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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Free Thinking

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Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

The ideas shaping our lives today - with artists and thinkers in debates and interviews.

The ideas shaping our lives today - with leading artists and thinkers in extended interview and debate.

Matthew Sweet

Steve McQueen

Ian Christie

Fred D'Aguiar

Kit Davis

Madge Dresser

Free Thinking: Oscar Nominations, Steve McQueen, Slavery Narratives

Oscar Nominations, Steve McQueen, Slavery Narratives

16/01/2014

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Oscar Nominations, Steve McQueen, Slavery Narratives

Director Steve McQueen talks to Matthew Sweet talks about his new film 12 Years a Slave.

Matthew Sweet is joined by film director Steve McQueen, critic Ian Christie, poet Fred D'Aguiar, anthropologist Kit Davis and historian Madge Dresser to discuss slave narratives.

On tonight's Freethinking, the opposite of freedom - and how to describe it. We're going to listen to the voices of slaves. We'll hear the recorded testimony of people who were once regarded as property. And we'll examine the slave autobiographies that became a vigorous literary genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How reliable are they - and what are we relying upon them for?

Matthew Sweet talks to director Steve McQueen about his new film '12 Years A Slave' and assesses this year's Oscar nominations, among them Gravity starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, and The Wolf of Wall Street starring Leonardo Di Caprio and directed by Martin Scorsese.

The text from which 12 Years a Slave was created was a narrative of the same name written by Solomon Northup in 1853. There are hundreds of such narratives but who really wrote them, who were they for and what can we tell from the surviving copies? The poet and writer Fred D'Aguiar, the historian Dr Madge Dresser and the anthropologist Dr Kit Davis discuss the ghosts that rise up amongst us when studying such texts.

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