Unheard

06/04/20 • 39 min

5 Listeners

In 1945, Ralph Ellison went to a barn in Vermont and began to write Invisible Man. He wrote it in the voice of a black man from the south, a voice that changed American literature. Invisible Man is a novel made up of black voices that had been excluded from the historical record until, decades earlier, he’d helped record them with the WPA’s Federal Writers Project. What is the evidence of a voice? How can we truly know history without everyone’s voices? This episode traces those questions — from the quest to record oral histories of formerly enslaved people, to Black Lives Matter and the effort to record the evidence of police brutality.

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Previous Episode

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In 1804, an Invisible Lady arrived in New York City.

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Next Episode

Project X

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The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to feature an American presidential candidate. And on election night, CBS News premiered the first computer to predict an American election — the UNIVAC. Safe to say, that part didn’t go according to plan. But election night 1952 is ground zero for our current, political post-truth moment. If a computer and a targeted advertisement can both use heaps data to predict every citizen’s every decision, can voters really know things for themselves after all?

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The Last Archive - Unheard

Transcript Summary

In the podcast episode titled "Unheard," listeners are taken on a journey into the world of Ralph Ellison, a renowned African American writer, and his struggle to give voice to the black experience. Through interviews conducted by both white interviewers and African American writers, the contradictions and complexities of slavery are uncovered. Ellison, famed for his novel "Invisible Man," becomes both evidence and spokesperson for black people, but his unfinished work reflects the unspoken and unheard truths that still resonate in society today. As Black Lives Matter captures evidence of injustice through recordings and videos, Ellison's quest to be seen and heard takes on renewed significance. The episode weaves together the historical significance of capturing oral histories, the rarity of testimonies from enslaved people, and the power of sound in shaping our understanding of the past and present. Ultimately, "Unheard" offers a captivating exploration of the struggle for visibility and the importance of preserving marginalized voices.

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:15.396

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