For our snap episode on the snap elections in the UK and France, we're joined by eminent decolonial scholar activists, Françoise Vergès in France and Priyamvada Gopal in the UK. Following the defeat of right wing parties in both countries in the polls, we discuss what's changed with the elections, what hasn't changed, and what should movements, activists, and organizers be focusing on.

Priyamvada Gopal is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge and Professorial Fellow, Churchill College. Her present interests are in the literatures, politics, and cultures of empire, colonialism and decolonisation. She has related interests in the novel, South Asian literature, and postcolonial cultures. Her published work includes Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (Routledge, 2005), After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies (Special issue of New Formations co-edited with Neil Lazarus), The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford University Press, 2009) and, most recently, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019) which was shortlisted for the British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Bread and Roses Prize. Her writing has also appeared in The Hindu, Outlook India, India Today, The Independent, Prospect Magazine, The New Statesman, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera English (AJE) and The Nation (USA). She is working on a new project called Decolonization: the Life and Times of an Idea which examines a range of thinkers, contexts and struggles across the Global South.

Françoise Vergès is a writer and decolonial antiracist feminist activist. A Reunionnese, she received an education that ran counter to the French hegemonic school from her anticolonial communist and feminist parents and the members of their organisations. She received her Ph.D in Political Theory from Berkeley University in 1995. She remained an activist during these years, collaborated on Isaac Julien’s film "Black Skin, White Masks » and published in feminist and theory journals. She has taught at Sussex University and Goldsmiths College and has been a visiting professor at different universities. She has never held a teaching position in France but created the Chair Global South(s) at Collège d’études mondiales where she held workshops on different topics (2014-2018). She was president of the National Committee for the History and Remembrance of Slavery (2009-2012), was a co-founder of Decolonize the Arts (2015-2020), the director of the scientific and cultural programme for a museum project in Reunion Island (2004-2010, a project killed by the State and the local conservatives). She is the convener and curator of L’Atelier a collective and collaborative seminar/public performance with activist and artists of color. Recent publications include: Programme de désordre absolu. Décoloniser le musée (2023), A Feminist Theory of Violence (2021), De la violence coloniale dans l’espace public (2021), The Wombs of Women. Capital, Race, Feminism (2021), A Decolonial Feminism (2020).

Charged by the United Nations General Assembly to ascertain the legality of the continued presence of Israel, as an occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, on July 19th, 2024, the International Court of the Justice, the highest court in the world on matters of international law, determined that “The Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the regime associated with them have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.” It called for the end of the Occupation, the dismantling of the apartheid structure that supports and maintains it, and the removal of Israeli settlers and settlements. All member states of the United Nations are obligated to support each of these actions. Israel’s response to this comprehensive and devastating report has been to dismiss it and hold itself above international law. In so doing it has sealed its reputation as a pariah state in the global community of nations.

In today’s special episode of Speaking Out of Place, we are honored to have eminent legal scholars Diana Buttu and Richard Falk join us to explain the significance of this historic document.

Diana Buttu Haifa-based analyst, former legal advisor to Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian negotiators, and Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. She was also recently a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

After earning a law degree from Queen's University in Canada and a Masters of Law from Stanford University, Buttu moved to Palestine in 2000. Shortly after her arrival, the second Intifada began and she took a position with the Negotiations Support Unit of the PLO.

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.

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.

Far too few people know about the terrible war and the massive famine taking place in Sudan. Today learn about the long history behind these events, the people and groups involved, and the roles that foreign governments and international organizations like the IMF have played. Importantly, we learn how civil society groups are bringing a form of mutual aid and support to the people of Sudan where the national government, warring factions, and international humanitarian organizations have utterly failed.

Dr. Osman Hamdan is a graduate of the University of Khartoum, Sudan, and holds a PhD in forestry economics from the Dresden University of Technology. He is a longtime pro-democracy fighter and activist.

Umniya Najaer is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University where she studies Black Feminist Thought and the Black Radical Tradition. Her poetry chapbook Armeika (2018, Akashic Press) explores experiences of the Sudanese-American diaspora and the unofficial government torture sites known as Biyout al-Ashbah, or ghost houses.

For decades, the works of scholar Angana Chatterji and author and journalist Siddhartha Deb have exposed the violence and fascism lying behind the mythology of India as the world's largest democracy. In the wake of India's most recent elections, in which the far right Hindutva BJP was surprisingly reduced from its former majority to a ruling minority government.

Siddhartha and Angana join us to discuss the election results, the deep roots of fascism, the enduring structures of colonialism, and possible futures of resistance.

Angana P. Chatterji is Founding Chair, Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights at the Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia, Dr. Chatterji’s work since 1989 has been rooted in local knowledge, witness to post/colonial, decolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, agency, and affective solidarity. Her investigations with colleagues in Indian-administered Kashmir includes inquiry into unknown, unmarked and mass graves. Chatterji’s recent scholarship focuses on political conflict and coloniality in Kashmir; prejudicial citizenship in India; and violence (as a category of analysis) as agentized by Hindu nationalism, addressing religion in the public sphere, Islamomisia, state power, gender, caste, and racialization, and accountability. Her research also engages questions of memory, belonging, and legacies of conflict across South Asia. Chatterji has served on human rights commissions and offered expert testimony at the United Nations, European Parliament, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congress, and has been variously awarded for her work. Her sole and co-authored publications include: Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law, and Nationalism in Majoritarian India; Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India; Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal; Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present; Kashmir: The Case for Freedom; Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa; and reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval; BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir.

