Pretty Heady Stuff

Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. His research interests focus on the politics of colonialism and structural forms of violence founded and exacerbated by and through imperialism. Alex Khasnabish is a writer, researcher and teacher committed to collective liberation who also lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). He’s a professor in sociology and anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University. His research focuses on the radical imagination, social justice and social movements. In our conversation we look at some of the ideas from their forthcoming book from Fernwood Press, Frequently Asked White Questions. The book comes out of both frustration and inspiration. They were frustrated by the insufficiency of existing efforts at anti-racist education, given especially the current state of affairs in the world, with a resurgent far-right populism winning political ground, but they were also inspired to create space for people to pose questions that, especially in the case of white folks like myself, we might feel somewhat anxious about asking, because there are certain expectations within existing social justice spaces. Their book was the outgrowth of a YouTube show where they saw specific patterns emerge from the questions that were being asked. It's clear that there were specific things on people's minds, and so they wrote the book in order to catalog and constructively engage with those patterns, those questions, those concerns that keep people from being able to even imagine multiracial society, and solidarity within it. Instead of trying to play expert, they want to try to move past “moralistic denunciation” and lecturing and toward a model of “generosity” and “genuineness.” As Ajay puts it, “basic respect” has become more difficult at a time of conflict and polarization. This is, for him, where the Left has collectively sort of “missed the boat;” it has “underestimated right populism and failed to adequately address the political moment.” In the face of these failures, they want to experiment with more “evocative methods” on what needs to be done. The crucial question, from their perspective, is who is going to come up with a narrative that is “savvy and engaging enough to capture public attention” and gain traction in an era of persistent white supremacy and a potent attachment to past and present frameworks for maintaining hierarchy? These are not ideas that are easy to drive home. Arguing for an anti-capitalist politics is not necessarily going to resonate with all people or publics. But they still bring it into the conversation in ways that are convincing, and bring it, more specifically into the conversation about ecological justice movements and anti-racism. One of the biggest takeaways here is the idea that where we start out ontologically has a crucial effect on where we end up. In Ajay’s words it's ontology rather than epistemology that is at stake here. Rather than just a matter of knowledge, it's about the “nuts and bolts that go into cultivating whole systems of knowledge and approaches to ethics.”

Monty Scott is a brilliant stand-up comedian from Scarborough, Ontario. His album The Abyss Stares Back was nominated for a Juno Award in 2019. And while it didn’t win Comedy Album of the Year, it still represents a real victory: Scott recorded it in part as a response to a near-death experience. We talk in this conversation about bouncing back, the lives and livelihoods of comedians in Canada, speak to the politics of comedy today, and try to imagine ways of thinking about comedy as an art. There are practical reasons for trying to figure out a way to define comedy in these terms. As I discussed in my article for The Breach (https://breachmedia.ca/comedy-and-solidarity-in-canada/), getting comedy recognized this way would open up funding opportunities for a creative community that was hit very hard by the temporary and permanent closure of many venues during the pandemic. But it’s also a theoretical question: there are entrenched assumptions about what art is and what it should do. Changing the definition is slow, difficult work. And yet, Scott suggests, there is a path to comedy getting perceived as a legitimate art. He emphasizes, first of all, that it’s already an obviously relevant art form. It is a live conversation. It’s popular. People need it. He says it may even be “foundational to our existence.” Nonetheless, getting comedy recognized as an art is still a major objective of the Canadian Association of Stand-up Comedians, the organization for which Monty currently acts as president. A shift is already happening on the provincial level, but it remains a struggle. His gut tells him that the important thing is to listen to the people, to take them seriously, and trust that the work comedians can accomplish when they move out of a purely individualistic space and into solidarity with one another can actually achieve something transformative. Another area where he says we gain a lot of clarity from listening to the people is on the question of shifting levels of tolerance, and the politics of comedy. While he admits that his own comedy is, in many ways, grounded in being truly silly, he gets that there is a changing political climate around comedy. Still valuing the power of humour to go to uncomfortable places, while also understanding that there is a fine line between challenging norms and seeking shock for its own sake, is a tricky thing. But I appreciated his point that shock value has little real value, and that there’s an important contradiction between people casually laughing at stereotypes and then getting offended by the willingness to explicitly identify racism. He admits that, in Canadian comedy, being a person of colour means facing a real struggle to avoid being stereotyped. In the fact of that push to simplify one’s perspective and make one’s comedy digestible, he points out that there is a real fusion in Canadian society and that we need a shift in perspective on immigration, on inclusion, and to radically embrace diversity. This also means taking seriously what sorts of racially stratified impacts the pandemic has had in Canada, and really worldwide, as well. This is bigger than comedy, but it also implicates humour in a number of different ways.

