Radical Futures

In more than two dozen books spanning Iraq, Bosnia, Palestine and Vietnam, poet, translator and scholar Ammiel Alcalay has crystallized a piercing critique of American imperialism. He illustrates a commitment to places and people upon whom the bloody trail left by American excursions is inscribed, whether abroad or at home. Alcalay has crafted a unique insider-outsider approach grounded in poetic practice, a study of languages, and which embraces a wide range of materials: news, poems, letters, books, essays, reports, speeches, music, art, comics, radio, conversations, and more. His work goes against the grain of institutionalized forms of writing and allows for an excavation of political, historical and literary narratives that have been deliberately buried, obfuscated and redirected. 

Our conversation was wide-ranging, yet focused on historicizing and contextualizing the present moment as genocide continues in Palestine, as American universities unravel with shocking speed, and as the grip of authoritarianism and fascism tightens worldwide. When it comes to Palestine, Alcalay reflects on past events that have created the material conditions for the genocide to take place with full global complicity, all in the bright light of day.

From 2018 onwards, he says, the world has been in a state of immense tumult, with demonstrations in Lebanon, Chile, Columbia, Hong Kong playing out alongside the Hirak protests in Algeria and the Great March of Return in Gaza.

“Suddenly, boom, coronavirus - everything shuts down," Alcalay says. "Enormous freedom of movement curtailed.” 

He adds that Gaza was very much on his mind as he realized that these social movements and their ensuing suppression would create resounding and long-lasting reverberations that would likely become compounded in Gaza. He was right. It is clear, as he says: “We're all heading to Gaza. That's the model for the world.” 

The “Gaza model” evokes what Aime Cesaire called the “imperial boomerang” whereby empire’s violence abroad inescapably boomerangs its way back home. Examples abound as terrorizing ICE agents roam the streets in the US and brutal practices of incarceration in North America, Europe and Asia mimic Israel to a fault. 

For Alcalay, however, one has to go even further back to understand the “Gaza model.”

“The war in Iraq is a gaping hole in US behavior, thought, culture, politics, etc. It’s like a blast crater, and so many of the things that have been happening in Gaza -- withholding of food -- all of that happened in Iraq, was done by the US, and they killed hundreds of thousands. And the general culture has no clue whatsoever about any of that.” 

To a large degree, American wars in the Gulf, and the amount of violence inflicted on Iraq through sanctions and “shock and awe,” have rarely penetrated the public psyche. Gaza has shocked the world, Alcalay explains, not only because these forms of brutalization have been obscured from the public, but also because of the horrifying speed and quantity with which they are being deployed. And simultaneously, the culture of protests has also changed over the years. The protests trying to stop the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 lacked the immediacy and collectivity that was present during the war in Vietnam, proving that modes of control and surveillance have successfully proliferated. The vicious and swift suppression of pro-Palestinian protests in the last two years is proof. 

Despite these sombre assessments, Alcalay continues writing, translating and teaching. He has been buoyed by the success of Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, since Alcalay was instrumental in bringing him to an American audience. In particular, he has been furiously translating and collaborating creatively with writers in Gaza. 

“This is a big year for books,” Alcalay says. He co-translated Nasser Rabah’s poems, and the volume Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece was published by City Lights books this year. He is awaiting the publication of writing by Alaa Radwan, a student of the late Refaat Alareer, and his collaborative book titled Imperial Abhorrences created with Gazan artist Kholoud Hammad is forthcoming.

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“Food is politics,” Omer Al Tijani declares. “The documenting of cuisine and culture is an act of resistance against the ongoing oppression that we have been experiencing in Sudan.” In a country ravaged by war and where hunger has been weaponized in extreme ways, Omer’s extraordinary cookbook Sudanese Kitchen works against invisibility and erasure. 

Sudanese Kitchen is a culmination of decade-long efforts to document Sudanese food and foodways, and to combine the genres of ethnography, archive, memoir and art into one work. The author and his team of photographers undertook a culinary journey across Sudan and took the time to sit down with members of different communities across the country to learn about their food. The book thus becomes a testament to the resilience, resistance and creativity of Sudanese people who keep their traditions alive despite having to endured decades of strife. 

