History is not the past. It is the present -- James Baldwin
Abraham, Yuval. "‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza." Monthly Review (April 5, 2024) ["During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing–just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all. Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes–usually at night while their whole families were present–rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences."]
Akuno, Kali. "Worker Cooperatives, Economic Democracy, and Black Self-Determination." Left Out (January 18, 2018) ["In this episode, we sat down with Kali Akuno — the co-founder and co-directer of Cooperation Jackson. We discuss the emerging network of worker-owned cooperatives and the people behind it building an alternative, solidarity-based economy inside the majority-black and impoverished city of Jackson, Mississippi. ... In Jackson Rising, Akuno helps chronicle the history, present and future of one of the most dynamic yet under-documented experiments in radical social transformation taking place in the United States. The book follows the surprising story of the city’s newly elected Mayor, Choke Antara Lumumba, whose vision is to “encourage the development of cooperative businesses” and make Jackson the “most radical city on the planet.” In the first part of the interview, we ask Akuno about the ongoing organizing and institution building of the black, working-class political forces concentrated in Jackson dedicated to advancing the “Jackson-Kush Plan.” We then dive deeper into the different types of worker-owned cooperatives that makeup Cooperation Jackson; the importance of developing cooperatives with clear political aims; and the need for a nationwide network of cooperatives and solidarity economic institutions as a viable alternative to the exploitative nature of our current economic, social, and environmental relations. Cooperation Jackson is one of the most important stories for those of us struggling for social justice, for human emancipation and self-determination, and for a solidarity economics as a base for working class political struggle and the fight against the systematic economic strangulation."]
Allen, Danielle, et al. "What is Education For?" Boston Review (May 9, 2016) ["Preparation for democratic citizenship demands humanities education, not just STEM. ... In 2006 the highest court in New York affirmed that students in the state have a right to civic education. It was a decision thirteen years in the making, and it spoke to a fundamental question: What is an education for? Lawyers representing the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE), which brought suit, argued that the purpose of education is to develop not only vocational capacities, but also civic agency. Students, in other words, are entitled to learn in public schools the “basic literacy, calculating, and verbal skills necessary to enable children to eventually function productively as civic participants capable of voting and serving on a jury.”"]
"Anti-Palestinian at the Core: The Origins and Growing Dangers of U.S. Antiterrorism Law." Center for Constitutional Rights (February 20, 2024) ["New white paper shows a decades-long campaign by Israel-aligned organizations to use U.S. anti-terrorism law against advocates for Palestinian liberation."]
Auster, Paul. "Why Is America the Most Violent Country in the Western World?: On the Normalization of Gun Culture in the United States." Lit Hub (January 18, 2023) ["Excerpted from Bloodbath Nation by Paul Auster and Spencer Ostrander." Book description: "An intimate and powerful rumination on American gun violence by Paul Auster, one of our greatest living writers and "genuine American original" (The Boston Globe), in an unforgettable collaboration with photographer Spencer Ostrander Like most American boys of his generation, Paul Auster grew up playing with toy six-shooters and mimicking the gun-slinging cowboys in B Westerns. A skilled marksman by the age of ten, he also lived through the traumatic aftermath of the murder of his grandfather by his grandmother when his father was a child and knows, through firsthand experience, how families can be wrecked by a single act of gun violence. In this short, searing book, Auster traces centuries of America's use and abuse of guns, from the violent displacement of the native population to the forced enslavement of millions, to the bitter divide between embattled gun control and anti-gun control camps that has developed over the past 50 years and the mass shootings that dominate the news today. Since 1968, more than one and a half million Americans have been killed by guns. The numbers are so large, so catastrophic, so disproportionate to what goes on elsewhere, that one must ask why. Why is America so different--and why are we the most violent country in the Western world? Interwoven with Spencer Ostrander's haunting photographs of the sites of more than thirty mass shootings in all parts of the country, Bloodbath Nation presents a succinct but thorough examination of America at a crossroads, and asks the central, burning question of our moment: What kind of society do we want to live in?"]
Baldwin, James, et al. "I Am Not Your Negro." Making Contact (November 8, 2017) ["Master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, Remember This House. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material. I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for."]
Baldwin, James, et al. "I Am Not Your Negro." Making Contact (November 8, 2017) ["Master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, Remember This House. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material. I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin and Peck have produced a work that challenges the very definition of what America stands for."]
Ball, Krystal. "Krystal Breaks Down The Israel Genocide Charge." Breaking Points (January 6, 2023) ["Krystal breaks down the latest International Court of Justice genocide charges against Israel."]
Bandele, Asha and Patrisse Khan-Cullors. "'When They Call You a Terrorist': The Life of Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors." Democracy Now (January 16, 2018) ["We turn now to a powerful new book, released today, that tells the story of one woman as she fights back against the impacts of social and racial injustice in America on her family. That woman is Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter. The book, titled “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir,” is both an account of survival, strength and resilience, and a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable. Patrisse’s story follows her childhood in Los Angeles in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as her mother worked three jobs, struggling to earn a living wage. And it puts a human face on the way mass incarceration and the war on drugs hurt young black men, including her relatives and friends. Patrisse’s father was a victim of the drug war. He died at the age of 50. Her brother spent years in prison for nonviolent crimes stemming from his battles against mental illness. He was once even charged with terrorism after being involved in a car accident. The police would target Patrisse, too—raiding her house without just cause. In 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, Patrisse co-founded Black Lives Matter along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. The movement began online but soon spread across the country. "]
Beauchamp, Scott. "War Games: The Cozy Relationship Between Perpetual War and Total Entertainment." The Baffler #39 (May 2018) ["The specter of the military-industrial complex that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his 1961 farewell address has metastasized into something even the former chief of the European theater in World War II couldn’t begin to imagine. After spending the better part of a century faithfully mimicking the civilian global supply chain that moves cheap consumer goods and raw materials along webs of commercial transit, the Pentagon also deepened its financial entanglements with America’s largest corporations. The resulting Leviathan of force no longer really requires the modifiers “military” or “industrial,” journalist Nick Turse, for one, has simply taken to referring to it as “The Complex.” The Department of Defense’s fingerprints are on everything from the internet to candy bars, from professional sports to consumer electronics."]
Booth, Heather, et al. "Mrs. Hamer Echoes." Making Contact (October 4, 2017) ["Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, spoke words that are all too relevant today. Mrs. Hamer would have turned 100 years old on October 6th 2017. Today on Making Contact, you’ll hear archival recordings, and excerpts from a powerful new film featuring Fannie Lou Hamer’s contemporaries– themselves now elders. You’ll hear about the context of her life, and the lives of other sharecroppers in Mississippi from a seldom heard film produced for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC."]
Branch, Taylor, Trey Ellis and Peter Kunhardt. "MLK’s Radical Final Years: Civil Rights Leader Was Isolated After Taking On Capitalism & Vietnam War." Democracy Now (January 25, 2018) ["Fifty years ago this April, Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just 39 years old. Today we look back at the last three years of King’s life, beginning after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite passage of the monumental legislation, King set his eyes on new battles by launching a Poor People’s Campaign and campaigning to stop the Vietnam War. King’s decision to publicly oppose the war isolated him from many of his closest supporters. We feature clips from a new HBO documentary about King’s last years, titled “King in the Wilderness,” and speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch, who wrote the “America in the King Years” trilogy and is featured in the film, as well as the film’s director Peter Kunhardt and writer Trey Ellis."]
