Harriett Gilbert talks to the bestselling author Neil Gaiman, voted by listeners as the 'most wanted' guest for the programme.
Neil is a British writer, comic book author, a short-story writer, a science fiction and fantasy novelist, now living in the United States. And our chosen book American Gods tells the story of the gods brought by immigrants over the centuries, from Scandinavia, Ireland, Russia, Greece, Egypt, and what happens to them as the years pass and they get forgotten, and surpassed by the modern gods of technology – television, mobile phones and the media.
Join Harriett Gilbert, and an invited audience to hear Neil Gaiman talk about his book American Gods.
Slate critics Dan Kois, Hanna Rosin, and David Haglund debate Rachel Kushner’s novel of the New York art scene, Italian revolutionaries, and motorcycle racing.
The maps drawn up by early settlers to plot their inexorable expansion were not the first representations of North American space. Colonialism does not simply impose a new reality, after all, but attempts to shatter and discard whole systems of understanding. Indigenous maps preceded the colonial encounter and indigenous maps persist is this extended colonial moment.
In Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Mishuana Goeman finds in the poetry and prose of Native women authors the maps of both colonialism’s persistence and resistance to its ongoing containments. Goeman shows how writers like E. Pauline Johnson, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Heid Erdrich point toward a Native future beyond the settler models of territory, jurisdiction, and race.
Pauline Turner Strong‘s new book American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries (Paradigm Publishers, 2012) traces the representations of Native Americans across various public spheres of the American imaginary. Based on historical and ethnographic research, she documents how representations of Native Americans have circulated through time and into ever-widening cultural domains. In the first section of the book, Strong begins by defining a theory of representational practices that employs an ethnographic approach. She then traces particular forms of representing Native Americans by exploring the concepts of “tribe” and “Indian blood.” The third section of the book focuses on narratives of captivity on the indigenous/settler frontier, highlighting the significance of captivity narratives to American national identity. The following section features a critical analysis of “playing Indian” as racial mimesis and cultural appropriation, highlighting the ways in which American youth are socialized into practices such as participating in Thanksgiving pageants of Pilgrims and Indians, using tribal names as part of camp activities, and even playing “cowboys and Indians.” The fifth and final section of the book, “Indigenous Imaginaries,” examines the more recent developments in indigenous politics of representation, including contemporary trends in collaborative ethnographic research and writing, and the installation of the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Pauline Strong contributes a careful analysis that traces the heritage of colonialist representations of American Indians and considers the ways in which contemporary practices and indigenous projects could begin to pose powerful challenges to these dominant representations in the American imaginary.
Slate critics Dan Kois, Emily Bazelon, and Katy Waldman discuss Kate Atkinson’s historical novel about a British woman who lives World War II over and over again.
At this crucial moment in Egypt’s story, this month’s World Book Club talks to one of the country’s great writers, Ahdaf Soueif, about her internationally acclaimed novel The Map of Love.
In her Booker-shortlisted bestseller Soueif weaves together two poignant stories separated by a century of Egyptian history: a love story between aristocratic English Anna Winterbourne and romantic firebrand Sharif al-Baroudi, is set amidst the brutality of British imperialism and the fierce political battles of the Egyptian Nationalists. This tale reaches across time to an account of their descendants negotiating passions and political unrest in late 20th Century Egypt. We hear how Soueif had originally set out to write a ‘tawdry romance’ but hadn’t managed to stop herself writing something much more meaningful and monumental!
Listen to this great Egyptian voice clearly and compellingly explain exactly what has gone wrong in Egypt, in her eyes, over the last decade.
“School was a place that devalued who we are as Indigenous people,” says Noelani Goodyear-Kapua. These were institutions — at least since white settlers deposed the Indigenous government in the late 19th century — that Native students “tolerated and survived…experienced more as a carceral space than a place of learning.”
So she and her community decided to start their own.
Founded in 1999, the HKM Public Charter School in Honolulu enacts a host of educational practices that Goodyear-Kapua labels “sovereign pedagogies.” From the “land-based literacies” of their Papa Lo’i agricultural project to Olelo language classes, HKM signaled a “radical departure from the fences, walls, and bell schedules that kept young people cut off from their ‘aina and other storehouses of ancestral knowledge.”
Now an associate professor of political science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa,Goodyear-Kapua tells the inspiring story of HKM in The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). No simple tale of triumph, Goodyear-Kapua explores the tensions and contradictions of fostering sovereign education in a settler colonial context and appropriating elements of the neocolonial/neoliberal charter school movement for anti-colonial ends.
World Book Club’s Harriett Gilbert talks to the acclaimed Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri, in front of a multi-national audience and listeners around the world at the Nehru Centre in London. Chaudhuri will discuss his novel The Immortals, which is about the place of Indian classical music in the modern world.
Set in the heart of the world of the Bombay middle class, it tells the story of three very different classical-musicians whose lives thread in and out of each other in 1970s and 80s Bombay.
The city itself is on a roll -- expanding, growing ever richer and more glittery -- and the novel's main characters are variously jostled by the changes taking place around them. But they're also struggling with such matters as the place of musical tradition in the modern world, and the need to earn a living while pursuing an artistic vocation.
Amit Chaudhuri himself is a musician as well as author and he talks about how contemporary Indian classical music is currently in a moribund state, as it takes a great deal of commitment to be successful.
And in a novel filled with strong and lively characters, Amit explains how difficult he finds it to write characters, and how in his work as a teacher of creative writing, he finds characterisation impossible to teach.
Hear him also read three extracts from The Immortals and take calls from listeners in Delhi and Pennsylvania who will bring their own international perspective to the story.
