Radical Futures

“Complaints often get us to the politics of how the institution works. And that's how I've tried to see it - as a lens into the institution.” Writer, scholar and activist Sara Ahmed learned the harsh truth about academic institutions over a decade ago. When a group of students and feminist faculty collectively complained about sexual harassment at their institution - Goldsmiths, University of Lond...

A story about love can “unspool the complexities of caste,” says Nikhil Pandhi, the editor of Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist Anthology of Love Stories published by Zubaan Books, an indie feminist press based in India. Such stories not only serve to give space to the rich, inner lives of Dalit communities but they can be an important resource for anyone who is keen to understand caste....

“I had always placed my queer identity and my Palestinian identity in different buckets,” admits writer Tareq Baconi. This changed when he began writing his memoir, Fire in Every Direction , a first-person account of young Tareq, a Palestinian boy living in Jordan and gradually coming to terms with his sexuality. “Through the writing of this book, and as I became more involved in Palestine organiz...

Today, in the United States, the right to vote is more precarious and more contested than ever. “I have had front row seats to voter suppression,” writer, poll worker, activist and Georgia resident Anjali Enjeti tells me, referring to Shelby County v. Holder , a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Enjeti explains that things have been going...

“Satire is dead. Long live satire,” Tanzanian political cartoonist Gado declares, laughing, as we sit down to discuss the role of satire, humor and cartoons in modern public discourse. Godfrey Mwampembwa - pen name “Gado” - is a prolific and prominent political cartoonist with a career that has spanned three decades. Gado’s talent for drawing, coupled with a voracious interest in the news, led him...

“Border regimes are some of the most normalized forms of violence,” writer and activist Harsha Walia says, because even the most progressive people “really struggle with the idea of abolishing the border.” Recently, the murder of Renee Good in the bright light of day, in Minneapolis, has sparked outrage across the US. However, this is a culmination of the past several months of an escalation in th...

“This is a brutal sanctions regime.” Writer, political scientist and educator Geo Maher emphatically reminds us about Venezuela. A bipartisan strategy that began with Barack Obama and got much worse under Donald Trump, sanctions have been a deliberate effort to keep Venezuela in a long term chokehold. The seeds to destabilize Venezuela were thus sowed decades ago, even as last week’s US strikes in...

Ramallah-based culture writer Lama Obeid finds that the genocide has brought about a paradigm shift - not only in the realms of cookery, cookbooks and recipes, but also in the very food that Palestinians are being made to consume. The attack on food, foodways, health and nutrition is sustained, deliberate and systematic, and works alongside tactics of starvation and hunger. Not only is there wides...

In more than two dozen books spanning Iraq, Bosnia, Palestine and Vietnam, poet, translator and scholar Ammiel Alcalay has crystallized a piercing critique of American imperialism. He illustrates a commitment to places and people upon whom the bloody trail left by American excursions is inscribed, whether abroad or at home. Alcalay has crafted a unique insider-outsider approach grounded in poetic...

“Food is politics,” Omer Al Tijani declares. “The documenting of cuisine and culture is an act of resistance against the ongoing oppression that we have been experiencing in Sudan.” In a country ravaged by war and where hunger has been weaponized in extreme ways, Omer’s extraordinary cookbook Sudanese Kitchen works against invisibility and erasure.  Sudanese Kitchen is a culmination of decade...

Writer, scholar, and educator Sunny Singh explains that everything she does “centers around finding ways to undo empire.” The world we have inherited is “an ongoing colonial project” and thus “the wars, the genocides that we're watching now, are still the same colonial wars.”  Imperial powers have poured vast resources into usurping power through shaping narratives. “Before a single shot is f...

Kenya’s Muslim population has “long experienced political and economic marginalization” says Samar Al-Bulushi, anthropologist and author of War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, United States and the War on Terror. Samar traces a rather under-explored contemporary history; that of Kenya’s role in the US-led War on Terror. The book investigates the ways in which Kenya emerges as a significant geopoliti...

