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Shownotes: Today I’m joined by Amanda Batarseh, an assistant professor of literature whose teaching and research span Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and diasporic literature, Indigenous Studies, Mediterranean Studies, and comparative literature.

Our conversation centers on Batarseh’s work on radical Palestinian epistemology and what she describes as a Palestine-centered way of knowing. Beginning with the limits of simply applying inherited European theoretical frameworks to Palestinian cultural production, Batarseh asks us to consider Palestinian literature not merely as something to be interpreted through theory, but as a site that produces knowledge and theory of its own.

From there, we discuss what colonial unknowing: not simply an absence of information about Palestine, but structures of knowledge that can render Palestinian histories, experiences, and claims unintelligible even when Palestinians have narrated those histories for generations. This pushes us beyond the question of who has permission to narrate and toward a deeper question: what determines whether a narrative can be recognized as knowledge in the first place?

We also turn to literature, poetry, and imagination as forms of political and epistemological practice. Palestinian cultural production does not simply document oppression; it can preserve relationships to land, transmit memory, create alternative geographies, and imagine forms of life beyond the structures that seek to contain them. Literature, in this sense, becomes a space of radical creativity whose possibilities extend outward from the individual toward collective liberation.

This becomes especially important in our discussion of cartography and Batarseh’s concept of rooted movement. Against colonial maps that transform land into bounded territory and property, Palestinian narratives can orient people through memory, movement, story, ancestry, and lived relationships to place. Rootedness, then, does not necessarily mean remaining fixed. Palestinian ways of knowing can be grounded in Palestine while moving across exile, diaspora, language, political struggle, and intellectual traditions.

Biography: Amanda Batarseh (بطارسة / bah–taar–say) is an Assistant Professor of Literature whose teaching and research focuses on Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and Arab diaspora literature, Indigenous studies, Mediterranean studies and comparative literature. Her research has been supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, Hellman Fellowship, Faculty Career Development Program and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0377919X.2026.2683727

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Show notes: What does it mean to pursue liberation without romanticizing the past? Can modern science, historical materialism, and even ideas associated with European modernity become tools of anti-colonial struggle? And what might the thought of Amílcar Cabral have in common with the Palestinian intellectual Ghassan Kanafani?

Joining me today is Zeyad El Nabolsy, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at York University. His work focuses on modern African intellectual history, African philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, Marxism, and anti-colonial political thought.

We turn first to El Nabolsy’s work “Amílcar Cabral’s Modernist Philosophy of Culture and Cultural Liberation” where we examine Cabral’s relationship to modern science, modernity and modernization, and his insistence that ideas or practices cannot simply be dismissed as “Western” because of where they historically emerged. This raises larger questions about reason, progress, language, cultural autonomy, and whether something introduced through histories of conquest can eventually become endogenous to a society.

In the second half of our conversation, we bring Cabral into dialogue with the Palestinian political theorist, Ghassan Kanafani. We discuss historical materialism, the Palestinian revolt of 1936, the failures of postcolonial nationalism, Afro-Arab solidarity, the relationship between Palestine and African liberation movements, and Cabral’s famous demand for the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie to commit what he called “class suicide.”

Biography: Zeyad el Nabolsy has a Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He has an M.A. in philosophy and a B. Eng. (in chemical engineering) from McMaster University. Zeyad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University. His main area of focus is modern African Intellectual History. His dissertation "Science, Modernity, and Progress in Nineteenth Century West and North Africa: A Comparative Study of Africanus Horton and Rifa’a al-Tahtawi" seeks to answer the question: how does our understanding of the role of modern science in African societies change when we cease to ignore the early reception of some of the modern sciences by nineteenth century African intellectuals such as Africanus Horton (1835–1883) in West Africa and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801 - 1873) in North Africa, prior to the Scramble for Africa?

