The Lit Review Podcast

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds is a radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help book designed to shape the futures we want to live. As brown argues, change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Page and Monica sat down with Hannah Baptiste to chat about adrienne maree brown's newest book.

An inspiration to many activists, community organizers, and revolutionaries for decades upon decades and beyond, Grace Lee Boggs was a feminist, organizer, philosopher, and author, committed to Civil Rights and Black Power activism and organizing in Detroit, MI. Monica sat down with activist Sarah Lu to talk about The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century, co-written with Scott Kurashige. In this deeply humanistic book, Boggs shows us how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. Special and brief appearance from Debbie Southorn.

Monica and Page sit down with Joey Mogul to talk about Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, a book that she co-wrote with Andrea Ritchie and Kay Whitlock in 2011. Joey is an attorney with the People's Law Office, initiated and co-founded Chicago Torture Justice Memorials and represented Jon Burge torture survivors demanding reparations from the city of Chicago, and won! Drawing on years of research, on-the-ground activism, and legal advocacy, their book examines queer & trans historical experiences-as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime, and unpacks queer criminal archetypes-like “gleeful gay killers,” “lethal lesbians,” “disease spreaders,” and “deceptive gender benders“-to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. And because it's Pride season, we also got into some conversation around Joey's amazing direct action experiences with disrupting Chicago Pride in the 90's with Queer to the Left, so basically, you should tune in now!

​Former FBI Director James Comey's recent assertion that "the FBI is honest, the FBI is strong," outraged all of us familiar with COINTELPRO. In this episode, Page sits down with Muhammad Sankari, a youth organizer with the Arab American Action Network, to learn more about the current evolution (and dishonesty) of the FBI since 9/11. Muhammad discusses The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, a 2014 book by Trevor Aaronson. Through investigative journalism, Aaronson exposes how the FBI has built a massive network of informants whose primary purpose is to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the Bureau can then claim it is winning the war on terror.

The end of racism & anti-Blackness is not yet in sight. In this week's episode, Black is a Country, Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the international & radical visions of equality that existed with Black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to the history of black struggle. Page chats with southside Chicago activist and host of Church on the 9, Charles Preston, about Black is a Country, discussing inclusion versus accommodation, and what exactly self-determination might look like.

A magnificent story of a young Black women's journey through the Underground Railroad. Her story confronts the nature of slavery, with each stop along her way revealing a different aspect of bondage and resistance. Haunting and deeply human, the story conveys both the horrors of bondage and the humanity of those who lived it. For this episode, Monica and Page sat down with writer, scholar, and cultural organizer, Dr. Eve Ewing, to discuss the importance of Colson Whitehead's novel, The Underground Railroad. Listeners Note: Spoiler around the 11:20 minute mark, so if you haven't read the book yet, skip to 12:20!

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire traces the roots of the Civil Rights Movement directly back to campaigns waged in defense of Black womanhood against sexual violence. ​For this episode, Monica and Page sat with their friend, mentor, and inspiration, Mariame Kaba, to talk through the details and significance of this repressed narrative. Mariame Kaba is an abolitionist organizer, educator, and curator. She is the co-founder of Project NIA, and her work focuses on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, transformative justice, and supporting youth leadership development. Listeners Note: Our conversation includes description of rape and sexual violence, so please listen with care.

Written in 1978 by Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, Orientalism is a seminal text critiquing the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism - how the Western world perceives the Orient. Monica and Page talked with Muslim-Iranian writer, community organizer, and creative educator Hoda Katebi to understand how this book is relevant in our current political moment, and to help us breakdown core concepts and key vocab that Said delves into throughout the book.

What happened to the American left after the sixties? L.A. Kauffman explores this in their first book Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. Kauffman brings a long view of movement history, having spent more than thirty years immersed in radical movements, as a participant, strategist, journalist, and observer. Page sat down with this wonderful book’s author to learn more about “what works” from the past 40 years of struggle.

Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 by Doug McAdam presents a political-process model that explains the rise and decline of the Black protest movement in the United States during the time period of 1930 to 1970. Jasson Perez is a Chicago-raised Black scholar and organizer with 16+ years of experience, from labor to the movement for Black Lives. On this episode, Page chats with Jasson in a two-part series discussing McAdam's book.