SUCHITRA VIJAYAN · FRANCESCA RECCHIA · ANAND TELTUMBDE

SUCHITRA VIJAYAN · FRANCESCA RECCHIA · ANAND TELTUMBDE

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Speaking Out of Place: Voices of Resistance Emerge from Behind the Walls of India’s Security State

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.

Speaking Out of Place: SARA AHMED discusses The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

Speaking Out of Place: SARA AHMED discusses The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

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Author of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook
Independent Queer Feminist Scholar

You're more likely to progress if you say yes. It's a reproductive mechanism, which is why feminist culture knows so much about everything. We can explain how it is that institutions keep being reproduced in the same way. So what then do you do? Where do you go if your no has nowhere to go? And I think when you say no to the world, and you're pushed out by it, you still find your people. And that there's the world-making is in the people who find in the refusal of the institution a common ground.

The Subversive Seventies: A Conversation with Political Theorist MICHAEL HARDT

The Subversive Seventies: A Conversation with Political Theorist MICHAEL HARDT

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A Conversation with Political Theorist MICHAEL HARDT on his expansive study of a broad range of subversive movements across the globe. He shows us how the 70s were actually ahead of us in terms of confronting key issues and contradictions that remain with us today and shows what we can learn from them.

Speaking Out of Place: MANIJEH MORADIAN discusses This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States

Speaking Out of Place: MANIJEH MORADIAN discusses This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States

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Author of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States

So you start having Iranian students coming in the late 1950s. The numbers increased throughout the sixties and seventies. Tens of thousands of Iranian students, more than from any other country, come to the United States to study. At the moment, in 1979, the moment of the revolution, there were 50,000 or more students in the United States. So it's by far the largest foreign student population here. In the 1970s, it became possible for less affluent students to come. For the first time, there were more government scholarships available to certain groups of workers in the oil industry, for example, to their children. They were not blue-collar, but more like white-collar office workers. Before that, it had been mostly wealthy families who could afford to send their children abroad and who had access to education in the first place, but when you have less affluent students coming to less expensive, smaller colleges. By the 1970s, Iran had become so repressive that young people were trying to leave. They want to leave, and some of them want to leave intentionally to become activists and join the Iran student opposition movement.

Speaking Out of Place: ANTHONY ARNOVE & HALEY PESSIN discuss Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century

Speaking Out of Place: ANTHONY ARNOVE & HALEY PESSIN discuss Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century

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Co-Editors of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century
(Arnove) Producer of the Academy Award-nominated Dirty Wars · Director of Roam Agency

We have to create alternative institutions to understand history. And to have conversations about how we can intervene because these conversations are increasingly being criminalized, and librarians are being fired and punished. Teachers are also being fired. Whole colleges are being taken over and certain courses are being labeled as not credit-worthy and being canceled. And while conversations around critical race theory and other topics are being declared illegal, there's a long history of book banning in this country. There's a long history of criminalizing dissent in this country, but I do think we all have to recognize that we're in a much more dangerous moment right now, where a new form of McCarthyism is emboldened and we have to speak out against that. - Anthony Arnove

Speaking Out of Place: SILVIA FEDERICI discusses Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

Speaking Out of Place: SILVIA FEDERICI discusses Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

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Scholar · Educator · Feminist Activist
Author of Caliban and the Witch
Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

When I came to America I had a shock. I never knew what it meant to be in a country that seems to have no history, being in a place where you feel like you are nowhere, you could have been dropped by a plane in a cultural, historical desert. In the United States, they're destroying historic buildings. They've paved over cemeteries of African slaves. They're changing the environment so that memory is destroyed.

Because you are placing yourself in a broader arc of time, I asked a woman from Guatemala: how can women keep fighting for so much power? And she said, "Because, for us, the dead are not dead." This gives them the courage to go on when everything seems to be lost. I think that this is the kind of struggle that we need to make against war, against the destruction of nature.

Speaking Out of Place: SUSAN ALBUHAWA discusses “Palestine Writes”

Speaking Out of Place: SUSAN ALBUHAWA discusses “Palestine Writes”

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Novelist · Poet · Essayist · Scientist · Mother · Activist
Organizer of “Palestine Writes” · the only North American literature festival celebrating Palestinian Writers & Artists
Founder of the Children’s Organization Playgrounds for Palestine

Palestinians have been facing erasure for decades. There's the physical erasure of our villages, the names of our villages, the erasure of the word Palestine from the map, erasure of our identities. And now there's this kind of colonization of our narratives, of our stories, and our history. And Palestine Writes is part of a counterforce against this new form of colonization. The Zionist colonial narrative has always shifted with shifting wind, depending on what's in vogue at the time. Initially, it was a sort of romantic ending to Europe's genocide of its own Jewish population. And there was this epic myth of "a land without people for a people without land". And of course that was unsustainable.

