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Podcast

Revolutionary Defeat and the Future of Struggle in Syria —and Beyond

Join us for the live stream of a conversation with Syrian writer & former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh moderated by Wendy Pearlman & Danny Postel. Broadcasting from Haymarket House. This event took place on October 17, 2023. Join us for the livestream of a conversation with Yassin al-Haj Saleh, the leading intellectual voice of the Syrian uprising and one of the key thinkers in the Arab world today, during his first visit ever to the U.S. Among al-Haj Saleh’s nine books is The Impossible Revolution (Haymarket Books, 2017), which makes sense of both the nature of authoritarian domination in Syria and the historic popular struggle to topple it. Moderated by Wendy Pearlman, author of We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria and Danny Postel, co-editor of The Syria Dilemma and The People Reloaded, this dialogue will explore the origins and trajectory of the Syrian uprising, the internal and external forces that thwarted it, what comes next in the quest of emancipatory change, what lessons the Syrian experience might have for other struggles, and what lessons other struggles might have for Syria. This public event is co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Middle East and North African Studies Program, New Lines Magazine, and Haymarket Books. Speakers: Yassin al-Haj Saleh is the leading intellectual voice of the Syrian uprising and one of the key thinkers in the Arab world today. Born in the city of Raqqa in 1961, he was arrested in 1980 in Aleppo for his membership in a left-wing political organization and spent 16 years in prison. His wife, Samira al-Khalil, was abducted by an armed Islamist group in 2013. He is the author of nine books, including The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (2017) and The Atrocious and its Representation (English edition forthcoming). One of the founders of the bilingual Arabic-English platform Aljumhuriya.net, he writes for a variety of international publications and is a Contributing Writer for New Lines Magazine. He is now based in Berlin. Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she also holds the Crown Professorship of Middle East Studies and is currently director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies program. She is the author of Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (2003); Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (2011); We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (2017); Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (with Boaz Atzili, 2018); and Muzoon: A Syrian Refugee Speaks Out (with Muzoon Almellehan, 2023). Her sixth book, The Home I Worked To Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora, is forthcoming from Liveright Books in 2024. Danny Postel is Politics Editor of New Lines Magazine, an award-winning global affairs publication which the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard says has “built a home for long-form international reporting.” He is the author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran (2006) and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future (2010), The Syria Dilemma (2013), and Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (2017). His current book-in-progress, “Critical Solidarity,” explores the legacies of the late international relations theorist, Middle East scholar and internationalist Fred Halliday. This event is co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Middle East and North African Studies Program, New Lines Magazine, and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/qfmjwRD_ho4 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

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May 18, 2026

Ukraine’s Anti-Imperialist Struggle

February 24th marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine. Right now, it is bombing the country’s energy system, cutting off heat and electricity for millions in the depths of a bitterly cold winter. At the same time, the Trump administration is trying to bully Ukraine into a land for peace settlement that rewards Putin’s aggression and, with the willing collaboration of Ukraine’s oligarchs, puts the country up for sale to Western multinationals. Join this webinar to hear about Ukraine’s struggle.

Speakers:

Artem Chapeye is the author of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Guns (Washington Post 2025 best non-fiction) and The Ukraine. He is a writer, translator, activist, and, after the 2022 invasion, an enlisted member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine .

Tanya Vyhovsky is a Ukrainian American, Vermont State Senator, member of Vermont’s Progressive Party, and also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Denys Bondar is a native of Ukraine and an associate professor of physics at Tulane University as well as a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction.

May 18, 2026

We Are Each Other's Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities

Join editors and contributors of We Are Each Other's Liberation, a major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.

A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other's Liberation envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.

Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers—including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today—We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.

Get a copy of We Are Each Other's Liberation from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2519-we-are-each-other-s-liberation

Speakers:

Rachel Kuo is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, which engages intersectional feminist politics grounded within Asian diasporic communities.

Jaimee A. Swift is the creator and executive director of Black Women Radicals, dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender-expansive people’s radical activism in Africa and in the African diaspora.

TD Tso is a feminist writer, editor, cultural organizer, and cofounder of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

Pratibha Parmar’s films have shaped the politics of feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures for over four decades. From experimental shorts to activist documentaries and feature-length works, Parmar’s cinematic language operates as an act of visual justice. Her practice engages the image as a site of struggle—challenging the power relations that determine who is seen, how they are represented, and what forms of visual expression are made possible. Her films are a site of narrative transformation, where memory, activism, and artistic expression converge to resist erasure and imagine new futures. Pratibha is a published author and editor of of several anthologies. The Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) and Sming Sming Books published, Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar in 2025.

Margo Okazawa-Rey is an activist-educator working on issues of militarism for over 30 years. She has long-standing activist commitments in South Korea and Palestine, with Du Re Bang and Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, respectively. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, its US group. She also hosts feminist radio program Women’s Magazine, broadcast on KPFA Berkeley California station of the Pacifica Radio network, and is known as DJ MOR Love and Joy, transnational feminist virtual dance party DJ.

Dr. Beverley Bryan is a lifelong educator and political activist, who is co-author of the classic book Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985) which detailed the experiences of Black women and their fight for equality from post-war up to 1980s Britain. Dr. Bryan was a founding member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD); a Saturday school organiser, a mainstream primary school teacher who pioneered Black history teaching in her classroom in the 1970s and a member of the British Black Panther Movement. A lifelong educator, Dr. Bryan is a retired Professor of Language Education from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica.

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