Originally from Khartoum but having grown up in the UK, Omer found himself listless at the food options during his university years. They were “not feeding my soul.” And unfortunately, there was no Sudanese restaurant to be found. This is when he started to teach himself to cook the food he had always known in his Sudanese home. He would nag his mother and aunts to give him recipes, and would patiently attempt to recreate dishes based on somewhat haphazard, intuitive instructions. Over time, Omer realized that he was on to something and the collecting of recipes transformed into a more ambitious endeavor. 

When Omar Al-Bashir’s regime fell in 2018, and Sudan erupted into revolt, Omer took off to Khartoum to participate in the protests and to also pursue what was now definitely turning into a book. This moment of transition that lasted a couple of years was filled with hope. “It was an energizing period,” Omer says, and one that he touches on several times in his book in an attempt “to keep the revolution alive.” He knows that these are important memories “given the state that we're in now where we have this two years long war.”

Sudanese Kitchen opens with a photograph of a mural memorializing a young martyr and the following page carries a dedication to all the martyrs of the December 2018 revolution and to the family members who “nourished the bodies and minds of Sudanese youth.” Right away, Omer grounds his book in the connected nature of revolution, liberation and Sudanese practices of food and sustenance. As the book progresses, vivid color photographs of landscapes, foods and markets are interspersed with infographics and lists. There is a timeline of key events in Sudanese culinary history that outline the important moments of agricultural history as well as a map of its current agricultural landscape. There is an inventory which lists all the main ingredients used in Sudanese cuisine as well as an illustrated glossary for pantry items, cooking utensils, Sudanese terminology and even some proverbs. 

Along the way, Omer weaves together the story of his family with the history of contemporary Sudan. Every few pages of recipes is punctuated by short autobiographical sketches. He starts with his early childhood in Khartoum and then recounts the difficulties of migration to Britain. At university, Omer embarked on his cooking journey. He started making trips to Sudan in 2018 and with two photographers in tow, the group systematically documented, prepared and photographed the dishes for over a year. Long road trips took them to the Nuba mountains and also deep into Al Fashir, and they made several stops to talk to people and to record recipes and cooking styles.  

In Sudanese Kitchen, food becomes a lens, a theory, a history, an aesthetic, and a manifesto. Despite the beauty of the book, it does not make for easy digestion (pun intended). It insists on political engagement and demands an interest in Sudan’s history, geography and culture. However, it is still very much a cookbook and remains grounded in the recipes. Omer is enthusiastic about making Sudanese food accessible to all and the recipes have been tried, tested, and translated so that everyone can give it a shot, and allow themselves to partake and immerse in the incredible and rich heritage of Sudan. 

Buy the book:

https://www.almasartfoundation.org/publications/12-the-sudanese-kitchen-the-sudanese-kitchen-omer-al-tijani/ 

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Writer, scholar, and educator Sunny Singh explains that everything she does “centers around finding ways to undo empire.” The world we have inherited is “an ongoing colonial project” and thus “the wars, the genocides that we're watching now, are still the same colonial wars.” 

Imperial powers have poured vast resources into usurping power through shaping narratives. “Before a single shot is fired, before a single grain of rice is confiscated as it happened in the Bengal famine; before a single package of aid is blocked, as is happening now in Gaza, there is a war of stories.” 

All of Singh’s work emphasizes the importance of writing back to these narratives and thus refusing those stories. Her recent story collection, Refuge: Stories of War (and Love), attempts to decenter the traditional war narrative by focusing on women’s perspectives. The stories are sparse, moving reflections on violence and suffering. 

At a stylistic level, the new collection might seem like a departure from Singh’s previous object of study: Bollywood cinema. But Singh argues that her writing on Bollywood comes from this same place of anti-colonial politics. 

Her 2023 book A Bollywood State of Mind: A Journey into the World’s Biggest Cinema is a memoir, but it is also an homage to the world’s oldest film industry. Singh offers an intimate glimpse into her own peripatetic childhood and youth, punctuated by songs from Hindi movies, family conversations about films, as well as happy memories of going to the cinema. As an adult, Singh was shocked to see the prejudice— even disdain— around scholarly writing about Bollywood. The scholars would insist on a very academic, objective, and neutral view, and Singh says that this “kind of demand is never made of a Hollywood scholar, or a French or Italian cinema scholar.” 

