Speaking Out of Place

In 1980, a synagogue in Paris was bombed, killing four and injuring 40 others. Thirty-four years later, French authorities settled on one suspect--Hassan Diab. This, despite the fact that it is likely that the bombing was undertaken by a neo-Nazi group, commemorating the anniversary of another one of its anti-semitic attacks. After being extradited from Canada to France in 2014, Diab was arrested and held in detention. In 2018, two of the top anti-terrorist judges in France dismissed the case, and Canadian premier Justin Trudeau publicly decried this miscarriage of justice.Nevertheless, the French prosecutors appealed the decision, and in 2023 Canadian academic Dr. Hassan Diab was convicted in absentia for this unsolved crime.  The two judges who had exonerated him in 2018 testified on Diab's behalf.  Former Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada, Alex Neva, has described the prosecution of Hassan Diab as, “surreal and disgraceful.”Diab has been sentenced to life despite all of the evidence indicating that he could not possibly have committed it. He is currently facing re- extradition from Canada to France. Today we have with us Dr. Hassan Diab, as well as Michelle Weinroth, a long-term member of the Hassan Diab Support Committee, and Bernie Farber, former head of Canadian Jewish Congress who previously advocated for the extradition of Dr. Diab, but now has become one of his supporters. Dr. Hassan Diab is a Canadian citizen and sociology professor who lives in Ottawa. Up until October, 2007, Hassan enjoyed an engaged and productive public life, including teaching, publishing research, and traveling internationally.Bernie Farber is the Founding Chair of the Canadian AntiHate Network. His career spans more than three decades focusing on human rights, diversity, countering antisemitism and extremism. His expertise has been recognized by Canadian Courts, media and law enforcement. His efforts have been documented in numerous Canadian human rights publications, books, films, newspapers and magazines. He is widely respected as a CEO in the not-for-profit world best known internationally as the former CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress. He is a published author and a newspaper columnist. He is a a recipient of numerous medals and awards for his human rights work. In his retirement he is a consultant on antisemitism and extremism to Canadian School Boards and police services, he sits as an advisor to Human Rights Watch Canada and the Mosaic Institute and Chairs the Rights and Ethics Committee of Community Living Toronto.Michelle Weinroth is a writer and teacher living in Ottawa. She taught English literature at the University of Ottawa and at Carleton University for a decade. Her area of specialization is the workings of propaganda in 19th- and 20th-century fiction and non-fiction. Over the past seven years, she has taken a special interest in the Hassan Diab Affair. 

This August, the Asian American Literary Festival was to take place in Washington, DC.. The event had already garnered substantial investments and expectations from both national and international groups and states. Thus there was considerable shock and outrage when Acting Director Yao-Fen You abruptly cancelled the entire festival, without a word of explanation.The Washington Post and other sources have hinted that it might be because of potentially controversial content.  The Post wrote: "According to emails shared with The Post, You notified Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis, the festival’s director since its founding in 2017 and a curator at the Smithsonian that “due to the current political climate,” Smithsonian leadership had requested that all upcoming exhibitions and multiday programs be reviewed under a policy known as Smithsonian Directive 603, which is meant to help identify any potentially sensitive or controversial content and prepare for potential responses from the public."On today’s show we speak with Ching-In Chen, a poet who was curating a festival event featuring books by trans and nonbinary writers, and Kate Hao, a program coordinator on contract with the Smithsonian for the festival, about the controversy, and about the issues it raises about art for the community vs. art that must conform to state institutional preferences and politics. We discuss why this festival is absolutely essential for the present day, where we have Asian Americans being used to help dismantle affirmative action, and where we see persistent and deadly acts of anti-Asian violence.We also hear about possible plans to go forward without the Smithsonian, and ways we can help support the artists and organizers.Acting Director You declined to comment for this show.Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project as well as a Kelsey Street Press collective member. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as Writer in Residence at Hugo House. www.chinginchen.comKate Hao is a poet and fiction writer, a cultural worker, a shy Leo, an ex-pianist, a soup enthusiast, an aspiring morning person. She grew up in the suburbs of northern Virginia and currently calls Providence, Rhode Island home.