Links: https://www.soufflesmonde.com/posts/amilcar-cabral-and-ghassan-kanafani-on-nation-and-class-in-colonized-societies

https://philpapers.org/archive/NABACM.pdf

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-89775-7

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Show notes: Antonio Gramsci is often remembered through a single image: the imprisoned intellectual, the theorist of hegemony, the author of the Prison Notebooks. His concepts have traveled across disciplines—from political theory and cultural studies to education, media, and postcolonial thought. Yet in becoming an icon, Gramsci has also been flattened into a head without a body, a thinker detached from the material conditions that made his thought possible.

Joining me today are Mauro Puddu and Saskia Kroonenberg to discuss their co-authored article, "Written on the Subaltern Body: Gramsci and the Material Politics of Sardinian and Italian Prison Lives," published in Cultural Studies by Routledge. The work brings together archaeology, literary studies, history, and materialist philosophy to rethink Gramsci through bones, objects, illness, food, labor, and imprisonment. Rather than treating Gramsci as an isolated genius, they reconstruct the social and bodily world that produced his political imagination. Through osteobiography, archaeological evidence, prison letters, and historical archives, they reveal how colonialism, poverty, disability, nutrition, and everyday material life became conditions of thought itself.

Biography: Mauro Puddu is an Italian archaeologist whose research focuses on the Roman world, particularly the archaeology of identity, mobility, and marginalized communities in the ancient Mediterranean. He is a Young MSCA Researcher Fellow at the University for Foreigners of Siena, where he leads the PAAST (Posthumanist Approaches to Ancient Social Transformations) project, examining mobility and social inequality in Roman-period Sardinia through posthumanist, feminist, and archaeological perspectives. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in Archaeology from the University of Cagliari, a second M.A. in Theoretical Archaeology from University College London, and a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Cambridge. His scholarship has appeared in leading journals including the Cambridge Archaeological Journal and the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal. His work combines archaeology, postcolonial theory, and bioarchaeology to recover the histories of marginalized communities and reinterpret the ancient Mediterranean through questions of inequality, embodiment, and social justice. 

Biography: Saskia Kroonenberg is a cultural studies scholar at Radboud University in the Netherlands whose research explores Italian literature, the political philosophy of Antonio Gramsci, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and new materialism. As a Fellow at Inheritance and Transformation, she investigates the intersections of epigenetics and literary studies, bringing together scientific and humanistic approaches to questions of memory, embodiment, and history. She previously held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities in Cologne and has been a visiting fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome, the Eric Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies, the University of Zurich, and Utrecht University. Her doctoral research examined Gramsci's political philosophy, postcolonial literature, and new materialism, earning the Antonio Gramsci Dissertation Prize from the Associazione Internazionale Gramsci di Biella. Her work bridges literary criticism, philosophy, and cultural theory to examine how marginalized histories and embodied experiences shape political thought.

Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2026.2615901

Show Notes: Today we're exploring the relationship between music, memory, abolition, and Black political thought through the lens of Christopher R. Rogers' essay, "How to Sample and Stretch a Prison Break: A Prelude to the Attica Blues." Using Archie Shepp's Attica Blues as a point of departure, the essay asks what it means to write in the spirit of Black music—not simply to analyze it, but to think, feel, and create through its rhythms, improvisations, and traditions.

Our conversation ranges across the long legacy of the Attica uprising, insurgent listening, the relationship between music and writing, and the ways Black communities preserve history, memory, and political possibility through sound. We also discuss what it means to write for one's community rather than simply for the academy, how place shapes intellectual and artistic practice, and why archives are often found not only in books and institutions, but in neighborhoods, performances, conversations, and songs.

Throughout, we reflect on the influence of figures including Archie Shepp, George Jackson, Toni Morrison, Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, and many others, while considering how Black music continues to function as a living archive, a form of theory, and a rehearsal for collective liberation.

