Octavia Butler's Kindred
Arts & Ideas11 Tammi 2024

Octavia Butler's Kindred

"A hermit in the middle of Los Angeles" is one way she described herself - born in 1947, Butler became a writer who wanted to "tell stories filled with facts. Make people touch and taste and know." Since her death in 2006, her writing has been widely taken up and praised for its foresight in suggesting developments such as big pharma and for its critique of American history. Shahidha Bari is joined by the author Irenosen Okojie and the scholar Gerry Canavan and Nisi Shawl, writer, editor, journalist – and long time friend of Octavia Butler.

Irenosen Okojie's latest collection of short stories is called Nudibranch and she was winner of the 2020 AKO Caine Prize for Fiction for her story Grace Jones. You can hear her discussing her own writing life alongside Nadifa Mohamed in a previous Free Thinking episode https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000k8sz Gerry Canavan is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction. Nisi Shawl writes about books for The Seattle Times, and also contributes frequently to Ms. Magazine, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, The Washington Post.

Producer: Luke Mulhall

You might be interested in the Free Thinking episode Science fiction and ecological thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000h6yw and on Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b6yb37 and a playlist exploring Landmarks of Culture including Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and the writing of Audre Lorde, and of Wole Soyinka https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01jwn44

Jaksot(2000)

Life expectations, philosophy in the world, protest

Life expectations, philosophy in the world, protest

Can we still expect a meaningful job, stable income, a chance of owning property? How have expectations changed and what is the place of protest? Matthew Sweet's guests this week are: David Willetts i...

10 Touko 202456min

Winning & Losing, Plato Scroll, the Decline of Nightlife

Winning & Losing, Plato Scroll, the Decline of Nightlife

Matthew Sweet talks about the philosophy of winning and losing with Professor Lea Ypi a political scientist at the London School of Economics and the journalist and author Peter Hitchens. They'll be j...

4 Touko 202457min

Kant today, Spice Girls Reunited, Impersonating an Animal

Kant today, Spice Girls Reunited, Impersonating an Animal

Marshmallows and Kant, ideas about girl power from Mary Wollstonecraft (born April 27th 1759) to the Spice girls; and galloping horses, sea-gull sounds and life as a goat. On today's Free Thinking Sha...

26 Huhti 202457min

New Thinking: Exploring the local

New Thinking: Exploring the local

Women made up 10-15% of the workforce in the early days of the post office. Looking at a series of different records from the 17th century onwards, Sarah Ward Clavier has discovered stories about spyi...

26 Huhti 202443min

Tacitus, Byron's fanmail and Bluey

Tacitus, Byron's fanmail and Bluey

Classicist Mary Beard picks Tacitus as a figure who still has relevance if we're thinking about satire, power and celebrity. Shahidha Bari is joined by Mary, historian Helen Carr, who co-edited What i...

19 Huhti 202457min

Change, scrabble and cultural christianity

Change, scrabble and cultural christianity

"The times they are a changin" or are they? In politics people are talking about an appetite for change, or being a candidate for change but how radical can you be? With climate change, seasonal chang...

12 Huhti 202456min

Hobbes, Abba, Waterloo and margarine

Hobbes, Abba, Waterloo and margarine

What do you owe the state and what does it provide for us? Writing during the English civil war, Thomas Hobbes came up with an outline for the social contract between individuals and the sovereign – o...

5 Huhti 202456min

Unravelling plainness

Unravelling plainness

Gold sequins, silk and vibrant colour threads might not be what you expect to find in a sampler stitched by a Quaker girl in the seventeenth century. New Generation Thinker Isabella Rosner has studied...

29 Maalis 202414min

Suosittua kategoriassa Yhteiskunta

olipa-kerran-otsikko
sita
kaksi-aitia
ihme-ja-kumma
siita-on-vaikea-puhua
i-dont-like-mondays
uutiscast
gogin-ja-janin-maailmanhistoria
poks
antin-palautepalvelu
kolme-kaannekohtaa
mamma-mia
rss-murhan-anatomia
yopuolen-tarinoita-2
aikalisa
rss-nikotellen
loukussa
meidan-pitais-puhua
rss-palmujen-varjoissa
naakkavalta