Sandra Battaglini is an actor, stand-up comedian and writer. She is also the founder of the Canadian Association of Stand-Up Comedians, an organization that represents comics in Canada and lobbies for them to be recognized as the brilliant, culturally significant artists that they are. I just wrote an article for The Breach that features Sandra, among other comedians, and looks at some of her efforts to push for fair pay, government recognition from the Canada Council, and organized resistance against the pull of American media imperialism. Her left political perspectives are in many ways written in CASC’s DNA. She talks here about how CASC was imagined as a kind of “rights movement” focused on stressing the right to be “included” among other communicative arts that we consider culturally more ennobling or important. She insists that we really take a hard “look at the system” and objectively assess the extent to which it is tilted in favour of already economically massive players. She wants us to ask the material question: “How many opportunities are there?” And to what extent are performers being sold certain fictions that make them more vulnerable to being exploited? For example, she says that performing just for exposure is basically “a big lie.” As she puts it: “what are you exposing yourself to?” if not a market in which “there are no standards.” Efforts like the ones that CASC organizes, like the #PayComedians viral campaign, work to establish standards of equitable pay and recognition of structural inequality. These campaigns are showing what is possible: giving comics a bigger piece of the revenue they create, exposing the power of a few players that, Sandra points out, “feel like they can” corral and control comedians, and reckoning with the fear that individual comedians may have, which tends to work against solidarity and take away their power to resist monopolistic control. The main theme here is probably autonomy. Sandra has this sense that building “our own stuff” here means that you’re generating the “spirit… to move forward.” I appreciated all of the detail she gave on the struggle to gain official recognition and government funding. Ultimately, she says that she’s not interested in having a theoretical argument about whether comedy is art; the question, for her, is “should it be supported?” For me, the answer to that question is definitely yes, because I agree with Battaglini that comedy is a more everyday, accessible artform than most. This is such a central part of its power: humour makes people more open to having difficult conversations, it’s “non-elitist,” in Sandra’s words, and so it often allows for a more lively form of connection to occur. I loved the point she makes here about how comedy is also way more immediate than many artforms: happening every night, and expresses in real time what it means to live in a particular place. That immediacy is a huge part of its appeal, its relevance, and a reason it should be better supported by the public.

