Join us for a conversation about recovering from climate disaster and building community within the context of colonialism in Puerto Rico.
Celebrate the launch of Mi María: Surviving the Storm, a new book from Voice of Witness and Haymarket Books, with a roundtable conversation about the aftermath of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico.
Mi María: Surviving the Storm brings together 17 first-person stories that explore how government neglect and colonialism impact recovery, how communities come together in the wake of disaster, and how precarity and inequity are exacerbated on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Weaving together long-form oral histories and shorter testimonios, the book offers a multivocal history of the storm and its long aftermath as people waited for relief and aid that rarely arrived and communities collectively organized to support one another in recovery.
This event is cosponsored by Haymarket Books and Voice of Witness. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able please make a solidarity donation in support of our important educational and publishing work. Donations from this event will support our work with Voice of Witness.
You can also support by purchasing the book, Mi María: Surviving the Storm, online here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1746-mi-maria-surviving-the-storm
Speakers:
Dr. Ricia Chansky is a professor in the English department at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and the co-editor of Mi María: Surviving the Storm. She is the co-editor of the scholarly journal, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and the editor of the Routledge Auto/Biography Studies book series. Ricia is also a Research Affiliate at the York University Centre for Research in Latin America and the Caribbean and a Global Fellow at the Brown University Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. For her work directing the large-scale public humanities project, “Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane,” Ricia won the MLA Innovation in the Humanities Award and the Oral History Association’s Post-Secondary Teaching Award, and was selected as a partner in the Humanities Action Lab. She has been recognized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance as a Global Human Rights Leader in the Climate Crisis.
Zaira Arvelo Alicea is a narrator in Mi María: Surviving the Storm and the Curriculum Specialist for the project. Zaira is a writer, editor, and educator with a focus on English language learners (ELLs) and equity in the continental US and Puerto Rico. She was born in Lares, Puerto Rico, a mountainous town in the archipelago with a tradition of anticolonial insurgency. Zaira and her husband survived Hurricane María by floating on an air mattress for sixteen hours, trapped in their home. Her story highlights several failures in the federal disaster-response system, which led them to remain homeless for well over a year after the hurricane. She currently lives on Puerto Rico’s largest island where she spearheads a small business.
Lorel Cubano Santiago is a narrator in Mi María: Surviving the Storm and a community organizer with a background in tourism. She is the founder of the Old San Juan Heritage Foundation and the community arts center Colectivo PerlArte. After Hurricane María, Lorel mobilized mutual aid efforts with her community to feed hundreds of people despite not receiving any aid from the supply ships that docked just minutes away from their neighborhood of La Perla in San Juan.
Brenda Flores Santiago is a researcher, translator, and oral historian. Brenda was a student interviewer for the Mi María project at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is currently a graduate student in the Master of Arts in Translation and Interpreting program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/4J-e1ITH3ZQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
More Episodes
Mar 4, 2021
Text Messages: Creating Worlds with Words ft. Narcy and Lowkey (10-29-20)
Join independent artists Narcy and Lowkey for a wide-ranging conversation celebrating the release of Narcy’s debut book Text Messages.
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Independent hip-hop artists Narcy and Lowkey on art, technology, empire, and the struggle to survive the end of consumer capitalism.
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Text Messages is the first multi-genre collection by Montreal-based Iraqi hip-hop artist, activist, and professor Yassin “Narcy” Alsalman. Composed entirely on a smartphone during air travel and married to artwork from comrades, Narcy’s writing speaks of the existential crises experienced by diasporic children of war before and during imperialism in the age of the Internet.
Narcy 's verses span the space between hip-hop and manifesto, portraying a crumbling, end-stage capitalist society, visions for a new reality, and exposes the myth of multiculturalism in post-9/11 North America. The wordsmith hollows and transmogrifies the grotesque excess of the West by juxtaposing McLife with images of death, destruction, and trauma in the East.
From the depths of apathetic consumerism arises a voice of spiritual self-realization that explodes the misrepresented, mythical monolith of Islam in the West and with the rubble builds healing through intelligent resistance and radical love.
