Free Thinking Folgen

Hanif Abdurraqib, the American poet and essayist, has written a book in praise of black performance challenging stereotypes and recovering figures including the magician Ellen Armstrong who performed along the Atlantic seaboard in the 1900s, the dancer William Henry Lane described by Dickens and Merry Clayton, the gospel singer who performed on the Rolling Stones song Gimme Shelter. He joins New Generation Thinker Adjoa Osei and Dawn Walton, founder of Eclipse Theatre Company for a conversation with Matthew Sweet looking at how attitudes towards black performance have changed - or not.Hanif Abdurraqib's book is called A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance.Dawn Walton is directing The Death of a Black Man by Alfred Fagon at the Hampstead Theatre 28 May – 10 July. It premiered at that theatre in 1975.Adjoa Osei is a 2021 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to make radio from academic research. She researches at the University of Liverpool and her postcard looks at the Brazilian TV series on Netflix Coisa Mais Linda or Girls from Ipanema.You can find a playlist on the Free Thinking website exploring identity from speakers including Eddie Glaude Jr and Nadia Owusu on James Baldwin; the writers JJ Bola and Derek Owusu in an episode about masculinity; novelist Paul Mendez in a discussion about Queer Bloomsbury; a quartet of artists on the Black British Art movement, Le Gateau Chocolat in a discussion about the subversion of Cabaret and Suzan-Lori Parks on her play Father Comes Home from the Wars https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jngzt and a second playlist offers other discussions exploring Black History https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08t2qbpThe Lights Up festival of performance is running across BBC Radio 3 and 4 and BBC TV. The opening drama Giles Terera's The Meaning of Zong is available now on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000tdk4Producer: Caitlin Benedict

In Frank Skinner's A Comedian's Prayer Book the broadcaster presents a series of prayers which read like a stand-up routine exploring questions of belief. A practising Roman Catholic, Skinner's questions include the correct way of addressing God, what it means to be humble, and an unpicking of some of the metaphors used in the Bible. Jeet Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, and his latest novel, Names of the Women, imagines the New Testament from the viewpoint of the women who became followers of Jesus Christ - from Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, to Lydia of Thyatira, who is regarded as the first documented convert to Christianity in Europe. Yaa Gyasi’s second novel is called Transcendent Kingdom and it tells the story of a woman working in science who is negotiating her relationship both with her mother and with her beliefs and background. Laurence Scott talks to these three authors about how they approached writing about faith in fiction and for a mass audience.Producer: Emma WallaceYou can find a playlist exploring religious belief on the Free Thinking website, with speakers including Ziauddin Sardar, Richard Dawkins, Karen Armstrong, Rabbi Sacks, Marilynne Robinson, and Rowan Williams. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mwxlp

Wartime saviour or the symbol of nostalgic imperialism ? David Reynolds, Priya Satia, Richard Toye and Allen Packwood join Anne McElvoy to look at the ways Churchill's story and legacy are being written now by both historians and in the press. How can we untangle the culture war that is raging over his reputation and what can we learn if we look at the research coming out of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge?Richard Toye is Professor of History at the University of Exeter co-author of The Churchill Myths (2020) and author of Winston Churchill: A Life in the News (OUP, 2020) Priya Satia is Professor of International History at the University of Stanford, author of Time's Monster: How History Makes History (2020) and Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (2018) David Reynolds is Professor of International History at the University of Cambridge and author of One World Divisible: a Global History since 1945 (2000) and In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (2004) which was the winner of the Wolfson Prize Allen Packwood is Director of the Churchill Archives Centre in CambridgeProducer: Ruth Watts