Biography: Christopher R. Rogers is an educator, scholar, and cultural worker whose work centers on abolitionist education, Black studies, community organizing, and cultural preservation. Based in Philadelphia and originally from Chester, Pennsylvania, Rogers serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Program at Haverford College, where he teaches courses on Black popular culture, educational justice, and social transformation. Rogers is a facilitator and member of the leadership team of the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, a political education initiative that prepares organizers working against poverty, policing, mass incarceration, and other systems of oppression. Rogers also co-coordinates the Friends of the Henry Ossawa Tanner House, leading efforts to preserve the historic home of the renowned Black artist as a center for community education, Black heritage, and neighborhood organizing. His research includes studies of abolitionist organizing, community storytelling, and collaborative learning, he co-edited How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising, and published My City Needs Something: Portraits and Prose for Black Existence featuring photography by Karim Brown.

Link: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/15/6/145

Show notes: Universities often present themselves as neutral institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. But what counts as knowledge? Who decides which ways of learning are legitimate? And why have certain forms of education—particularly those rooted in community, oral tradition, and collective practice—so often been excluded from the academy in favor of European models of expertise?

Today, we're exploring these questions through the lens of Caribbean music in higher education. I'm joined by ethnomusicologist Andrew Martin to discuss his article, "Traditional Methods: The UWI Campus as Caribbean Music Laboratory."

Together, we discuss the history of steel pan and its transformation from a grassroots music tradition into an object of academic study. We examine how colonialism continues to shape what universities recognize as legitimate knowledge, why experiential and community-based learning often remains subordinated to lecture-based instruction, and how practices such as liming challenge dominant assumptions about productivity, education, and social life.

We also explore the relationship between universities and the communities that surround them, asking how music can serve as a bridge between formal and informal education rather than remaining confined to the classroom. Along the way, we discuss oral traditions and alternative systems of musical notation, the politics of curriculum design, the influence of tourism on Caribbean musical cultures, and the surprising role American universities played in legitimizing steel pan studies before many Caribbean institutions did.

Biography: Andrew Martin holds a Ph.D. in Musicology/Ethnomusicology, an M.A. in Musicology, and an M.M. in Percussion Performance. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. In 2011, he served as an academic fellow with the Arbeitskreis Studium Populärer Musik at the Institute for Musicology and Music Pedagogy in Osnabrück, Germany. At Inver Hills Community College, Dr. Martin teaches courses in music history, music analysis, and percussion. He also directs the Inver Hills African Drum and Dance Ensemble and the Inver Hills Steelband Ensemble. His research has appeared in journals such as American Music, Pan Podium: The Journal of the British Steel Band Society, and The Journal of New York Folklore, as well as in The Grove Dictionary of American Music. He is the author of the book Steelpan Ambassadors: The US Navy Steel Band, 1957–1999.

Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase26?openform&fp=clrjames&id=clrjames_2024_0999_12_19_116

Show notes: In this episode, I'm joined by David Ventura, Associate Res earcher at Newcastle University, whose work engages the Black Radical Tradition, colonial temporality, and practices of refusal. We discuss his recent article, "History and Histories: Fanon and Glissant on Breaking with the Colonial Past," which revisits an enduring question within decolonial thought: What relationship should struggle for liberation have to the past?

Drawing together the work of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, Ventura challenges readings that position the two thinkers in opposition. Instead, he argues that both provide indispensable resources for thinking about how colonial histories continue to structure contemporary life, while also illuminating the traces of resistance, invention, and fugitivity that make decolonized futures imaginable.

Our conversation explores Fanon's psychiatric practice in Algeria, Glissant's distinction between History with a capital "H" and plural histories, the political significance of creolization, debates surrounding Negritude, and competing interpretations of revolutionary rupture, historical memory, and the possibility of invention. Along the way, we consider what it means to read Fanon and Glissant together, not as rivals, but as complementary thinkers whose work helps us better understand the temporalities of colonialism, the persistence of its afterlives, and the poetic and ethical practices through which they might be refused.

