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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Radio
Every weekday, the wildly popular Tom Joyner Morning Show reaches
more than eight million radio listeners. The show offers broadly
progressive political talk, adult-oriented soul music, humor,
advice, and celebrity gossip for largely older, largely
working-class black audience. But it's not just an old-school show:
it's an activist political forum and a key site reflecting on
popular aesthetics. It focuses on issues affecting African
Americans today, from the denigration of hard-working single
mothers, to employment discrimination and sexual abuse, to the
racism and violence endemic to the U.S. criminal justice system, to
international tragedies. In Black Radio/Black Resistance, author
Micaela di Leonardo dives deep into the Tom Joyner Morning Show's
25 year history inside larger U.S. broadcast history. From its rise
in the Clinton era and its responses to key events-9/11, Hurricane
Katrina, President Obama's elections and presidency, police murders
of unarmed black Americans and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and
Donald Trump's ascendancy-it has broadcast the varied, defiant, and
darkly comic voices of its anchors, guests, and audience members.
di Leonardo also investigates the new synergistic set of
cross-medium ties and political connections that have affected
print, broadcast, and online reporting and commentary in antiracist
directions. This new multiracial progressive public sphere has
extraordinary potential for shaping America's future. Thus Black
Radio/Black Resistance does far more than simply shed light on a
major counterpublic institution unjustly ignored for reasons of
color, class, generation, and medium. It demonstrates an
alternative understanding of the shifting black public sphere in
the digital age. Like the show itself, Black Radio/Black Resistance
is politically progressive, music-drenched, and blisteringly funny.
Often described as 'the father of realism', Henrik Ibsen was a
pioneer of modernist drama. He influenced playwrights as diverse as
George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, and is the most frequently
performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Included in
this collection are adaptations of his tragicomic masterpiece The
Wild Duck, his complex and compelling play Rosmersholm, the epic
drama Brand and the tragedy John Gabriel Borkman. Ibsen's A Doll's
House is relocated to 1879 India in Tanika Gupta's Audio Drama
Award-winning dramatisation, while the provocative and scandalous
Ghosts is adapted by Richard Eyre, with the cast of his Olivier
Award-winning Almeida Theatre production. Also featured are vibrant
dramatisations of Hedda Gabler, whose desperate heroine is trapped
in a suffocating marriage; The Lady from the Sea, about a woman
torn between security and passion; and An Enemy of the People, in
which a whistleblower reveals an inconvenient truth and is vilified
for it. The casts of these stunning dramas include David Threlfall,
Nicholas Farrell, Helen Baxendale, Indira Varma, Lesley Manville
and Harriet Walter.
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