Bronson, Zak. "Thinking Weirdly with China Miéville." Los Angeles Review of Books (January 13, 2018) ["No matter how commodified and domesticated the fantastic in its various forms might be, we need fantasy to think the world, and to change it." — China Miéville]
Brown, Adrienne Marie. "Love as Political Resistance: Lessons from Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler." Bitch (February 14, 2017)
"Buying the War: How Did the Mainstream Press Get It So Wrong." Bill Moyers Journal (2007)
Carver, Ron, Paul Cox and Susan Schnall. "The GI Resistance Continues: Vietnam Vets Return to My Lai, Where U.S. Slaughtered 500 Civilians." Democracy Now (March 16, 2018) ["As a group of Vietnam War veterans and peace activists travel back to Vietnam to mark the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre, Amy Goodman and Juan González speak with three members of the delegation: Vietnam veteran Paul Cox, who later co-founded the Veterans for Peace chapter in San Francisco; Susan Schnall, former Navy nurse who was court-martialed for opposing the Vietnam War; and longtime activist Ron Carver, who has organized an exhibit honoring the GI antiwar movement at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City."]
Chang, Jeff. "On Revolutions in Seeing and Being." Making Contact (October 11, 2017) ["“From almost every kind of responsibility and tie from engagement and from faith. So the artist–our task is to move ourselves and the rest of us in the opposite direction. Toward more engagement, towards stronger ethics, toward a social that’s open and inclusive to all toward seeing each other in full, to challenge us to recognize the debts, and yes, the reparations that we owe to each other.” – Jeff Chang offers ideas to reinforce the importance of art and artists in today’s sociopolitical climate. Chang presented a keynote address for the Art and Race conference, that took place at Oakland Impact Hub earlier this year."]
"Chelsea Manning Talks with Nadya Tolokonnikova (Pussy Riot)." Talkhouse (April 26, 2018) ["The program includes a talk by Manning on resisting “the data-driven society and the police state”; a conversation between her and Tolokonnikova on their experiences in resistance, incarceration and prison reform; and a talk by Tolokonnikova on bringing “punk feminism” to Russia and the problems with Putin. The two also share their views on how neighborhood communities have better answers than think tanks, the ways empathy can help make real change, and — powerfully — how political action can be more than voting."]
Cohen,Julie and Betsy West. "RBG: New Documentary Celebrates Life of Groundbreaking Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg." Democracy Now (January 22, 2018) ["One of the most talked-about documentaries at this year’s Sundance Film Festival looks at the groundbreaking life of the nearly 85-year-old Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 2018 marks her 25th year on the court, and she has no plans to retire. Ginsburg first gained fame in the 1970s when she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court. In recent years, Ginsburg’s public profile has soared as the court has swerved to the right. Ginsburg often now finds herself on the dissenting side of opinions. We feature excerpts from the new film and speak with its directors, Julie Cohen and Betsy West."]
Coll, Steve. "Directorate S: Steve Coll on the CIA & America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan & Pakistan." Democracy Now (February 8, 2018) ["The U.S. is intensifying its air war in Afghanistan as U.S. Central Command has announced it is shifting military resources from Iraq and Syria back to Afghanistan, where the United States has been fighting for over 16 years in the longest war in U.S. history. U.S. Air Force Major General James Hecker recently said Afghanistan has “become CENTCOM’s main effort.” The news comes after a particularly bloody period in Afghanistan. Despite the spiraling violence, President Trump recently ruled out negotiations with the Taliban during a meeting of members of the United Nations Security Council. We speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll about his new book, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan."]
Coombs, Wayne. "Analysis: The Pharmaceutical Colonization of Appalachia." The Daily Yonder (February 7, 2018)
Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003. ["With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for “decarceration”, and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole."]
Diaz, Junot. "Radical Hope is Our Best Weapon." On Being (September 14, 2017) ["'From the bottom will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible. I believe that with all my heart.' These are the words of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz. His hope is fiercely reality-based, a product of centuries lodged in his body of African-Caribbean suffering, survival, and genius."]
Dellums, Ron. "Ron Dellums (1935-2018): Organizing for Peace Forces Us to Challenge All Forms of Injustice." Democracy Now (July 31, 2018) ["Ron Dellums, the legendary politician and anti-war activist who fought against U.S. intervention around the globe, apartheid in South Africa and the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 82. During his nearly three decades in Congress, Dellums opposed every major U.S. military intervention except a bill in 1992 to send troops to Somalia. This legacy began when Dellums pushed for the House to conduct a probe into U.S. war crimes committed in Vietnam shortly after taking office in 1970. When this effort failed, Dellums held his own ad hoc war crimes hearings. The celebrated congressmember once said, “I am not going to back away from being called a radical. If being an advocate of peace, justice, and humanity toward all human beings is radical, then I’m glad to be called a radical.” We remember Ron Dellums’s legacy by airing his 2015 speech at the “Vietnam: The Power of Protest” conference in Washington, D.C., where he was introduced by Democracy Now! co-host Juan González."]
Dorfman, Ariel and Thanh Nguyen. "The Displaced: Refugee Writers Ariel Dorfman & Viet Thanh Nguyen on Migration, US Wars & Resistance." Democracy Now (May 4, 2018) ["As dozens of migrants from Central America remain camped out at the U.S.-Mexico border attempting to seek asylum in the United States, we spend the hour with two of the nation’s most celebrated writers, both refugees themselves. Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he and his family fled to the United States. He is the author of three books, including “The Sympathizer,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, and he teaches at the University of Southern California. He is also the editor of a new collection titled “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.” We are also joined by the Chilean-American writer Ariel Dorfman, who has been described as one of the greatest Latin American novelists. Forty-five years ago, he fled Chile after a U.S.-backed coup displaced President Salvador Allende. Dorfman had served as Allende’s cultural adviser from 1970 to 1973. Living in exile, he became one of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s most vocal critics, as well as a celebrated playwright and novelist. Dorfman, who teaches at Duke University, has just published a new novel, “Darwin’s Ghosts,” and a new collection of essays titled “Homeland Security Ate My Speech.” He also contributed an essay to “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.”]
---. "On the Vietnam War, How Hollywood Reframes U.S. Imperialism & More." Democracy Now (May 4, 2018)
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. "In Conversation with Nick Estes." Lannan Lectures (October 11, 2017) ["Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades, working with Indigenous communities on sovereignty and land rights and helping to build the international Indigenous movement. She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay. She is the author of numerous books and articles on indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico, The Great Sioux Nation, and An Indigenous People's History of the United States, which received the 2015 American Book Award. A new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment is forthcoming in January."]
---. An Indigenous People's History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2014.
Eisen, Arnold. "The Opposite of Good is Indifference." On Being (September 21, 2017) ["'In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.' A mystic, a 20th-century religious intellectual, a social change agent, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., famously saying afterwards that he felt his legs were praying. Heschel’s poetic theological writings are still read and widely studied today. His faith was as much about 'radical amazement' as it was about certainty. And he embodied the passionate social engagement of the prophets, drawing on wisdom at once provocative and nourishing."]
