The first cut on this record has been cross-format focused for Airplay success.

The men beat on their drums. I'm going to be. I'm going to I'm going to

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I'm

the Hello and welcome to another episode of Politics Theory Other.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Anna Della Subin.

We talked about her new book, Accidental Gods,

on men unwittingly turned divine. The book tells the stories of men who have inadvertently

been turned into living gods, from Gandhi and Haile Selassie to Prince Philip and Narendra Modi.

In the book, Anna shows how deification and violence were intertwined in the colonial enterprise

and in the present-day cult of the political strongman. Yet she argues it's also a process

that has been central to struggles for liberation. In our conversation we focused on the chapters

of the book on Haile Selassie and the emergence of the Rastafari in Jamaica in the

1930s and on the history of deification in the British Raj regarding both the colonial authorities

and the iconic leaders of the independence movement. Today's show is brought to you by

PTO supporters on Patreon and also by Verso Books, who have lots of great left-wing titles

that may be of interest to PTO listeners. One you might like to check out is Bad Gaze,

A Homosexual History by Hugh Lemmy and Ben Miller. Why must liberatory history be populated by

heroes? And what if it isn't? Part revisionist history, part historical biography,

and based on the hugely popular podcast series,

Badgays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes

and asks what we can learn about LGBT history, sexuality and identity

...