Speaking Out of Place

Today I talk with Huda Fakhreddine, writer, translator, and scholar of Arabic literature. Among the many topics we touch upon are the challenges of teaching Arabic literature, especially Palestinian literature, in a time of genocide, when universities, professional organizations, and political groups militate against any honest discussion of these topics, and punish those who do.  We talk about the notion of belonging, and the importance of being able to choose what to belong to, and what not to. Huda speaks of the freedom found in living in Arabic, and explains what that means to her.  She also reads in Arabic and English Nima Hasan’s stunning and wrenchingly beautiful poem, “Old Song.”Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Among her translations are The Sky That Denied Me: Selections from Jawdat Fakhreddine (University of Texas Press, 2020), The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books, 2024), and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah (World Poetry Books, 2024). Her creative work includes a book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time under a Different Sun), Dar al-Nahda, Beirut, 2019 and the forthcoming Wa min thamma al-ālam (And then the World), Manshūrāt Marfa’, Beirut, 2025. Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Protean, Lithub, Words Without Borders, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures among many others.  She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and section editor of the Encyclopedia of Islam.

Today it’s my honor to speak with Danica Savonick about her marvelous book entitled Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College. This is a riveting and deeply inspiring story of how each of these luminaries in the fields of literature and feminism found their way into the City University of New York in the 1960s, when community activists had forced open what was called the Harvard for the proletariat to admit new classes of Black, brown, and other people of color.  Savonick shows through copious archival research how Bambara, Jordan, Lorde and Rich each came to find radical teaching methods in collaboration with these new students, and how their experiences with this new pedagogy affected their creative and other writing in profound and lasting manners. This is a critical history we can and must learn from today, when federal and state governments have added to the damage and violence done by the neoliberal university. We find exactly the tools and models we need to create spaces for education for liberation both within, but also outside, the Academy.Check out our blog, featuring these writers' teaching materials!Danica Savonick is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Cortland and the author of Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College (Duke University Press, 2024). Her current project focuses on the radical writers and artists who taught at the experimental Livingston College (part of Rutgers University) in the 1970s. Her research has appeared in MELUS, American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Radical Teacher, Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Public Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

 Today I'm delighted to talk with Quinn Slobodian about his new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. We take a deep dive into the genesis of a weird and powerful merging of two seemingly different groups the Far Right and neoliberals. Slobodian writes, “as repellent as their politics may be these radical thinkers are not barbarians the gates of neoliberalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself.” We talk about how this meshing is driven by a primitive desire to ward off egalitarianism, difference, democracy, and government that services the common good. Our wide-ranging talk ends with addressing DOGE, Trump's tariffs, and yes, the Jeffrey Epstein case.Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.

Today we are deeply honored and privileged to speak with journalist-activist Yousef Aljamal, one of the editors of a remarkable, gripping, and altogether inspiring collection, Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide, 27 stories written by Palestinians in Gaza. We talk about the conception behind the book, and concentrate on certain keywords like obligation, pride, inventiveness, and resilience. Aljamal talks about how Palestinians are relying on a long history of survival and persistence—educating, caring for, and continuing life under the most oppressive circumstances imaginable. We end by echoing the voices in this collection, which call on the international community to continue to fill the streets, pressure politicians and to fight for Palestinian freedom.Yousef Aljamal, born in a refugee camp in Gaza, works as the Gaza coordinator at the Palestine Activism Program at the American Friends Service Committee and recently received his PhD at Sakarya University in Turkey. He is the editor of If I Must Die Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer. He is the co-editor of Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide.

Recently, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed sanctions on the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, saying, “The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur.”  Today we are joined by three of Albanese’s predecessors—John Dugard, Richard Falk, and Michael Lynk, who talk about what these sanctions mean. They trace the United States’ and Israel’s longstanding attacks on not only Special Rapporteurs on Palestine, but the very claims to Palestinian rights. This latest instance is a particularly egregious attack on the UN and international law. We end with a plea to the international community to come to the aid of the Palestinian people, who are suffering famine, disease, and warfare of immense proportions.John Dugard SC, Emeritus Professor of Law, Universities of the Witwatersrand and Leiden; Member of Institut de Droit International; ; Director of Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, Cambridge (1995-1997); Judge ad hoc  International Court of Justice (2000-2018); Member of UN International Law Commission (1997 -2011); UN Special Rapporteur on Situation of Human Rights in Occupied Palestinian Territory (2001-2008); Legal Counsel, South Africa v Israel (Genocide Convention).Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.Falk has advocated and written widely about ‘nations’ that are captive within existing states, including Palestine, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Catalonia, Dombas.Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.Michael Lynk was a member of the Faculty of Law, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada between 1999 and his retirement in 2022. He taught courses in labour, human rights, disability, constitutional and administrative law. He served as Associate Dean of the Faculty between 2008-11. He became Professor Emeritus in 2023.In March 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council unanimously selected Professor Lynk for a six-year term as the 7th Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967. He completed his term in April 2022.He has written about his UN experiences in a 2022 book co-authored with Richard Falk and John Dugard, two of his predecessors as UN special rapporteurs: Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine: Working Through the United Nations (Clarity Press).Professor Lynk’s academic scholarship and his United Nations reports have been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and the United Nations General Assembly.  