Singh wanted to write about Bollywood through an “emotional core” while paying attention to how “stories work” and “how they impact people and how they impact culture.” She believes that Bollywood historically had an anti-colonial impulse, even though some of today’s overtly nationalist cinema is disconcerting and needs to be critiqued. Unfortunately, “empire is built into the [Indian] nation state's DNA,” Singh says. 

Singh’s commitment to amplifying stories and storytellers that are marginalized in the mainstream is also evident in her founding of the Jhalak prize, an annual literary prize awarded to BAME writers (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) who are residents of Britain. Fed up with all-white juries, all-white longlists, and the false refrain about the lack of Black or brown writers, Singh decided to found a prize dedicated to her grandmother, whose words were an inspiration to her as a girl: “If you see something wrong, fix it.”

The prize is now ten years old, but it has been an uphill battle to get mainstream media to even cover it. They also had a member of parliament who even accused them of racism. But Singh laughs it off and soldiers on. “The issue is not individuals, it's the structure. I'm interested in knocking down the structure.” 

Singh says that almost 40% of children in the UK are now from a minority ethnic background, and publishing books by writers of color is urgent. “Every time that child reads a book that features someone like them, that features their family, that features their story, that's one kid who's had a little chip out of that imperial propaganda worldview knocked out. That's a child who's had one tiny taste of freedom.”

Further reading: https://www.sunnysingh.net/ 

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Kenya’s Muslim population has “long experienced political and economic marginalization” says Samar Al-Bulushi, anthropologist and author of War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, United States and the War on Terror. Samar traces a rather under-explored contemporary history; that of Kenya’s role in the US-led War on Terror. The book investigates the ways in which Kenya emerges as a significant geopolitical player during the first two decades of the 21st century. With the US outsourcing its wars, Kenya was molded into a willing and violent partner in counter-terrorism programs.

At the heart of Samar’s book are Kenyan Muslims--the real subjects of counter-terrorism policies, and the militarism, surveillance and policing that it sets in motion. She explains that “Kenya is not a site of drone strikes. It's not a site of US bombing. It's a site of much more mundane daily policing.” But these forms of policing have profoundly destabilizing effects. Just as US counter-terrorism policies have waged a war against Muslims globally, so too has Kenya but on a local level. Samar’s research urges for a clearer and granular understanding of these linked US-Kenyan histories.

“We're looking at 20 years of specialized police bodies that are accountable to no one, that operate in a very similar way to the ICE agents that we're seeing deployed on the streets of L.A., D.C., and across the United States today. They're not uniformed. They operate in vehicles that are unmarked so they can appear out of nowhere, no warning, knocking down doors, shooting people in their beds in the middle of the night.”

“And that,” Samar says, “is a dramatic change in terms of the experiences of Kenyan Muslims.”

It took several years of research for Samar to excavate these histories and to map them and connect them along a historical, geographical and cultural spectrum. Samar worked in the field of international human rights, and was with a group called the International Center for Transitional Justice when the election violence of 2007 and 2008 shook Kenya. “I was struck by the fact that all of my colleagues immediately jumped because so much of the violence had been perpetrated by the Kenyan police.” However, they also started offering “very prescriptive solutions for Kenya, one of the core ones being police reform.”

This was also exactly the moment that the US military command for Africa (AFRICOM) was being launched. Samar started to ask what “it would mean to put Kenya and the United States in a single analytic frame to be thinking about imperial entanglements.”

Samar spent a lot of time conducting research in Mombasa and the Kenyan coast, and she was invited into the intimate space of families whose relatives have been detained, disappeared and tortured. She also conducted interviews with activists who have been at the forefront of local organizing against these dangerous and often unlawful policies. These are touching stories that Samar places right at the beginning of each chapter thus humanizing and enlivening what is a scholarly, dense and theoretically challenging book. Samar found that these histories go far back to colonial times and to the early era of decolonization, but realized that an enormous cultural apparatus allows for these stories to remain under-reported and thus, for the most part, concealed. Kenya “has presented itself on the global stage as a peaceful country…as a leader…as modern, as civilized, cosmopolitan; every conceivable frame that will ensure that there's little to no scrutiny.”

