Today we speak with Daniela Navin and Jeanette de La Riva, two members of Grupo Auto Defensa, a community organization based in Pasadena CA which has come about in response to attacks by ICE which have violently disrupted everyday life and led people to form new relations of mutual support and care. We hear their stories of how Trump lieutenant Stephen Miller’s demand that ICE arrest 3,000 people every day has put unbelievable constraints on hard-working people’s lives. Nevertheless, we also hear how they have invented tactics to challenge these repressive measures. We are joined by journalist-activist Maxmillian Alvarez of The Real News Network who grew up in Los Angeles and comments on the broad networks of resistance cropping up organically to fight fascism.

Maximillian Alvarez is an award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network (TRNN) in Baltimore. He is the founder and host of Working People, “a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today,” and the author of “The Work of Living,” a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to joining TRNN, he was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review. His writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, In These Times, Poynter, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, and The Chronicle of Higher Education; as an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The New Republic, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, and more.

Today I talk with M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi about their dazzling and challenging book, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 to 2072. They imagine a world haunted by genocide, ecocide, disease, fascism, and viral capitalism, but rather than writing a dystopian novel, O’Brien and Abdelhadi create a complex mosaic of oral histories, in which they each play the part of interviewer. The result is a story that far exceeds New York, and the twenty years noted in the title.  The histories cover generations across the globe, and reach into the deep sources of trauma, and the kinds of mutual care we will need to not only survive, but also to thrive in these frightening times.

Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, organizer and writer based in Chicago. She is co-author of “Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072,” a revolutionary sci-fi novel published in 2022 with Common Notions Press. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities, and she is a columnist at In These Times magazine where she writes on the Palestine Liberation movement and American politics. Eman organizes with the Salon Kawakib collective, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at the University of Chicago, Scholars for Social Justice and other formations.

M. E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She has written two books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023) and a co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She is a member of the editorial collective of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan, and Turkish.

Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements.

She currently works a psychotherapist in private practice and is a psychoanalyst in formation.

Today we talk with members of the organizing collective of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education, or CAHE, about their second National Day of Action, taking place on Thursday, April 17. The Day of Action is a call for free higher education in every meaning of that term. CAHE calls for “the elimination of all existing student debt, making all public colleges and universities tuition-free, and ensuring that our colleges and universities remain sites of robust free thinking about the world we live in and the world we want.”

We talk about the genesis of this group, and the gap it seeks to fill at the intersection of all of these interests, with Palestine squarely at the center. CAHE is thus a critical hub for activism that addresses each of the major points of attack on education coming from the Trump administration.

Karim Mattar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education.  He is currently at work on two book projects.  The Ethics of Affiliation seeks to develop a curriculum and a public pedagogy of truth and reconciliation in historic Palestine, focusing on the areas of education, culture, public institutions, civil society, and law.  Reflections on Palestine: Exile, Privilege, Responsibility interweaves personal experience, family history, cultural critique, and political analysis to tell a multigenerational, transcontinental story of responsibility to the oppressed.  Also a dedicated community organizer, Karim works at the local, state, and national levels to enhance public awareness and understanding of Palestinian literature, history, and politics and to advocate for Palestinian liberation.  Karim received his D.Phil. in English at the University of Oxford in 2013, and writes and teaches more broadly on comparative Middle Eastern literatures and cultures, the history of the novel, media and technology, and critical theory.

Bill V. Mullen is Professor Emeritus of American Studies at Purdue.  He is the author of several books including most recently We Charge Genocide! American Fascism and the Rule of Law (Fordham University Press) and (with Jeanelle Hope) The Black Antifascist Tradition Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition (Haymarket Books).  He is a member of Purdue AAUP and the organizing collective for the Coalition for Action in Higher Education.  He is also a member of Writers Against the War on Gaza.

Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film studies at Portland State University. Her most recent work is a volume co-edited with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson called The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom (Beacon Press, 2024). She is the director, with Jan Haaken, of The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests? 

