Speaking Out of Place

Today I have the honor and the pleasure to speak once again with celebrated poet and physician, Fady Joudah. The last time Fady was on the podcast was in November, 2023, shortly after the outbreak of war in Gaza. At that point we spoke about the impossibility of, even then, quantifying the genocide. Today we focus on the politics of language—in particular, the distinction Fady Joudah makes between Palestine in English, and Palestine in Arabic. We speak too of the need for and limitations of solidarity, and finish with a reading and discussion of one of Fady Joudah’s most remarkable and stunning poems, “Truth is Never Finished.”  Fady Joudah  is the author of […]. He has also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

Today we talk with members of the organizing collective of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, or CAHE, about their second National Day of Action, taking place on Thursday, April 17. The Day of Action is a call for free higher education in every meaning of that term. CAHE calls for “the elimination of all existing student debt, making all public colleges and universities tuition-free, and ensuring that our colleges and universities remain sites of robust free thinking about the world we live in and the world we want.”We talk about the genesis of this group, and the gap it seeks to fill at the intersection of all of these interests, with Palestine squarely at the center. CAHE is thus a critical hub for activism that addresses each of the major points of attack on education coming from the Trump administration. Karim Mattar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education.  He is currently at work on two book projects.  The Ethics of Affiliation seeks to develop a curriculum and a public pedagogy of truth and reconciliation in historic Palestine, focusing on the areas of education, culture, public institutions, civil society, and law.  Reflections on Palestine: Exile, Privilege, Responsibility interweaves personal experience, family history, cultural critique, and political analysis to tell a multigenerational, transcontinental story of responsibility to the oppressed.  Also a dedicated community organizer, Karim works at the local, state, and national levels to enhance public awareness and understanding of Palestinian literature, history, and politics and to advocate for Palestinian liberation.  Karim received his D.Phil. in English at the University of Oxford in 2013, and writes and teaches more broadly on comparative Middle Eastern literatures and cultures, the history of the novel, media and technology, and critical theory.Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue.  He is the author of several books including most recently We Charge Genocide! American Fascism and the Rule of Law (Fordham University Press) and (with Jeanelle Hope) The Black Antifascist Tradition Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition (Haymarket Books).  He is a member of Purdue AAUP and the organizing collective for the Coalition for Action in Higher Education.  He is also a member of Writers Against the War on Gaza.Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. Her most recent work is a volume co-edited with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson called The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom (Beacon Press, 2024). She is the director, with Jan Haaken, of The Palestine Exception: What's at Stake in the Campus Protests? 

Today I speak with Nasser Abourahme about his new book, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony. Drawing on a wealth of diverse materials including, but not limited to, state documents, political philosophy, literature, and historical archives, The Time Beneath the Concrete focuses on the “struggle over historical time itself.” This is a struggle that is predicated on a constitutional inertia or “stuckness” of the colonial project.  We end by talking about the notion of “inhabitation,” which Abourahme describes as “the life-making practice of the dispossessed everywhere.”  He suggests this as a way to imagine a life that can be lived in a different set of temporal coordinates that recognize a different set of human possibilities.Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher, and is currently Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College. He’s the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025). 

Today I have the great honor of speaking with activist and educator Jesse Hagopian about his new book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. We talk about the assault on public education that takes the form of criminalizing the truth itself. We note both the powerful corporate forces behind this movement and what they are afraid of, and also discuss the many instances of people fighting back to name, amplify, and mobilize the truth together.Jesse Hagopian’s African ancestors survived the middle passage and enslavement on plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. Jesse is a Seattle educator and author of the new book, Teach Truth: The Attack on Critical Race Theory and the Struggle for Antiracist Education. He is editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, a founding steering committee member of Black Lives Matter at School, and is the Director the Teaching for Black Lives Campaign of the Zinn Education Project. Jesse is the editor of of the book, More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High Stakes Testing, and the co-editor of the books, Teaching Palestine, Teaching for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter at School, and Teachers Unions and Social Justice.Jesse’s writing has appeared in The Seattle Times, The Nation, The Progressive, Truthout, and The Washington Post. You can connect with Jesse on IG  (@jessehagopian), Bluesky (@jessehagopian.bsky.social) or his website, www.IAmAnEductor.com.

