Exterminate All The Brutes with Sheri-Marie Harrison, Andrew Hoberek, & Ignacio Sanchez Prado

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Following his 1895 worldwide lecture tour, which took him to many of the outposts of the British Empire, Mark Twain grew increasingly hostile to the processes of European colonization and American imperialism. This manifest first with biting satire of “civilization” and “the human race” in the book based on that lecture tour, Following The Equator (1897), then in increasingly vitriolic criticisms of colonial governments and imperial wars in his private correspondence, and finally climaxed with a public campaign against the violent, hypocritical march of Western Empire in published works like “To The Person Sitting In Darkness” (1901) and “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905), as well as planned works like “The Secret History of Eddypus, World-Empire” and “The Stupendous Procession,” left unfinished when Twain died in 1910, but made available in the collection Fables of Man (1972) from the Mark Twain Project, which you can now read online.

Twain’s account is strikingly compatible with that of Raoul Peck in his new HBO documentary series, Exterminate All The Brutes, released last month.

On a new episode of the American Vandal Podcast, Matt Seybold discusses the film with three scholars with very different backgrounds, personal and professional, all of whom are both enthusiastic and, at times, unsettled by Peck’s grand narrative of racialized violence, genocide, and conquest on a global scale.

Sheri-Marie Harrison is Associate Professor of English at University of Missouri. Her first book was Jamaica’s Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty in Anglophone Caribbean Literature & Criticism (Ohio State UP, 2014). She has since published broadly on Caribbean literature and cinema, mass culture of the African Diaspora, and transnational gothic traditions. During season one of The American Vandal Podcast, she spoke with Dr. Seybold about HBO’s Lovecraft Country in the contexts of her essays on “New Black Gothic” and “Global Horror.” Dr. Harrison has also since launched her own podcast, The Sheri Show.

Andrew Hoberek is Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English and Chair of Languages, Literatures, & Cultures at University of Missouri. His books include Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics (Rutgers UP, 2015) and The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction & White-Collar Work (Princeton UP, 2005). He also edited The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy (Cambridge UP, 2015) and was longtime editor of the Comics Section at Los Angeles Review of Books.

Ignacio Sánchez Prado is the Jarvis Thurston & Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also is Director of Undergraduate Studies in Latin American Studies, and a Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Film & Media Studies. He is author of numerous works of scholarship in both Spanish and English, including Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988-2012 (Vanderbilt UP, 2014) and Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, The Neoliberal Book Market, & The Question of World LIterature (Northwestern UP, 2018). He has written extensively on prose fiction, critical theory, film, and, most recently, food. Recent publications of note include a review essay of Harold Bloom’s late works, “On Cosmopolitanism & the Love of Literature” in Los Angeles Review of Books and “Enrique Olvera & the Sociopolitical Aesthetics of Neoliberal Culinary Art” from Post45‘s cluster on “The 7 Neoliberal Arts” which also features Dr. Harrison on audiobooks.

Our episode concludes with Dr. Prado making an impassioned case for increased engagement with global cinema from U.S. audiences. He specifically recommends two streaming services – MUBI and The Criterion Channel – both of which have free trial subscriptions and showcase several of the films mentioned in the episode and included in the episode bibliography below.

We hope you enjoy!