Elba, Mariam. "How Islamophobia was Ingrained in America's Legal System Long Before the War on Terror." The Intercept (May 6, 2018)
Bandele, Asha and Patrisse Khan-Cullors. "'When They Call You a Terrorist': The Life of Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors." Democracy Now (January 16, 2018) ["We turn now to a powerful new book, released today, that tells the story of one woman as she fights back against the impacts of social and racial injustice in America on her family. That woman is Patrisse Khan-Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter. The book, titled “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir,” is both an account of survival, strength and resilience, and a call to action to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable. Patrisse’s story follows her childhood in Los Angeles in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as her mother worked three jobs, struggling to earn a living wage. And it puts a human face on the way mass incarceration and the war on drugs hurt young black men, including her relatives and friends. Patrisse’s father was a victim of the drug war. He died at the age of 50. Her brother spent years in prison for nonviolent crimes stemming from his battles against mental illness. He was once even charged with terrorism after being involved in a car accident. The police would target Patrisse, too—raiding her house without just cause. In 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, Patrisse co-founded Black Lives Matter along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. The movement began online but soon spread across the country. "]
Beauchamp, Scott. "War Games: The Cozy Relationship Between Perpetual War and Total Entertainment." The Baffler #39 (May 2018) ["The specter of the military-industrial complex that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his 1961 farewell address has metastasized into something even the former chief of the European theater in World War II couldn’t begin to imagine. After spending the better part of a century faithfully mimicking the civilian global supply chain that moves cheap consumer goods and raw materials along webs of commercial transit, the Pentagon also deepened its financial entanglements with America’s largest corporations. The resulting Leviathan of force no longer really requires the modifiers “military” or “industrial,” journalist Nick Turse, for one, has simply taken to referring to it as “The Complex.” The Department of Defense’s fingerprints are on everything from the internet to candy bars, from professional sports to consumer electronics."]
Blumenthal, Max. "Killing Gaza 2.0 an interview with Max Blumenthal." Jump Cut #62 (Winter 2023 - 2024) ["On December 14, 2023, Max Blumenthal, author of several books on Palestine/Israel and the editor of Grayzone news, who with Dan Cohen made the film Killing Gaza about the 2014 Israeli attacks on Gaza, spoke at the Community Church of Boston about the current situation. The Jump Cut editors have recast his talk as an interview."]
Beydoun, Khaled A. "What is Islamophobia?" American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. University of California Press, 2018. ["The term “Islamophobia” may be fairly new, but irrational fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims is anything but. Though many speak of Islamophobia’s roots in racism, have we considered how anti-Muslim rhetoric is rooted in our legal system? Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the United States. Beydoun charts its long and terrible history, from the plight of enslaved African Muslims in the antebellum South and the laws prohibiting Muslim immigrants from becoming citizens to the ways the war on terror assigns blame for any terrorist act to Islam and the myriad trials Muslim Americans face in the Trump era. He passionately argues that by failing to frame Islamophobia as a system of bigotry endorsed and emboldened by law and carried out by government actors, U.S. society ignores the injury it inflicts on both Muslims and non-Muslims. Through the stories of Muslim Americans who have experienced Islamophobia across various racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines, Beydoun shares how U.S. laws shatter lives, whether directly or inadvertently. And with an eye toward benefiting society as a whole, he recommends ways for Muslim Americans and their allies to build coalitions with other groups. Like no book before it, American Islamophobia offers a robust and genuine portrait of Muslim America then and now."]
Blitzer, Jonathan. "What the Media Misses by Focusing on the Southern Border." On the Media (February 2, 2024) ["Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker covering immigration. He’s observed that the last three American presidents have each faced a humanitarian emergency at the southern border — in 2014, 2019, and 2021 — but each of these crises is experienced by the American public as a separate, unrelated incident. In his new book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, he traces the broader historical and geopolitical root causes of the unique moment of mass migration to the United States that we’re witnessing today. Brooke speaks with Blitzer about how the causes of the mass migration to the United States from Central America over the past decade stem back to the 1980s and the Cold War."]
Blitzer, Jonathan and James Serwer. "Is a Constitutional Crisis Brewing in Texas." On the Media (February 2, 2024) ["Amid a surge of migrants at the southern border and following a Supreme Court ruling that did not go in his favor, Texas Governor Greg Abbott last week released a defiant statement declaring the border crisis an "invasion." The governor borrowed language from the Texas Declaration of Secession, written on the cusp of the Civil War, to claim that the federal government had breached the contract between the United States and the states by not enforcing laws at the border. Since then, Donald Trump has spoken out in support of Abbott, along with twenty-five other GOP governors. This week, Brooke speaks with Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic, about the consequences of Abbott borrowing neo-secessionist language from the Confederacy, and the potential for a brewing constitutional crisis. Plus, Jonathan Blitzer, immigration reporter for The New Yorker and author of the new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, on the media framing of the humanitarian emergencies at the border."]
Brown, Adrienne Marie. "Love as Political Resistance: Lessons from Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler." Bitch (February 14, 2017)
"Buying the War: How Did the Mainstream Press Get It So Wrong." Bill Moyers Journal (2007)
Chang, Jeff. "On Revolutions in Seeing and Being." Making Contact (October 11, 2017) ["“From almost every kind of responsibility and tie from engagement and from faith. So the artist–our task is to move ourselves and the rest of us in the opposite direction. Toward more engagement, towards stronger ethics, toward a social that’s open and inclusive to all toward seeing each other in full, to challenge us to recognize the debts, and yes, the reparations that we owe to each other.” – Jeff Chang offers ideas to reinforce the importance of art and artists in today’s sociopolitical climate. Chang presented a keynote address for the Art and Race conference, that took place at Oakland Impact Hub earlier this year."]
"Chelsea Manning Talks with Nadya Tolokonnikova (Pussy Riot)." Talkhouse (April 26, 2018) ["The program includes a talk by Manning on resisting “the data-driven society and the police state”; a conversation between her and Tolokonnikova on their experiences in resistance, incarceration and prison reform; and a talk by Tolokonnikova on bringing “punk feminism” to Russia and the problems with Putin. The two also share their views on how neighborhood communities have better answers than think tanks, the ways empathy can help make real change, and — powerfully — how political action can be more than voting."]
Coll, Steve. "Directorate S: Steve Coll on the CIA & America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan & Pakistan." Democracy Now (February 8, 2018) ["The U.S. is intensifying its air war in Afghanistan as U.S. Central Command has announced it is shifting military resources from Iraq and Syria back to Afghanistan, where the United States has been fighting for over 16 years in the longest war in U.S. history. U.S. Air Force Major General James Hecker recently said Afghanistan has “become CENTCOM’s main effort.” The news comes after a particularly bloody period in Afghanistan. Despite the spiraling violence, President Trump recently ruled out negotiations with the Taliban during a meeting of members of the United Nations Security Council. We speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll about his new book, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan."]
Coombs, Wayne. "Analysis: The Pharmaceutical Colonization of Appalachia." The Daily Yonder (February 7, 2018)
Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003. ["With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for “decarceration”, and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole."]
