More Episodes
Dec 18, 2021
What's Happening in Ethiopia?
Join us for this discussion about how to make sense of the current crisis in Ethiopia.
How should progressives make sense of the government of Ethiopia, alongside the Amhara regional militia, launching a genocidal attack on the country’s northern Tigray region — even going as far as inviting neighboring Eritrea to join in on the atrocities? NGOs have documented some of the torture, sexual assault, starvation and state violence uniquely directed at Tigray — including Eritrean refugees who lived there prior to the war — but without providing broader analysis of the historical and contemporary political forces driving the conflict. The panelists in this forum will juxtapose the Tigray genocide with the #OromoProtests movement — which ousted the previous regime — seeking to rectify legacies of conquest and enslavement in an Ethiopian empire best described as a “prison house of nations”.
The mainstream media and humanitarian organizations count casualties from the standpoint of nowhere, and some claiming to represent the international left, like the ANSWER Coalition and the Black Alliance for Peace, which co-organized the November 21 coordinated rallies, approach the war through a US-centric prism and defend the Abiy government. In contrast, a grounded political analysis that rejects US imperialism and genocide is possible if we ask a different set of questions. How should we understand the #TigrayGenocide in relation to conscription in Oromia by the federal government and reports of the Tigrayan Defense Force committing atrocities in Amhara, Afar and against Eritrean refugees? What do the Qimant, Somali or those of the 83+ nationalities forcibly incorporated into Ethiopia tell us about how state formation got us here and what’s politically possible to get us out?
Speakers:
J. Khadijah Abdurahman is founder and Director of We Be Imagining at Columbia University’s INCITE Center and the American Assembly’s Democracy and Trust Program. They are also a Tech Impact Network Research Fellow at NYU’s AI Now Institute in partnership with UCLA’s C2I2 and UWA Law School. Their research focus is on predictive analytics in the New York City child welfare system and the role of tech in mass atrocities in the Horn of Africa.
Maebel Gebremedhin is the founder and president of Tigray Action Committee, a nonprofit committed to helping end the suffering of millions of Tigrayans due to the #TigrayGenocide.
Ayantu Tibeso is a scholar focusing on transnational Indigenous Oromo knowledge production and archival erasure in the construction of Ethiopian national narratives. She is a Cota-Robles Fellow and doctoral student in Information Studies at UCLA.
Recent article by Ayantu Tibeso & J. Khadijah Abdurahman: “Tigray, Oromia, and The Ethiopian Empire”: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/against-genocide/tigray-oromia-and-the-ethiopian-empire
Recent from Maebel Gebremedhin: "Will My Tigrayan Family Ever Really Be Free?": https://www.thecut.com/2021/10/my-tigrayan-family.html
Moderator:
Promise Li is an activist and writer from Hong Kong and Los Angeles. He organizes international solidarity work with Internationalism from Below and Lausan Collective.
This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Internationalism From Below, Africa Is A Country, and Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE).
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/sMTdgtzoiro
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Dec 20, 2021
Just Resistance: Building Toward a Demilitarized and Decolonized Future
Join organizers and advocates to imagine and discuss building a future safe for all and free of militarization and colonization.
The Immigrant Defense Project, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Haymarket Books are proud to present “The Next 20 Years: Building towards a demilitarized and decolonized future of safety for all”, the final event of a 4-part series marking the 20th anniversary of 9/11. The event commemorating International Human Rights Day brings together organizers and advocates who are building towards a world we have not yet seen, and helping to pave our collective path forward. From the abolition of borders, to the complete defunding of the military industrial complex within a future of economic, racial, gender and climate justice, we will discuss both the necessity of imagination, as well as the strategies, tactics and principles we need to win the world we deserve.
To mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Haymarket Books and our partners are pleased to present a 4-part series, "Just Resistance: 20 years of global struggle against the post-9/11 human rights crisis."
Moderator:
Mizue Aizeki is the Deputy Director of the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP). Mizue’s work focuses on ending the injustices—including criminalization, imprisonment, and exile—at the intersections of the criminal and immigration systems. Mizue guides IDP’s local and state policy work, including the ICE Out of Courts Campaign and IDP’s campaigns to end the growing entanglement between local law enforcement and ICE. .
