Interchange – 2021 Producer’s Choice Awards – Part 1

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Today we’ll hear four clips from four shows that weave together ideas of slavery, imperialism, and ideological and environmental pollution. Each clip is about ten minutes long.

Those shows are:
Slavery’s Imperial Skein: Knitting Together the Capitalist Empire with guest Zach Sell
Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People, with guest Mark Driscoll
Revolutionary Parallels: Zhang Taiyan and Anti-Imperialism with guest Viren Murthy
And The Poison Makers: On Liberal Modernity with Robert Stolz

I.
In our June 15 show, “Slavery’s Imperial Skein” with Zach Sell, we asked if the brutal practices of US white settler colonial agriculture, which is to say the slave plantation, could be transplanted across Britain’s colonial empire in the wake of the US Civil War and Black emancipation without actual enslavement? The answer “troubled” the rapacious Imperial imaginary.

II.
In “Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People” we begin by unpacking what Mark Driscoll calls an ugly phrase for an ugly phenomenon, “Climate Caucasionism,” and then we’ll hear about a minstrel show put on by the historically decorated US national hero Commodore Matthew Perry aboard the ship named the Powhatan – not quite the Pequod of Melville’s Moby Dick, but in the same spirit one assumes.

III.
In “Revolutionary Parallels: Zhang Taiyan and Anti-Imperialism” Viren Murthy discusses what might be described as a positive form of nationalism – anti-imperial nationalism – specifically mobilized to fight off the ideological invasion of so-called Western powers.

IV.
In “The Poison Makers: On Liberal Modernity” – about the life and work of Japanese philosopher, politician, and social activist, Tanaka Shozo, we talk about the problem of industrial scale pollution and the modernizing state, and how Tanaka Shozo discovers that the liberal state cannot (and does not care to) protect individuals “freed” from feudalism when capitalist industrialism poisons every aspect of natural life.

MUSIC
“Jaipur” – Amancio D’Silva
“London Bridge Is Falling Down” – Count Basie
“Truth” – Art Bears
“Cuyahoga” – R.E.M.
“The Song of Investment Capital Overseas” – Art Bears

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young