Human Conditions

In 'Black Music', a collection of essays, liner notes and interviews from 1959 to 1967, Amiri Baraka captures the ferment, energy and excitement of the avant-garde jazz scene. Published while he still went by LeRoi Jones, it provides a composite picture of Baraka’s evolving thought, aesthetic values and literary experimentation. In this episode, Brent and Adam discuss the ways in which Baraka tackled the challenge of writing about music and his intimate connections to the major players in jazz. Whether you’re familiar with the music or totally new to the New Thing, 'Black Music' is an essential guide to a period of political and artistic upheaval.

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Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.

Get in touch: [email protected]

Further reading in the LRB:

Adam Shatz: The Freedom Principle

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/may/the-freedom-principle

Adam Shatz: On Ornette Coleman

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n14/adam-shatz/diary

Philip Clark: On Cecil Taylor

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/april/cecil-taylor-1929-2018

Ian Penman: Birditis

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n02/ian-penman/birditis

Ian Penman: Birditis

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n02/ian-penman/birditis

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Brent Hayes Edwards talks to Adam about Aimé Césaire's 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century anti-colonial thought and a precursor to the writings of Césaire's protégé, Frantz Fanon. Césaire was Martinique’s most influential poet and one of its most prominent politicians as a deputy in the French National Assembly, and his Discourse is addressed directly at his country’s colonisers. Adam and Brent consider Césaire’s poetry alongside his political arguments and the particular characteristics of his version of négritude, the far-reaching movement of black consciousness he founded with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas.

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Further reading and listening:

Musab Yunis: Against Independence

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n13/musab-younis/against-independence

Brent Hayes Edwards: Inside the Barrel

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n17/brent-hayes-edwards/inside-the-barrel

John Berger & David Constantine: Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land

https://lrb.me/bergercesaire

Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam discuss the ‘ur-text of Black political philosophy’, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Spanning autobiography, history, biography, fiction, music criticism and political science, its fourteen essays set the tone for Black literature, political debate and scholarly production for the course of the 20th century. Souls was an immediate bestseller, the subject of furious debate and a foundational work in the new field of sociology.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

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Further reading in the LRB:

Adam Lively: Fisticuffs

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n05/adam-lively/fisticuffs

Kevin Okoth: Resistance from Elsewhere

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n07/kevin-okoth/resistance-from-elsewhere

Lewis Nkosi: An UnAmerican in New York

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n16/lewis-nkosi/an-unamerican-in-new-york

Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before dying in transit to the gulag. His wife, Nadezhda, spent the rest of her life dodging arrest, advocating for Osip’s work and writing what came to be known as Hope against Hope.

Hope against Hope is a testimony of life under Stalin, and of the ways in which ordinary people challenge and capitulate to power. It’s also a compendium of gossip, an account of psychological torture, a description of the poet’s craft and a love story.

Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to discuss his final selection for Human Conditions. They explore the qualities that make Hope against Hope so compelling: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s uncompromising honesty, perceptiveness and irrepressible humour.

Non-subscriber will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Further reading in the LRB:

Seamus Heaney: Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n15/seamus-heaney/osip-and-nadezhda-mandelstam

Clarence Brown: Every Slightest Pebble

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n10/clarence-brown/every-slightest-pebble

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Writer and the Valet

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n18/frances-stonor-saunders/the-writer-and-the-valet

Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free women’ – unmarried, creatively ambitious, politically engaged – Lessing wrestles with the breakdown of Stalinism, settler colonialism and traditional gender roles. Pankaj and Adam explore the lived experiences that shaped the novel, its feminist reception and why Pankaj considers it to be one of the best representations of ‘the strange uncapturable sensation of living from day to day.’

Non-subscriber will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Further reading:

Anita Brookner: Women Against Men

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n16/anita-brookner/women-against-men

Frank Kermode: The Daughter Who Hated Her

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n14/frank-kermode/the-daughter-who-hated-her

Jenny Diski: Why can‘t people just be sensible?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n15/jenny-diski/why-can-t-people-just-be-sensible

Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy is a study of the psychological toll of colonialism on both the coloniser and colonised, showing how Western conceptions of masculinity and adulthood served as tools of conquest. Using figures as disparate as Gandhi, Oscar Wilde and Aurobindo Ghosh, Nandy suggests ways in which alternative models of age and gender can provide compelling challenges to colonial authority. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to unpack Nandy’s subtle and unexpected lines of thought and to explain why The Intimate Enemy remains as innovative today as it did in 1983.

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Further reading in the LRB:

Ashis Nandy: The Last Englishman to Rule India

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n10/ashis-nandy/the-last-englishman-to-rule-india

Amit Chaudhuri: India before Kipling

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n01/amit-chaudhuri/a-feather!-a-very-feather-upon-the-face

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In A House for Mr Biswas, his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore Naipaul’s fraught relationship to modernity, and the tensions between his attachment to individual freedom and his insistence on the constraints imposed by history. 