How do not only monuments, but also the very idea of monumentality, serve to mystify and perpetuate beliefs that maintain social orders that deserve to be strenuously re-evaluated? Archaeologist and anthropologist Dan Hicks traces the development of a particularly virulent strain of monument-worship, that which emerges out of what he calls “militarist realism,” which harnesses technologies of war, particularly colonial, white supremacist war, to build institutions, disciplines, museums in its image in order to permanently maintain a border between those deemed human subjects and the object-worlds of the non-human—which includes racial others. Rather than grant the past immunity, Hicks argues that we need to decide for ourselves what we chose to remember, and what deserves to be forgotten.Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford University, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College. He has written widely on art, heritage, museums, colonialism, and the material culture of the recent past and the near-present. Dan's books include The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution (Pluto 2020) and Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting (Hutchinson Heinemann 2025). Bluesky/Insta: @ProfDanHicks 

Today we speak with Daniela Navin and Jeanette de La Riva, two members of Grupo Auto Defensa, a community organization based in Pasadena CA which has come about in response to attacks by ICE which have violently disrupted everyday life and led people to form new relations of mutual support and care. We hear their stories of how Trump lieutenant Stephen Miller's demand that ICE arrest 3,000 people every day has put unbelievable constraints on hard-working people's lives. Nevertheless, we also hear how they have invented tactics to challenge these repressive measures. We are joined by journalist-activist Maxmillian Alvarez of The Real News Network who grew up in Los Angeles and comments on the broad networks of resistance cropping up organically to fight fascism.Maximillian Alvarez is an award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network (TRNN) in Baltimore. He is the founder and host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today," and the author of "The Work of Living," a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to joining TRNN, he was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review. His writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, In These Times, Poynter, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, and The Chronicle of Higher Education; as an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The New Republic, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, and more.

Today I talk with Rahim Kurwa about a powerful study of housing rights and police repression in Southern California. Tapping into a vast historical archive as well as oral histories with residents of Antelope Valley, California, Rahim traces the complex relationship between this region and the City of Los Angeles.  Using David Harvey’s famous notion of a “spatial fix,” Kurwa argues that for decades Antelope Valley acted both as a safety value for LA’s over-accumulation of capital, and Black labor. Anti-black racism took the form of powerful collaborations between local police departments, politicians, the courts, the media, and citizens groups that acted as vigilantes. Yet Rahim Kurwa also speaks about organized resistance to these attacks that resulted in significant victories, and of the history of Sun Village, that started on land from a socialist community, and grew into an all-Black town. Given today’s brutal ICE assaults on migrants and others in Los Angeles and the policing of public and private space, this episode is of special importance.Rahim Kurwa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His work is broadly focused on the policing of housing, and he has published work on this topic in Du Bois Review, Housing Policy Debate, City and Community, and Feminist Formations. His book, Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing, traces the past century of Black history in Los Angeles' northernmost outpost, known as the Antelope Valley, showing how pre-1968 methods of racial segregation have been replaced today by policing. At UIC, he is currently studying the eviction crisis in the Chicago Housing Authority while teaching courses on race, class, gender, and the law. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2018.

On May 15, international legal experts Lara Elborno, Richard Falk, and Penny Green joined me to discuss the work of the Gaza Tribunal, a group devoted to creating an archive of facts and a set of documents and arguments to help international civil society fight against the genocide in Gaza and the Zionist regime that, along with the United States, has perpetrated this atrocity.  Today they all return to update us. They present a grim picture of what they call the final phase of genocide and note both the overwhelming global support for Palestine and the concurrent repression against advocacy and protest. This is a critical episode to listen to and share.Lara Elborno is a Palestinian-American lawyer specialized in international disputes. She has worked for over 10 years as counsel acting for individuals, private entities, and States in international commercial and investment arbitrations. She dedicates a large part of her legal practice to pro-bono work including the representation of asylum seekers in France and advising clients on matters related to IHRL and the business and human rights framework.  She previously taught US and UK constitutional law at the Université de Paris II - Panthéon Assas. She currently serves as a board member of ARDD-Europe and sits on the Steering Committee of the Gaza Tribunal. She has moreover appeared as a commentator on Al Jazeera, TRTWorld, DoubleDown News, and George Galloway's MOAT speaking about the Palestinian liberation struggle, offering analysis and critiques of international law."\Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.He is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, having served for seven years as Chair of its Board. He is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He is co-director of the Centre of Climate Crime, QMUL.Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.His recent books include (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), Power Shift: The New Global Order (2016), Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (2017), Revisiting the Vietnam War (ed. Stefan Andersson, 2017), On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (ed. Stefan Andersson & Curt Dahlgren, 2019.Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at QMUL and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has published extensively on state crime theory, resistance to state violence and the Rohingya genocide, (including with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, 2004 and State Crime and Civil Activism 2019). She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Kurdistan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Tunisia, Myanmar and Bangladesh. In 2015 she and her colleagues published ‘Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar’ and in March 2018 ‘The Genocide is Over: the genocide continues’. Professor Green is Founder and co-Director of the award winning International State Crime Initiative (ISCI); co-editor in Chief of the international journal, State Crime; Executive member of the Gaza Tribunal and Palestine Book Awards judge. Her new book with Thomas MacManus Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold: Myanmar and the Rohingya will be published by Rutgers university Press in 2025

Today we welcome Malcolm Harris back to the show.  Previously he talked with us about his mammoth study, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. This time we are looking not at a history of Capitalism and the World, but our possible futures under the threat of catastrophic climate change. We talk about not only failed policies, but failed perspectives on society, politics, and culture, and focus on a deadly form of Value that has led us to the abyss precisely because it has emanated from a basic rift between humans and the world. It is a rift that Capital has always both fed and exploited, but will end up exhausting a finite resource—the Planet. We talk about what is needed to heal this, and what we are up against. Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and Palo Alto. His newest book is What's Left?: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis.