Dune: Part Two, Part 2
It’s here. I just pressed the “make live” button on the episode a couple hours ago and already the numbers on this pod are jumping. I’m really excited about that. But not as excited as I am for HATM Producer Fletcher Powell, who welcomed his second child this week, even though said child is not named after me. Whatever.
Usually producing an episode takes hours, removing all the ums and ahs, and getting all the sound to actually sound good. That’s nice except Baby Powell will be joining Toddler Powell in attempts to keep Fletcher from doing anything, especially sleeping. So, in our efforts to get this to you as soon as we could, I asked Fletcher to not actually produce the episode. We slapped on an intro and outtro and you have a podcast. A note about the episode- if you haven’t seen the film yet, THAT’S OK. We have a spoiler-free section at the beginning where we talk about influences and essentially set the stage and then note when we are going to talk about the rest of the movie in detail.
Last night I gave you a glimpse of the episode and you got to see Margari doing her thing. So tonight I thought it was only fair that you got to see Mary talking about dueling ideologies in Dune vis-a-vis Chani and Stilgar (this won’t ruin anything).
The conversation we had on this pod is probably the deepest dive into a film and the history behind it that we have ever had. The breadth of knowledge between Margari and Mary is astounding as we bounced between ideas of indigeneity, colonialism, race, sex, power, and the histories of Portugal, North Africa, Sudan, and the Middle Ages. And lest you think that this was only history, I assure you that both Mary and Margari are certified nerds (as high of an honor as I can bestow) since we talked about Dune’s influences on Star Wars, Star Trek, even….a Vin Diesel trilogy???
I wrote this last night, but this pod encapsulates everything that history and movies can be. We can bring together our love of movies, of space fantasy and far-off planets to form new friendships and then have awesome conversations about the past and why that links us all. I’m so proud of this episode, and I hope you like it. Links below.
About our guests:
Mary Hicks is Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and is a historian of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on transnational histories of race, slavery, capitalism, migration and the making of the early modern world. Her first book, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery, 1721-1835, reimagines the history of Portuguese exploration, colonization and oceanic commerce from the perspective of enslaved and freed black seamen laboring in the transatlantic slave trade. As the Atlantic world’s first subaltern cosmopolitans, black mariners, she argues, were integral in forging a unique commercial culture that linked the politics, economies and people of Salvador da Bahia with those of the Bight of Benin.
More broadly, she seeks to interrogate the multiplicity of connections between West Africa and Brazil through the lens of mutual cultural, technological, commercial, intellectual and environmental influences and redefine how historians understand experiences of enslavement and the middle passage. In addition to investigating the lives of African sailors, she also explores the cultural and religious sensibilities of enslaved and freed African women in living in 19th century Salvador da Bahia. Along these lines, her second book will detail the emergence and elaboration of new gendered and racialized subjectivities in the wake of Portugal’s initiation of trade with West Africa in the fifteenth century.
Margari Hill is the co-founder and Executive Director of Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC), a human rights education organization. She is also a freelance writer published in How We Fight White Supremacy (2018) Time, Huffington Post, and Al Jazeera English. She earned her master’s degree in History of the Middle East and Islamic Africa from Stanford University in 2006. Her research includes transformations in Islamic education, colonial surveillance in Northern Nigeria, anti-colonial resistance among West Africans in Sudan during the early 20th century, interethnic relations in Muslim communities, anti-bias K-12 education, and the criminalization of Black Muslims. She is on the Advisory Council of Islam, Social Justice & Interreligious Engagement Program at the Union Theological Seminary. For her work, she has received numerous awards including the Council of American Islamic Relation’s (CAIR) 2020 Muslim of the Year award, Khadija bint Khuwaylid Relief Foundation Lifetime Humanitarian award in 2019, the Big Heart Award in 2017, and MPAC’s 2015 Change Maker Award. She has given talks and lectures in various universities and community centers throughout the country.