Dellums, Ron. "Ron Dellums (1935-2018): Organizing for Peace Forces Us to Challenge All Forms of Injustice." Democracy Now (July 31, 2018) ["Ron Dellums, the legendary politician and anti-war activist who fought against U.S. intervention around the globe, apartheid in South Africa and the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 82. During his nearly three decades in Congress, Dellums opposed every major U.S. military intervention except a bill in 1992 to send troops to Somalia. This legacy began when Dellums pushed for the House to conduct a probe into U.S. war crimes committed in Vietnam shortly after taking office in 1970. When this effort failed, Dellums held his own ad hoc war crimes hearings. The celebrated congressmember once said, “I am not going to back away from being called a radical. If being an advocate of peace, justice, and humanity toward all human beings is radical, then I’m glad to be called a radical.” We remember Ron Dellums’s legacy by airing his 2015 speech at the “Vietnam: The Power of Protest” conference in Washington, D.C., where he was introduced by Democracy Now! co-host Juan González."]
---. "On the Vietnam War, How Hollywood Reframes U.S. Imperialism & More." Democracy Now (May 4, 2018)
---. An Indigenous People's History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2014.
Elba, Mariam. "How Islamophobia was Ingrained in America's Legal System Long Before the War on Terror." The Intercept (May 6, 2018)
Gawad, Aisha Abdel. "No Safe Place to Grieve: The Trauma of Muslim Americans Living Under Surveillance." Lit Hub (January 29, 2024) ["For the past four months, Palestinians have been begging the world to see a child as a child, a journalist as a journalist, a hospital as a hospital. I’m faced with the ugly realization that those decades of war against Arab and Muslim bodies have not ended. Part of that war is not only dehumanizing us so we can be killed en masse abroad, but also criminalizing us so we can be silenced at home."]
Greenwell, Garth. "An Unquiet House: Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest." To a Green Thought (February 5, 2024) ["I wasn’t sure what I thought after seeing the film for the first time. All I knew was that something had happened to me: the film wouldn’t let me go, it was like a dark stain spreading in my interior. The film disquieted me in a way that felt more important than whether it was “good” or “bad,” certainly more important than any argument I might make justifying my response. I talked about it with friends. I bought the Martin Amis novel on which the film is putatively based (it’s also up for the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, though it’s hardly an adaptation at all) and read it in a day. I went to the film again, this time not in a little art cinema but in the huge AMC in Times Square, my first time in that bizarre labyrinth of a space, where I felt a little like a lost figure in an Escher engraving, riding endless escalators up and up. Ten minutes into the movie—maybe it didn’t even take that long—I felt sure I was seeing something great."]
Gupta, Arun. "Anthony Bourdain (1956 - 2018)." Jacobin (June 11, 2018) ["Anthony Bourdain’s genius was not in the kitchen. His genius was in knowing which side he was on."]
Hannah Arendt (Germany/Luxemborg/France: Margarethe von Trotta, 2012) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive) ["Hannah Arendt is a portrait of the genius that shook the world with her discovery of “the banality of evil.” After she attends the Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Arendt dares to write about the Holocaust in terms no one has ever heard before. Her work instantly provokes a furious scandal, and Arendt stands strong as she is attacked by friends and foes alike. But as the German-Jewish émigré also struggles to suppress her own painful associations with the past, the film exposes her beguiling blend of arrogance and vulnerability — revealing a soul defined and derailed by exile."]
Susstein, Cass R. "It Can Happen Here." The New York Review of Books (June 28, 2018) [Published responses to the essay.]
Taibbi, Matt. "If We Want Kids to Stop Killing, the Adults Have to Stop, Too: America's Rage-Sickness Trickles Down from the Top." Rolling Stone (February 16, 2018)
Terry, Brandon M. "MLK Now." Boston Review (January 8, 2018)
The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins (Canada: Geoff Bowie, 2001: 76 mins) ["This feature documentary is a portrait of Peter Watkins, an Oscar®-winning British filmmaker who, for the past 4 decades, has proved that films can be made without compromise. With the proliferation of TV channels, documentaries are enjoying an unprecedented boom fuelled by audiences seeking an alternative to infotainment. But now documentary filmmaking, too, finds itself constrained by the imperatives of television. However, there is a rebel resisting this uniformity of the spirit. Pre-eminent among today's documentary filmmakers concerned about this mind-numbing standardization, Peter Watkins has never strayed from either his principles or the cause."]
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. "A Threat to Global Democracy: How Facebook & Surveillance Capitalism Empower Authoritarianism." Democracy Now (August 1, 2018) [I was meditating today on a river bank thinking about the impact of technology (especially SM) on my psyche. I was wondering what it is doing to us as humans and what are the questions we should be asking about that influence/time/impact. Then, later, while I was cleaning my house I listened to this interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan and my thoughts were pushed further and more questions arose. I was first concerned about my own psyche even as I thought about it on a larger social level. Then, because I am preparing for classes, I began to think of a pedagogical exercise. Introduce my classes to Vaidhyanathan's ideas in this interview and initiate a conversation about the impact of social media on how we operate in and understand our world. I'm thinking that I would ask my students to attempt to have a social media fast for an entire week (I would, of course, participate). To keep a record of our successes and failures, to think about how being disconnected in this way affects us, to keep a record of questions and conclusions. With all of that in mind, I would like to hear any responses to this interview and/or this conception of a pedagogical exercise. Also, would others be interested in doing this exercise at the same time - individually or collectively? I know this can come off as hypocritical as I am on SM. I have to honestly admit that when I was engaged in my higher education as the Internet (and later SM when I was a professor) appeared, and later dominated, I was excited (and bought into the rhetoric about its revolutionary possibilities) by the radical possibilities of being able to communicate with people from all corners of the earth (how many of you remember long distance charges on landlines) and to freely access information (including that which is purposely being censored or disappeared). Even as this fantasy dissipated in the wake of corporate colonization of the Internet, I still clung to a belief that if we just used it intelligently, modeled higher thinking, used it to connect to our loved ones, that it could be changed for a better purpose. More and more I am becoming cynical about that possibility..... I think we have to ask some hard questions. I will accept all positions with no judgement and in open discussion (as long as when you make conclusive/factual claims you back them up). Peace.]
Vogel, Joseph. "The Forgotten Baldwin." The Boston Review (May 14, 2018)
Gupta, Arun. "Anthony Bourdain (1956 - 2018)." Jacobin (June 11, 2018) ["Anthony Bourdain’s genius was not in the kitchen. His genius was in knowing which side he was on."]
Hedges, Chris. "Let Them Eat Dirt." The Chris Hedges Report (February 8, 2024) ["There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed."]