Today, Sunday morning, October 20, former general Prabowo Subianto is being sworn in as Indonesia’s new president. We release a conversation we had earlier this month with Intan Paramaditha and Michael Vann about the road leading up to this inauguration, beginning in the 1960s with the Suharto regime.  Prabowo is a strong-arm authoritarian figure with a bloody record of human rights violations, yet he has remade his image as a cuddly, elder populist figure.  We spend some time talking about how his regime is likely to continue, if not accelerate, aggressive and brutal economic development policies that have wrecked the environment and displaced Indigenous peoples.  We talk a lot about how both the Indonesian media and some of its art world has been enlisted to promote this regime, and how decolonial feminists and others have taken on the task to both resist and present, and embody, other ways of being through listening to and engaging with voices from outside Jakarta and the liberal elites.

Please check out the Blog for this episode.

Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian writer and an academic based in Sydney. She received her Ph.D from New York University and is now a Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University. Her fiction, academic, and activist works focus on decolonial feminism and the politics of travel and mobility. She is the author of Apple and Knife and The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK, translated by Stephen J. Epstein). Her fiction has been translated into English, Polish, Turkish, German, and Thai. Intan’s latest books are the novel Malam Seribu Jahanam (GPU 2023) and the co-edited volume The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (Routledge 2024). She is the co-founder of the feminist collective Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (SPP/ The School of Women’s Thought).

Michael Vann has a Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz and is a professor of world history at Sacramento State Univesity who specializes in the history of imperialism and the Cold War, with special attention to Southeast Asia. Mike’s hometown is Honolulu, Hawai’i, and he has taught at universities in Indonesia, Cambodia, and the People’s Republic of China. Among his publications are The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam and articles on race, film, empire, genocide, pandemics, the politics of Korean zombies, and the political economy of surfing in publications ranging from the Journal of World History and Historical Reflections to Jacobin and The Diplomat. He is currently writing an analysis of depictions of Cold War era mass violence in Indonesia, Vietnamese, and Cambodian museums. Since 1990 Mike has been trying to spend as much time as he can in Indonesia.

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).

Today’s conversation is perhaps one of the most unusually important ones we have had on the podcast.  Len and Hwei-ru Tsou are two Taiwanese activists whose main commitment, over a period of decades, has been to discover and disclose the involvement of Asian and South Asian anti-fascists in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.  Not only do we discover their longstanding friendship with one of their first interviewees–Kenneth Graeber, father of celebrated anarchist David Graeber–but we also hear them linking their anti-fascist work to their pro-Palestine activism, which included their courageous participation in the flotillas protesting Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza. We hear Len and Hwei-ru draw the links between the anti-fascist struggle in Spain and the international movement for Palestinian rights. The conversation inspires and gives one hope about international solidarity in the past, and the present.

Bios of Len Tsou and Hwei-Ru Tsou

We are the authors of a book on the Chinese volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, in Chinese as well as in Spanish edition.

Growing up in Taiwan, we came to the U.S. to pursue our graduate studies in natural sciences.  The new land provided us with space and resources for our curiosity in modern Chinese history and the cold war.  In 1973 a military coup overthrew the Chilean President Salvador Allende, a democratically elected Socialist.  It led us to pay attention to the America’s Dirty Wars.

After obtaining our PhDs in Chemistry, Len worked in semiconductor field and Hwei-Ru in pharmaceutical industry. We each published numerous scientific papers and patents in our respective fields. To serve as a bridge, we founded Cultural International in 1989 to introduce to Taiwan the experiences of American people’s struggles in environment, labor and human rights.

In 2002, we organized weekly peace vigil in Rockland County, NY, hoping to prevent the imminent war on Iraq from happening. The peace vigil continued for nine years. In 2011 Len joined the US Boat to Gaza challenging Israel’s blockade on Gaza.  After moving to California, we join the San Jose weekly peace vigil to continue protesting the endless wars.

In 2001 our research result was published in Taiwan as a book 《橄欖桂冠的召喚：參加西班牙內戰的中國人(1936-1939)》.  A Spanish edition “Los Brigadistas Chinos en la Guerra Civil: La LLamada de España (1936-1939)” was published in Madrid in 2013.  The revised editions were published in Chinese as 《当世界年轻的时候：参加西班牙内战的中国人(1936-1939)》 in 2013 and 2015.

Our writings can be found in The Volunteers, Science & Society, South China Morning Post Magazine (南华早报), Southern Weekend (南方周末), China Times (中國時報), and others. 

Our collection of photos and documents of the Chinese volunteers resulted in the travelling photo exhibitions in Spain since 2019.  Based on our book, the Phoenix Satellite TV produced a documentary 《当世界年轻的时候——国际纵队里的中国人》in 2020.