Speaking Out of Place: JEFF CHANG discusses the Supreme Court’s Recent Decision on Affirmative Action

Speaking Out of Place: JEFF CHANG discusses the Supreme Court’s Recent Decision on Affirmative Action

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Journalist · Activist · Public Intellectual
Author of We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation ·
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

This conversation focuses on the Supreme Court’s recent decision on affirmative action and presenting a ”true and historically honest confrontation with America’s racism.”

“Beyond Kafkaesque”: Will Hassan Diab Receive Justice?

“Beyond Kafkaesque”: Will Hassan Diab Receive Justice?

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A Conversation with DR. HASSAN DIAB · MICHELLE WEINROTH & BERNIE FARBER

Former Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada, Alex Neva, described the prosecution of Hassan Diab as, “surreal and disgraceful.” Diab was sentenced to life, despite all of the evidence indicating that he could not possibly have committed it. He is currently facing re-extradition from Canada to France.

Speaking Out of Place: CHING-IN CHEN & KATE HAO discuss the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023

Speaking Out of Place: CHING-IN CHEN & KATE HAO discuss the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023

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on the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023

This August, the Asian American Literary Festival was to take place in Washington, DC.. The longstanding event had been on hiatus because of the pandemic, so this year’s event had generated a lot of buzz.  Organized by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), the event had already garnered substantial investments and expectations from both national and international groups and states. Ching-In Chen is a poet who was curating a festival event featuring books by trans and nonbinary writers. Kate Hao is a program coordinator who was on contract with the Smithsonian for the festival.

Speaking Out of Place: JENNIFER JACQUET discusses The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World

Speaking Out of Place: JENNIFER JACQUET discusses The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World

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Author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World

They weren't able to employ scientists to not find a fingerprint of anthropogenic climate change. They weren't able to pull that off, and when they're not able to do that, what they do instead is create an arsenal of expertise who just create the illusion of disagreement, and they were so successful at doing that with climate change that it's remarkable because there actually was scientific consensus. There wasn't this giant rift in the scientific community, and for decades, they created an illusion of disagreement that we all bought. And they're able to do that using Stanford University, Rockefeller University, these names of institutions as well as individuals, but they're not actually publishing science. And so I think it deserves a kind of special carve out of all of the tactics because it really says: actually these systems are working pretty well. You're just not getting the right information. And they do that again through the media and PR firms and controlling the dialogues and press releases and journals, and especially their relationship with the media, is very, very privileged.

Speaking Out of Place: CYNTHIA G. FRANKLIN discusses “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea”

Speaking Out of Place: CYNTHIA G. FRANKLIN discusses “Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea”

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Author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea
Professor of English at University of Hawai'i · Coeditor of the journal Biography

I posit narrated humanity as a lens through which to study how narratives participate in struggles to conceive human being beyond juridical and narrative humanity. What I was thinking about was just the kind of narrative codes and conventions and genres that help us to understand who counts as human in ways that people who are fighting for human rights as a thing that you have to do, even as there are all kinds of critiques that can and have been made rightly so of human rights, but that you have to do it.

Speaking Out of Place: DR. JENNIFER M. GÓMEZ discusses “The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls”

Speaking Out of Place: DR. JENNIFER M. GÓMEZ discusses “The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls”

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Author of The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse
Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work · Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at Boston University,

So many of us have experienced things along this vein, and when we know that, then the feelings of isolation can be interrupted with this understanding that many of us have been through these things. And if that person over there can experience joy, well maybe I can experience joy too, and maybe this is a different kind of harm and cultural betrayal. Sexual trauma and abuse as a collective community-level harm, that means community-level healing and personal healing.

Speaking Out of Place: OLIVIA HARRISON discusses “Natives Against Nativism”

Speaking Out of Place: OLIVIA HARRISON discusses “Natives Against Nativism”

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Author of Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France
Associate Professor of French & Comparative Literature at University of Southern California

We know, of course, how colonized territories were settled. They were settled by the poorest, most marginal sometimes, criminal, surplus populations. There is that inbuilt fear, right? I don't want to narrate this in psychological terms, but I do think that there's a way we can understand how these discourses have worked. How is it that these discourses that don't actually make sense when you read them work? It's because they offer a solution. So it's not the fault of globalization in neoliberalism that you don't have a job. It's because of these people at the gates, right? So it just taps into these very primal kind of ways of thinking about threats to one's own well-being. 

Speaking Out of Place: IMRAAN MIR & HALEY DUSCHINSKI discuss Human Rights in Kashmir

Speaking Out of Place: IMRAAN MIR & HALEY DUSCHINSKI discuss Human Rights in Kashmir

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Activist/Author/Educators growing Global Awareness of Kashmir to Secure Human Rights for its People

It's a complex history. I think the key thing to understand about Kashmir is that it is a place that was never decolonized, and it was recolonized in what is a nominally post-colonial world. This is the 75th anniversary of the UN Security Council's recognition of Kashmir as an international dispute. And, along with Palestine, Kashmir is the longest-running unresolved dispute on the agenda of the Security Council.

