4.8 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2019
⏱️ 46 minutes
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0:00.0 | Nobel Prize winning author Tony Morrison died last week at the age of 88. |
0:06.0 | Novels like Beloved and the Bluest Die established her as one of America's greatest writers, someone who captured truths about our broadly shared |
0:15.7 | humanity without flinching away from the visceral specificity of the Black American experience. |
0:22.0 | I'm thinking about Morrison this week, |
0:24.0 | not just because of her passing, though, |
0:26.5 | but because of her politics. |
0:29.2 | Morrison didn't write in a vacuum. |
0:31.9 | As an editor at Random House, |
0:33.9 | she published Black Radical Activists, |
0:36.4 | like Angela Davis and Huey P Newton. |
0:39.6 | And importantly, for the purposes of this episode she advocated for inclusion and |
0:45.0 | solidarity in the context of the movements of her time. |
0:49.0 | In 1981, she delivered a speech at the American Writers Congress that called on writers |
0:55.6 | to join in solidarity against often harsh and isolating conditions in the publishing industry. |
1:02.4 | Morrison said, romanticized and misapplied. |
1:06.0 | Individualism keeps us self-indulgent. |
1:09.0 | It keeps us ignorant of contracts, of money, of benefits, of rights, of how the partnership between |
1:16.4 | author and publisher ought to work, of the areas that threaten both publisher and writer. She went on to say, |
1:24.7 | the political philosophy of the country chanced its love of individualism. The nature of our |
1:30.0 | work makes us prize it. The corporate compulsion of the industry fosters it. |
1:36.0 | But it is not as individuals that we are abused and silenced. |
1:41.2 | It is as writers. We need protection in the form of structure, an accessible |
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