On today’s Speaking Out of Place we talk with journalist., activist, and public intellectual Jeff Chang.  Jeff’s most recent book, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation (Picador), was called by the Washington Post  “the smartest book of the year,” and inspired a four-episode digital series adaptation for PBS Indie Lens Storycast. He was named to the Frederick Douglass 200, as one of “200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit of Douglass.”  We talk about the Supreme Court’s recent decision on affirmative action. The plaintiffs of that case, “Students for Fair Admission,” an organization started and led by non-student Ed Blum, made particular use of Asian Americans as a kind of stand-in for whites.  Jeff and I talk about the history of that tactic, which dates back the late Sixties, and especially the 1980s, the years of the Reagan presidency. We also discuss the ways in which many liberal and progressive Asian Americans and others took shelter under Harvard University’s defense of “diversity.” Jeff points out that such a move effectively erases the long-term bias Harvard and other elite universities have displayed toward Jews and Asian Americans, and backs away from a true and historically honest confrontation with America’s racism. Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation won the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. His most recent book, We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation (Picador), was named the Northern California Nonfiction Book Of The Year, called by the Washington Post “the smartest book of the year,” and inspired a four-episode digital series adaptation for PBS Indie Lens Storycast. He was named to the Frederick Douglass 200, as one of “200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit of Douglass.” His bylines have appeared in The Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. He was previously the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University and led the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy.

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Jennifer Jacquet, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Director of XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU. She is also deputy director of NYU's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. Her research focuses on animals and the environment, Agnotology, and attribution and responsibility in the Anthropocene. She is author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World-- a work of 'epistolary non-fiction' that makes the business case for scientific denial. Among other things, we learn how corporations create an arsenal of experts and pseudo-experts at prestigious universities to create misinformation and disinformation for corporate profit, and at great cost to the public. At the end, we make the case for a partnership between the sciences and the humanities to fight such lies and violence.Jennifer Jacquet is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Director of XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU. She is also deputy director of NYU's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. Her research focuses on animals and the environment, Agnotology, and attribution and responsibility in the Anthropocene.  Along with The Playbook, Jacquet also wrote Is Shame Necessary? (Pantheon/Penguin, 2015) about the evolution, function, and future of the use of social disapproval in a globalized, digitized world. She is the recipient of a 2015 Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship and a 2016 Pew fellowship in m3arine conservation.

Today we talk with Cynthia Franklin about her new book, Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea. Taking on pivotal historical moments like the murder of George Floyd and the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter, the on-going struggle of the Palestinian people against the ethno-nationalist Zionist state, and the fight for Indigenous rights in Hawai’i, Franklin asks the question, what requirements to people have to meet in order to fit into the human narrative?  And what are the possibilities of creating alternate stories of the human that can accommodate individuals who identify more as members of political collectives, and also narratives that exceed the normative category of the human? This powerful book asks fundamental questions about the relationship between art and activism.Cynthia G. Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i, and coeditor of the journal Biography. She is the author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory and the University Today and Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Multi-Genre Anthologies. She has coedited special issues of Biography including “Life in Occupied Palestine” and “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing.” For the past ten years, Cynthia has been on the Organizing Collective of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and she is a founding member and faculty advisor of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH (SFJP@UH). She serves on the Editorial Collective for the newly established initiative EtCH (Essays in the Critical Humanities).

In today’s episode of Speaking Out of Place we speak with Dr Jennifer Gomez about her new book, The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse, which takes on the particular difficulty of centering the voices and experiences of Black women and girls when confronting sexual violence in the Black community.In her foreword the book, Thema Bryant, President of the American Psychological Association writes, This important work … is a love song to the survival of black sis and trans women and girls. For love to be liberating it must see and affirm survivors holistically. Gomez calls psychologists and other mental health providers to adopt courageous compassion, which means sharing concern and outrage at the realities of sexual violence as well as concern and outrage for the injustices that contextualize the trauma and recovery process for black women and girls. In our conversation Dr. Gomez explains how she fought to reconcile the need for solidarity in the Black community with the demand that the abuse of Black women and girls be confronted and healed. Alongside this struggle was her effort to change the ways psychologists and others silence these traumas.Jennifer M. Gómez is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at Boston University, and a Board Member and Chair of the Research Advisory Committee at the Center for Institutional Courage. Her primary research focus is cultural betrayal trauma theory (CBTT), which she created as a framework for understanding the mental, behavioral, cultural, and physical health impact of violence on Black and other marginalized youth, young adults, and elders within the context of inequality.Written while she was a 2021-22 Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), her book, “The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women & Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse” (American Psychological Association; 2023), provides individual, interpersonal, and structural strategies for healing. Website: https://jmgomez.org ; Book Website: https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/cultural-betrayal/; Twitter: @JenniferMGmez1   

