ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗

Update frequency:
every 36 days
Average audio length:
36 minutes
English
United States
29 episodes
since May 20, 2022
episodic

LATEST EPISODE 🔗

Robert Philipson invites his old friend Joseph Mbele — a fellow Swahili scholar he first met as a graduate student in 1986, and who later hosted him in Dar es Salaam during his own dissertation research — onto the podcast to have a conversation about the most famous book to come out of East Africa:…

SEARCH PAST EPISODES

Search past episodes of Shoga Speaks.

PREVIOUS EPISODES

At the turn of the 20th century, African American artists faced a fundamental question: how could they prove their citizenship and claim their place in American culture? Historian and musician David Gilbert traces how the first generation of African American performers to crack Broadway effected th…
In 1896, Ernest Hogan's "All Coons Look Alike to Me" became the first song to sell a million copies in America, making him a star and setting off the "coon song craze"—an era in which African American performers and composers achieved unprecedented professional success whil…
Part Two continues the story of Marion's unbroken involvement with the Philipson family, maintained over the next four decades in spite of the distance that separated Paris from Pasadena. Dr. Philipson, whose development through French culture and language was the deepest and most sustained, r…
Dr. Philipson looks back at the life of his cousin Marion, a fiercely independent anti-colonialist and socialist documentary filmmaker, known for her work with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. Philipson explores how, from an unpromising bourgeois Jewish background in Cleveland, she lived in Chicago, Ne…
My mother's first cousin, Marion Michelle, had grown up in the first decades of the 20th century chafing against the bourgeois restrictions of Cleveland Jewish society. She went to the University of Chicago where Thornton Wilder frightened her out of serious literary effort and learned photogr…

The Family Dog

Our choice of pets says a lot about who we are … and we are all very different. There are cat people; there are dog people; there are bird people; there are reptile people and on and on. The famlly pet can mark a child’s development for better or worse, but if a dog or cat lives out the full term o…

HIV Negative

The phrase "HIV Negative" implies the diagnosis "HIV positive," a precursor to the AIDS epidemic which decimated the gay male population in the 1980s and beyond.  The stigma, still a force in some sectors of our society, delayed the mobilization for effective treatment when the …
This episode explores the life and legacy of actor John Garfield (born Julius Garfinkel), focusing on how his Jewish roots shaped his identity, artistic choices, and political stance. Journalist Robert Nott, author of He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield, recounts Garfield’s upbringing on …
In the conclusion of The Artificial Grandma, Dr. Robert Philipson continues his journey through post-college drift, emotional illness, and the disillusionment of returning home. Set against the backdrop of a failed commune dream, an acid-laced revelation, and the oppressive weight of family history…
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Robert Philipson, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.