Non-subscriber will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

D.A.N. Jones: The Enchantment of Vidia Naipaul

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/d.a.n.-jones/the-enchantment-of-vidia-naipaul

Frank Kermode: What Naipaul Knows

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n17/frank-kermode/what-naipaul-knows

Paul Theroux: Out of Sir Vidia’s Shadow

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/paul-theroux/diary

Sanjay Subramahnyam: Where does he come from? 

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/where-does-he-come-from

Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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In the fourth episode of Human Conditions, the last of the series with Judith Butler, we fittingly turn to The Human Condition (1956). Hannah Arendt defines action as the highest form of human activity: distinct from work and labour, action includes collaborative expression, collective decision-making and, crucially, initiating change. Focusing on the chapter on action, Judith joins Adam to explain why they consider this approach so innovative and incisive. Together, they discuss Arendt’s continued relevance and shortcomings, The Human Condition’s many surprising and baffling turns, and the transformative power of forgiveness.

Non-subscriber will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Jenny Turner: We must think!

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n21/jenny-turner/we-must-think

Judith Butler: 'I merely belong to them'

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n09/judith-butler/i-merely-belong-to-them

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Shatz is the the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Begun as a psychiatric dissertation, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) became a genre-shattering study of antiblack racism and its effect on the psyche. At turns expressionistic, confessional, clinical, sharply satirical and politically charged, the book is dazzlingly multivocal, sometimes self-contradictory but always compelling. Judith Butler and Adam Shatz, whose biography of Fanon was released in January, chart a course through some of the most explosive and elusive chapters of the book, and show why Fanon is still essential reading.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Adam Shatz: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n02/adam-shatz/where-life-is-seized

Megan Vaughan: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n20/megan-vaughan/i-am-my-own-foundation

T.J. Clark: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n18/t.j.-clark/knife-at-the-throat

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Shatz is the the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz to discuss a landmark in feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Dazzling in its scope, The Second Sex incorporates anthropology, psychology, historiography, mythology and biology to ask an ‘impossible’ question: what is a woman? Focusing on three key chapters, Adam and Judith navigate this dense and dizzying book, exploring the nuances of Beauvoir’s original French phrasing and drawing on Judith’s own experiences teaching and writing about the text. They discuss the book’s startling relevance as well as its stark limitations for contemporary feminism, Beauvoir’s refusal to call herself a philosopher, and the radical possibilities released by her claim that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Joanna Biggs: The earth had need of me

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n08/joanna-biggs/the-earth-had-need-of-me

Toril Moi: The Adulteress Wife

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n03/toril-moi/the-adulteress-wife

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Shatz is the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz for the first episode of Human Conditions to look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew, originally published in French as Réflexions Sur La Question Juive. Sartre’s ‘portraits’ of the ‘anti-Semite’ and the ‘Jew’, as he saw them, caused controversy at the time for directly confronting anti-Jewish bigotry in France and how Jewish people had been treated under the Vichy government and before the war.

Judith and Adam discuss Sartre’s attempt to develop a philosophical understanding of this kind of hatred and the apparent moral satisfaction it brings, and his contentious suggestion that not only does the antisemite owe his identity to the Jew, but that 'the Jew' is a creation of the antisemitic gaze. They also consider some of the criticisms levelled at the book, such as its focus on the bourgeois personality, and Sartre’s definition of Jews in entirely negative terms.

NOTE: This episode was recorded on 5 October 2023.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the rest of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Read more in the LRB:

Adam Shatz: Sartre in Cairo

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n22/adam-shatz/one-day-i-ll-tell-you-what-i-think

Jonathan Rée: Being and Nothingness

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n08/jonathan-ree/peas-in-a-matchbox

Pierre Bourdieu: Sartre

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n22/pierre-bourdieu/sartre

Julian Barnes: Sartre's Flaubert

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n10/julian-barnes/double-bind

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Shatz is the the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.

Get in touch: [email protected]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the second of three introductions to our full Close Readings programme for 2024, Adam Shatz presents his series, Human Conditions, in which he’ll be talking separately to three guests – Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards – about some of the most revolutionary thought of the 20th century.

Judith, Pankaj and Brent will each discuss four texts over four episodes, as they uncover the inner life of the 20th century through works that have sought to find freedom in different ways and remake the world around them. They explore, among other things, the development of arguments against racism and colonialism, the experience of artistic expression in oppressive conditions and how language has been used in politically substantive ways.

Authors covered: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, V. S. Naipaul, Ashis Nandy, Doris Lessing, Nadezhda Mandelstam, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amiri Baraka and Audre Lorde.

First episode released on 14 January 2024, then on the fourteenth of each month for the rest of the year.

To listen to the full series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

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