Speaking Out of Place: ADAM ARON discusses “The Climate Crisis: Science, Impacts, Policy, Psychology, Justice, Social Movements”

Speaking Out of Place: ADAM ARON discusses “The Climate Crisis: Science, Impacts, Policy, Psychology, Justice, Social Movements”

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Author of The Climate Crisis: Science, Impacts, Policy, Psychology, Justice, Social Movements
Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego · Climate Activist

Psychology has something to tell us about why so few people are really engaged in the climate struggle. There are different components to this. First of all, there is what I call epistemic skepticism in the book, which is to say, skepticism about the facts of climate change. The second thing is threat perception, that threat levels are not as high as they should be. And the third is that people are skeptical about the response. They don't think that they can do anything, or they don't believe that groups or even countries can make a difference. Epistemic skepticism: psychologically this means that quite a lot of people, for example, the United States, don't believe in the human cause of heating. And the reason for that is very much to do in fact, with the systematic campaign of misinformation that's been fostered by the fossils industry, systematically set out to confuse people about the scientific consensus. We should be very threatened by this. In fact, the youth, generally speaking, are anxious to some extent about it. In effect, Mother Earth is saying, "I can't deal with what you're doing to me, people. I'm putting up my temperature." And if you're not feeling anxious, then you're not paying attention. That's the right way to feel on Planet Earth.

Speaking Out of Place: ASHLEY DAWSON discusses “Environmentalism from Below”

Speaking Out of Place: ASHLEY DAWSON discusses “Environmentalism from Below”

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Author of Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket 2024) · Extinction: A Radical History · People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons · Professor of English at the Graduate Center / CUNY and the College of Staten Island

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews Ashley Dawson, Professor of English at the Graduate Center / City University of New York and the College of Staten Island. Dawson’s recently published books focus on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, and include People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). Dawson is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket) and the co-editor of Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2023).

Speaking Out of Place: NAOMI ORESKES discusses “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government & Love the Free Market”

Speaking Out of Place: NAOMI ORESKES discusses “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government & Love the Free Market”

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Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science & Affiliated Professor · Earth & Planetary Sciences · Harvard University
Co-author of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government & Love the Free Market

I think the word consortium is a good word. It's not a conspiracy, although at times it takes on conspiratorial elements, but it's a kind of network or consortium of people who are working over a very long period of time, going back to the early 20th century to build an ideology that basically says we should trust the marketplace. That markets are not merely an efficient way of developing and delivering goods and services, but that they're actually playing a crucial role in protecting political freedom, protecting political democracy, and they build that story in order to persuade people that government regulation of the marketplace, whether it's to protect workers, consumers, or the environment - even though it might seem attractive superficially - what they're saying is: yeah, but don't be fooled by that because it will actually undermine freedom and democracy. And it's a very clever move because it takes what is initially a self-interested defense of the prerogatives of the privileged, the prerogatives of the captains of industry, and turns it into a seemingly virtuous defense of democracy. And, of course, who wouldn't want to defend democracy?

Introducing: Speaking Out of Place: Ep 1 - What Is Behind the Revolutionary Moment in Iran?

Introducing: Speaking Out of Place: Ep 1 - What Is Behind the Revolutionary Moment in Iran?

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We’re pleased to introduce “Speaking Out of Place,” Professor David Palumbo-Liu’s new podcast, which carries on the spirit of his 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.

In this episode, Palumbo-Liu is in conversation with scholar, activist, and poet Dr. Persis Karim, director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. Karim provides indispensable background information reaching back to 1979, explains the long history of gender apartheid in Iran and why today there has been an explosion of mass protests led by young women joined by tens of thousands of others, including rappers, educators, human rights workers, ethnic minorities, artists, children, and others. She also explains the tremendous gaps in Western media coverage and fills in missing information.  She ends with a reading from her own poetry, and a plea to link these protests to all protests against authoritarian regimes.

(Highlights) DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

(Highlights) DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

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Writer, Activist, Comparative Literature Professor
Author of Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back

To explore different worlds. That’s what literature has taught me. Reading has taught me how difficult it is to write well, to do you something other than the mundane or the expected, so all those things point to a kind of human creativity and a human capacity to both create and also to learn. To learn about life in different ways and to pass on those lessons to other people. One thing I think great teachers do is to embody what they talk about, the values that they profess, the things they feel are important in their everyday lives outside of the literature. So when I become involved in politics or a cause, it’s a reflection of what I've learned through any number of things including literature. Literature doesn’t stand alone. Literature is part of the world.