Hedges, Inez. "Introduction: Seeing Gaza Differently." Jump Cut #62 (Winter 2023-2024) ["The air, land, and sea blockade of Gaza is now in its 16th year. Children that were 5 and 6 years old when the blockade started are now in their 20s and trying to plan their professional futures within the travel limits set by Israel and Egypt. According to OCHA (the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), even before the outbreak of new hostilities between Hamas and Israel, of the more than 2.3 million people living in Gaza, 26 % of the workforce was unemployed, including 38% of youth; 75% of the population required food aid; over 90 % of the water was undrinkable and had to be purified. Residents were subjected to rolling electricity blackouts. Since the start of the blockade, Gaza has endured four major bombing attacks by Israel, in 2009, 2014, 2021 and just now in 2023. Despite all this, Gaza has refused to be reduced to the world’s image of suffering and disaster. Women worked to support their families (see the UNRWA video by Motaz Azaiza, https://www.instagram.com/p/CrMBXJLglOW/). Talented musicians took up the violin. Families enjoyed time at the beach. Young people learned computer skills—there is no blockade in cyberspace. Children played hide-and-seek, soccer, hopscotch—and sometimes made sorties to throw stones at soldiers manning the border crossings."]
---. "Gaza Screened." Jumped Cut #62 (Winter 2023 - 2024) ["Perhaps nowhere on Earth is the power of film more striking than in its portrayal of the Gaza strip. The seismic shifts in Israeli policy, military intervention, and access rules that have affected this narrow stretch of territory, lying between Israel and Egypt along the Mediterranean sea, have resulted in a landscape so transformed and traumatized that fiction films from a few years ago become documentaries of what was, while documentaries evoke ravaged science fiction dystopias."]
---. "Resilience under fire: Gaza on film, video and television." Jump Cut #62 (Winter 2023 - 2024) ["This important book comes out of the 2019 film festival held at Columbia University curated by Nadia Yaqub, the book’s editor. The festival was sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia, founded in 2010 in honor of legendary Palestinian author and critic Edward Said. Yaqub is a professor at the University of North Carolina, where she put together a second Gaza film festival also in 2019. This was sponsored by the Duke-UNC consortium for Middle Eastern studies and UNC Middle East and Islamic Studies. Here, as Yaqub reports, things did not go as smoothly: the 2019 Gaza Conference, of which the film festival was a part, was attacked by anti-Palestinian racists (as often happens with events highlighting Palestinian issues). Yaqub reports that as a result of these attacks, the Duke-UNC Consortium was investigated by the US Dept. of Education, and that one of the contributors was later attacked as being “anti-Semitic” at her home institution."]
Hewitt, Annie. "Why unarmed civilian protection is the best path to sustainable peace." Waging Nonviolence (July 6, 2018) ["Unarmed civilian protection is a proven alternative to armed UN peacekeeping that can save lives, empower communities and secure strong and lasting peace."]
Hirthler, Jason. "Colonizing the Western Mind." Counterpunch (March 2, 2018) ["This ‘Washington Consensus’ is the false promise promoted by the West. The reality is quite different. The crux of neoliberalism is to eliminate democratic government by downsizing, privatizing, and deregulating it. Proponents of neoliberalism recognize that the state is the last bulwark of protection for the common people against the predations of capital. Remove the state and they’ll be left defenseless. Think about it. Deregulation eliminates the laws. Downsizing eliminates departments and their funding. Privatizing eliminates the very purpose of the state by having the private sector take over its traditional responsibilities. Ultimately, nation-states would dissolve except perhaps for armies and tax systems. A large, open-border global free market would be left, not subject to popular control but managed by a globally dispersed, transnational one percent. And the whole process of making this happen would be camouflaged beneath the altruistic stylings of a benign humanitarianism."]
Hewitt, Annie. "Why unarmed civilian protection is the best path to sustainable peace." Waging Nonviolence (July 6, 2018) ["Unarmed civilian protection is a proven alternative to armed UN peacekeeping that can save lives, empower communities and secure strong and lasting peace."]
Holland, Tom and Dominic Sandbrook. "The Nazis in Power: The Conquest of Austria." The Rest is History (January 10, 2024) ["By 1937, Hitler’s ever-growing ambitions were driving Europe to the brink of war. Ever restless, he knew that Germany must conquer the world, or be destroyed. His first target was Austria, his homeland, whose annexation to Germany would unite German blood under one indomitable Reich. However, in an effort to avoid Nazi rule, the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, called a referendum on annexation, to show the Austrian people’s will against it. Hitler’s reaction was one of rage, and on the morning of Friday, the 11th of March, 1938, he sent an ultimatum to Vienna. At 5.30am the next day, the German army crossed into Austria. It was met by great cheering crowds, and Hitler’s arrival in Vienna was one of true apotheosis… Yet the darkness at the heart of Hitler’s European dream was also emerging, as the Nazis began to detain and repress Austrian minorities, particularly the Jewish population, on an unprecedented scale. Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the annexation of Austria, and the post-war myth of Austria’s victimisation at the hands of Hitler and the Nazis. They also look at the Nazis’ first acts of violence, discrimination and deportation against Vienna’s Jewish population, prefiguring the horrors to follow."]
---. "The Nazis in Power: Hitler's War on the Jews." The Rest is History (January 15, 2024) ["As Hitler ramps up the German war machine, he remains obsessed with one idea: uprooting Jews from the Reich. The Nazis embark on a campaign of totalitarian oppression against them, persecuting Jewish people in every aspect of life. They are excluded from most professions, forbidden from intermarrying, Jewish children are bullied and excluded from schools, all Jews have a “J” stamped in their passport, to name but a few measures. Worst of all, the brainwashing of the German people has become apparent, and many are willing participants in the various forms of persecution; plenty of German towns have put up signs by this point saying “Jews not wanted here”. Hitler may tone down the oppression to whitewash the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but this does not last. One terrifying truth is clear: he is fully set on the destruction of European Jewry. Join Tom and Dominic in the fifth part of our series on the Nazis in power, as they look at how the persecution of Jewish people in the Reich increased in the lead-up to the Second World War."]
Hudis, Peter. "Frantz Fanon, The Philosopher of the Barricades." Against the Grain (October 9, 2017) ["Peter Hudis discusses the Martiniquan philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, best known for his books The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks."]
Hypernormalisation (BBC: Adam Curtis, 2016: 166 mins) ["HyperNormalisation wades through the culmination of forces that have driven this culture into mass uncertainty, confusion, spectacle and simulation. Where events keep happening that seem crazy, inexplicable and out of control—from Donald Trump to Brexit, to the War in Syria, mass immigration, extreme disparity in wealth, and increasing bomb attacks in the West—this film shows a basis to not only why these chaotic events are happening, but also why we, as well as those in power, may not understand them. We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. And because it is reflected all around us, ubiquitous, we accept it as normal. This epic narrative of how we got here spans over 40 years, with an extraordinary cast of characters—the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, early performance artists in New York, President Putin, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi and the Internet. HyperNormalisation weaves these historical narratives back together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created and is sustained. This shows that a new kind of resistance must be imagined and actioned, as well as an unprecedented reawakening in a time where it matters like never before."]
Jauch, Herbert. "How The IMF-World Bank and Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) Destroyed Africa." News Rescue (May 26, 2009)
Kelley, Robin D.G. "Black Study, Black Struggle." Boston Review (March 7, 2016) ["The university is not an engine of social transformation. Activism is."]