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Real name Yassin Alsalman, Narcy is a musician, director, professor, writer, and actor. He teaches a hip-hop production class and a cultural study of rap and politics at Concordia University. He is the cofounder of WeAreTheMedium, a culture point for publishing, media, and the arts. He currently resides in Montreal, has his heart in the Arab world, and is grounded on planet Earth. Most importantly, he is a father of two.
Lowkey is a hip hop artist and political campaigner. He has worked with Immortal Technique , Wretch 32, Akala, Dead Prez and Outlawz. He is part of the super group Mongrel alongside members of the Arctic Monkeys, Babyshambles and Reverend And The Makers. The band released their album Better than Heavy in tandem with the Independent newspaper.
In Canada order the book from Fernwood Publishers: https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/text-messages
In the US and World: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1474-text-messages
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/1vo8CNFu2w0
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
The Virus, The Climate, The Alternative: Solutions to Capital’s Crises (10-29-20)
Join leading ecosocialist authors and activists Andreas Malm and Thea Riofrancos for a discussion of how to stop the climate crisis.
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From annual ‘once a centuries’ fires, to ‘storms to end all storms’ making landfall every hurricane season, the signs that capitalist climate change represents a civilizational threat have never been more ominously evident. It has become impossible to ignore the dire need to move beyond green tinkering to an overhaul of the entire system, lest we be left with a charred and blasted husk where once there was a planet. As the global fever rages, we are faced with the choice of "Ecosocialism or Barbecue."
In his new book, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, leading environmental thinker, Andreas Malm points to the state mobilizations across the globe to combat the coronavirus as an example of the scale of intervention that will be required to execute the just-transition we need.
If it is possible to conjure trillions of dollars to combat an invisible, epidemiological threat, why is the climate emergency not greeted with similar sized programs?
Malm will be joined for this virtual teach-in by fellow activist and author Thea Riofrancos—whose new book Resource Radicals looks at lessons for our movement from the experience in Ecuador— for a conversation that will touch on this question and many more. ----------------------------------------------------
Speakers:
Andreas Malm is a scholar of human ecology, and the author of Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, The Progress of this Storm and Fossil Capital, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020-2022), and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2020-2021). Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America. These themes are explored in her book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020) and her co-authored book, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and serves on the steering committee of the organization's Ecosocialist Working Group.
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Order a copy of Andreas Malm's Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3704-corona-climate-chronic-emergency
Order his other books:
The Progress of this Storm: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3140-the-progress-of-this-storm
Fossil Capital: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2002-fossil-capital
Order a copy of Thea Riofrancos's "Resource Radicals": https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781478008484
Order her other books:
A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3107-a-planet-to-win
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/HFK8BPQfyXE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Building Abolition Now! Planting Seeds, Growing Abolitionist Futures (10-29-20)
Join Critical Resistance and the AbolitionNOW coalition for the final session in their series of virtual teach-in's.
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The prison industrial complex (PIC) is sold as a solution that you turn to for all of your problems but in reality communities need specific solutions that are tailored and not carceral. This panel will explore what safety actually means and a vision for keeping communities safe from harm without prisons, police and systems of state punishment.
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Speakers:
Nia Umoja
Solange Azor- BYP100
Mirian Porras - Poder Emma
Moderator - Cory Lira - Critical Resistance
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This event is presented by the AbolitionNOW Network and cosponsored by Haymarket Books, an independent, radical, non-profit publisher. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our continuing to do this important work.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/WLQqzuiTMYQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire with David McNally (11-5-20)
For the first HM online panel this year, please join us for a discussion of David McNally's book: 'Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance'.
'In most accounts of the origins of money we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money’s origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money’s emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war. Blood and Money demonstrates the ways that money has “internalized” its violent origins, making clear that it has become a concentrated force of social power and domination. Where Adam Smith observed that monetary wealth represents “command over labor,” this paradigm shifting book amends his view to define money as comprising the command over persons and their bodies.'(Text taken from the book cover.)
Join us for this discussion with David McNally (author, editor of Spectre Journal, Professor of History at University of Houston), joined by Maia Pal (HM editorial board) & Tithi Bhattacharya.
PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider supporting the Historical Materialism project.
Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima
Also, please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism book series through Haymarket Books. For $25 per month, this subscription gets you every new title from the Historical Materialism series when it is released (as long as your subscription remains active) plus a 50% discount on *all* Haymarket books titles via our website. Non-US subscribers will be charged an extra $20/month for international shipping.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/894-haymarket-book-club-historical-materialism-series
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/v6psUWDkUjc
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
Engels at 200 with Michael Roberts & Camilla Royle (11-7-20)
Marx is often accused of what has been called a Promethean vision of human social organisation, namely that human beings, using their superior brains, knowledge and technical prowess, can and should impose their will on the rest of the planet or what is called ‘nature’ – for better or worse.
On the 200th anniversary of his birth, Engels too must be saved from the same charge.Actually, Engels was well ahead of Marx (yet again) in connecting the destruction and damage to the environment that industrialisation was causing.
Engels’ major work (written with Marx’s help), The Dialectics of Nature, written in the years up to 1883, just after Marx’s death, is often subject to attack as extending Marx’s materialist conception of history as applied to humans, into nature in a non-Marxist way. And yet, in his book, Engels could not be clearer on the dialectical relation between humans and nature. it's time to revise the revisionists.
Engels and Ecology The Urban Political Ecology of Friedrich Engels - Camilla Royle
This paper takes the 200th anniversary of Engels’s birth in November 1820 to rethink his contribution to what we might today call urban political ecology. Marxist thinkers within critical environmental geography, have long argued for a focus on the natural processes that constitute the urban environment, demonstrating how the urban is shaped by both social and ecological processes. Their approach is rooted in a dialectical rather than a mechanistic materialism. While some have cited Engels as an early advocate of these views, others – such as Neil Smith in Uneven Development – have been more critical of his views on nature, seeing them as representing a dualist approach alien to Marx’s understanding. This paper will address these debates by highlighting Engels’s work on housing conditions, air and water pollution as well as his writings on infectious disease pandemics of the time such as typhus and cholera. It will show how Engels’s approach to public health and his accusations of “social murder” perpetuated by the ruling class predates the analysis of structural violence developed by critical theorists of global health over a century later. It will suggest that Engels’s understanding of how capitalist social relations produced an urban environment detrimental to workers aligns with Marx’s views.
PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider supporting the Historical Materialism project.
Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima
Also, please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism book series through Haymarket Books. For $25 per month, this subscription gets you every new title from the Historical Materialism series when it is released (as long as your subscription remains active) plus a 50% discount on *all* Haymarket books titles via our website. Non-US subscribers will be charged an extra $20/month for international shipping.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/894-haymarket-book-club-historical-materialism-series
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/EbGrV9UzYo4
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Mar 4, 2021
The 2020 US Election w/ Kali Akuno, Meagan Day, & Peter Drucker(11-7-20)
The 2020 US election may be the biggest crisis of bourgeois democracy since the defeat of Black Reconstruction. The past several years and weeks have been rich in lessons about the nature of the US state and its electoral system. Issues that the panelists will discuss include: the ongoing far right threat and the changing character of the Republican Party; the nature of the Democratic Party and what the left can and cannot use it for; the roots of the current political crisis in the economic crisis going back to 2008, and the impact of the pandemic; and the intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality in this current crisis.
Meagan Day is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She is the co-author with Micah Uetricht of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go From the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism (Verso, April 2020). Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
Peter Drucke's long years as a socialist and queer activist began in the US in 1978, when he was 19. He is the author of Max Shachtman and His Left and of Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism (Haymarket). He lives in the Netherlands.
Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima
Also, please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism book series through Haymarket Books. For $25 per month, this subscription gets you every new title from the Historical Materialism series when it is released (as long as your subscription remains active) plus a 50% discount on *all* Haymarket books titles via our website. Non-US subscribers will be charged an extra $20/month for international shipping.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/894-haymarket-book-club-historical-materialism-series
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/yenbB5fxkY4
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
