Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

This month Bryan, Christina, and Jules explore the intersection of queer life and incarceration. How has America’s prison-loving penal system shaped our history and present, and how does that experience get channeled—or not—into the culture we make and consume? The hosts are joined by Hugh Ryan, author of the new book The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, which uses one infamous mid-century institution in New York’s Greenwich Village to return the overlooked lives of incarcerated women and transmasculine folks to our collective story, and to make a stirring case for prison abolition as a queer issue. Then they discuss how prison shows up in pop culture—and whether they’re entirely comfortable with those fantasies.

Items discussed in the show:

Selling Sunset

Two recent articles on phalloplasty: “How Ben Got His Penis,” by Jamie Lauren Keiles in the New York Times, and “My Penis Myself,” by Gabriel Mac in New York

Original Plumbing

“Madison Cawthorn Thrusting His Naked Body on Another Man’s Face Doesn’t Tell Us Much About His ‘Gayness,’ ” by Bryan in Slate

Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, by Jane Ward

The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, by Hugh Ryan

When Brooklyn Was Queer, by Hugh Ryan

Huey P. Newton’s 1970 speech on the women’s liberation and gay liberation movements

Chained Heat 2

Orange Is the New Black

Gay Agenda

Christina: Great Freedom

Jules: The Vice series Transnational

Bryan: From Gay to Z: A Queer Compendium, by Justin Elizabeth Sayres

This podcast was produced by June Thomas.

Please send feedback, topic ideas, and advice questions to outwardpodcast@slate.com.

 

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Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement (Between the Lines Books, 2020) details the life of George Manuel, a seminal figure in the emergence and development of the modern Indigenous rights movement in Canada. A three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, he laid the groundwork for what would become the Assembly of First Nations and was the founding president of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples; an advocacy organization that fights for the rights of Indigenous peoples internationally. A critical reference point for three generation of Indigenous activists and intellectuals, Manuel’s commitment, politics, and vision are now again assessable to a new generation of readers courtesy of Doreen and Peter, and Between the Lines Books in Toronto.

Zachary Smith (Anishinaabe) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He researches histories of Indigenous-settler relations in Canada and is currently writing a dissertation on the migration of Indigenous peoples from reserves to urban centres in mid-twentieth century Canada. He can be found on Twitter at: @zacharylwsmith.

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On this week’s episode of The Waves, historian and original Waves host, Marcia Chatelain is joined by sociologist Danielle Lindemann to talk all things reality TV. They discuss Danielle’s new book, True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us and why we don’t take reality television as seriously as we should. Later in the show they talk about why women are more successful at monetizing their reality TV brand and how the genre takes us on a tour of the class system.  

In Slate Plus: Is The Bachelorette feminist? 

Recommendations:

Marcia: The True Crime Obsessed podcast, Let the Women Do the Work

Danielle: The Netflix series Selling Sunset

 

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Shannon Palus and Alicia Montgomery. 

Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com

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The important new book by Alicia Puglionesi, In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession and the Landscapes of American Empire (Scribner, 2022), is a fat sampler of episodes that show how origin stories get made, what happens when white-supremacist origin stories are mistaken for empirical fact, and how the political impacts persist. The book is decidedly anti-capitalist; resoundingly anti-colonial. It is an invitation not to jettison story-work, but to imagine, collectively, origin stories of the present that might bring into being a more just future.

In Whose Ruins could easily be categorized as Environmental History or Native Studies. But Puglionesi forges a book that is more than either field could accomplish alone. The “power” of the book’s subtitle has a double meeting: political power and the energy sources of a capitalist economy (oil, hydropower, and nuclear energy).

The book is organized into four sections, or “sites,” that visit four evocative land features: a hulking, conical earth mound in present-day West Virginia adjacent to a decommissioned state prison; wells dug into the ground in smalltown Pennsylvania; rocks that tell stories (they’re etched with petroglyphs) along the Susquehanna River with kin fragmented elsewhere; the Sonoran Desert rich with pottery, uranium, and physicists, both white and Native. In each of these sites, people with different political projects—some announced, some implicit—have generated multiple accounts of the landscapes and ideas of value.

Within a context of shifting political power, white-settler stories about each site displaced empirical knowledge of Native labor, skill, presence, and endurance with harmful fables of white origins and of Native communities’ need for white “rescue.” Into the present day, the effect has been to justify white theft of Native land and deadly violence against tribal communities for the purposes of resource extraction. In the end, even the false white origin stories became a resource to commodify.

Puglionesi is a writer of poetry, fiction, academic scholarship, and, now, In Whose Ruins, a mass-market trade publication. She holds a PhD in History of Medicine and is a lecturer in Medicine, Science and Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. On the page, Puglionesi has a friendly, funny, quiet presence—an affable Where’s Waldo that centers the relationships of historical actors (including spirits) and the work of scholars such as Kim TallBear, Zoe Todd, and Eve Tuck.

This conversation explores ways of living in good relation via writing; the status of truth; the relevance of singer-songwriter Prince for labor studies; and many other themes. It discusses the important book by Chadwick Allen, Earthworks Rising (Minnesota, 2022). In an unrecorded snippet, we also swap names of our favorite local indie bookstores. So check out Red Emma’s the next time you’re in Baltimore, MD (or on Bookshop.org) and Symposium, Riff Raff, and Paper Nautilus when your compass points to Providence, RI.

Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society.

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In Affect, Ecofeminism, and Intersectional Struggles in Latin America: A Tribute to Berta Cáceres (Peter Lang, 2020), Irune del Rio Gabiola examines the power of affect in structuring decolonizing modes of resistance performed by social movements such as COPINH (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras). Despite a harsh legacy of colonialism, indigenous communities continue suffering from territorial displacements, dispossession, and human rights abuses due to extractivist projects that are violently destroying their land and, therefore, the environment. In particular, the Lenca communities in Honduras have been negatively affected by Western ideas of progress and development that have historically eliminated ancestral knowledges and indigenous ecological cosmologies while reinforcing Eurocentrism. Nevertheless, by reflecting on and articulating strategies for resisting neoliberalism, COPINH and its cofounder Berta Cáceres' commitment to environmental activism, ecofeminism, and intersectional struggles has contributed affectively and effectively to the production of democratic encounters in pursuit of social justice. In homage to Berta, who was brutally assassinated for her activism in 2016, this book takes the reader on an affective journey departing from the violent affects experienced by the Lencas due to colonial disruption, contemporary industrialization, and criminalization, towards COPINH's political and social intervention fueled by outrage, resistance, transnational solidarity, care, mourning, and hope. In this way, subaltern actors nurture the power to--in line with Brian Massumi's interpretation of affect--transform necropolitics into natality with the aim of creating a fairer and better world

The host, Elize Mazadiego, is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and author of Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art: Experimental Forms in Argentina, 1955-1968 (Brill, 2021). She works on Modern and Contemporary art, with a specialization in Latin American art history. 

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On this episode: Elizabeth and Zak are joined by Amber O’Neal Johnston. She’s the author of A Place to Belong: Celebrating Diversity and Kinship in the Home and Beyond and has a blog called Heritage Mom. They talk about how families can celebrate their own identities while learning about and appreciating other people’s races and cultural differences. What does it mean to teach kids about “hard history,” but also celebrate cultural heritage? And, why do so many parents find it difficult to talk about culture and race? 

Recommendations

Elizabeth recommends: Read Aloud Those Kids from Fawn Creek by Erin Entrada Kelly 

Zak recommends: Make your own pesto

Amber recommends: Get a good knife

Resources

A Place to Belong: Celebrating Diversity and Kinship in the Home and Beyond by Amber O’Neal Johnston

Amber’s blog: Heritage Mom

Join us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to ask us new questions, tell us what you thought of today’s show, and give us ideas about what we should talk about in future episodes. 

Podcast produced by Rosemary Belson and Jasmine Ellis. 

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No matter what people call them today the northwestern Great Plains have been and continue to be Blackfoot country, argues Colgate University assistant professor Ryan Hall in Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720-1877 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). By maintaining their boundaries and enforcing power between both European empires and Indigenous neighbors, the Blackfoot were able to carve out a lasting niche in the contested borderlands of the early North American West of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although disease, resource depletion, and colonization would eventually be visited upon the Blackfoot, along with American settler colonialism, this outcome was never preordained. Nor was that the entire story, as Blackfoot history carries on well after such well known events as the Montana gold rush and the Marias Massacre. Beneath the Backbone of the World is an example of Native history's power to force a rethinking of North American history's arc.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology (Harvard UP, 2021) is a searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect.

In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objects—crafts, clothing, images, song recordings—by the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the “vanishing Indian” and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology.

The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptions—a vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectors’ methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the public’s confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by “scientific” racism.

Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance.

Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

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In The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Paul Conrad brings to life the stories of displaced Apaches and the kin from whom they were separated. Conrad uses the lens of “diaspora” to analyze four centuries of Ndé/Apache history, from their initial interactions with Europeans in the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century, when several dozen Apaches returned to the Southwest –if not to their ancestral lands, after decades of forced exile. The case for an Apache diaspora is persuasively demonstrated throughout with illustrative examples drawn from a wide array of secondary and primary sources, including original documents from repositories in the U.S., Mexico, and Spain. Conrad charts Apaches' efforts to survive or return home from places as far-flung as Cuba and Pennsylvania, Mexico City and Montreal. While deeply analytical, Conrad enlivens his narrative with meaningful stories, such as the arrival of the first shipment of Apaches to Havana in 1784, and evocative vignettes, for instance, of life on the reservations in the 1870s.

Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez es profesor de Historia en Texas State University. Sus intereses académicos incluyen la etnohistoria, los pueblos indígenas de las Grandes Llanuras y el Suroeste de EE.UU., la frontera México-EE.UU. y la América hispánica.

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When Samantha and her husband moved from a condo to a fairly large house, they knew they’d have a lot of updating and upkeep to do. But they had no idea how much time their new chores would gobble up. Or even what chores to do. (If only there was a guide to adulting!) Even when they weren’t holding themselves to picture-perfect standards, it still felt like they were barely keeping their heads above water. On this episode of How To!, we bring on Kendra Adachi, she’s a best-selling author, podcaster, and professional permission giver. She has tangible, easy steps that you can do right now to help you prioritize and organize your mess—and ultimately, your life. 

If you liked this episode, check out “How To Stop “Having It All” (Before You End Up With Nothing)” 

Do you have a problem that needs solving? Send us a note at howto@slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 646-495-4001 and we might have you on the show.

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