Panelists:
Lara Kiswani is the executive director of the Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), and a faculty member in the College of Ethnic Studies at SF State University. Lara has been active in movements against racism and war, for Palestinian self-determination, and international solidarity for the last 20 years.
Arun Kundnani is the author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2014) and The End of Tolerance: racism in 21st century Britain (Pluto, 2007). He has previously been an editor of the journal Race & Class and a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
Timmy Châu (he/him) is a Viet organizer, lawyer, and facilitator based in Zhigaagoong, also known as Chicago. He started organizing with an effort called We Charge Genocide doing cop-watch and know-your-rights trainings across the City. He is the Managing Director at the Prison + Neighborhood Arts / Education Project (PNAP) where he works on building inside/outside networks of mutual support and advocacy between incarcerated and freeworld activists, scholars, thinkers, and artists. He’s also a co-starter of Dissenters, a new youth-led anti-war organization, where he currently sits on the Advisory Committee.
Fernando Martí is a poet, printmaker, community architect, and housing activist. His work reflects his formal training in urbanism, his roots in rural Ecuador, and his current residence in the heart of Empire in an age of climate catastrophe. His poetry, prints, altar ofrendas and utopian constructions inhabit the space between ancestral traditions of place and a futurist imagination rooted in Latinx culture. For over a decade, Fernando co-directed the Council of Community Housing Organizations. His artwork can be found regularly on justseeds.org. His writing has appeared in publications as varied as El Tecolote, Street Sheet, Geez magazine, Left Turn and Shelterforce. He shares his art and writing in a zine called Amor y Lucha.
This event is sponsored by the Immigrant Defense Network, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/SfXYOx3cGq4
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jan 4, 2022
Coup: Violence and Resistance in Bolivia (Book Launch)
Join the authors for a book launch and discussion of "Coup: A Story of Violence and Resistance in Bolivia."
In three dramatic weeks in October and November 2019, the fourteen years of progressive change that Evo Morales’ pink tide government had worked to implement in Bolivia and beyond came to a screeching halt. President Morales was forced to resign after protests against his re-election to a fourth term in allegedly fraudulent elections erupted among the urban middle classes, anti-indigenous racists, and prominent conservative politicians.
Join Linda Farthing and Thomas Becker in conversation as they discuss the story of this year of upheaval in Bolivia, providing a critical analysis of the 14 years of the MAS government that preceded it as well as the MAS return to power in 2020. The will relate personal accounts and commentary from women and men on the streets, leaders in social movements, members of the MAS party and government, survivors of Áñez’s abuses, and intellectuals.
Buy the book from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1745-coup
Speakers:
Linda Farthing is a journalist and independent scholar who reported and commented from Bolivia during the 2019-2020 coup for The Guardian, The Economist, Al Jazeera, Americas Quarterly, NPR and the BBC. She is the co-author of three books on Bolivia.
Thomas Becker is an activist, attorney, and academic who has worked on human rights issues in Bolivia for over 15 years. He spent much of 2019-2020 in Bolivia investigating abuses carried out after the 2019 coup for Harvard Law School.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/2yv34EDD_pQ
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jan 5, 2022
Haymarket Poetry Presents: The Patron Saint of Making Curfew
Join Tim Staffford to celebrate the release of his new chapbook The Patron Saint of Making Curfew! Tim will be joined on the mic by special guests Natasha Carrizosa, Omar Holmon and Dan “Sully” Sullivan, for an evening hosted by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.
Get the book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1890-the-patron-saint-of-making-curfew
Poets:
Tim Stafford is a poet and public educator from Lyons, IL. He is the editor of the Learn Then Burn all-ages anthology series on Write Bloody Publishing. He is a former Chicago Poetry Slam champion and he performs regularly across the U.S. and Europe including the 2015 Woerdz Festival in Luzern, Switzerland and the ABC Brecht Festival in Augsburg, Germany.
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is a New York Times bestselling nonfiction writer and poet. Author of seven books of poetry, her latest How to Love the Empty Air was published in 2018. Her nonfiction book Dr. Mutter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine, debuted at #7 on the New York Times Bestseller List for Books about Health and would stay on it for three months. Cristin is married to fellow bestselling author and screenwriter Ernest Cline. She lives in Austin, Texas with her family and their two eccentric rescue dachshunds.
