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BBC Radio 4

Leading thinkers discuss the ideas shaping our lives - looking back at the news and making links between past and present. Fridays at 9pm on BBC Radio 4. Presented by Matthew Sweet, Shahidha Bari and Anne McElvoy.

Arts & Ideas

Henry VIII's encounter with Brazilian royalty, Inuit hunting in the Somerset countryside, Aztecs at the court of Charles V: Caroline Dodds Pennock's research flips history to focus on the impact of indigenous Americans on early modern Europe. And how is this kind of approach influencing museum displays? Anthropologist Adam Kuper has written a history of The Museum of Other People, charting the changing ethnological approaches to colonialism, cultural appropriation, and scientific authority. Plus musicologist Rupert Till has co-created a virtual sound map of the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacán. John Gallagher hosts.

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock is out now and can also be found serialised on BBC Sounds. 
The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions by Adam Kuper is published next week.

You might also be interested in conversations available as Arts & Ideas downloads asking What language did Columbus speak ? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0d0tk22 
What kind of history should we write ? with Peter Frankopan and Maya Jasanoff https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06sfl58 
The Mayflower and Native American history with Sarah Churchwell, Kathryn Napier Gray & Lauren Working https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08r76kl 
First Encounters: Nandini Das and Claudia Rogers share their research https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kpgp

Producer in Salford: Ruth Thomson

Aztecs and Otherness

Martin Amis, whose death has been announced at the age of 73, was noted for his writing style and literary voice. His novels included The Rachel Papers, Money and London Fields and a series of works exploring figures including Stalin (in Koba the Dread) and the Holocaust in Time's Arrow and The Zone of Interest. On publishing this in 2014, he joined Radio 3's Philip Dodd and recorded a discussion in front of an audience at a Prom Plus event. Their conversation centres on ideas of evil, culpability and Jewish history.

Martin Amis talking with Philip Dodd in 2014

Pankaj Mishra's Run and Hide tells a story of modern Indian times, as the hidden pasts of wealthy, Gatsby-style tech entrepreneurs must be reckoned with. 

And to help put this modern India in context, Dr Pragya Dhital will consider the resonances of the tumultuous period of "The Emergency", the response of the Indian government to a period of "internal disturbance" in the 1970s. She discusses the homemade or samizdat style leaflets which journalists like Ram Dutt Tripathi used to great effect. 

The cuisine of India is a national symbol around the world, but Dr Sharanya Murali explores how this most traditional artform, cookery, can become iconoclastic when utilised in performance art by the likes of Pushpamala N and Raj Goody. 

And Dr Vikram Visana will consider populism in India, telling us how differing parties are vying to answer questions of national identity which seem increasingly ill-suited to the challenges facing this modern democracy - and one of the key figures he discusses is KM Munshi. 

Asked for their key cultural figures of India the panel made some eclectic choices. Seek out the short stories of Ismat Chughtai who endured an obscenity trial for her works, and VS Naipaul was viewed as a great chronicler of a crisis in the Hindu struggle with the modern world. Bilkis Dadi was the most recognisable face of the Shaheen Bagh protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the music of Mehdi Hassan was remembered as a culturally unifying force between India and Pakistan. 

Read more at: https://www.shethepeople.tv/news/shaheen-baghs-bilkis-dadi-on-bbcs-100-women-of-2020-list/

Presented by Rana Mitter
Produced by Kevin Core

Image: Pankaj Mishra, credit: Windham Campbell Prize

If you want more programmes exploring South Asian culture and history you can find Rana looking at the film Pather Panchali made by Satyajit Ray and the writing of Sunjeev Sahota https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b060zmjs 
Maha Rafi Atal, Anindita Ghosh, Jahnavi Phalkey and Yasmin Khan share their research in an episode called Everything You Never Knew About Indian history https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b069yb6k 
O What a Lovely Savas explores India's First World War experiences https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b047zvbj 
Tariq Ali on the 50th anniversary of 1968 uprisings https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05x9zq2 
Rana explores Pakistan politics and water supplies https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s9cg 
Amitav Gosh on weaving the ancient legend about the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi into a journey between America, the Sundarbans and Venice https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00066px
Arundhati Roy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08slx9t

Pankaj Mishra, Research into Indian history

Anne Applebaum's new book The Twilight of Democracy has the subtitle The failure of democracy and the parting of friends. She talks to Anne McElvoy about what happened when she tried to connect up with past friends whose politics are now different to her own. The American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman is most famous now for her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Will Abberley tells us about her view of fashion and why women should not seek to stand out because a focus on their appearance was counterproductive to them gaining more public power. Gilman conjured a female utopia in her 1915 book Herland. And 2020 New Generation Thinker Sophie Oliver from the University of Liverpool writes us a postcard about the actress Ingrid Bergman and the way she and her would-be biographer Bessie Breuer tried to carve out a different public image for a female star in a novel Breuer published in 1957 called The Actress. 