Biography: David Ventura is an Associate Researcher at Newcastle University (UK), where he recently completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship focused on Édouard Glissant. Broadly speaking, David’s work engages the Black radical tradition to interrogate how the history of transatlantic slavery continues to structure the political coordinates of today’s world, as well as the radical practices and poetics through which that structuration might be displaced and refused. David’s research has featured in Philosophy & Social Criticism, The C.L.R. James Journal, and with German Primera, he recently co-edited a special issue of Paragraph on the topic of time and refusal. David is currently working on a book project, titled Poetics of Refusal: Refiguring Fugitivity with Édouard Glissant, which expounds Glissant’s imaginary of refusal by examining a series of figures of refusal that appear in his fictional writings. 

Links: https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase26?openform&fp=clrjames&id=clrjames_2024_0030_0001_0221_0248

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Show Notes: In this episode of  I sit down with philosopher Zeyad el Nabolsy to discuss his article, "The Concept of Western Civilization in Black Marxism: Cedric Robinson as an Ethnophilosopher." Together, we explore one of the most influential and debated texts in Black Studies and political theory: Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism.

Our conversation examines Robinson's conception of Western civilization as a transhistorical formation structured by racism, his account of the Black Radical Tradition, and his critique of Marxism. We discuss whether racism can be understood as a continuous essence running from classical antiquity to the modern world, the relationship between capitalism and racial domination, and the historical development of concepts such as equality, human rights, slavery, and dehumanization.

Along the way, we explore the Valladolid debate, Aristotle's theory of natural slavery, the Haitian Revolution, liberalism and its emancipatory possibilities, the influence of Western intellectual traditions on anti-colonial thinkers such as C.L.R. James and Amílcar Cabral, and the methodological debates surrounding ethnophilosophy and African philosophy. We also consider Robinson's treatment of Islam, Orientalism, and the broader question of how intellectual traditions travel, transform, and become tools for liberation in new historical contexts.

Biopgraphy: Zeyad el Nabolsy has a Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He has an M.A. in philosophy and a B. Eng. (in chemical engineering) from McMaster University. Zeyad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University. His main area of focus is modern African Intellectual History. His dissertation "Science, Modernity, and Progress in Nineteenth Century West and North Africa: A Comparative Study of Africanus Horton and Rifa’a al-Tahtawi" seeks to answer the question: how does our understanding of the role of modern science in African societies change when we cease to ignore the early reception of some of the modern sciences by nineteenth century African intellectuals such as Africanus Horton (1835–1883) in West Africa and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801 - 1873) in North Africa, prior to the Scramble for Africa?

Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08935696.2025.2516348

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Show notes: In this episode, I sit down with Emily Contois to discuss her recently published article, “Fueling Masculinity: How Ads for Plant-Based Burgers and Electric Trucks Reinforce Gender Norms and Resist Sustainable Imaginaries.” We explore the politics of food, masculinity, consumer culture, and advertising.

Drawing on her work in food studies, media studies, and public health, Contois examines how everyday objects—from Impossible Burgers to Ford F-150s—become powerful cultural symbols through which ideas about gender, identity, expertise, and citizenship are constructed and contested.

Together, we discuss the hidden ideologies embedded in food marketing, the relationship between meat consumption and hegemonic masculinity, the rise of alternative proteins, the gendered history of dieting, and the surprising parallels between the advertising of electric vehicles and plant-based meat. Along the way, we explore concepts such as petromasculinity, food anxiety, and carno-nostalgia, as well as the ways advertising simultaneously reflects and shapes our collective visions of the future.

Biograhpy: Emily Contois researches media within consumer culture, focusing on how identities are formed at the vital intersection of food, the body, and ideas about health. She is the author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) and co-editor of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (University of Illinois Press, 2022). A richly interdisciplinary scholar, her academic work has been published in Advertising & Society Quarterly, American Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Gastronomica, and Fat Studies, among others. She has also written for NBC News, Jezebel, and Nursing Clio; been interviewed on podcasts, such as The Sporkful, Gastropod, and Good Food; and appeared on CBS This Morning and Ugly Delicious on Netflix. She is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where she also serves as Faculty in Residence. She holds a PhD and an MA in American Studies from Brown University, an MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University, and an MPH focused in Public Health Nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Show Notes: When we think about colonialism, countries like Britain, France, and Spain often come immediately to mind. Italy, by contrast, is frequently imagined through a different set of narratives—art, culture, food, and, perhaps most significantly, a national mythology that has long obscured the realities of its colonial past.