But the moment for scrutiny has arrived. As Kenya enters one of its most turbulent moments in recent history with the Gen-Z protests against the financial and economic policies of President William Ruto, police brutality and horrific policing methods are now in the limelight. Ruto can't simply be replaced because "we would simply have business as usual with a new face.” Samar believes that the protesters need to broaden their understanding of Kenya's history while also building solidarities with similar movements worldwide.

One such learning moment presented itself with the deployment of Kenyan police to stabilize Haiti. On the one hand, they might simply be following American orders. On the other hand, with the Kenyan government cynically invoking the language of Pan-Africanism to justify this deployment might, in fact, “opens the door for both Kenyans and Haitians to be learning more about each other's histories and struggles against colonialism and imperialism.” Samar insists, optimistically: “There will always be that spirit, right?”

Further reading:

War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror by Samar Al-Bulushi https://www.sup.org/books/politics/war-making-worldmaking

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“I spent the first two months of the genocide in Gaza,” writer, professor and activist Haidar Eid explains. “In Gaza itself, I was displaced three times.” After being evacuated in December 2023, Eid went from Gaza to South Africa, which became his “fourth displacement.” He is now based on Johannesburg and has been closely scrutinizing the 20-point Gaza ceasefire plan strong-armed by Trump and Netanyahu.

Eid’s scrutiny revolves around whether this plan meets even the bare minimum of fundamental rights for people in Gaza, and for Palestinians as a whole. The plan, he says, is only focused on the first phase of hostage exchange and is vague about the next two phases, and deliberately exclude any Palestinian representation. Another bare minimum would be to call what has been going on a “genocide.” Despite a global consensus on the term from weighty international bodies, Eid is outraged that this ceasefire plan is premised on genocide denial. He wonders “whether this will really put an end to the ongoing genocide, or the genocide itself will take a different form.”

Born in Nuseirat refugee camp, and having lived in Gaza all his life, Eid embodies the struggles, and the fiery resilience and resistance of a generation of Gazans, all of whom have endured Israeli occupation and apartheid, including the series of brutal sieges. He reminds us that Ilan Pappe called Israel’s pre-October 7th policy in Gaza “incremental genocide,” and that Richard Falk, former UN Special Rapporteur, similarly called it a “prelude to genocide” several years ago. This time around, however, he says that it has been exponentially more violent and more genocidal.

“Gaza is the largest refugee reservoir,” Eid explains. He walks us through the history of how Israel created the Gaza strip in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced to the South, and then could not enter Egypt. Gaza has become “the cradle of Palestinian nationalism and the Palestinian revolution,” he says. From the late sixties onwards, “all Palestinian uprisings, the emergence of the Palestinian revolution, started in the Gaza Strip itself.

“So there it is: Israel wanted to punish the Palestinian people by punishing Gaza.”

In fact, Eid was in Gaza when the “deadly hermetic siege” of 2006 was imposed and was meant “to punish Palestinians for voting against the two-state solution, for voting for resistance, or rather, for voting against the Oslo Accords.”

Even as the Israeli onslaughts continued unabated over the years, it was 17 years later that October 7th presented Israel with the perfect opportunity to take its historically punitive approach towards Gaza to horrific new levels.

The 1993 Oslo Accords are a point of strife for Eid. We turn to his provocative short book Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind, which is an incisive analysis and rebuke of the “racist fiction of a two-state solution” for Palestine. The critique, inspired by Edward Said, argues that the Oslo agreements sowed the problematic seed of statehood but by cutting Palestine into two states. “Palestinian neo-nationalism is about everything that beautifies occupation, endorses normalization and defends the racist two-state solution as the solution to the Palestinian question regardless of the glaring fact that it denies the rights of two-thirds of the Palestinian people, namely refugees and Palestinian citizens of Israel,” writes Eid (31).

Eid is enraged that the Palestinian people have been persuaded to believe that “they could live, coexist rather, with settler colonialism, with apartheid, with ethnic cleansing.” This is impossible because, “first of all, you need to dismantle apartheid, dismantle settler colonialism, dismantle occupation, and after that you can start negotiating about coexistence.”

