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: Isak Denison's Out of Africa. What is a reflection of the colonial mindset, uncritically accepted by the European settler, and what actually holds up? The conversation ranges from the tender (Blixe...
24 Feb 2026
From Minstrelsy to Broadway, Part Two
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 this transformation. Ernest Hogan named himself “the unbleached American.” Bert Williams and George Walker, marketed themselves as "the two real coons." Bob Cole and the Johnson Brothers transce...
17 Feb 2026
From Minstrelsy to Broadway, Part One
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 while trafficking in the very stereotypes designed to undermine their citizenship. David Gilbert, a historian and musician, traces how coon songs emerged at the intersection of ragtime's rhythmic innovations and post-Reconstruc...
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