Podcast Summary: "Ugly Freedoms" with Elisabeth R. Anker

Podcast: New Books Network: Political Science
Host: Lily Goren
Guest: Elisabeth R. Anker (Libby), Author of Ugly Freedoms
Date: October 19, 2025
Publisher: Duke University Press (2022)

Episode Overview

In this compelling episode, political theorist Elisabeth R. Anker discusses her 2022 book Ugly Freedoms, which investigates the complex, often uncomfortable ways that "freedom" is practiced and understood, especially within Western political thought and culture. The discussion traverses philosophical definitions, historical contradictions around the concept of freedom, and its intersections with violence, domination, subjugation, and contemporary crises like climate change and neoliberal capitalism.

Anker also situates her argument through the examination of cultural artifacts—analyzing installations, films, and television—to illuminate how "ugly freedoms" are enacted and represented.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins and Motivation for the Book

[02:23–04:28]

• Anker's Frustration With Heroic, Individualistic Freedom:

  • Traditional narratives (e.g., breaking chains, heroic individuals) exclude more collaborative, everyday experiences.
  • "I was looking for understandings of freedom that not only were more violent on the one hand, but in the opposite way, freedom that was more accessible, that was more humane, that included many more of the US mortals in this world..." — Anker, 03:44

• Desire for Broader Definitions:

  • Moves beyond the "ideal" or purely individualistic; seeks to include collective, daily practices of freedom.

2. Defining "Freedom" and the Idea of "Ugly Freedoms"

[05:05–08:44]

• No Singular Meaning of Freedom:

  • Western thought suggests conflicting views: self-determination, collective self-rule, non-domination, etc.
  • Anker resists narrowing the definition, instead studying how conceptions of freedom often produce violence, even as they deny it.

• Ugly Freedom:

  • Practices of freedom built on subjugation, violence, or exploitation—but often narrativized as heroic, pure, or noble.
  • Examples: US founding hinged on Indigenous dispossession and slavery, even while touting equality and liberty.
  • "So this is what I mean by ugly freedom. The ways in which acts of freedom often rely on forms of subjugation, brutality, and violence that are then disavowed..." — Anker, 11:45

• Morality and Freedom:

  • Challenges the notion that freedom is always enacted by "morally pure" actors.

3. The Role and Meaning of "Ugliness"

[14:07–17:02]

• Double Valence of Ugliness:
  • Ugliness as critique—revealing violence and exclusion in "idealized" freedoms.
  • Ugliness as generative—exploring marginalized spaces (associated with "ugliness") for emancipatory possibilities.
  • "Calling them ugly draws, on the one hand, an ugliness's capacity to challenge what we imagine our ideals to be..." — Anker, 14:19
  • Aesthetics and politics are inseparable; notions of "beautiful" are often tied to dominant classes and their ideals.

4. Tracing Ugly Freedoms Through History and Culture

[17:02–22:03]

• Case Studies Across Systems of Power:

  • Settler colonialism, patriarchy, heteropatriarchy, enslavement, white supremacy, neoliberalism, and climate change.
  • All justified with reference to "freedom," although through different logics.
  • Plantation system originated as "freedom" for colonial subjects (through domination and property rights).

• Freedoms Justified by Destruction:

  • Control of nature, property, and resources linked to freedom, but lead to exploitation and violence.

5. Deep Dives: Cultural Artifacts as Illustrations

a. Kara Walker’s “Sugar Baby” and Plantation Freedom

[23:31–29:44]

• Significance of Sugar:
  • Central to the transatlantic slave trade, Caribbean history, and liberal thought.
  • "Sugar helps us to see that linchpin that connects liberal freedom to sugar plantations in the Caribbean..." — Anker, 24:20
• Walker’s Sculpture:
  • 70-ton sugar sphinx—a "mammy" figure—created in Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory.
  • Reveals histories of exploitation and imagines forms of freedom unbound from plantation violence.
  • "Her mammy figure is more powerful than anybody else who comes in contact with it...it is about connection, it is about relationality..." — Anker, 27:55

b. Lars von Trier’s Manderley and Emancipation Myths

[31:52–36:30]

• Film Critique:
  • A plantation continuing enslavement post-Civil War; emancipation experiment fails and former slaves “request” re-enslavement.
  • Manderley as both testament to enduring white supremacy and as imagined space of covert Black self-governance.
  • "We can see the way the law itself is still structured as...white supremacy. And yet what we also see...is a self-sufficient black polity..." — Anker, 34:28

c. Neoliberalism & David Simon’s The Wire

[36:30–48:24]

• Neoliberal “Freedom”:

  • Market logic, individual entrepreneurship, retreat of the state—often valorized as maximizing freedom.
  • But these can be forms of "ugly freedom"—freedom through enforced isolation, exploitation, alienation.

• Lessons from The Wire:

  • The show's Baltimore is a laboratory of neoliberal policy failure but also shows everyday, unheroic refusals of the system.
  • "Their challenges to neoliberalism go unnoticed or discounted...because their practices are not heroic forms of freedom." — Anker, 40:37

• Notable Scene—The Sigh in the Teachers’ Lounge
  [43:11–48:24]

  • Brief scene in season four where teachers, subjected to meaningless mandates and neoliberal mantras, collectively refuse compliance.
  • "At the beginning, those small sighs and those small eye rolls...are doing something..." — Anker, 45:20
  • Small acts of disaffection and refusal propagate, showing an accessible path to everyday resistance.

d. Freedom as Climate Destruction

[48:24–55:04]

• Freedom Against Nature:
  • Historically, freedom defined as human domination over nature (Locke, Kant); leads to climate crisis.
• Interdependence & the Microbiome:
  • Anker provocatively argues that even our bodies are not singular: teeming with microbiota, shaped by others, by chemicals, and by cosmic matter—all show the self as deeply collective.
  • "Practices of freedom...have never been as such [autonomous and self-determining]..." — Anker, 53:12
  • The book’s art—dust composed of human, animal, environmental, and historical remnants—embodies radical interconnectivity.

Timestamps for Important Segments

| Topic/Section | Timestamp | |----------------------------------------------------|----------------| | Book Background and Anker’s Aims | 02:23–04:28 | | What is “Freedom”? | 05:05–07:58 | | Defining “Ugly Freedom” | 08:44–13:00 | | Ugliness Beyond Beauty: Political/Aesthetic Points | 14:07–17:02 | | Systems Analyzed: Colonization to Neoliberalism | 17:02–22:03 | | Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby & Plantations | 23:31–29:44 | | Manderley and False Emancipation | 31:52–36:30 | | The Wire and Neoliberalism | 36:30–43:11 | | Teachers’ Lounge Scene | 43:11–48:24 | | Freedom & Climate, Microbiome Interdependence | 48:24–55:04 | | Re-conceptualizing Self as Collective | 55:04–56:45 | | What’s Next for Anker (Future Work) | 57:02–58:46 |

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On accessible freedom:
  "Freedom can often be practiced in ways that feel small, that might be in situations of dependence, rather than, you know, heroic freedom." — Anker, 07:49

• The myth of moral purity:
  "When we often imagine [freedom], we imagine that the people practicing them are morally pure...that doesn't actually do justice to...the Founding Fathers, but also...morality and the assumption that freedom can only be practiced...by pure subjects often denies the lived complexity of human beings in the world." — Anker, 12:28

• On neoliberal resistance:
  "Part of what the wire shows us is that...neoliberal subjectivity is really uncompelling, right? Most people don't desire to be profit maximizers...even people in weak spaces of power are not compelled by being profit maximizers..." — Anker, 41:46

• Gross but radical interdependence:
  "Our guts and our whole bodies are shaped by microbiota...numerically our bodies are primarily...non human...when we imagine freedom is that we ourselves determining that that self determining self is always a collective..." — Anker, 50:01

Episode Takeaways

• Western ideals of freedom are deeply entangled with violence and forms of domination, which are often disavowed by mainstream narratives.
• "Ugly freedoms" recognizes that practices of freedom are often messy, morally compromised, and more widespread than heroic tales allow.
• Looking to marginalized, overlooked, or "ugly" spaces (in both culture and society) can reveal new, emancipatory practices of freedom.
• Small, collective acts of refusal or resistance (e.g., sighs in a teachers’ lounge, small interactions in marginalized communities) are vital and accessible forms of agency.
• Even our bodies—and selves—are fundamentally collective and interconnected, challenging fantasies of autonomous, self-determining individuals.
• Anker suggests that facing this complexity opens new possibilities for genuine freedom, for solidarity, and for confronting crises like climate change.

For Further Exploration

• Book: Ugly Freedoms by Elisabeth R. Anker (Duke University Press, 2022)
• Key Artifacts: Kara Walker’s “Sugar Baby,” Lars von Trier’s Manderley, HBO’s The Wire
• Independent Bookstores Shouted Out: Politics & Prose and Loyalty Books (Washington, D.C.)

This episode is essential listening for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the uneasy, complicated realities behind cherished ideals of freedom. Anker’s insights fundamentally challenge listeners to rethink who freedom is for, how it is lived, and what new futures might be possible.