For Eid, who is a literature professor, these journeys must begin by immersing in the ideas of great revolutionary thinkers like Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, Edward Said, Steve Biko, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani, among others. It is vital to work towards decolonizing Palestinian minds and making them see alternative and radical futures for Palestine.

Eid moves between intellectual and political clarity and frenetic despair. The personal loss, for Eid, has been too tremendous to even grasp: 45 relatives killed, 39 colleagues at Al-Aqsa University, 288 of his students.

“I am part of this culture of sumud - steadfastness and resistance,” he reminds me. “This is the lesson I have learned from my people.”

Further reading:

Banging on the Walls of the Tank: Dispatches from Gaza by Haidar Eid (Foreword by Richard Falk), Between the Lines Books, 2025 https://btlbooks.com/book/banging-on-the-walls-of-the-tank

Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind (Afterword by Victoria Brittain) by Haidar Eid, Between the Lines Books, 2025 https://btlbooks.com/book/decolonizing-the-palestinian-mind

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Sisonke Msimang is clear that she is, first and foremost, an African.

“Despite the fact that Africa is not a country, I experience myself, I feel myself, to be African,” she tells me. Sisonke was born to South African activist parents and grew up “a child of the freedom struggle.” Even though she moved around a lot, Sisonke feels at home in many countries and continents, as well as within the global Black diaspora.

South Africa, however, remains a political and intellectual anchor. By the time she finished university there, “freedom was on its way,” and for Black South Africans, the challenge of building the country was monumental. After working in development and human rights organizations for several years, Sisonke experienced a “loss of faith in what international institutions could do, and what it meant to use the language of human rights.” The gap between what was promised on paper and in charters and the reality of the state’s conduct felt “viscerally clear.” She turned to writing to articulate these precise concerns, and to make sense of “a moment in which the promise of freedom and the promise of the liberation struggle was beginning to fade.”

Sisonke is the author of two books and dozens of essays and articles, all of which are deeply political and incisive works of cultural criticism centering Black women, race and racism, and Africa. Palestine has also been central to Sisonke’s writing, engagement and activism. She believes that progressive South Africans have instinctive solidarity for Palestine because they, too, have experienced apartheid and occupation.

“The parallel struggles between our people are impossible to ignore,” she says.

Yet questions of solidarity and the precise shape of political activism and engagement have also come under strain in an attention economy that is miserly and quick to devolve into a virtue signaling circus.

“I try very hard to remember, and to be rooted in what activism felt and looked like before we lived online,” she says when asked about why we choose to focus on some struggles and not others; why Palestine and why not Sudan or Congo? Before the times of social media and online activism, “there was no requirement, no capacity to be an activist on all issues at one time, nor was there a sense that you were somehow a lesser person, you were somehow less committed to social justice or to activism.”

Online activism creates a double bind because it functions as a “kind of panopticon,” according to Sisonke; there comes about a “surveillance of activism as performance.” It forces a politics of gesture that is preoccupied with visibility. “One can both seem to be more engaged than one actually is because of social media and because of what’s visible. And then one can also be assumed to be less involved and engaged…in ways that are not seen and not known to others on Sudan or Congo, simply because one is posting about Palestine.”

However, Sisonke sees a silver lining amidst the gloom and dejection of news from Gaza. In Australia, where Sisonke is now based, the genocide has brought Indigenous and Palestinian groups together, and mass mobilizations have started to take shape. Given the high levels of Islamophobia and anti-Indigenous and anti-Black sentiment in the country, there is now “a real feeling amongst groups, at community level, of folks who are othered by this settler colony, that we see each other and that we are very much in solidarity.”

Additionally, Sisonke also notes that there an “upswell in radical media” with new podcasts, substacks and writing initiatives popping up, speaking back to mainstream Australian politics. Palestine has made radical solidarities possible.

“What might be the role of the writer today?” I ask. Sisonke believes that everyone, and not just the writer, should be on “the front lines of fighting for justice.” But she is aware that it is particularly hard when there is a genocide being carried out, and when those very forces “have the power to silence you and to punish you for speaking up against that genocide.”

