Speaking Out of Place

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.  

How have companies like Uber and Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash and others, changed the nature of work from bad to horrific? Veena Dubal joins me to explain how such companies have exported globally a technique of algorithmic wage discrimination that pays workers based on data to which they have no access. Owners dangle bonuses before workers but take away work from them as they draw close to achieving their targets; they use psychological tricks derived from video games to create a casino-like environment where the house always wins. Dubal urges us not to fall into the trap of competing against the house, but back to “good old-fashioned organizing.” This is one of the most powerful and significant episodes of Speaking Out of Place.Professor Veena Dubal’s research focuses broadly on law, technology, and precarious workers, combining legal and empirical analysis to explore issues of labor and inequality. Her work encompasses a range of topics, including the impact of digital technologies and emerging legal frameworks on workers' lives, the interplay between law, work, and identity, and the role of law and lawyers in solidarity movements.  Dubal has written numerous articles in top law and social science journals and publishes essays in the popular press. Her research has been cited internationally in legal decisions, including by the California Supreme Court, and her research and commentary are regularly featured in media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, CNN, etc. TechCrunch has called Prof. Dubal an “unlikely star in the tech world,” and her expertise is frequently sought by regulatory bodies, legislators, judges, workers, and unions in the U.S. and Europe.  Professor Dubal is completing a book manuscript that presents a theoretical reappraisal of how low-income immigrant and racial minority workers experience and respond to shifting technologies and regulatory regimes. The manuscript draws upon a decade of interdisciplinary ethnographic research on taxi and ride-hail regulations and worker organizing and advocacy in San Francisco.Prof. Dubal received a B.A. from Stanford University and holds J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she conducted an ethnography of the San Francisco taxi industry. The subject of her doctoral research arose from her work as a public interest attorney and Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow at the Asian Law Caucus where she founded a taxi worker project and represented Muslim Americans in civil rights cases. Prof. Dubal completed a post-doctoral fellowship at her alma mater, Stanford University. She returned to Stanford again in 2022 as a Residential Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  Prof. Dubal is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Fulbright, for her scholarship and previous work as a public interest lawyer. 

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.

In response to the attacks launched against the Palestinian people in Gaza by the State of Israel, on Oct 12 Speaking Out of Place created a special episode on Gaza with legal experts Diana Buttu and Richard Falk. We did so with the aim to address and correct the proliferation of misinformation that the mainstream press was spewing out.We also solicited and received many statements of solidarity with the Palestinian people.  So many have come in, and continue to come in, that we decided to create a separate podcast episode consisting entirely of these statements.  We will update this episode continually. Listen to these voices, and please help amplify them my sharing this episode as widely as possible.  May there be a just peace for the Palestinian people, may they have the land and freedom that is rightfully theirs.  Free Palestine.A full list of contributors is on our Blog, and will be updated.