---. "What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?" Boston Review (January 12, 2017)
Lawson, James. "MLK’s Final Days: The Rev. James Lawson Remembers King’s Assassination & Support for Memphis Strike." Democracy Now (April 3, 2018) ["Fifty years ago today in Memphis, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final sermon, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” Less than 24 hours later, King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just 39 years old. King was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. We speak to Rev. James Lawson, who invited King to come to Memphis to support the strike. At the time, Lawson was the pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis. King called Rev. Lawson “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”']
Lederach, John Paul. "The Art of Peace." On Being (July 8, 2010) ["What happens when people transcend violence while living in it? John Paul Lederach has spent three decades mediating peace and change in 25 countries — from Nepal to Colombia and Sierra Leone. He shifts the language and lens of the very notion of conflict resolution. He says, for example, that enduring progress takes root not with large numbers of people, but with relationships between unlikely people."]
Miéville, China. "‘One thinge that ouerthroweth all that were graunted before’: On Being Presidential." Salvage (January 30, 2018)
Nordgren, Andie. "The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy." Anarchist Library (July 14, 2012) ["Relationship anarchy questions the idea that love is a limited resource that can only be real if restricted to a couple. You have capacity to love more than one person, and one relationship and the love felt for that person does not diminish love felt for another. Don’t rank and compare people and relationships — cherish the individual and your connection to them. One person in your life does not need to be named primary for the relationship to be real. Each relationship is independent, and a relationship between autonomous individuals."]
Pavlic, Ed. "Baldwin's Lonely Country." Boston Review (March 29, 2018)
Purnell, Derecka. "Radical Political Action." Boston Review (March 7, 2016) ["In the Black Study, Black Struggle forum, Robin D. G. Kelley advocates for a rebirth of grassroots political education. A forum contributor, Derecka Purnell, informed us that some groups of student-activists are already doing exactly that. At Harvard Law School, a group called Reclaim Harvard Law has occupied one of the school's lounges and is holding weekly political education sessions there. Purnell shared with us her list of the texts that have been circulating in the group. It reveals an investment in liberation from not only racial oppression, but from all forms of oppression, including sexual and financial. This is informed by a commitment to "intersectionality," Kimberlé Crenshaw's insight that various forms of oppression are entangled and amplify one another, and thus must be fought in concert. We present this list, in the form it was presented to us, as the current pulse of the movement and a testament to its members' brilliance."]
Risen, James. "The Biggest Secret: James Risen on Life as a NY Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror." Democracy Now (January 5, 2018) ["We spend the hour with former New York Times reporter James Risen, who left the paper in August to join The Intercept as senior national security correspondent. This week, he published a 15,000-word story headlined “The Biggest Secret: My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror.” The explosive piece describes his struggles to publish major national security stories in the post-9/11 period and how both the government and his own editors at The New York Times suppressed his reporting, including reports on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, for which he would later win the Pulitzer Prize. Risen describes meetings between key Times editors and top officials at the CIAand the White House. His refusal to name a source would take him to the Supreme Court, and he almost wound up in jail, until the Obama administration blinked."]
Roberts, Neil. "Race, Injustice, and Philosophy: An Interview with Tommie Shelby." Black Perspectives (January 2, 2018)
Robertson, Campbell. "A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It." The New York Times (April 25, 2018)
Sanders, Bernie. "Talk About Inequality." Deconstructed (March 23, 2018) ["The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan sits down with former presidential candidate and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to talk poverty, inequality, media bias, and the 2020 presidential election."]
Slavery By Another Name (USA:Samuel D. Pollard, 2012: 90 mins) ["A documentary that recounts the many ways in which American slavery persisted as a practice many decades after its supposed abolition."]
---. "The Nazis in Power: The Night of Broken Glass." The Rest is History (January 17, 2024) ["By November 1938 the scene in Germany was at its darkest yet, as the full scale of Hitler’s intentions for the Jewish population of the German Reich was becoming evermore apparent. As the threat of another world war increased, so the Nazi anti-semitism machine went up a gear. Synagogues were destroyed, Jewish businessmen, bureaucrats, lawyers and doctors disbarred, plans were made for a mass expulsion of Jews from Europe. But the worst was yet to come, as the assassination of a German official in Paris in late 1938 instigated the most savage wave of Jewish persecution in Germany so far… Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the build up to Krystallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass - and the diabolical destruction, brutality and violence that ensued. By the end of 1938, Hitler’s two dearest ambitions, an apocalyptic victory over the Jewish people and the conquest of Europe itself, seemed terrifyingly within reach."]
Hypernormalisation (BBC: Adam Curtis, 2016: 166 mins) ["HyperNormalisation wades through the culmination of forces that have driven this culture into mass uncertainty, confusion, spectacle and simulation. Where events keep happening that seem crazy, inexplicable and out of control—from Donald Trump to Brexit, to the War in Syria, mass immigration, extreme disparity in wealth, and increasing bomb attacks in the West—this film shows a basis to not only why these chaotic events are happening, but also why we, as well as those in power, may not understand them. We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. And because it is reflected all around us, ubiquitous, we accept it as normal. This epic narrative of how we got here spans over 40 years, with an extraordinary cast of characters—the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, early performance artists in New York, President Putin, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi and the Internet. HyperNormalisation weaves these historical narratives back together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created and is sustained. This shows that a new kind of resistance must be imagined and actioned, as well as an unprecedented reawakening in a time where it matters like never before."]
Jauch, Herbert. "How The IMF-World Bank and Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) Destroyed Africa." News Rescue (May 26, 2009)
Jilani, Zaid. "Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebrations Overlook His Critiques of Capitalism and Militarism." The Intercept (January 18, 2016)
---. "Martin Luther King Jr. Spent the Last Year of His Life Detested by the Liberal Establishment." The Intercept (January 15, 2018) ["Martin Luther King Jr. was much more radical than he is often portrayed."]
Judis, John. "Israel and Palestine Across History." Open Source (December 7, 2023) ["With the historian John Judis we are looking for a longer timeline in the crisis of Gaza, Israel, Palestine. It has been, in fact, a century of layered conflict between Arabs and Jews, two peoples in stop-and-go warfare over a small plot of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. What if (as in James Joyce’s most famous line) that hundred years of history is itself the nightmare from which we are all trying to awake? Can we break the nightmare war cycle by relearning the history, by taking it again, by doing it over?"]
Kelley, Robin D.G. "Black Study, Black Struggle." Boston Review (March 7, 2016) ["The university is not an engine of social transformation. Activism is."]
---. "What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?" Boston Review (January 12, 2017)
Lederach, John Paul. "The Art of Peace." On Being (July 8, 2010) ["What happens when people transcend violence while living in it? John Paul Lederach has spent three decades mediating peace and change in 25 countries — from Nepal to Colombia and Sierra Leone. He shifts the language and lens of the very notion of conflict resolution. He says, for example, that enduring progress takes root not with large numbers of people, but with relationships between unlikely people."]
Lifton, Robert Jay. "The Assault on Reality." Dissent (April 10, 2018) ["Essential to understanding Trump is his attempt to subject the public to his own solipsistic reality—and thereby destroy our shared basis for democracy."]
---. "Malignant Normality." Dissent (Spring 2017) ["Extreme ideologues do much to create a malignant normality, which comes to pervade most institutions, including medical ones. Then ordinary people who work in those institutions adhere to that normality, often aided by bits and pieces of the extreme ideology. The prevailing normality can be decisive because it excludes alternatives and provides strong pressures for destructive behavior."]
Magid, Shaul. "‘Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism’ Isn't Just Wrong, It's the Problem." Religion Dispatches (December 13, 2023) ["Let’s be honest, for anyone with basic liberal values, even if you are a Zionist, the state of Israel is presently very problematic (as the Israeli protests have shown—to say nothing of the occupation) and thus many of the criticisms are not prejudicial by definition. Some Jewish anti-Zionists argue that the nation-state is not the best or healthiest collective structure for Jews. Nation-states are, after all, pretty egregious entities, responsible for mass murder, inequality, and oppression. One can argue with that for sure, but is that statement antisemitic?"]
Mandel, Joan. "Gaza Ghetto: How to Make a Film Under Military Occupation." Jump Cut #62 (Winter 2023 - 2024) ["Last year, I was asked by Jump Cut to write an article about the making of our film, Gaza Ghetto. The times that the film portrays, from 1948 to 1984, seem almost innocent by comparison with today. (December 2023) From outside the killing fields of Gaza, we have watched the destruction of the lives and livelihood of two million people. Homes, schools, mosques and churches blasted into archaeological ruin with more still happening. Our brains seek safe spaces to absorb the shock of the murder of children and adults by high-powered Israeli bombs, sent and funded by the United States. With all our fervent prayers, protests and petitions, we have not been able to stop this calamity. Palestinian poets and painters, students and teachers, journalists and farmers have scattered, clutching each other in tiny shelters, nursing the wounds and deaths of loved ones. Scrambling to find food, water and fuel as winter settles, trying to stay alive and to connect with each other. Among these people are the residents of Jabalia Refugee Camp portrayed in our documentary. Abdullah, who appeared in the film as a child, and is now a father of teenagers, had this to say in a recent phone conversation: “This film was the first documentary to tell the history of Gaza in a brave way, against what the formal news was showing and what pro-Israel media was saying. It shows how my grandmother died, and how my brother was born. It shows how to advocate for people’s rights and for anti-colonialism, and how to tell the truth even if everyone is saying it differently.” I hope that you will take this opportunity to watch Gaza Ghetto, to learn about Palestinian history through the stories of Abdullah’s family and their neighbors in Jabalia. That you will hold them in your hearts, as you find your own ways to advocate for people’s rights, for peace and justice. Even if the powers-that-be tell you differently.]
Matsumoto, Nancy. "How Foodies Can Understand Capitalism and Farm-to-Table Justice." Yes! (April 30, 2018) ["Our food system can be a place for systemic transformation through an alliance between the progressive and radical wings of the food movement."]
Miéville, China. "‘One thinge that ouerthroweth all that were graunted before’: On Being Presidential." Salvage (January 30, 2018)
Nestle, Marion. "Food and Politics." Conversations with History (March 20, 2017) ["Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Marion Nestle Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition at New York University. Professor Nestle reflects on the evolution of her thinking on the interplay between nutrition studies and the politics of food. She discusses the environment of the food industry emphasizing its dilemma of producing too much food in an environment in which profits are paramount and the competition with other food producers is intense. She analyzes the arsenal of tools at its service—advertising and lobbying and talks about the role of food activism in creating a structure of choice in which health, the environment and social justice are determining factors in what is produced and what we eat. Finally, she identifies the role of government in entrenching the status quo and the possibilities of it assuming a different kind of role. Finally, she offers advice to students preparing for the future."]
O'Connor, Rory. "Berlinale Review: Powerful West Bank Documentary No Other Land Gives Voice to the Palestinian Cause." The Film Stage (February 17, 2024) ["Some years ago, an uncle of mine traveled to Palestine with a group of volunteers. It was a time of fewer videophones, certainly in the region, and the organisation involved had asked for volunteers to visit the West Bank and document what they saw. After a few days, my uncle circulated an email in which he recounted the story of a mechanic who had had his tools and equipment arbitrarily confiscated by the Israeli army. The equipment, valued in the region of €50,000, provided for him and his fourteen employees and their families––entire livelihoods vanished with the flick of a pen. The suspicion amongst locals was that the garage, which was also frequented by settlers, was doing too well: “Part of the West Bank operation is to destroy the local economy,” my uncle wrote, before adding, “One got the feeling that the relationship between the settlers and the Palestinians also needed to be destroyed.”"]
Purnell, Derecka. "Radical Political Action." Boston Review (March 7, 2016) ["In the Black Study, Black Struggle forum, Robin D. G. Kelley advocates for a rebirth of grassroots political education. A forum contributor, Derecka Purnell, informed us that some groups of student-activists are already doing exactly that. At Harvard Law School, a group called Reclaim Harvard Law has occupied one of the school's lounges and is holding weekly political education sessions there. Purnell shared with us her list of the texts that have been circulating in the group. It reveals an investment in liberation from not only racial oppression, but from all forms of oppression, including sexual and financial. This is informed by a commitment to "intersectionality," Kimberlé Crenshaw's insight that various forms of oppression are entangled and amplify one another, and thus must be fought in concert. We present this list, in the form it was presented to us, as the current pulse of the movement and a testament to its members' brilliance."]
Roberts, Neil. "Race, Injustice, and Philosophy: An Interview with Tommie Shelby." Black Perspectives (January 2, 2018)
Robertson, Campbell. "A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It." The New York Times (April 25, 2018)
Sanders, Seth. "Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think." Religion Dispatches (January 14, 2024) ["Like the Israeli government, Levy implies any charges against Israel as a nation-state are attacks on the Jewish people as a whole: that any anti-Zionism is antisemitic. So is the state of Israel actually the sole political representative of the Jews? Or, per the world’s largest Hasidic court, does Israel have no legitimate Jewish status at all? For Satmar authority Rabbi Shimon Israel Posen argued that Israel’s claim to legally represent Judaism is nothing less than “forging the signature of God.” And is the identification of the state of Israel with Judaism a political exaggeration? Is it, as Shaul Magid writes, “just another chapter in the narrative to make sure Jews in America don’t feel too safe, or too wanted, as Jews [because that] is not very good for Israel”? In Magid’s argument, automatic identification with Israel “gives American Jews, who have largely abandoned religion, a solid foundation of Jewish identity that requires very little effort.” Indeed, when the House of Representatives passed a GOP bill asserting all anti-Zionism was antisemitism they found a surprising opponent in Jerry Nadler (NY-12), the representative with the largest Jewish constituency in the country. Painfully alive to the problem of antisemitism, Nadler nonetheless described the bill as trying “to weaponize Jewish lives for political gains.” He ripped into the House claim as “either intellectually disingenuous or just factually wrong,” and argued that “the authors, if they were at all familiar with Jewish history and culture, should know about Jewish anti-Zionism that was, and is, expressly NOT antisemitic [because] even today, certain orthodox Hasidic Jewish communities…as well as adherents of the pre-state Jewish labor movement have held views that are at odds with the modern Zionist conception.”]
Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Scahill, Jeremy. "Blacklisted Academic Norman Finkelstein on Gaza, 'The World's Largest Concentration Camp.'" The Intercept (May 20, 2018)
Shuster, Simon. "The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (William Morrow & Company, 2023)." New Books in European Politics (January 20, 2024) ["Since Simon Shuster's November 2023 Time cover story ("Nobody believes in our victory like I do - Nobody"), anyone with an interest in the war in Ukraine has been waiting for his fly-on-the-wall study of command. Finally, The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky (William Morrow, 2024) is out. Born in Moscow but raised in California, Simon Shuster has reported from Russia and Ukraine for 17 years. Before joining Time, he worked in the region for the Moscow Times, Reuters, and AP. He first met Ukraine’s leader and his entourage when Zelensky was running for president in 2019 and built enough trust to be granted sustained wartime access three years later. Based on off-and-on-the-record conversations with the Ukrainian principals – including the president, his wife, their childhood friends, his chief of staff, his defence minister, his national security advisor, and the chief of staff of the armed forces – The Showman provides a unique insight into the conduct of the war from the top."]
Slavery By Another Name (USA:Samuel D. Pollard, 2012: 90 mins) ["A documentary that recounts the many ways in which American slavery persisted as a practice many decades after its supposed abolition."]
Slotkin, Richard. "American Disorder: The Origin of the Culture War." Open Source (April 25, 2024) [MB: I'm currently reading this book. Essential history to understand how stories/myths are used to create a sense of national identity (and who does and does not belong) and the current narratives being deployed in our acrimonious cultural wars. "The key battle taking place in this American crisis year of 2024 is happening in our heads, according to the master historian Richard Slotkin. He’s here to tell us all that we’re in a 40-year culture war and an identity crisis by now. It’s all about drawing on legendary figures like Daniel Boone and Frederick Douglass, Betsy Ross and Rosa Parks, Robert E. Lee and G.I. Joe for a composite self-portrait of the country. Richard Slotkin says we’re in a contest of origin stories, in search of a common national myth. His book is A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America. It is the Trump-Biden fight, of course, but with centuries of history bubbling under it."]
Srinivasan, Amia. "What is a Woman?" Philosophy Bites (January 1, 2017) ["'What is a woman?' may seem like a straightforward question, but as Amia Srinivasan explains, it is not quite as easy to answer as you might think. Here she discusses key feminist ideas about what a woman is, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir's ideas on the topic."]Susstein, Cass R. "It Can Happen Here." The New York Review of Books (June 28, 2018) [Published responses to the essay.]
Taibbi, Matt. "If We Want Kids to Stop Killing, the Adults Have to Stop, Too: America's Rage-Sickness Trickles Down from the Top." Rolling Stone (February 16, 2018)
Terry, Brandon M. "MLK Now." Boston Review (January 8, 2018)
The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins (Canada: Geoff Bowie, 2001: 76 mins) ["This feature documentary is a portrait of Peter Watkins, an Oscar®-winning British filmmaker who, for the past 4 decades, has proved that films can be made without compromise. With the proliferation of TV channels, documentaries are enjoying an unprecedented boom fuelled by audiences seeking an alternative to infotainment. But now documentary filmmaking, too, finds itself constrained by the imperatives of television. However, there is a rebel resisting this uniformity of the spirit. Pre-eminent among today's documentary filmmakers concerned about this mind-numbing standardization, Peter Watkins has never strayed from either his principles or the cause."]
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. "A Threat to Global Democracy: How Facebook & Surveillance Capitalism Empower Authoritarianism." Democracy Now (August 1, 2018) [I was meditating today on a river bank thinking about the impact of technology (especially SM) on my psyche. I was wondering what it is doing to us as humans and what are the questions we should be asking about that influence/time/impact. Then, later, while I was cleaning my house I listened to this interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan and my thoughts were pushed further and more questions arose. I was first concerned about my own psyche even as I thought about it on a larger social level. Then, because I am preparing for classes, I began to think of a pedagogical exercise. Introduce my classes to Vaidhyanathan's ideas in this interview and initiate a conversation about the impact of social media on how we operate in and understand our world. I'm thinking that I would ask my students to attempt to have a social media fast for an entire week (I would, of course, participate). To keep a record of our successes and failures, to think about how being disconnected in this way affects us, to keep a record of questions and conclusions. With all of that in mind, I would like to hear any responses to this interview and/or this conception of a pedagogical exercise. Also, would others be interested in doing this exercise at the same time - individually or collectively? I know this can come off as hypocritical as I am on SM. I have to honestly admit that when I was engaged in my higher education as the Internet (and later SM when I was a professor) appeared, and later dominated, I was excited (and bought into the rhetoric about its revolutionary possibilities) by the radical possibilities of being able to communicate with people from all corners of the earth (how many of you remember long distance charges on landlines) and to freely access information (including that which is purposely being censored or disappeared). Even as this fantasy dissipated in the wake of corporate colonization of the Internet, I still clung to a belief that if we just used it intelligently, modeled higher thinking, used it to connect to our loved ones, that it could be changed for a better purpose. More and more I am becoming cynical about that possibility..... I think we have to ask some hard questions. I will accept all positions with no judgement and in open discussion (as long as when you make conclusive/factual claims you back them up). Peace.]
Waldrun, Jeremy. "Brave Spaces." The New York Review of Books (June 28, 2018) ["“How can we—those of us who profess to educate—accept the student demand not only as a rebuke, which it certainly is, but also as a gift?” -- Tav Nyong’o"]
Yazdiha, Hajar. "The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton University Press, 2023)." Princeton UP Ideas Podcast (January 12, 2024) ["In the post-civil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, from people with disabilities to women's rights activists and LGBTQ coalitions. Increasingly since the 1980s, white, right-wing social movements, from family values coalitions to the alt-right, now claim the collective memory of civil rights to portray themselves as the newly oppressed minorities. The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton UP, 2023) reveals how, as these powerful groups remake collective memory toward competing political ends, they generate offshoots of remembrance that distort history and threaten the very foundations of multicultural democracy. In the revisionist memories of white conservatives, gun rights activists are the new Rosa Parks, antiabortion activists are freedom riders, and antigay groups are the defenders of Martin Luther King's Christian vision. Drawing on a wealth of evidence ranging from newspaper articles and organizational documents to television transcripts, press releases, and focus groups, Hajar Yazdiha documents the consequential reimagining of the civil rights movement in American political culture from 1980 to today. She shows how the public memory of King and civil rights has transformed into a vacated, sanitized collective memory that evades social reality and perpetuates racial inequality. Powerful and persuasive, The Struggle for the People's King demonstrates that these oppositional uses of memory fracture our collective understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we go next."]
Zinn, Howard (Historian/Playwright/Political Science) ["Howard Zinn was a historian, author, professor, playwright, and activist. His life’s work focused on a wide range of issues including race, class, war, and history, and touched the lives of countless people." source)
Zollman, Florian. "Fake News by Design." Monthly Review (March 7, 2018) ["Mainstream news media reporting and the manufacture of bloodbaths in Libya and Syria"]
Framing the Picture: Perspectives on Islamophobia in American Sniper and The Reluctant Fundamentalist from Matt Marlin on Vimeo.
Zollman, Florian. "Fake News by Design." Monthly Review (March 7, 2018) ["Mainstream news media reporting and the manufacture of bloodbaths in Libya and Syria"]
Framing the Picture: Perspectives on Islamophobia in American Sniper and The Reluctant Fundamentalist from Matt Marlin on Vimeo.