Armond R. Towns is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. His research and teaching focuses on the relationship between media, communication, race, blackness, and history. He’s just released an amazing book called On Black Media Philosophy with University of California Press. And he’s also the cofounder and editor of the brand new journal Communication and Race, which will start publishing issues in 2024. In this conversation, we dwell with the sprawling, exciting claims of his new book On Black Media Philosophy. And one of the central theoretical problems in that book is the question of what is left unsaid in the influential work of Marshall McLuhan, a figure who still has a lingering impact within media studies especially, particularly in Canada. Towns talks about how encountering McLuhan’s thinking was “eye-opening”, and most of all because he was exposed first to media studies in the United States, where the primary focus tends to be on representation itself, the content of the text, rather than the medium. McLuhan’s work offered Towns a really interesting corrective to that tendency, but when he started to dig into McLuhan’s writing, he found some notable gaps, especially around race. So what was unsaid in McLuhan became in some ways more important than what was said—which often gets reduced to the phrases we’re all familiar with: “the medium is the message,” the “global village,” and so on. McLuhan has an impact on Towns’ thinking, but Towns is really trying to act back on McLuhan’s impact by asking why McLuhan is invested in notions of the “tribal” and “de-tribal.” Why is he citing who he is citing? Why is he writing letters to people like J. C. Carothers? So his book, through what he calls a “practice of reading” that is deeply historical, aims to complicate the legacy of people like McLuhan, and others too, like Charles Darwin, for which there is an already established history that may obscure more than it reveals. How do we “break that logic,” as Towns puts it? A logic that frames Africa as a purely “natural” place from which “objects are extracted”? And what are the implications of aiming to break that logic for politics? I was really struck, in reading his work and talking to him, by the way he approaches this through the radical concept of climate reparations, and the destruction of the natural environment. How, as he says, it goes hand in hand with the destruction of particular people. He pushes us, in framing these ideas, to approach reparations as more than just a financial question. Reparations means taking seriously how land, water, and space have been partitioned, poisoned and commodified, and realizing that the question “Where are people going to go?” is going to be central in a future where we see innumerable climate refugees fleeing the sacrifice zones. So much of what he’s writing about really comes from this emphasis on “historical situatedness in all of our thought.” He makes it clear that, “as a Black scholar, bringing in that historical context changes the theory” for him. Maybe my biggest takeaway here was this idea that there has been a systematic neutralizing of radical thought within institutional settings. He explains how there’s been a “neoliberal shift” since the 1970s toward inclusion in the “project of higher education” and at the state level, with elected officials. As a “Black middle class” emerged, he says we saw radical demands “replaced by a more liberal” institutional politics that enshrines “mastery” and the logic of the “expert.” This made “things that were once radical… profitable.” The challenge, then, I suppose, becomes figuring out a way to maintain real traction, a means of preserving “revolutionary thought,” without succumbing to what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has called “elite capture.”

Janelle Niles is a stand-up comedian from Truro, Nova Scotia and the producer of Got Land?, an all-Indigenous comedy tour. The Got Land? show is an example of what greater solidarity could mean for the culture of comedy in Canada. The stated goal of the show is to “express solidarity with humour” as a way of gaining grassroots control over the sites of cultural production: the venues, shows, institutions and platforms that determine who makes it and who gets missed in comedy. We discuss Janelle’s ability to use humour to cope with some of the most difficult subjects imaginable. Beyond just the joy of making other people laugh, we know that humour can also be a kind of survival strategy. So, COVID-19, we also know, has devastated creative communities, and it has created a level of suffering in communities of colour that should show us, unequivocally, how present and immediate the legacies of systemic oppression are in Canada. Niles talks about her hustle here, which she says is required to fight that system; but the point of solidarity is that the status quo can’t be changed by one person alone. Her ambition is to construct a legacy of comradeship and mutual care, one that is real and formidable enough to fight deeply unfair forms of exclusion. One of the things that Janelle says that I really appreciate here is that “people are not politically aware” in Canada. That’s an important baseline, in a way. It implies having to be sort of pragmatic about communication, and comedy, she says, is an extremely intuitive communicational art. She describes this feeling of having been “born political,” not only because she is Black and Indigenous, but because her experience of racism in Canada has opened her eyes to the scale of racial inequality in this country. A certain kind of racism exists within the culture of comedy in Canada. Niles describes the experience of a Black comedian in Montreal who was told that if there was more than one Black comic on a bill, then the show would be “too ghetto, too ethnic.” As she puts it, this attitude means that, in effect, people of colour are still either the “token” performer on a white-dominated bill, or not included at all. And she wants to “dismantle that.” The watchword here is this notion of “audacity.” Janelle makes connections between how the Idle No More movement, which is ten years old and going strong, provided the grassroots opportunity to “speak the truth” and push to be heard and respected. It reminded First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples in the place currently called Canada that it’s “unfair” to be pushed into a point in the past, to be pressured into invisibility and intimidated out of asserting basic rights. Niles doubles down and says that Got Land? is like “Idle No More with jokes,” it insists on the audacity of BIPOC comedy and the fact of her presence on this land, now. In this context, she talks about trying to be “truthful, transparent and come from a place of love” while working to ensure that she never has to “justify” her existence. She says she is willing to go to difficult places and break down “misconceptions one joke at a time.”

Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. While her research covers a lot of topics, the work she’s created that has had the biggest impact on me is her writing on the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, and the creation and maintaining of gender classifications in law and medicine. The book that we focus on here is the one she put out through University of California Press in 2018: Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520275041/trans-kids). This book is teeming with insights on how we acquire a gendered sense of ourselves, the powerful constraints placed on that process, and how those constraints are both generative and restrictive. We talk about the overarching concerns of Meadow’s work and the curiosities that motivate it, but we also work through the claims of Emily Bazelon’s controversial article in the New York Times from June of this year, “The Battle Over Gender Therapy.” Meadow explains that the way Bazelon gives “equal footing” to those that problematize gender-related care is actually very misleading, because we’ve luckily reached a point, after a history of struggle for legitimacy from groups advocating for transgender rights, where it’s no longer assumed, professionally or politically, that avoiding being trans is somehow “the best outcome.” There is, now, what Meadow describes as a “massive consensus” which says that “affirming and facilitating gender nonconformity in children leads to better psychological, social, educational, physical outcomes for those children.” What also clearly matters is who is speaking, and who isn’t. Because of the power of gender norms, and the compulsion to protect kids from harm, many parent organizations that advocate for trans identities, but are not led by transgender adults, often make it their goal to produce or to promote “the most normative non-normative kids.” The effect, in some ways, is to “create a version of transness without trauma,” and one that doesn’t necessarily learn from what Meadow calls the “incredible wisdom gleaned from decades of navigating cisgender culture.”

Al Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician who has appeared on programs for CBC, MTV, and YTV. She’s also headlined standup comedy shows all over North America. A graduate of Second City’s Conservatory Program, Val also performed with improv troupe “Starwipe” for 8 years. Val is set to co-headline Just for Laughs Toronto with Allie Pearse in the Fall, has just finished filming a reality show for OutTV, and has been performing non-stop during Pride. Val combined coming out as transgender during the pandemic with her sudden emergence as a force in Canadian comedy. She spoke with me about how, as a comedic performer, one of the first things she is driven to address is the legibility of her gender nonconforming identity. She does this with a terrific sense of timing, and also through her great command of physicality—a thing that not all stand-up comedians have. We also talked about the sense of responsibility she has to bring joy through humour; this is, of course, common among comics, but perhaps not as common as we might think. Her goal is not only to “break the tension,” but to also remind audience that they don’t need to decide what is “morally okay to laugh at,” and that there is no need for “pity” or “coddling”—affective states that are antithetical to a good comedy show and certainly not conducive to recognizing transgender as a legitimate social identity. It was really interesting to get a sense, from Al, of how the industry of comedy works in Canada. It’s a competitive market, and one where comedians don’t really receive much or any support. For this reason, she says she’s had to build a career mostly on her own. Working independently means that, as she puts it, “your attention is being pulled in so many different directions.” There can and should be more support for the art of stand-up comedy in Canada, and so we address the kinds of organizing and lobbying that’s happening around this issue, which has only been exacerbated by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The conversation really zeroes in on the question of how comedy works, and the place of vulnerability and authenticity in it. This is especially relevant to Al Val’s brand of comedy. Comedy is, from her perspective, easier when it's “honest,” and this is in spite of the fact that there’s a degree to which, when you perform, you’re always “submitting yourself to judgment” as an entertainer. That relationship between humour and truth is maybe an especially salient feature of today’s comedy, when you think about the ways that it’s emerged as a confessional, intimate, immediate art form in the last 5 years. The way Al puts it, it’s about “packaging” both “trauma and insight into joke form” to both “disguise” it and inspire people to “think and reflect” on a “thesis” for a while. A central part of her comedy right now is working through the question of “what constitutes gender.” In the words of Tey Meadow, “Gender subjectivity is tender ground. It shifts beneath our feet, eludes easy capture, and impinges on emotional nerves. Sometimes we find ourselves seeking recognition in the most unlikely places. Even when handled with care, it is treacherous territory.” We’re seeing this throughout society right now, as greater support for transgendered folks is also provoking a regressive, conservative backlash against gender nonconformity. I found it really striking that, for Val, the focus is on making sure that, with positive trans representation, we make transphobic jokes and rearguard politics “a relic of the past.” She says she just has a “nonchalant, indifferent blind trust” that we will look back in ten years and know that the backlash was the last gasp of a hostile, uncaring attitude that has no place in society.

Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written several books, including: Geoengineering: the Gamble, But will the planet notice?, Climate Shock, which he co-authored with Martin Weitzman, and City, Country, Climate published in German. Since he’s well-versed in environmental science, public policy, and economics, I wanted to ask him some questions about the nature of the capitalist system we inhabit as a global order, and also some of the ways that system is reinforced, both through government policy and through social norms. While he readily concedes the fact that the system of neoliberal capitalism is fundamentally a flawed one, replete with problems, he makes it clear that he feels the fix for our situation is to work within it. The sense I get is that, from Wagner’s perspective, we have to hope it is possible to reform capitalism in part because the version of it we live in now is completely unregulated, it’s a space where, despite the obviousness of the truth of climate collapse, the average car now “looks like a tank.” It’s an iteration of capitalist overproduction in which “we are just letting things rip and not caring” about the consequences. I like his idea that the current state of affairs means that societies have, to some extent, made “a fetish out of” the market as a sensible source of social organization, when it is clearly not. But, to put it differently, the point is that another capitalism is possible. For this reason, Gernot says he really disagrees with folks like Naomi Klein, who say that right now, our moment of peril and precarity, is our “last best chance” to replace capitalism. He agrees that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the global instability it has caused really did represent a “window of opportunity” for climate and energy policy, but we talk about how it has mainly led to a shift in defense spending, a widespread militarization which, incidentally, is going to worsen the climate crisis. I got so much out of talking with Gernot. He argues really clearly for attacking the problem of climate change by centring human desires, and more particularly social norms. He stresses that, given the overwhelming mess we are in, we are going to flip the switch not just by making rational arguments, but by combining the work of pushing for policy change with the perhaps more complicated work of rewriting the norms and cultural defaults that make ecocidal behaviour seem acceptable. As an economist, but also as an observer of the built environment, he’s really perceptive about the way that social norms function as a major determinant of climate action, to a greater extent than the level of knowledge we have.

