Stop, Look, and Listen #11
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts (and occasionally programmes and films) that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week. I also maintain a regular record of all these via Substack’s ‘Notes’ feature; you can also read these via the Notes section of my site.
Content warnings: The Holocaust; Anti-Black racism.
This week’s recommended reading and listening are on the areas of:
The New Year.
African Americans responding to racism.
Sport and politics.
Species out of place.
The political economy of literature.
The New Year
On New Years, past and present, and the traditions, aspirations, and fears that have accompanied them.
Recommendations:
- writes for Time about the relevantly recent harmonisation of the commencement of the New Year on January 1st, and the wide range of other calendrical systems, infused with their own chronological, seasonal, and religious logics, that both predated and to an extent coexisted with the now dominant Gregorian one.
In this post for his Systemic Hatreds newsletter,
reflects on the distinction between time as we measure and routinise it and time as it exists beyond our systems of measurement. He highlights how older civilisations responded to this with periods effectively outside routine time at the end of years, and how for white-collar workers in the contemporary West, the period between Christmas and New Year fulfils some similar functions.- explores Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Scandinavian food traditions relating to the coming of the New Year on this episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme. She and her interviewees discuss the significance and origins of these rituals, why they remains popular, and the conditions under which they change.
The Acid Washed Memories podcast with Michael Quinn and Joe Marotta revisits the Y2K bug panic of the late 1990s. They discuss how the news and political discussion of the issue overlooked the measures already being taken by organisations and their tech departments to redress the issue, and the fairly minimal disruption that occurred once the year 2000 arrived.
Drawing on his family’s historical archives,
reflects in this post for his Unpopular Front newsletter on what was his forebearers’ last New Year’s Eve together in Cologne in 1933, and the poems they wrote to mark the occasion, before most departed Germany to escape Nazi persecution, and the remainder ultimately perished in the Holocaust.
African American responses to racism
How African Americans have responded since the 19th century to the deeply embedded racism they have faced, through law, literature, and activism.
Recommendations:
On the Civics and Coffee podcast, Alycia Asai talks to Dylan Penningroth about his research into how African Americans used the legal system in the 19th and 20th centuries, prior to the civil rights movement. They discuss how African Americans, including slaves, drew upon the law to protect and enforce their rights in areas such as property, contract, inheritance, and association, and on how white lawyers – who were often extremely racist in their private and political rules – sought to tap into the growing market for Black clients after abolition.
This episode of the History of Africana Philosophy podcast, written by
and Chike Jeffers, looks at critical race theory. It covers CRT’s emergence in the 1980s, pioneered by the likes of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell, out of previous critical approaches to legal studies, but also its reaction to their own colour blindness; its expansive approach to questions of both legal rights and discrimination, including the intersectional oppression experienced by Black women; and its perceptions of the limitations of legal reforms to advancing the fortunes of African Americans.On this episode of the Past Present Future podcast miniseries on the ‘History of Ideas’, David Runciman looks at James Baldwin’s 1956 essay ‘Notes of a Native Son’. He discusses Baldwin’s revisiting of the day of his father’s funeral in Harlem, and his own 19th birthday, in 1943, and the mixture of feelings he experienced of fear and resentment of his father and belated understanding of his father’s own efforts to protect his children from the racist world in which he was raised – all against the backdrop of a race riot that reflected tensions between America’s war mission and its racial hierarchy.
Writing for his The Journeyman newsletter,
reflects upon the sacrifices previous generations of his family made both fighting for America overseas and at home for a more just country for they and their children as African Americans, and wonders what they would have made of contemporary America’s embrace of the evils they fought against.
Sport and politics
On how governments have sought to make political capital from sport, and how participants in sports have negotiated the politicisation of their activities.
Recommendations:
I wrote this piece for the University of Wolverhampton’s Football and the War blog, on the treatment of Cold War themes in British footballers’ autobiographies. In it, I discuss how these (usually ghost-written) books treated the question of whether sides from behind the Iron Curtain had a particular advantage over their British counterparts, and the comparative merits of their respective political systems.
