The Phil Lind Initiative Speaker Series: Suleika Jaouad & Jon Batiste

Celebrated artists and life partners, writer Suleika Jaouad and musician Jon Batiste gave the world an intimate look into their life in the recent 2023 Netflix documentary American Symphony which has been hailed as “a moving ode to love, creativity, and the art of survival” (Rolling Stone). Chronicling the year that Batiste was nominated for 11 Grammy awards and Jaouad’s leukaemia returned after almost a decade of remission, the two artists never stop creating as they move through extraordinary tribulations and triumphs together.

Their Phil Lind Initiative talk will offer a wide-ranging exploration of art and creative expression as an act of survival and connection—be that the meaningful connection that author Jaouad forged with Quintin Jones, an inmate looking for clemency who was ultimately executed in 2021, or the foundational philosophy behind Batiste’s latest album World Music Radio, which challenges the borders we draw between musical genres, artistic disciplines, and communities of people themselves.

Pop Politics: Pop Culture and Political Life in the United States

Popular culture plays a vital if complicated role at the heart of American political life. The music, movies, memes, podcasts, shows, and novels that saturate our daily existence reveal much about how American society thinks about itself and how it understands politics. The narratives conveyed through pop culture often seek to reflect the realities of American life and, in so doing, help shape those realities. A testament to its influence, more people experience politics through mass culture than they do through formal political acts. This speaks to the potential power that pop culture has for getting Americans – and younger generations in particular – engaged with the political debates that define our era. But pop culture, susceptible as it is to manipulation and underpinned by commercial interests, is not without potential pitfalls for democratic societies. This series asks how the defining debates of American political life are represented in pop culture and, in turn, how pop culture helps define them. Going beyond the substantive content, it also offers a critical eye to the mediums of pop culture and how they shape how we understand politics. Ultimately it explores the promise and peril of pop culture in how we understand, experience, and practice politics in the United States.