In today’s show, I speak with Evyn Le Espiritu Gandhi about two pathbreaking studies which create new ways of thinking about populations bound by complex and contradictory notions of loyalty and psychological investment. Based on meticulous archival research and oral histories amongst disparate populations in South Vietnam, Guam, and Israel-Palestine, in Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine Gandhi is able to probe deeply into fascinating personal stories of refugees that have moved between these spaces, disclosing complex and often contradictory notions of belonging and loyalty. We also talk about her current book project, which tackles the idea of southern regions such as South Korea, South Vietnam, and the American South, as each mourning lost images of the nation.Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA (Tovaangar). She is the author of Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022) and co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023). She is the lead curator of a public history exhibit, “Remembering Saigon: Journeys through and from Guam,” which opened this month at UC Irvine’s Southeast Asian Archive. She is currently working on a second book project which revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Sarah T Roberts about the hidden humans behind Artificial Intelligence, which is reliant on executives and business managers to direct AI to promote their brand and low-level, out-sourced, and poorly paid content managers to slog through masses of images, words, and data before they get fed into the machine. We talk about the cultural, sociological, financial, and political aspects of AI. We end by taking on Elon Musk and the DOGE project, as an emblem of how Silicon Valley executives have embraced a brand of tech rapture that disdains and destroys democracy and attacks the idea that people can take care of each other, independent of sociopathic libertarianism.Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. is a full professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with award-winning novelist Laila Lalami about her new novel, The Dream Hotel. What happens when the state, with the pretext of protecting public safety, can detain indefinitely certain individuals whose dreams seem to indicate they may be capable of committing a crime?  Set in a precarious world where sleep-enhancing devices and algorithms provide the tools and formulae for making one’s unconscious a witness to one’s possible waking life, this novel touches on a myriad of political, philosophical, and moral concerns as they particularly connect to issues of gender, race, ethnicity, privacy, and  the security state.Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times.  She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.  She lives in Los Angeles.  

Today I have the pleasure of talking with Professor Adrian Daub about the recent elections in Germany, where we saw a surge in votes for the Far Right AfD party, which is now the second-most powerful party in the country.  We discuss the significance of this rise in popularity,  and the ways the elections reveal a number of shifts in German politics, as the various parties stake out positions which align with not just a center-right orientation, but, more dangerously, a far right one. We speak of the parallels to the recent election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, and what it says about the entrenchment of both neoliberalism and a faux populism based on xenophobia, and not serving the actual material interests of everyday people.Adrian Daub teaches German and Comparative Literature at Stanford, where he directs the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. He is the author most recently of The Cancel Culture Panic (2024), and co-hosts the podcast In Bed With the Right.”

Today on Speaking Out of Place I talk with Omar El Akkad about his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The title of the book comes from a tweet he posted three weeks after the bombardment of Gaza began. Since then, the tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. Horrified at what has transpired since that moment, Omar El Akkad wrote this full-throated indictment of the “principal concern” of the modern American liberal. It is “not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be.” Moving from the scale of the individual to that of entire industries and political parties, we talk about the terrible consequences of this attitude with regard to Palestine, and beyond.OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager, and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His books have been translated into thirteen languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of one hundred novels that shaped our world.

Maha Nasser, an associate professor focused on Palestine's cultural history and author of "Brothers Apart," joins Karam Dana, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies and author of "To Stand with Palestine." They dive into the formation of transnational Palestinian identities and the critical role of language and art in activism. Highlights include resilience amid settler colonialism, the historical shaping of Palestinian identity, and the importance of solidarity in resistance movements. They also share insights on confronting academic repression and amplifying Palestinian voices in broader social struggles.