Born in Shillong, north-eastern India, Siddhartha Deb lives in New York. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open prize and the 2024 Anthony Veasna So Fiction prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Dissent, The Baffler, N+1, and Caravan. His latest books include the novel, The Light at the End of the World (Soho Press 2023) and Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India (Haymarket Books, 2024).

Today we speak with acclaimed author and activist, and San Francisco legend, Chris Carlsson about his new novel, When Shells Crumble. It begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale—it focuses on how to resist political cynicism and defeatism, and rebuild on planetary wreckage. It is a world-building project filled with wisdom, sadness, and joy. We put this fictional text in conservation with Chris' brilliant non-fiction work, Nowtopia, which offers a radical redefinition of “work” that restores dignity and value to their proper places.

Chris Carlsson, co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the seminal and infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. In 1995 work began on “Shaping San Francisco;” since then the project has morphed into an incomparable archive of San Francisco history at Foundsf.org, award-winning bicycle and walking tours, and almost two decades of Public Talks covering history, politics, ecology, art, and more (see shapingsf.org). Beginning in Spring 2020, Carlsson has hosted Bay Cruises along the San Francisco shoreline.

His latest novel, When Shells Crumble was published by Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn, NY at the end of 2023. At the dawn of the pandemic, he published a detailed historical guidebook of the city, Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020). His full-length nonfiction work Nowtopia (AK Press: 2008), offers a groundbreaking look at class and work while uniquely examining how hard and pleasantly we work when we’re not at our official jobs. He published his first novel, After The Deluge, in 2004, a story of post-economic utopian San Francisco in the year 2157. He has edited six books, including three “Reclaiming San Francisco” collections with the venerable City Lights Books. He redesigned and co-authored an expanded Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay after which he joined the board of the Mission Creek Conservancy. He has given hundreds of public presentations based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, Vanished Waters, and his “Reclaiming San Francisco” history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet.

Today we speak with co-authors Sami Hermez and Sireen Sawalha about their book, My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine. The eminent Palestinian author Hala Alyan calls it “A breathtaking display of literary prowess that tells the story of an entire homeland through the frame of one woman’s life.”

In our conversation Hermez and Sawalha explain the intricate back and forth that took place as the two collaborated to weave together Sireen’s many stories about her extended family on Palestine through many generations. At the heart of the book is the story of her brother Iyad. Through his life, and those he interacts with we hear a story of colonial violence, Palestinian resistance, and the never-ending struggle for liberation across generations of Palestinians.

Sami Hermez, PhD, is the director of the Liberal Arts Program and associate professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (UPenn 2017), which focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence, and My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford 2024), that tells the story of a Palestinian family resisting ongoing Israeli settler colonialism. His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, the future, memory, violence, and critical security in the Arab World.

Sireen Sawalha, born in the small village of Kufr Rai in Jenin, Palestine, comes from a family deeply connected to the region's rich history. She moved to the US in 1990 and completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Rider University. Recognized by Cornell University for her outstanding contributions to education in 2022, Sireen serves as a social studies teacher in New Jersey. Beyond academia, she is a passionate chef and compelling storyteller, sharing her family's experiences under occupation. My Brother, My Land is the story of her family.

Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen about their new book, The Black Antifascist Tradition, which uses a vast set of archival materials to show how Black intellectuals and activists regarded anti-Black racism as inseparable from fascism. This is brought out vividly in the ways the law was constructed, labor was extracted, culture oppressed, and lives curtailed.

Struggles for Black liberation are therefore connected across national boundaries, just as fascist and racist laws and practices are shared by oppressive regimes globally. Hope and Mullen show how these cross currents work in examples like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War, and the momentous 1951 document, “We Charge Genocide,” that linked fascism in the US to violations of international humanitarian law. Ultimately, we talk about how peoples’ movements must always acknowledge how racism and fascism are baked into the law, and unite in world-making projects that lead to liberation for all peoples.

Dr. Jeanelle K. Hope is the Director and Associate Professor of African American Studies at Prairie View A&M University. She is a native of Oakland, California and a scholar of Black political thought, culture, and social movements. Dr. Hope is the co-author of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition. Her research has been published in several academic journals including The American Studies Journal, Amerasia, View, and Black Camera, and her public scholarship has been featured in Voices of River City, Essence, and the African American Policy Forum.

Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue. He is co-author with Jeanelle Hope of The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-lynching to Abolition. He is also author of James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press) and We Charge Genocide!: American Fascism and the Rule of Law (forthcoming September Fordham University Press). He is a member of the organizing collective for USACBI (United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel).

As the long burning genocide against the Rohingya continues to unfold with recent conflagrations of violence in Rakhine State, we are joined on Speaking Out of Place today with prominent Rohingya advocate and writer Nay San Lwin and veteran journalist Chris Gunness, now with the Myanmar Accountability Project.

They take us through recent disturbing developments in the area and the present perils facing the Rohingya. They discuss the pervasive failings of international institutions and the relationship between the Gaza and Rohingya genocides, and also, together, envision what a just future might look like and require.

Chris Gunness covered the 1988 democracy uprising for the BBC in what was then Burma. After a 23-year career at the BBC, he joined the United Nations as Director of Strategic Communications and Advocacy in the Middle East. In 2019 he left the UN and returned to London. He founded the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP) in 2021.

Nay San Lwin is a Rohingya activist and blogger. For the past 18 years, since his departure from Myanmar, he has been documenting human rights violations and the military campaigns of the Tatmadaw in Arakan State of Myanmar. He is a prolific commentator on Rohingya issues on radio, television channels and other mainstream media outlets. He is a co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition.