Christopher Lydon's blog

The Obama Moment in America reminds the Chicago anthropologist John Comaroff of the Mandela Moment in his native South Africa in the early 1990s. The whole world has embraced the Obama Moment as its own, Comaroff says, because it marks “the reentry of a pariah nation into the world” on the terms of a revived democracy.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Comaroff. (52 minutes, 24 mb mp3)

There’s a bracing analysis here from a man who makes it his business to jar our perspective — whose definition of anthropology boils down to “critical estrangement.” Anthropology won the election, Comaroff says, only half kidding. He means not just that Barack Obama is the son of an anthropologist but has a mind to stand outside the consensus when he must.

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with openDemocracy author Godfrey Hodgson (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3)

When you’ve had enough of the dugout convention chatter on the US cable networks, try Godfrey Hodgson from Oxford, 5000 miles from the convention scene. I wonder if anybody sees American politics more essentially than the co-author of a reporters’ masterpiece (up there with Norman Mailer’s) on the 1968 campaign, An American Melodrama, and many other rapt studies of us. (Forthcoming: The Myth of American Exceptionalism.) Hodgson volunteers in conversation that what he missed forty years ago was the length and depth of the conservative cycle the US was entering with Richard Nixon’s election. Today, forty years later, Hodgson’s keynote is that the conservative ascendancy, having fomented the Iraq War and a Gilded Age of inequality, sounds far from broken. The “change” chord rings to Hodgson more of therapy than political reconstruction. The tune from America these days, he says, still sounds something like the Russophobic ditty sung in England in the 1870s — the song that gave “Jingo” to the lexicon of chip-on-the-shoulder patriotism.

We don’t want to fight,

But by Jingo if we do,

We’ve got the ships,

We’ve got the men,

And we’ve got the money, too.

From a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt, around 1877.

Here’s a first conversational stab at the point that Obama vs. McCain — while it’s not the world’s election — is a world event like no US presidential campaign before it. This is partly the Web effect, which puts millions, maybe billions, of people in the churn of daily information about the campaign. And it’s even moreso the resonance of Barack Obama, who’s been dubbed “Germany’s favorite politician at the moment” (in Germany) and “definitively… the candidate of Europe” (in Portugal), as Shmuel Rosner of Ha’aretz wrote in Slate this Spring.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Barnett and Kanishk Tharoor (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

It’s different and remarkable, furthermore, as the young editor of openUSA, Kanishk Tharoor, remarks in our conversation, that interest abroad in US politics seems based less on calculations of US foreign policy toward nations and continents like China, say, or Africa or the Middle East. The fascination seems rather with “underlying issues like race, like generation, like globalism.” And the provocative effect of the fascination shows up, for example, in a piece written for openUSA from India that asks: “Can there be a Muslim Obama?” Or as Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy puts it in this conversation from London, Obama “unlocks possibility. He unlocks the imagination. If he could do that, what could I do? What could we do?”

Read this post in its entirety on Radio Open Source.

Bob Marley and Barack Obama are the absent heroes of the 8th annual Calabash literary festival in Jamaica: Marley, because his music and poetry incarnate the living “reggae aesthetic” (with the pan-African, Judaeo-Christian, sexual, political and celebratory overtones which the poet and Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes expounds in conversation here). And Obama, because he seems to stand for a possibility that is artistic as well as political — for the idea that imagination can lead the way, that shocking transformations can develop before our eyes. I don’t know how many people I heard say things like: “I never thought that I would live to see the Berlin Wall fall down,” or more often: “I never thought I would see the day when Nelson Mandela walked free in South Africa. And I never thought I’d see a black man nominated for president in the United States.” So the suspense of the Obama moment in America touches this gathering of writers and readers in the West Indes. And for many of the writers I interviewed at Calabash, the Obama moment in America has implications that are artistic as well as political. The poet Yusef Komunyakaa made the literary link with Obama this way: “I think it has everything to do with possibility,” he said. “The writer is definitely a dreamer.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations on the Obama Moment at Calabash ‘08 (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3)

So I asked a number of the writers at Calabash to fill in the connection between the Barack Obama politics back in the States with the stories and poems and dreams being read out to a couple of thousand listeners on a beach in the Caribbean in this late spring of 2008.

Are we supposed to be hoping that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s hair-raising 15 minutes of fame are over?

The black polymath Glenn Loury and I are puzzling in conversation here about all that the YouTube and network frenzy left out — the blessed insight and fellowship of black church life in America, but also the radicalism of its perspectives.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Glenn Loury (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3)