Experts Frédéric Mégret, Neve Gordon, and Nicola Perugini discuss the role of international law in enabling and structuring mass violence, rooted in colonial histories. They explore the limitations of legal frameworks in addressing systemic violence and advocate for broader understandings of justice beyond the law.

Today’s conversation is perhaps one of the most unusually important ones we have had on the podcast.  Len and Hwei-ru Tsou are two Taiwanese activists whose main commitment, over a period of decades, has been to discover and disclose the involvement of Asian and South Asian anti-fascists in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.  Not only do we discover their longstanding friendship with one of their first interviewees--Kenneth Graeber, father of celebrated anarchist David Graeber--but we also hear them linking their anti-fascist work to their pro-Palestine activism, which included their courageous participation in the flotillas protesting Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza. We hear Len and Hwei-ru draw the links between the anti-fascist struggle in Spain and the international movement for Palestinian rights. The conversation inspires and gives one hope about international solidarity in the past, and the present.Bios of Len Tsou and Hwei-Ru TsouWe are the authors of a book on the Chinese volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, in Chinese as well as in Spanish edition. Growing up in Taiwan, we came to the U.S. to pursue our graduate studies in natural sciences.  The new land provided us with space and resources for our curiosity in modern Chinese history and the cold war.  In 1973 a military coup overthrew the Chilean President Salvador Allende, a democratically elected Socialist.  It led us to pay attention to the America’s Dirty Wars. After obtaining our PhDs in Chemistry, Len worked in semiconductor field and Hwei-Ru in pharmaceutical industry. We each published numerous scientific papers and patents in our respective fields. To serve as a bridge, we founded Cultural International in 1989 to introduce to Taiwan the experiences of American people’s struggles in environment, labor and human rights.In 2002, we organized weekly peace vigil in Rockland County, NY, hoping to prevent the imminent war on Iraq from happening. The peace vigil continued for nine years. In 2011 Len joined the US Boat to Gaza challenging Israel’s blockade on Gaza.  After moving to California, we join the San Jose weekly peace vigil to continue protesting the endless wars.   In 2001 our research result was published in Taiwan as a book 《橄欖桂冠的召喚：參加西班牙內戰的中國人(1936-1939)》.  A Spanish edition “Los Brigadistas Chinos en la Guerra Civil: La LLamada de España (1936-1939)” was published in Madrid in 2013.  The revised editions were published in Chinese as 《当世界年轻的时候：参加西班牙内战的中国人(1936-1939)》 in 2013 and 2015.  Our writings can be found in The Volunteers, Science & Society, South China Morning Post Magazine (南华早报), Southern Weekend (南方周末), China Times (中國時報), and others. Our collection of photos and documents of the Chinese volunteers resulted in the travelling photo exhibitions in Spain since 2019.  Based on our book, the Phoenix Satellite TV produced a documentary 《当世界年轻的时候——国际纵队里的中国人》in 2020.  

Today I talk with Marthie Momberg, whose book 21 Voices from Israel and South Africa: Why the Palestine Struggle Matters, compiles interviews Momberg conducted over many years. Her interviewees are Israelis and South Africans who have followed different paths to become activists for Palestine. The 21 voices speak about this connection, but about many other things as well, including gender, generational difference, race, human rights, and Zionism. Taped in December during Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, which have brought millions onto the streets in protest across the globe, Marthie’s book serves as a vibrant reminder of the spirit of solidarity.Marthie Momberg (PhD) is a South African activist scholar with postgraduate qualifications in theology, literature and education. In 2020 her postdoctoral research was awarded for exceptional achievement by Stellenbosch University (SU). As a researcher at SU and at Nelson Mandela University she has published many peer-reviewed publications and regularly addresses international conferences, the media and other forums including the South African Parliament. Marthie serves on the Theology Committee of Global Kairos for Justice and in 2011 monitored human rights violations in Israel and Palestine on behalf of the World Council of Churches. During her earlier career in corporate communications her work received several local and international awards, including a Gold Quill for Excellence from the International Association for Business Communicators for the best entry worldwide in the category Human Resources & Benefits Communication. Marthie is an Honorary Member and Fellow of the Frederik van Zyl Institute for Student Leadership Development.

Today we speak with legendary climate activist Bill McKibben and scholar Caroline Levine. McKibben relates his long struggle to get companies to divest from fossil fuels and for the world in general to act immediately to seriously and substantially address this existential crisis. Levine tells of her efforts to get the giant pension fund, TIAA-CREF, to divest. She also talks about her new book, The Activist Humanist, and its relation to both her teaching and her activism.Caroline Levine has spent her career asking how and why the humanities and the arts matter, especially in democratic societies. She argues for an understanding of forms and structures as essential both to understanding links between art and society and to the challenge of taking meaningful political action. She is the author of four books. The most recent, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press 2023), grows out of the theoretical work of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015, winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA, and named one of Flavorwire’s “10 Must-Read Academic Books of 2015”). Levine has also published The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003, winner of the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007).Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor.  

We recorded this episode of Speaking Out of Place on Saturday the 18th of November, 2023, as Israel’s massive attack on Gaza passed the 40-day mark. Almost immediately after the deadly October 7 Hamas attack, the image of the child, both Israeli and Palestinian, began to dominate the media’s coverage, and appeals to international humanitarian law were made to “save the children.” Azeezah Kanji and I decided to create this podcast to coincide with November 20, International Children’s Day, in order to take a deeper look at why such appeals to the law must be contextualized both historically and politically. Hedi Viterbo is an associate professor of law at Queen Mary University of London in the UK. His research examines legal issues concerning childhood, state violence, and sexuality from an interdisciplinary and global perspective. His latest book is Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2021).Dr. Jess Ghannam is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at UCSF. His research areas include evaluating the long-term health consequences of war on displaced communities and the psychological and psychiatric effects of armed conflict on children. Dr. Ghannam has developed community health clinics in the Middle East that focus on developing community-based treatment programs for families in crisis.  He is also a consultant with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and other international NGO's that work with torture survivors. Locally he works to promote and enhance the health and wellness of refugee, displaced, and immigrant populations from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and has established a community-based Mental Health Treatment Programs to support these communities.

This is a special project of Speaking Out of Place, meant to collect and amplify the voices of artists, musicians, and publishers from around the world raising their voices in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We will add to this episode as statements come in.  Here you will hear James Schamus, Ben Ehrenreich, Judith Gurevich, Raja Shehadeh, Ariel Dorfman, Bora Chung, Intan Paramaditha, Nancy Kricorian, Hala Alyan, Anton Shammas, Suzanne Gardinier, and others (please see the blog entry on the Speaking Out of Place website for full list--we update as often as possible).

On Saturday 4th November, 2023, leading scholar activists, anti-genocide campaigners, human rights defenders, and musicians from 20 countries, as well as Rohingya refugees joined Palestinians from the West Bank as a global online show of support for the 2.3 million residents of Gaza, who are currently under Israel’s genocidal onslaught perpetrated with the unconditional backing of the United States and historically colonizing, genocidal Europe, including Germany, France and United Kingdom. This mini-podcast segment features the statements of Speaking Out of Place co-host David Palumbo-Liu, Neferti Tadiar, and Chloe DS.Neferti X. M. Tadiar is a feminist scholar of cultural practice, social imagination, and global political economy, and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her most recent book is Remaindered Life (Duke, 2022). She is founding Director of the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, an independent community library, cultural space, and publisher in San Fernando, La Union, Philippines.Chloe DS represented Socialist Alliance, Australia. She is a refugee activist, and a Green Left journalist.

Noura Erakat, a Palestinian legal expert and activist, delivers a powerful speech at the Palestine Literature Festival in NYC, discussing the genocide in Gaza from various perspectives. She explores the legal implications of Israel's actions, the struggle for justice, and the call for solidarity and support for Palestine Legal in the ongoing fight for freedom.

Today we speak with Palestinian American poet and physician Fady Joudah. We are recording this interview on Thursday, November 2, 2023, as the State of Israel expands its brutal and illegal collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza—an act of genocidal ethnic cleansing. Health authorities in Gaza report more than nine thousand deaths in a population where 60 percent are under the age of 18. The United Nations General Assembly has just overwhelmingly passed a resolution demanding the “protection of civilians and [the] upholding [of] legal and humanitarian obligations.” The Assembly, also demanded that all parties “immediately and fully comply” with obligations under international humanitarian and human rights laws, “particularly in regard to the protection of civilians and civilian objects.”Fady Joudah’s poetry has always addressed the situation of the Palestinians in Israel, in the Occupied Territories, and in diaspora, managing somehow to capture both the political and the personal, and above all the courage and humanity of the Palestinian people. We speak in particular about his recent LitHub piece, “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation: Thirteen Maqams for an Afterlife.” We are honored that he made time in this period of crisis to speak with us.Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He was educated at the University of Georgia, the Medical College of Georgia, and the University of Texas Health Sciences in Houston. In 2002 and 2005 he worked with Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and Sudan, respectively.Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, chosen by Louise Glück. Joudah followed his second book of poetry, Alight (2013) with Textu (2014), a collection of poems written on a cell phone wherein each piece is exactly 160 characters long. His fourth collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018).  In 2014, Joudah was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. As critic Charles Bainbridge observed in a 2008 Guardian review of The Earth in the Attic, “Joudah’s poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”Joudah translated  several collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work in The Butterfly’s Burden (2006), which won the Banipal prize from the UK and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and in If I Were Another, which won a PEN USA award in 2010. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser's Petra: The Concealed Rose and A Map of Signs and Scents.Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine.  

Today we talk with the prolific and wide-ranging scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly about her new book, Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, just out from the University of Chicago Press. The book shows the emergence and conjuncture of two strands of discourse and practice that were used to suppress Blacks in the United States, beginning in the early twentieth century and still present today. The Black Scare created and nurtured a phobic psychic disposition towards Blacks on the basis of race, the Red Scare was based on anti-Bolshevik and anti-Communist fears rampant at the time. The Black Scare was used to maintain White Supremacy, the Red Scare to prop up Capitalism. Charisse Burden-Stelly talks with us about these phenomena on both the national and international stages, and attends to the specific dynamics of gender, race, and class through a series of case studies.Charisse Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, and intellectual history. Their research pursues two complementary lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the transnational entanglements of U.S. capitalist racism, anticommunism, and antiblack racial oppression; the second area of focus examines twentieth-century Black anticapitalist intellectual thought, theory, and praxis. Burden-Stelly is the co-author, with Dr. Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and my single-authored book titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States is forthcoming in November 2023. They are also the co-editor, with Dr. Jodi Dean, of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings (Verso, 2022) and the co-editor, with Dr. Aaron Kamugisha and Dr. Percy Hintzen, of the latter’s writings titled Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean and the Postcolonial State.They also edited the “Claudia Jones: Foremother of World Revolution” special issue of The Journal of Intersectionality.Charisse Burden-Stelly’s published work appears in journals including Small Axe, Monthly Review, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, CLR James Journal, and American Communist History and in popular venues including Monthly Review, Boston Review, Essence magazine, and Black Agenda Report.