Nostalgia Trap

My conversation with Jayashree Kamble, a writer and English professor at LaGuardia Community College, was an opportunity to talk about popular culture, an intense and rich subject of study that, at least in my experience, is often met with some resistance in graduate history departments. Jayashree discusses her early education in India, how she decided to move to Minnesota for graduate school, and all about the main focus of her work studying popular romance fiction. What do those books and other pieces of media have to tell us about race, politics, identity, and ideology? Jayashree's answers to these questions gave me a mind-blowing glimpse into the profound ways that popular culture can function in our lives.

Sarah Jaffe is a freelance writer and journalist whose work appears in The Guardian, In These Times, Salon, and Dissent Magazine, where she co-hosts the Belabored Podcast. We had a fun conversation about 90s culture, the paradox of loving the NFL, Beyoncé's feminist status, Ferguson's continued uprising, the state of higher education and, of course, the biographical details of how "punk rock and shitty jobs" helped lead her to a life of left journalism.

Steve Brier is a historian whose work at the American Social History Project helped draw me into the field of working class social history. Steve also has some amazing stories about his father's time fighting fascists on the streets of East London in the lead-up to World War II, his time spent at Berkeley in the middle of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, and his work and friendship with legendary social historian Herbert Gutman.

Sarah Leonard is an exciting voice in left journalism, currently working as a writer and editor for The Nation, New Inquiry, and Dissent. She writes about stuff that matters: mass incarceration, feminism, the evolution of media and technology, and much more. We talked about her experiences working around figures from the Democratic Party, her take on Occupy's past and future, and the limits of identity-driven politics in the context of Hillary Clinton's inevitable 2016 run.

Frances Fox Piven is a towering figure of the American Left, a professor of political science whose combined academic work and political activism provide an extraordinary framework of ideas about poverty, race, war, and many other vital issues. We sat down for a conversation about her upbringing during the Great Depression, the development of her political values, her friendship with Howard Zinn, and her encounters with American reactionaries after becoming a featured target of right-wing hatred and paranoia on Glenn Beck's television program.

James Oakes was sitting at the head of a frighteningly tiny conference table when I entered the room for my first graduate course at the CUNY Graduate Center many years ago. A professor of American history, his intensely thoughtful approach to the discipline impressed and, of course, intimidated me. I've since come to know him as a serious and generous scholar, whose work on slavery and abolitionism serves, to me, as a great model for how politics and history can be effectively interwoven. In this conversation, we talk about his focus on slavery and the Civil War, his response to Lincoln's radical critics, and why he prefers to explore his politics, at least publicly, through the study of the 19th century.

In recent months I have been depending on writer and professor Anthony Galluzzo's fantastic Facebook feed for his uniquely cynical take on the latest news, notes, and opinions--particularly when it comes to higher education, gentrification, militarized police, imperial foreign policy, and lots of other big issues facing the world today. I finally got to sit down with him, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, of all places, to hear about his weird experience with actor Jason Patric on the week of 9/11/01, his perception of the freakish nature of Los Angeles sunshine, and the sometimes enlightening, sometimes frustrating times he's spent teaching at colleges like West Point and CUNY.

I've known Joe and John Lombardo since the mid-1990s, when I met them while working at a restaurant called Marie Callender's in Ventura, California. As an alienated, nerdy teenager, I looked up to the Lombardo brothers as models of a different kind of man than the jocks and surfers I was surrounded by in high school. In hindsight, they were my first encounter with hipsterism, and they taught me a lot about being cool. In this conversation, they tell me about their own upbringing, how they came to punk music as a saving grace, encounters with Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, and Richard Simmons, and why they think the alternative rock scene of the 1990s was the last great moment in American counterculture.

Nichole Shippen is a political theorist and professor at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, New York. We talked a bit about her youth in a small rancher town in Wyoming, and how she navigated the particular cultural landscape of such a space. Our discussion focuses mainly on race, identity, and class structure in America, as we try to situate events in Ferguson, Missouri within a wider political and historical continuum. Her book Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom will be published this fall.

David Zeiger's documentary film Sir! No Sir! had a profound impact on my graduate studies, educating me about the "GI movement" against the Vietnam War and kick-starting my project on the "GI coffeehouses" that functioned as the institutional support network for that important movement. We had a great conversation about his years growing up in Los Angeles, his need to "do something" about the war in Vietnam, his work with antiwar soldiers at a GI coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas (outside Fort Hood) in the early 1970s, and his development as a photographer and filmmaker.