Clayton Thomas-Müller is an organizer, public speaker and author focused on fighting for environmental and economic justice. He’s worked for more than two decades in support of grassroots movements and Indigenous peoples. He is a campaigner for 350.org, and has worked with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Global Justice Ecology Project, and Bioneers. I had the opportunity to talk to him about his memoir Life in the City of Dirty Water, which you might have heard about as part of this year’s Canada Reads competition, or because it is an absolutely brilliant book. In caring, luminous prose, Clayton writes in the book about his growth into the climate activist and storyteller he’s become. A phrase that comes up a couple of times in the book is this idea of having a “PhD in hustle;” I asked Clayton about that way of phrasing it, and he talked about how the book is partly about showing how he’s seized multiple opportunities to acquire new knowledge, but without thinking of that knowledge as a commodity. Instead, for him, it’s about applying knowledge, not just forming theories. Applying knowledges means actually trying to do the work of building community. The title of his memoir has thrown some people off, he says. People assumed, from the title, that the book is only about what he calls his “day job” as an environmental activist and water protector. So, Thomas-Muller, as a member of the Treaty #6-based Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, located in Northern Manitoba, is really making a “very specific reference” to Winnipeg with that title. The Cree and Ojibwe name for Winnipeg translates as "murky water" or "muddy water.” I asked him about some of the resonances, though, of that title—how it can open up conversations about the murky nature of political and environmental communication in our moment of catastrophic climate change. He emphasizes that the goal of his memoir is really to encourage readers’ own interpretations, to “agitate and create” and to just “make people think.” Because, as he puts it, “there is no one answer” to colonial violence and climate collapse. He says, ultimately, that it will likely take “a hybrid mix of Western science, traditional ecological knowledge and straight-up magic” to pull ourselves out of the dire and desperate mire of capitalist accumulation and fossil fueled modernity. The greed we see naturalized today, he feels, is by no means natural. It is a “sickness,” and the product of “disconnection from nature.” The alienation we feel is a thing that derives directly from this uprooting. It breeds “hyper-individualism” and “hyper-consumerism,” in his account. So he looks to unite people “on the jagged intersections of our movement goals and our social movement sectors, “to break down barriers and build up systems of accountability and transparency as we build the largest social movement in the history of humankind.”

Chanelle Gallant has participated in grassroots movements for sex workers rights and racial justice for 20 years as an organizer, writer, strategist, fundraiser and speaker. She is on the leadership team for Showing Up For Racial Justice in the US, she co-founded the Migrant Sex Workers Project and has worked with sex work organizations locally and nationally including Butterfly, Maggie’s, Desiree Alliance, and Red Canary Song. Her writing about sexuality, social justice and sex work has appeared in dozens of publications. Elene Lam is the founder and Executive Director of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and the Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has been involved in the sex work movement and migrant and labour activism for almost 20 years. She has also conducted training for community members, service providers and policymakers on sex work, migration, anti-oppressive practice and human rights in more than 20 countries. Shiri Pasternak is a researcher, writer, and organizer and a professor of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto. She is the author of the award-winning book Grounded Authority: the Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State, and the co-founder and former Research Director at Yellowhead Institute. Shiri notes that the book that she and two of her collaborators spoke with me about—Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: On Police Abolition in Canada—was, in part, the outcome of a gathering called The Abolition Convergence that was set to take place in Toronto in May 2020, but had to be canceled due to COVID. They had planned, she says, to use the event to build “trust and solidarity and understanding across movements.” But rather than accept the cancellation of the event as an ending, the organizers and contributors decided to reformulate the project and reroute their energies into creating the book. This is reflective of a spirit of relentlessness that characterizes the movement for police abolition here in Canada. While Pasternak suggests that abolition in Canada is regularly thought of as a “copycat movement” that follows and reacts to political trends in the US, it’s important to see the ways in which their local focus grows out of a commitment to communities and peoples who are directly impacted here by the violence of the settler colonial state. So, for people looking for direction and a means of mobilizing, Disarm, Defund, Dismantle is a book that, as Elene Lam explains, is important as a tool for organizing, and not just as a source of academic analysis. She is profoundly insightful on this point, insisting that we tend to assume that these “false binaries between theoretical, intellectual and practical work” exist, when, in fact, it is within social movements that “theory is generated.” Or, in Channelle’s words, the book highlights “frontline community defense against policing” and the “theoretical, political knowledge that comes from that work.” We talk about the manipulative way that the figure of the “average Canadian” is invoked, and how it is usually used to reinforce exclusion. Those seen as “outsiders” are more easily ousted, criminalized, punished, Lam explains, because they are seen as harming the community of “average Canadians.” She argues, that, in this context, the “anti-trafficking movement, the anti-sex work movement benefits everyone except sex workers. So, police, law enforcement, politicians become the heroes,” and more power flows to the police. What will it take to break the identification of working class people in Canada with “white owning classes”? What will it take to dismantle the basic logic of property rights by which so much containment, enclosure and capture continues? How do we grasp at the roots of oppression in Canada and elsewhere?