In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji talk with the founders of the Polis Project—Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia—about their new book, How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners. They are joined by the eminent Dalit intellectual, and former political prisoner Dr. Anand Teltumbde to lend his unique insight into the political situation in India and the realities of being a political prisoner there. The book combines deep historical research, documents regarding the current political situation in India, and a set of creative works from political prisoners conveying to the world their resistance and courage.

The Polis Project, Inc. is a New York-based hybrid research and journalism organization that works with communities in resistance. Through its Research, Reportage and Resistance approach, they publish and disseminate critical ideas that are excluded from mainstream media.

Their work sheds light on the rise of authoritarianism especially in democracies and focuses on issues of racial, class and caste injustice, Islamophobia and State oppression around the world.

In September 2019, the United States Library of Congress selected The Polis Project, Inc.’s website for inclusion in its web archives. They consider the “website to be an important part of their collection and the historical record.”

Francesca Recchia is an independent researcher, educator and writer whose work is grounded in the values and principles of decolonial philosophy and radical pedagogy. She is interested in the geopolitical dimension of heritage and cultural processes in countries in conflict and she focuses on creative practices of collective resistance in contexts of unequal structures of power. Over the last two decades, Francesca has worked in different capacities in Palestine, Pakistan, India, Kashmir, Iraq and Afghanistan. Her latest assignment in Kabul was as Acting Director of the Afghan Institute for Arts and Architecture.

Francesca is a founding member of The Polis Project, a hybrid research and reportage humanities collective that works with communities in resistance in the Global South. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College of London, has a PhD in Cultural Studies at the Oriental Institute in Naples and a Master in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She was a Research Associate at the Centre of South Asian Studies. SOAS, London, and is a Visiting Lecturer at Università Bocconi in Milan. She directed the 4th Afghanistan Contemporary Art Prize and Caravanserai – Kabul in Karachi, a regional cultural festival bringing together cultural expressions from Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.

She is the author of How long can the moon be caged? Voices of Indian political prisoners (with Suchitra Vijayan), The Little Book of Kabul (with Lorenzo Tugnoli), Picnic in a Minefield and Devices for Political Action (with a photo-essay by Leo Novel).

Dr Anand Teltumbde

Besides being a scholar and practitioner in his formal disciplines of Technology and Management, with an illustrated corporate career spanning four decades at top management positions, and a decade as an academic, he maintained and excelled in his parallel career as a civil rights activist, writer, columnist and public intellectual right since his student days.

An alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad and Ph D in Business Management, he is a fellow of many professional institutions. He published nearly two dozen research papers in reputed international journals and worked on editorial boards of some of them. He also had a stint in academia as Professor of Management at IIT, Kharagpur and thereafter as Senior Professor and Chair, Big Data Analytics in Goa Institute of Management, wherein he launched India’s first post-graduate programme in Management based on Big Data that is ranked among the top programmes right from its inception.    

He immensely contributed to the civil rights movement in India as one of its founding pillars and contributed theoretical insights through his voluminous writings into most issues. He participated and led many fact finding missions and peoples’ struggle. He is General Secretary, Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR), and a Presidium Member, All India Forum for Right to Education. A prolific writer, he has already published more than 30 books on contemporary issues, numerous papers and articles and wrote a column Margin Speak for a decade in Economic & Political Weekly before being arrested in the infamous Bhima-Koregaon case.

Suchitra Vijayan is an essayist, lawyer, and photographer working across oral history, state violence, and visual storytelling. She is the award winning author of the critically acclaimed book Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India (Melville House, New York) and How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (Pluto Press). Her essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Time Magazine GQ, The Nation, The Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Rumpus, Electric Literature, NPR, NBC, and BBC. As an attorney, she worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, giving Iraqi refugees legal aid. She is an award-winning photographer and the founder and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organization. She teaches at NYU Gallatin and Columbia University’s Oral History Program and lives in New York.

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Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.

Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:

“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times.  This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
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