Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize 2020
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The tribe of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, having a Jamaican Welsh identity, the idea of freedom and anti-colonial resistance, the alarming rise of youth suicide among Indigenous people in Canada and how a group of pioneering cultural anthropologists – mostly women – shaped our interpretation of the modern world: these are the topics tackled in the shortlist for the 2020 prize for a book fostering global understanding. Rana Mitter talks to the authors.
Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands by Hazel V. Carby Insurgent Empire – Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopal Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power by Pekka Hämäläinen The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture by Charles King All Our Relations: Indigenous trauma in the shadow of colonialism by Tanya Talaga
The international book prize, worth £25,000, and run by the British Academy, rewards and celebrates the best works of non-fiction that have contributed to global cultural understanding, throwing new light on the interconnections and divisions shaping cultural identity worldwide. Over 100 submissions were received and the winner is announced on Tuesday 27 October.
Producer: Karl Bos
The winner in 2019 was Toby Green for A Fistful of Shells – West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution and other previous winners include Kapka Kassabova, Neil MacGregor and Karen Armstrong. You can find interviews with the winenrs and the other shortlisted authors for the 2019 prize (Ed Morales, Julian Baggini, Julia Lovell, Aanchal Malhotra and Kwame Anthony Appiah in this Free Thinking collection https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxh
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:36.9 | I'm Rhana Mitter. |
| 0:38.0 | In a moment, we'll be travelling round the world, |
| 0:40.3 | on the plains of North America, on horseback with the Warriors of the Lakota Nation, |
| 0:44.6 | to the warm beaches of Samoa, |
| 0:47.1 | and plenty of places in between as I talked to the finalists |
| 0:49.7 | for the British Academy, Niaf Lodan Prize in Global Cultural Understanding. |
| 0:54.6 | But before that, a quick word. |
| 0:57.1 | My name's Ian McMillan, keeper of the box of delights that is the verb. |
| 1:02.2 | If you like poetry and stories and spoken word and performance |
| 1:06.1 | and language that falls between the cracks, then the verb is for you. |
| 1:11.3 | Downloaders wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:14.2 | Hello, global cultural understanding. |
| 1:17.5 | Like Mahatma Gandhi's quip on Western civilization, that it will be a good idea, |
| 1:22.2 | it seems more of an aspiration than a reality. |
| 1:25.0 | But over the past decade, one book prize has tried to find written work that |
| 1:29.2 | does something to make that idea more concrete. That's the Nayef L. Rodan Prize for Global Cultural |
| 1:35.7 | Understanding, run by the British Academy, the UK's home for humanities and the social sciences. |
| 1:41.6 | Recent winners have included the writers Kapka Kasabova for her work on European |
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