Natasha Carrizosa won the National Poetry Award for multicultural poet of the year in 2013. She is a poet, writer, and spoken word artist. She is a published author of several projects – including heavy light, mejiafricana, and Of Fire and Rain (co-authored with Joaquin Zihuatanejo.) She has performed her work and conducted workshops for audiences in Madrid, Paris, St. Lucia, New York, Chicago, Houston and countless other cities.
Omar Holmon is an Alumni poet of Rutgers University and has competed in slam poetry for numerous years with two final stage appearances at the National Poetry Slam. He has been featured on Button Poetry, Tedx, and a commercial for Laphroaig whiskey (we outchea). In 2014 Omar Holmon Co-founded the Black Nerd Problems website with William Evans, where he spends his days writing essays on pop culture, blackness, and making top quality gifs.
Dan “Sully” Sullivan poems and performances have been featured on HBO Def Poetry Jam, WGN Morning News, and National Public Radio. Sully is a three-time Chicago Poetry Slam Champion, a recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Poetry Award, the Earl S Ho Award for Excellence in Teaching Creative Writing, and an Indiana University Writer in South Asia Recipient. His first full-length book of poems, The Blue Line Home, is available from EM-Press.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/istJRk0L3UE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jan 26, 2022
To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change w/ Alfred McCoy
Join two world-renowned historians, Andrew Bacevich and Alfred W. McCoy, to discuss McCoy's latest book, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.
In a sweep through seven centuries from 1350 to 2050, the work explains how catastrophes-- pandemics, wars, and climate crisis--have shaped the destiny of empires and world orders. By rendering often-opaque environmental science in lucid prose, the book explains how climate change and changing world orders will shape the life opportunities for younger generations, born at the start of this century, during the coming decades that will serve as the signposts of their lives—2030, 2050, 2070, and beyond.
Get To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change from Haymarket: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1742-to-govern-the-globe
Speakers:
Alfred W. McCoy holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of The Politics of Heroin, the classic study of drug trafficking that the CIA tried to suppress, and In the Shadows of the American Century.
Andrew Bacevich grew up in Indiana, graduated from West Point and Princeton, served in the army, became an academic, and is now a writer. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books, among them The New American Militarism, The Limits of Power, Washington Rules, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, and After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. He is president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank.
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This event is sponsored by TomDispatch and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/udvAt2lU1EE
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
Jan 27, 2022
Understanding E-Carceration: A Book Launch w/ Ruth Wilson Gilmore & James Kilgore
Join James Kilgore and Ruth Wilson Gilmore for an urgent discussion of punitive carceral technologies and Kilgore's new book.
In the last decade, as the critique of mass incarceration has grown more powerful, many reformers have embraced changes that release people from prisons and jails, but maintain some degree of surveillance. As educator, author, and activist James Kilgore brilliantly shows in his new book, these rapidly spreading reforms largely fall under the heading of “e-carceration”—a range of punitive technological interventions, from ankle monitors to facial recognition apps, that deprive people of their liberty, all in the name of ending mass incarceration.
E-carceration can block people’s access to employment, housing, healthcare, and even the chance to spend time with loved ones. Many of these technologies gather data that lands in corporate and government databases and may lead to further punishment or the marketing of their data to Big Tech.
For this launch Kilgore, himself a survivor of prison and e-carceration, will be joined in conversation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Order a copy of Understanding E-carceration: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781620976142
Moderator:
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James Kilgore is an activist, researcher, and writer based in Urbana, Illinois, where he has lived since paroling from prison in 2009. He is the director of the Challenging E-Carceration project at MediaJustice and the co-director of FirstFollowers Reentry Program in Champaign, Illinois. He is the author of five books, including Understanding E-Carceration and the award-winning Understanding Mass Incarceration (both from The New Press).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press) and the forthcoming book Change Everything (Haymarket) . Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).
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This event is sponsored by The New Press and Haymarket Books.
Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/fc2JaRJWcFM
Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org
Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
