034 Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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This episode we follow the journey of two half sisters and their descendants through more than 300 years of Ghanaian and United States history in Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing. From Cape Coast Castle and the slave plantations of Alabama to Jazz Age Harlem and the African independence movements, Gyasi examines the generational trauma caused by colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. We’re joined by guest Hayley Schueneman, a Chicago-based writer, and together we explore Gyasi’s brilliant debut novel.

Recorded on May 24, 2020

Where to Donate:

• Minnesota Freedom Fund

• George Floyd Memorial Fund

• I Run With Amaud Fund

• Justice for Breonna Taylor

Where to Learn More:

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

• White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

• Hope and Hard Pills podcast with Andre Henry

• Intersectionality Matters with Dr Kimberle Crenshaw

• The Red Couch Podcast with Propaganda and Dr Alma

• Uncivil podcast

• White Homework resources by Tori Williams Douglass

• Be the Bridge educational resources by Latasha Morrison

Links to Things Mentioned in the Episode:

• So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

• Our Guest Hayley Schueneman’s writing for The Cut and Reductress

• Women and Children First feminist bookstore

• Postcolonial Literary Theory and Frantz Fanon

• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

• Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

• Marie Antionette film by Sofia Coppola

Recommended Reading Mentioned in the Episode:

• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

• Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

• 13th film by Ava Duvernay

• I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown

• The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra

Quarantine Recommendations:

• Notes on a Conditional Form album by The 1975

• D-2 mixtape by Agust D

• Daechwita music video by Agust D

• The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

• Headspace app (free for the unemployed)