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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

What does trade set in motion beyond the exchange of goods? Anne McElvoy explores the movement of commerce across time as a carrier of habits, ideas, ambitions and influence, as well as of material things. From the early modern world, where trade was entangled with colonial expansion and shaped by unequal, sometimes unexpected encounters, to the supply chains and diplomatic negotiations of the present, this discussion asks how economic exchange has also mediated cultural contact. Alongside rivalry and wealth, how has trade given rise to its own languages of civility, reciprocity and trust? 

Guests include: 

Nandini Das is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Oxford University and author of This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England

Jeremy Hunt is a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and the author of Can We Be Rich Again?

Soumaya Keynes is an economist and columnist at the Financial Times and the author of How to Win a Trade War

Professor Rana Mitter is ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School

Dr Lauren Working is a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at York University and author of A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England 

Producer: Ruth Watts

Trade and Traffic

Shahidha Bari investigates the child’s-eye view of the world. From navigating AI to living through war and the joys of reading, what makes children’s perspectives so distinctive? With writer Katherine Rundell, psychotherapist Josh Cohen, nature writer and novelist Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, historian Emma Butcher and psychologist Nomisha Kurian. 

Producer: Luke Mulhall

The Child's Eye View

How has the figure of the outsider or eccentric been used to explore English culture, history, politics, and our relationship with nature and the countryside? Matthew Sweet discusses, including a re-reading of Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1926 novel Lolly Willowes, in which a middle aged woman leaves her suburban life behind to become a witch. With philosopher Charles Foster, literary historian Jade Munslow Ong, political philosopher Sophie Scott Brown, and psychotherapist Mark Vernon. 
Producer: Luke Mulhall

Eccentrics & Outsiders

Do we have a responsibility to inform ourselves about the state of the world? Is the experience of some people valued more highly than that of others? Matthew Sweet investigates the ethics of knowledge in Radio 4's round table discussion programme. 
With: 
Quassim Cassam, philosopher and author of Intellectual Vices
Havi Carel, a philosopher who's worked extensively on imbalances of knowledge in healthcare and other areas 
Ian Kidd, philosopher specializing in the ethics of knowledge
Ebony Reid, author of Trapped Lives 
Marianna Spring, the BBC's misinformation correspondent
Producer: Luke Mulhall

Part of a series of programmes across Radio 4 looking at what drives us apart and how to bring us together – look for Common Ground.

The Ethics of Knowledge

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

'The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must'. So claimed the powerful Athenians, according to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Plato tried to demonstrate that might does not make right, and thinkers ever since, from Hobbes and Rousseau to Kant and Carl Schmitt, have placed the idea that might is right at the centre of their political philosophies, for better or worse. Matthew Sweet traces the intellectual history of the idea, with Angie Hobbs, Margaret MacMillan, Lea Ypi, and Hugo Drochon. 
Angie Hobbs' book Why Plato Matters Now, and Lea Ypi's book Indignity, are both out now, Hugo Drochon's book Elites And Democracy is published in March
Producer: Luke Mulhall

Is Might Right?

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