Will Abberley's book is called Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture 
You might be interested in the Essay Series Women Writers to Put Back on the Bookshelf which looked at Yolande Mukagasana, Storm Jameson, Margaret Oliphant, Lady Mary Wroth and Charlotte Smith
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fwff 
and this Essay about another feminist utopia in the writing of Sarah Scott https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b7hrw4

You can find previous Free Thinking conversations with Anne Applebaum to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts on Marxism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b0x6m0 
and Russian Nationalism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b094f9p0

Producer: Ruth Watts

Anne Applebaum, Ingrid Bergman, Herland

Anne McElvoy looks at changing fashions and values in the art world as she talks to Observer critic Laura Cumming about her researches into a 19th-century court case involving a Velázquez portrait. New Generation Thinker Joe Moshenska joins the conversation to explain more about the trip to Spain during which the future Charles I was painted by the Spanish artist.

Curator Liz Gilmore and dealer Julian Hartnoll discuss the British painter John Bratby who was celebrated and seen as an enfant terrible of the art world in the '50s and '60s. He is believed to have painted over 1500 works and an exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings has drawn upon paintings brought in by members of the public.

Artist Gayle Chong Kwan is working on a project based upon the North Eastern food dish Pan Haggerty. She talks about the walks, videos and photographs she has been creating as part of her residency in East Durham.

Laura Cumming's book is called The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez

John Bratby: Everything But The Kitchen Sink Including The Kitchen Sink runs at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings from January 30th to April 17th.

The Pan Hag Project is being produced in conjunction with Forma Arts.

Producer: Ella-Mai Robey

(Main Image: Still Life, John Bratby (c)The Artist's Estate).

Laura Cumming on Velazquez, John Bratby, The Pan Hag Project

This year's Free Thinking Lecture is given by the American poet Claudia Rankine. Her book 'Citizen: An American Lyric' is a New York Times best seller and has become an instant classic. At one of the most volatile moments in American race history, her meditations on the language used to describe tennis star Serena Williams and on events such as the Ferguson riots and the shooting of the teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida provide the vehicle for an incisive interrogation of justice and injustice, exposing the myth of a 'post-racial' 21st century.

A professor of English at the University of Southern California and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine grew up first in Kingston Jamaica and then New York City and has also lived in England. 'Citizen' has been called 'the book of a generation' and one which 'throws a Molotov cocktail' at the idea that the struggle against racial injustice has been won.

The winner of this year's Forward Prize for Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award comes to Sage Gateshead to talk to Free Thinking presenter Matthew Sweet about the power of language and what it means to be black in the new millennium.

Recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead.

Claudia Rankine

Poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger reflects on his writing, and German history, in his latest book New Selected Poems. New Generation Thinker Danielle Thom and the historian and columnist Tim Stanley, join Anne McElvoy to discuss Tate Britain’s exhibition of history painting from the eighteenth century to present day. Plus writer Lindsay Johns reviews the first night of a new RSC production of Othello staring Hugh Quarshie and Lucien Msamati.

Free Thinking - Othello, Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Martin Amis, Zachary Leader and Sarah Churchwell join Matthew Sweet to discuss Saul Bellow and his masterpiece, Herzog with readings by Kerry Shale.

Free Thinking - Saul Bellow

Matthew Sweet has a go on Carsten Höller's slide at the Hayward Gallery with arts critic Charlotte Mullins and discusses freaks and fairgrounds with Dr Helen Davies, Vanessa Toulmin, Director of the National Fairground Archive and performance artist Martin O'Brien

Free Thinking - Carsten Höller, freaks and fairground

Anne McElvoy discusses maths and music with Mathematician Eugenia Cheng. Susan Abulhawa talks about her latest book The Blue Between Sky and Water. And, New Generation Thinker Gregory Tate shares his research into the way British writers were inspired by the figure of Napoleon.

Susan Abulhawa - Gregory Tate - Eugenia Cheng

Churchill famously commented that ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.' Rana Mitter and his guests David Runciman, Professor of Politics, University of Cambridge; 
Duncan Kelly, Reader in Political Thought, University of Cambridge; 
Patricia Thornton, University Lecturer in the Politics of China, University of Oxford and Tim Stanley, blogger and columnist for The Daily Telegraph test Free Thinking to its limits by looking at the alternatives to our own political system.

Free Thinking - Against Democracy

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