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This episode contains strong language.
Wesley has been obsessed with lists since he was a child — think Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, the Academy Awards and Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums of All Time. Now, he wants to think more seriously about expanding what we call the canon, making sure more people have a say in which works of art are considered great, enduring and important.
For guidance, Wesley sits down with Daphne A. Brooks, an academic, critic and music lover, to ask whether expanding the canon is even the right way to think about this. Her thoughts surprise him: We can do better than lists!
Daphne A. Brooks’s Recommendations and Influences
Today’s guest, Daphne A. Brooks, is a professor of African American studies; American studies; women’s, gender and sexuality studies; and music at Yale University. Her recent book, “Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound,” traces the history of American music with Black women at its center.
The Still Processing team asked Daphne to recommend some further avenues to explore canonization in popular culture — and how to find other, less hierarchical ways to preserve and care for all kinds of artistic expression.
We’ve put together a collection of Daphne’s recommendations below, as she experienced them throughout her life:
Childhood Influencers
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Listen to vintage episodes of American Top 40! This is where we found the archive tape from the exact weeks in the 1970s and ’80s that Daphne and Wesley remembered from their childhoods.
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Read about the making of Sister Sledge’s hit “We Are Family,” and then dance to it.
Listening to the Blues with Depth, Vigor and Joy
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Daphne co-curated a public listening session of blues music at Yale with many other custodians of the blues, including Jack White of the White Stripes. They played Paramount records that “had not been listened to in decades upon decades.”
Visionary Scholars
Explore the literature of academics who have been raising questions about the ways that quantitative forms of record keeping tied to Atlantic world slavery are deeply entangled with histories of violence, dehumanization and erasure of the details of human life. Read and hear their alternatives to imagining Black lives and history:
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Saidiya Hartman, author of “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.”
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Jennifer Morgan, author of “Reckoning With Slavery.”
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Vincent Brown, a professor at Harvard University, on the relationship between slavery and war.
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Stephanie Smallwood, author of “Saltwater Slavery.”
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Autumn Womack and “The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930,” which Daphne says is “brand-new and brilliant, by a rising young scholar.”
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Katherine McKittrick on Black methodologies and “Mathematics Black Life.”
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Sylvia Wynter’s “On Being Human as Praxis” and “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.”
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Jacqueline Najuma Stewart’s “Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity.”
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Tyehimba Jess’s “Olio.”
A Mentor and Friend
Greg Tate, a journalist and critic, was Daphne’s inspiration throughout adulthood. “Greg always reminded us through his writing that we have a place in the world,” she said. “And that the way that we affirmed and announced our place in the world had everything to do with the art that we made — and also the ways that we passed on to each other the meaning of that art as a tool of survival.”
Hosted by: Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris
Produced by: Elyssa Dudley and Hans Buetow
Edited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha Weiss
Engineered by: Marion Lozano
Executive Producer, Shows: Wendy Dorr
Assistant Managing Editor: Sam Dolnick