Guy Burton and Francesco Belcastro interview Heather Dichter about her research into sports diplomacy on The Footpol Podcast. They discuss why historical scholarship on sport has tended to focus on its domestic social rather than international political dimensions; the significance of football diplomacy within the contexts of both the Cold War but also decolonisation, and how it played out regionally as well as globally; and the potential for future research into the diplomatic implications of the rise of elite women’s football.
- explains in his Kültürkampf newsletter the dynamics in Türkiye underpinning the cancellation of a Supercup match between Turkish clubs Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe in Saudi Arabia, after the Saudi organisers reportedly prohibited the players from wearing t-shirts bearing the image of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the secularist founder of the Turkish nation state. Koru argues that the controversy was further fuelled by wider distrust of the ruling AKP’s barely concealed anti-Kemalist tendencies, and by an anti-Arabist strain in secular Turkish nationalism.
Host
and guest Scott Laderman talk about the 1991 film Point Break and the history of surfing on this episode of the Historians at the Movies podcast. They discuss surfing’s origins in Hawaii and subsequent spread to the continental US and other parts of the world, and its embroilment in controversial political issues such as Apartheid in South Africa. They also look at Point Break within the broader context of the surfing film subgenre, with which surfers have a difficult relationship, and the way it captured a divide between the increasing commercialisation of surfing on the one hand and its significance as a way of life for many participants on the other.
Species out of place
How experts have responded to unexpected appearances of plant and animal species, which promise to bring both benefits and new challenges.
Recommendations:
On the BBC World Service’s The Inquiry programme, presenter Charmin Cozier talks to oceanographers Chuanmin Hu and Ajit Subramaniam, marine biologist Marie-Louise Felix, and David Freestone of the Saragosso Sea Commission about sargassum, and the emergence of a large belt of the seaweed between the Gulf of Mexico and West Africa since 2011. They discuss both its key role within the ecosystem of the Saragosso Sea, but also the economic, health, and environmental threats posed by large quantities of sargassum washing ashore and emitting noxious gases.
This episode of BBC World Service’s Assignment programme, hosted by Jane Chambers, focuses on the Paiche, a gigantic omnivorous fish that spread to Bolivia’s rivers during floods from a fish farm in neighbouring Peru. It details how paiche has become a popular delicacy in Bolivia, bolstering fish consumption in the landlocked country, but also explores the potentially deleterious impact that it might be having on other species within Bolivia’s ecosystems.
On the This Day in Esoteric Political History podcast,
, , and Kellie Carter Jackson are joined by Ian Chillag to discuss an event from late 1948, when Idaho Department of Food and Game relocated 76 beavers from a residential area to an unsettled part of the state, by parachuting them from a plane. They discuss the unlikely logistics of this project, the way in which it fitted into a post-war context of familiarity with and eagerness (and means) to undertake military-style operations, but also how its humaneness and ecological consciousness differed from many of the environmental transformation projects undertaken in the US during this period.
The political economy of literature
On the study of both the evolving commercialisation and industrialisation of literature, and of the literary works produced within that context.
Recommendations:
On BBC’s In Our Time podcast, Melvyn Bragg discusses Edgar Allen Poe with guests Bridge Bennett, Erin Forbes, and Tom Wright. They discuss his troubled but also much mythologised personal life; his place within the expanding commercial literary culture of early 19th-century America; his usage of the gothic as a way of exploring themes of death and romance; his pioneering of the detective story; the ways in which his work depicted a world haunted by enslavement (and how this related to his own attitudes to race and slavery); and his influence on French, Southern Gothic, and African American literature, as well as on cinema, counterculture, and subcultures.
Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson are joined by
for this episode of the Money on the Left podcast. They discuss the paradox of a booming para-academic sphere of cultural criticism occurring alongside the drastic defunding of the humanities in universities, and the vital importance of critique within literary studies at a time when the higher education is becoming increasingly commodified. They also talk about the making of Seybold’s own podcast series on literary studies, The American Vandal, and the role that podcasting can play within a changing academic publishing and online media environment.Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant join
for this episode of The American Vandal podcast. They talk about the value of close reading as a practice, the challenges of teaching it in different types of academic institution, and its significance within the context of the increasing conglomerisation of the publishing industry. They then turn their focus to the novels of Danielle Steel: an author who in many ways embodies this era in publishing with her increasingly conservative and prodigious output.
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