On today’s episode of Speaking Out of Place we talk with Olivia Harrison, author of a new book entitled, Natives Against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France, which takes on the appropriation of the figure of the “native” to serve progressive and indeed revolutionary causes, but also its appropriation by the alt-right both in France and internationally to drive a reactionary program against so-called anti-white racism.Our conversation covers a lot of ground, from a discussion of the basic premises of the French Republic, to unpacking the long history of anti-racist struggles in France, to the period of the late 1960s and 1970s, where we see in particular the figure of the Palestinian, and of the American Indian, play enormous roles in the radical imaginary.We then turn to the ways things like the “Great Replacement Theory” signal a convergence of US and French anti-right “nativism,” and use photographs, films, and poetry to show the complexity of this terrain, perhaps best illustrated by the collaboration between French avant-garde film maker Jean-Luc Godard and the pre-eminent Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish.Olivia C. Harrison is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on postcolonial North African, Middle Eastern, and French literature and film, with a particular emphasis on transcolonial affiliations between writers and intellectuals from the Global South. Her publications include Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2016), and essays on Maghrebi literature, Beur and banlieue cultural production, and postcolonial theory. With Teresa Villa-Ignacio, she is the editor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2016) and translator of Hocine Tandjaoui’s proem, Clamor/Clameur (Litmus Press, 2021). 

Dr. Haley Duschinski and Mr. Imraan Mir discuss the struggle in Kashmir, highlighting India's oppressive occupation, propaganda tactics, and global perspectives. They address resource exploitation, state terrorism labeling, and the call for international solidarity with Kashmiri people.

In November 20, 2015, a resolution presented to the members of the American Anthropological Association for a boycott of Israeli institutions narrowly missed adoption (2,384 in favor and 2,423 opposed; 49.6% - 50.4%). Responding to the new petition members submitted on March 3, the American Anthropological Association has scheduled a vote on the boycott of Israeli academic institutions from June 15-July 14. In this episode of Speaking Out of Place we talk with two of the main scholar-activists involved in the campaign, who tell us why the American Anthropological Association must follow other academic organizations such as the American Studies Association in answering the call from Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli institutions.Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today. Sami Hermez is director of the Liberal Arts Program and Associate Professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar.  His forthcoming book will be released in February 2024 with Stanford University Press titled, My Brother, My Land: A Story From Palestine, which is a creative nonfiction that chronicles the life of a Palestinian family living through ongoing Israeli occupation and dispossession. His first book published with Penn Press, War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (2017), focused on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.  

In today’s episode of “Speaking Out of Place” we talk with Professor Adam Aron, author of the book, “The Climate Crisis: Science, Impacts, Policy, Psychology, Justice, Social Movements.”As the title of the book indicates, it is a systematic and thorough discussion of not simply the Climate Crisis, but also, and very importantly, all the key elements we need to know about to do effective activism to save our planet.I speak with Adam first about the fact that science has shown that we are at a tipping point in the climate crisis—a point of no return.  After that, we explore the psychological responses to that science, and how we might work toward changing our individual, collective, national, and international behaviors and actions to address the accelerating climate crisis.Adam is a Professor in the Psychology Dept at UC San Diego. His research and teaching focus on the social science of collective action on the climate crisis. His climate activism has been through the Green New Deal at UC San Diego where he has worked on several campaigns such as fossil fuel divestment and also campus decarbonization via ElectrifyUC and he has also produced the documentary Coming Clean. Before switching to the climate crisis, Adam had a successful career in cognitive neuroscience. He earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA.