In your ear
Long-form spoken essays — primary-source readings, original commentary, and occasional conversations. Every essay ships with a written transcript.
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Lorde's most-quoted line, recovered from the slogan into the argument it lives inside. Twenty-four minutes on the full essay, the conference it was delivered at, and the work of misreading that has been done to it since.
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Twenty-two minutes drawing on Stuart Hall's posthumous memoir Familiar Stranger and the 1958 Notting Hill riots as the moment Hall identified as his political turning point. The episode is also a meditation on what dias…
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A dramatic reading of Amílcar Cabral's 1970 Syracuse University address 'National Liberation and Culture,' framed by ten minutes of context on the war for independence in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.
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King's 1963 letter is the most-anthologized document in American civil-rights history. It is also the most domesticated. Thirty minutes returning the letter to its context and recovering the parts the school anthologies…
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Twenty minutes on Patrice Lumumba — the June 30, 1960 independence speech, the July 1960 secession crisis, the January 1961 murder. The episode draws on declassified Belgian and U.S. records released since 2000.
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An unabridged reading of the chapter 'Some Questions on Development' from How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, followed by eight minutes of commentary on its continuing relevance.
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Ngũgĩ's 1986 decision to write fiction only in Gikuyu, read in the context of his subsequent forty-year career — including the work that has and has not been translated.
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A dramatic reading of the 1900 'Address to the Nations of the World,' framed by historical context on the first Pan-African Conference and the global Black audience it convened.
Read by A guest reader
Seventeen minutes on the eight-line 1773 poem 'On Being Brought from Africa to America' — what it has been read to mean, what it might actually mean, and what the conditions of its publication tell us about the constrai…
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Twenty-six minutes on Steve Biko's writing, his political context inside the South African Students' Organisation, and the August 1977 detention and police killing that ended his life at thirty.
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Why The Souls of Black Folk reads, today, as if it were written this week — and what that says about the United States in 2026.
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Thirty-five minutes on Du Bois's 1935 Black Reconstruction — the historiographic argument, the closing 'Propaganda of History' chapter, and the half-century it took the U.S. academy to admit Du Bois had been right.