E80 - Good News by David Gramling

UNESCO RIELA: The sounds of integration

This episode is a recording of the opening keynote address Prof David Gramling delivered at the UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating 2025, in Glasgow, Scotland. Here is the abstract: Good News Bernice Johnson Reagon once sang for us a corrective teaching, along the lines that: “It’s ‘good news’ when you reject things as they are. […] And they don’t say ‘it’s good times’, they say ‘it’s good news’.” Fifty years later, these are definitely not good times. And, in this powerfully strange moment, even looking around for ‘good news’ often feels inappropriately consolational, often at fatal odds with the dreads and taunts of today’s geopolitical realism. This opening talk for our Spring School welcomes in the resources of “untimely optimism” (Feldman 2023), “out-of-phasedness” (Doumani 2007), “gramáticas de lo inaudito” (Acosta López 2023) and “anticipatory illuminations” (Bloch in Zipes 2019), in hopes of making room for a peace-in-this-time whose living vitality is the opposite of resigned quietism. To that end, we will meet head-on a few of the nightmares-of-the-self that may well haunt a peace-lover in Spring of 2025, seeking to expel that haunt and conjure in its place some unprecedented good news. For the full show notes, including David's biography, please visit bit.ly/thesoundsofintegration