meaning no accusation, no trial, no jury, no judge, just death by cop) which Dayan claims are wholly sanctioned by laws which were formulated in and through this slave-holder nation. Dayan calls these "ritual repetitions" hauntings embodied in the very language of our laws.

SEGMENT TWO

In With Dogs at the Edge of Life, Dayan relates her personal responses to the treatment of dogs and dog-owners with her more scholarly pursuit of the black codes that still inhabit court decisions. Dogs as proxy for color, for poverty, for the category of the inferior, creatures termed Pariah dogs...the pit bull and the stray. When we went to the break Dayan had discussed how in her childhood in Atlanta they called police and dog catchers (indistinguishable to her then--and perhaps still as regards indiscriminate power in law) “the laws”--an embodiment of a power that was seemingly out of nightmares. We continue the conversation with the ways that the law, materialized in police, creates unequal geographies in our country. A walk on a public street is a potential locus of terror for the black man.

SEGMENT THREE

We begin this final segment with a look at the Humane Society which often serves as a locus of extermination: does putting the word “humane” in front of a killing act justify it? Also Dayan notes how the “language of care” is a language of privilege. We then turn to “Animal Quintet,” Dayan’s most recent work in memoir that perhaps is a return to a writing she suggested she would not do in her 1995 book titled “Haiti, History, and the Gods”:

Let me admit at the outset that I am obsessed by Haiti, for reasons that have much to do with my own vexed and haunted childhood, the uncertainty of my family origins, and my confrontation with an always blocked, silenced, or unspeakable history…I will take my reader on no backward-turning journey into childhood terror, fragments of denial, and lies that kept me forever outside, always on the margins of any place or self that could be called my own.

The South of Colin Dayan's Atlanta is the context for this final segment on Interchange.

GUEST

Colin Dayan is Robert Penn Warren Professor of the Humanities and professor of law at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of With Dogs at the Edge of Life, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, The Story of Cruel and Unusual, and Haiti, History, and the Gods. She has also written for the New York Times, London Review of Books, and Boston Review.

RELATED

Dead Dogs: Breed bans, euthanasia, and preemptive justice by Colin Dayan (Boston Review)

Like a Dog by Colin Dayan (Boston Review)