Liberating Libraries

A quick note on where things are at with Liberating Libraries. 

You can find all our past episodes and writings at liberatinglibraries.org.

Tash Aw's We, The Survivors (2019) is all about exploitation and the toll of development on workers. Vladamir Lorchenkov's The Good Life Elsewhere (2008) looks at workers who have been made useless and disposable. They're two sides to the same capitalist system, and they show us some important things in this moment when work (especially the underpaid 'essential' kind that's keeping us alive) and hope are on our minds.

Fantastic interview with Tash Aw.

Max Haiven on the Crisis of Imagination

We're back in 2020 with a look at one of the authors who inspired this whole project: Octavia Butler. In this brand new episode we return to and build on our very first discussion of her amazing works Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). This time we add our reflections on one of her most famous, and most intense, novels, Kindred (1979). A powerful voice in science fiction, speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism, Octavia Butler should be read by anyone interested in transformational and liberatory movements.

For more about what Butler can mean to movements today, check out the anthology Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction from Social Movements

Link to discussion on the unfinished Parable of the Trickster:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/theres-nothing-new-sun-new-suns-recovering-octavia-e-butlers-lost-parables/ 

Ever wonder what it's like to hear us talk about books we DIDN'T like? Best and worst reads off our shelf in 2019, and some discussion of plans for upcoming episodes (pleasure, work, and African and Indigenous Futurisms). 

Books we talk about:

The Old Drift (Namwali Serpell) Spring (Ali Smith) Mean Spirit (Linda Hogan) The Marrow Thieves (Cherie Dimaline) The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen) Cities of Salt (Abdelrahman Munif) Berlin (Jason Lutes) Gold Fame Citrus (Claire Vaye Watkins) American War (Omar El Akkad)

And the ones we don't recommend:

El Murmullo de las Abejas (Sofia Segovia) and The Book of Joan (Lidia Yuknavitch)

How should we feel and share our feelings in times of rising fascism? In this episode we tackle this question by looking at stories about life in German and Italy before and during WWII. We examine the three part graphic novel Berlin (2018) by Jason Lutes and Natalia Ginsburg's memoir of Mussolini's Italy, Family Lexicon (published in Italian in 1963, translated to English in 2017). These books helped us unpack things like resilience, language, community, and despair in a different way, something we hope can benefit others in contemporary movements.

We had to truncate our long conversation, so here are some of the resources we used to gather information on the history of fascism and its relationship to the rise of alt-right, nationalist, and white supremacist movements today.

https://youtu.be/k5og6XP3_pg

https://monthlyreview.org/2014/09/01/the-return-of-fascism-in-contemporary-capitalism/

https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2017/06/20/fascism-anti-fascism-a-decolonial-perspective/

Leave a rating or review on your podcasting app, or find us on Instagram at liberating.libraries to send us a comment!

A short repost of an episode from last year. Zadie Smith is one of our favourite authors, so we had to cut this one down A LOT! Here we're talking about her most recent novel Swing Time. You can find the full original version on our website, liberatinglibraries.org.

We've been excited about this one for a while! An episode looking at two epic tales of dispossession, transformation, and the development of contemporary capitalism. Putting together John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt, we're talking about fiction that explores economic transformations and the upheavals of resource extraction, with a focus on relationships to land and the emergence of workers' struggles.

In other news, you can now follow us on instagram @liberatinglibraries. Leave us a comment there!

An episode we recorded in 2018, but remains as timely as ever. Looking at Mohsin Hamid's books The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West to talk about breathing life into historical moments, and writing with human dignity.

A repost of one of our first episodes looking at A History of Seven Killings and The Book of Night Women by Marlon James. CONTENT WARNING: contains descriptions of graphic violence, oppression, and sexual assault.

In this episode we look at Scarborough (2017) by Catherine Hernandez and Brother (2017) by David Chariandy, two powerful novels that bring voice to a diverse and chronically underfunded community in Canada. Both set in Scarborough, Ontario, they use intimacy and bureaucracy to show the workings of Canadian forms of power, structural racism, and economic inequality in ways not often seen in the historically white and middle-class Can-Lit (Canadian Literature). Through their work, we're invited to ask who gets to determine what a community looks like, whose stories are told, and when and how does survival happen.