In this episode, we're joined by scholar Noreen Kane to discuss her article “Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)” examining how contemporary writers Igiaba Scego and Maaza Mengiste confront these silences through fiction. Drawing on trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and memory studies, Kane explores how these authors challenge dominant narratives of Italian innocence by revealing the interconnected histories of colonialism, fascism, the Holocaust, and present-day migration.

Our conversation moves across a wide range of themes: the persistence of the "good Italian" myth, the relationship between colonial violence and collective memory, the politics of naming and forgetting, and the ways literature can make visible histories that official narratives often leave unspoken. We also explore concepts such as the implicated subject, multidirectional memory, and cosmological trauma, asking how fiction creates new possibilities for reckoning with the past and imagining more ethical futures.

Biography: Noreen Kane has a BA and MA in Italian Studies from University College Dublin and worked for over a decade in English language education. In January 2026, she received her PhD from University College Cork. Her thesis, entitled “Transgenerational Trauma and the Gendered Body: Postcolonial Women’s Writing in Italy”, was funded by the Irish Research Council and a National University of Ireland Travelling Doctoral Studentship. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Quaderni d’italianistica, and Atlantic Studies. She is currently guest editor for a special issue of Notes in Italian Studies on Memory in Italian Culture. She has lectured on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses at University College Cork and University College Dublin on topics including contemporary Italian women’s writing, trauma narratives, Italian hip-hop, and Italian mobilities. Her research interests are cultural memory studies, decolonial feminist approaches to trauma, and postcolonial Irish and Italian women’s writing and music. 

Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2024.2384916

Show notes: I’m joined by Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs for a wide-ranging conversation on their article, “On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” we explore why honesty has become such a central aesthetic category in popular music and what it means when listeners begin to understand themselves through artists they consume. 

Throughout the conversation, we discuss how confessional pop music creates what Max and Jacob describe as a “two-way authentication,” where listeners are not simply consuming an artist’s private life, but actively projecting themselves into the music. We think through the politics of intimacy, headphone listening, TikTok, fandom, neoliberal selfhood, indie aesthetics, and the blurred boundary between performer and listener. Along the way, we unpack the genealogy of confessional expression from mid-century poetry to singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and contemporary pop icons, asking how authenticity itself became a marketable aesthetic. 

We also spend time thinking about fragmentation, mirrors, broken glass, fantasy imagery, monstrosity, reinvention, and the strange tension between vulnerability and hyper-capitalism in Taylor Swift’s music and public persona. We close by reflecting on the ethical and political stakes of confessional culture more broadly — from celebrity branding and fandom to politics, social media, and the contemporary obsession with “rawness” and transparency.

Biography: Max Blansjaar is a musician and writer from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He holds a BA in Music from St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, where he was awarded the Gibbs Prize by the Faculty of Music in 2024. His work centres around cultural politics in popular music and the negotiation of social identities and relations through music and sound, with recent essays published in Sound Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, as well as the popular magazines Dirt, The Mortar, and The Story. He currently holds a Clarendon Scholarship at Jesus College, University of Oxford.

Biography: Dr Jacob Kingsbury Downs is Departmental Lecturer in Music and Chair of Faculty in the Faculty of Music, as well as Organizing Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. He is also Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. He studies listeners’ and musicians’ experiences with music and sound technologies, combining qualitative empirical methods with historical research and theoretical approaches drawn from the fields of musicology, sound studies, phenomenological philosophy, and music psychology. He is currently working on two book projects. He Received his PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2021, studying under Nicola Dibben.

Links: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/37/2/117/212143/On-Taylor-Swift-and-Broken-GlassConfessional-Pop