“I spent the first two months of the genocide in Gaza,” writer, professor and activist Haidar Eid explains. “In Gaza itself, I was displaced three times.” After being evacuated in December 2023, Eid went from Gaza to South Africa, which became his “fourth displacement.” He is now based on Johannesburg and has been closely scrutinizing the 20-point Gaza ceasefire plan strong-armed by Trump and Neta...

Sisonke Msimang is clear that she is, first and foremost, an African. “Despite the fact that Africa is not a country, I experience myself, I feel myself, to be African,” she tells me. Sisonke was born to South African activist parents and grew up “a child of the freedom struggle.” Even though she moved around a lot, Sisonke feels at home in many countries and continents, as well as within the glob...

On October 25th, 2023, writer Omar El Akkad wrote a tweet about Palestine: “One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” The narratives about victims and victimizers were already so disproportionate, and the institutional silences so loud given the brutality we...

“I have been writing this book almost my whole life,” Maxamed Abumaye admits when asked about the motivation behind his recently published Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence. Though this is a scholarly book published by a university press, Maxamed deviates from the academic format by making his own life story central to the text. He writes...

If you’re being censored or policed, “you learn to recognize the signals your body sends you,” writer Anna Badkhen explains. A few months ago, Anna had turned down an invitation to participate in PEN America’s World Voices festival to protest their “absolutely despicable treatment” of Palestinian writers and journalists. She articulated the reasons for her boycott in a letter which she posted on s...

Whether its legacy figures like Cecil Rhodes, Mahatma Gandhi and B.R Ambedkar, or various military men or aggressive phallic sculptures, statues are the public’s direct and unavoidable encounter with institutionally constructed histories. They represent the supremacy of colonialism, race, caste and gender, and so movements centered on either dismantling  or building them have become critical...

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist, prolific scholar, and active participant in the Algerian war of independence against France would have been 100 years old this year. He wrote about a wide range of topics yet it is his reflections on colonial violence and the counter-violence of the colonized that loom large even today, 64 years later. Despite filmmaker Hassane Mezine’s and my own fairly...

Podcast was recorded in French. English subtitles are available in the YouTube video included below. Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, scholar and revolutionary, would have turned 100 years old this year had his life not been cut short by leukemia at the age of 36. By then, Olivier Fanon, the son of Frantz and Josie Fanon, had already spent his childhood in Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana and other places where...

Anthropologist Maura Finkelstein had always incorporated Palestine in her university teaching and felt that, as an anti-Zionist, Jewish American academic, it was her moral obligation to do so. She knew well the type of repression and harassment that Palestinian academics experienced at US universities, but thought that being a Jewish scholar would likely protect her. Absurdly, Maura became the fir...

For the last two years, Huda Fakhreddine has endured a barrage of harassment by the US government and her employer, the University of Pennsylvania, for the simple reason that she writes about, teaches and translates Palestinian poetry.  The witchhunt for academics associated with Palestine is not new, but has ramped up immensely since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza in the aut...

The mythology of the city of Sana’a writes itself: nestled in a valley; the charming, crumbling architecture; the winding alleys; and a history and heritage older than time itself. As Yemen’s largest city and its capital, a literary anthology through the lens of Sana’a seems like a natural choice.  The Book of Sana'a joins an illustrious list of city fiction anthologies published by Comma Pre...

When a little boy drowns in the Nile, a Sudanese village is forced to confront its racist past in Reem Gaafar’s debut novel A Mouth Full of Salt. Narrated through a choral protagonist, the novel weaves together the lives of villagers who are suddenly beset by a curse: the drowning is followed by another death, and cattle begin to contract a mysterious illness.  The village is an allegory inte...

Sim Kern’s journey as an outspoken and empathetic activist for Palestinian liberation began when they realized, as a teenager, that global warming would blow up our planet one day. Back in 1999, saving the environment was not a “mainstream” topic and for Sim, these early climate justice concerns became an entry point for understanding that our global system was catastrophically racist, colonial an...