Peter Matthiessen & Subhankar Banerjee

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Peter Matthiessen & Subhankar Banerjee

November 25, 2008 by windmtn

Peter Matthiessen Reads From Shadow Country

Listen to Peter Matthiessen reading from Shadow Country. Dr. Robert Newman, PhD introduces Peter Matthiessen. Peter is joined by his fellow collaborator, humanitarian, environmental activist and internationally acclaimed photographer Subhankar Banerjee. Subhankar presents a discussion on their recent adventures in the Arctic.

To Listen Select from the Tracks in the Table Below

Track –	(Size, Time)	Speaker	Description
1 –	(1 mb, 2 mins)	Robert Newman -	Opening Remarks – Introduces the program
2 –	(1 mb, 2 mins)	Robert Newman -	Introduces Subhankar Banerjee
3 –	(1 mb, 3 mins)	Robert Newman -	Introduces Peter Matthiessen
4 –	(9 mb, 31 mins)	Subhankar Banerjee -	On photography and the Arctic
5 –	(4 mb, 12 mins)	Peter Matthiessen -	On Subhankar and the Arctic
6 –	(2 mb, 7 mins)	Peter Matthiessen -	Introduces Shadow Country
7 –	(3 mb, 9 mins)	Peter Matthiessen -	Reads Shadow Country
8 –	(3mb, 12 mins)	Peter Matthiessen -	Reads Shadow Country
9 –	(2 mb, 7 mins)	Peter Matthiessen -	Reads Shadow Country
10 –	(2 mb, 5 mins)	Peter Matthiessen -	Concluding Remarks

Opening Remarks by Dr. Robert Newman, PhD.

robertnewmanuofu Dr. Newman, Dean of the College of Humanities and Associate Vice President for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Utah introduces the annual Lyceum II lecture series in Environmental Humanities featuring Peter Matthiessen and Subhankar Banerjee. “The Environmental Humanities program seeks to create an axis of inquiry around the integration of community and geography, focusing on the environments of culture, conflict and resolution, in the creation of a society to match our scenery.” This evening marked the first event in a year long celebration of the centennial of Wallace Stegner’s birth.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edges and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. — Wallace Stegner, Wilderness Letter

Subhankar Banerjee

Subhankar Banerjee, an Indian–born artist–activist, uses photography to raise awareness about issues that threaten the environment. Since 2000, he has focused his activist efforts on the rights of indigenous peoples and land conservation issues in the Arctic. His Arctic photographs have been shown in nearly forty group and solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including a solo exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. In 2009, his photographs will be featured in the group exhibition IMPACT: Living in the Age of Climate Change that will open in Copenhagen at the Staten Museum for Kunst (the Danish National Gallery of Art) and will travel to Iceland, Sweden, and Norway in 2010. Banerjee received an inaugural Greenleaf Artist Award from the United Nations Environmental Program and an inaugural Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. In Fall 2008, he is a visiting artist at F.A.R. (Future Arts Research) at Arizona State University in Phoenix and a visiting scholar at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. In Winter 2009 he will be artist–in–residence at Dartmouth College in Hanover. For more information visit www.subhankarbanerjee.org.

Subhankar Banerjee uses photography to raise awareness about issues that threaten the health and well–being of our planet. — Dr. Robert Newman

National Book Award

Peter Matthiessen was recently honored with his second National Book Award. Matthiessen last won a National Book Award in 1979 for The Snow Leopard. This year’s fiction prize was awarded for Shadow Country, an 890–page revision that deepens and condenses a trilogy of novels originally released in the 1990s. Matthiessen was a National Book Award finalist in two previous years.

[Matthiessen's] powerful trilogy Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone imaginatively reconstructs the life and times of the nineteenth century pioneer farmer and force–of–evil Edgar J. Watson. It has been compared to the Brothers Karamazov, Absalom Absalom, and Euripides. It embraces the American experience from the Civil War to the Great Depression. In his newest novel, Shadow Country, Peter stunningly has reworked this epic trilogy, offering new illumination about American self–transformation and renewal, patriotism and xenophobia, racial fear, greed, the rape of our wild places, and the psychological violence in the family. Shadow Country is a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and many reviewers have written glowingly of it as a contemporary masterpiece. — Dr. Robert Newman