“It’s both more important and more difficult than ever to just be a human in this time,” she says. “So, I think the role of the writer is no special or no different from the role of anybody else. It is to show up and to speak the truth about what it is that you see.”

Subscribe to Sisonke’s newsletter: https://sisonkemsimang.substack.com/

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On October 25th, 2023, writer Omar El Akkad wrote a tweet about Palestine: “One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” The narratives about victims and victimizers were already so disproportionate, and the institutional silences so loud given the brutality we were plainly seeing, that El Akkad’s words immediately clicked.

The tweet went viral. It also became the title of El Akkad’s literary memoir that emerged out of his rage, shock and despair at the lack of public outcry against the live-streamed genocide of Palestinians.

"Will everyone have always been against this?" I ask El Akkad. It has now been two years. The slaughter continues. It is literally nonstop. Even the notion that somehow, someday, the world will take a substantive stand against this feels optimistic, even arcane. Shouldn’t the tide have turned by now?

El Akkad admits that the pace of change is at once glacial and agonizing, adding that he has a tendency for comprehending “pattern recognition.” When it comes to Palestine, he considers the time frames that have accompanied "other acts of colonial theft," and notes that "in some of those cases, we're talking about hundreds of years.”

We attempt to unpack the cynical wisdom has always been lodged in the middle part of El Akkad’s long sentence; the part which speaks to accountability, complicity, the safety of silence, and the act of naming, the “calling a thing what it is.”

El Akkad’s memoir was one of the first mainstream publications to engage with the horror unfolding in Palestine in a resounding way. It offers a map, and even more importantly, a language to grapple with the utter moral failure of a world that just will not stop a genocide.

The book alternates between recounting his family’s movement from Egypt to Qatar to Canada and tracking what was happening in Palestine from October 2023 onwards in the form of lyrical vignettes. At the core of this book is the story of El Akkad’s loss of faith in Western liberalism - an almost imperceptible yet powerful ideology that the West is a world governed by laws, rights, democracy, freedom of speech, all that good stuff. All of Western culture and Western institutions are invested in holding up this narrative, and El Akkad admits that he spent much of his life believing in these ideals and even chasing them. “Until the slaughter,” he writes.

“Even my superhuman capacity to compartmentalize has fallen apart over the last two years. There is a level of direct hypocrisy and there's a level of intimacy and immediacy to the violence and to the slaughter and to what is an ongoing genocide that essentially destroys that capacity.”

"Why has the narrative of the good liberal West endured for this long?" I ask.

“These are systems of endless taking," he replies. Systems like colonialism and capitalism are “systems without ceiling.” More importantly, these systems have built up an “immense narrative power that creates conditions where you can simultaneously be the underdog and the empire.” But he warns that this risk-reward mechanism that has undergided these systems is “being blown completely out of the water.” Today, every powerful Western edifice has fallen; from journalism to human rights to international law to education. And this is because eventually, “the snake starts to eat its own tail.”

El Akkad perfectly articulates the existential precipice that the world finds itself on, but he does not see any use for it. It seems futile to expound on the writer’s duty to witness and speak truth to power at a time when institutional silences reign supreme, and those that are in power concoct narratives that justify the indiscriminate killing.

“I've now borne witness to more dead kids than I can count. What the hell good have I done? I'm watching the most inhuman things be done every single day. And maybe I come up with the most profound or beautifully written way to write about it. Who cares? All of the sort of ready-made answers that I've kept in my back pocket that allow me to justify what it means to spend your life telling stories feels so incredibly hollow right now.”

We return to the theme of time. El Akkad says that “in ten, twenty, thirty years time, there's gonna be so many beautifully written novels about all of that horrible stuff that happened way back then. And they're gonna be written by the same people who are saying absolutely nothing right now. And they're gonna win awards and they're gonna be treated with such reverence because it's gonna be safe.” He says that this will be infuriating but he is certain that the maybe book he has written “doesn't do anything at all, but at least it's not that, right?”

Further reading:

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/777485/one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this-by-omar-el-akkad/

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“I have been writing this book almost my whole life,” Maxamed Abumaye admits when asked about the motivation behind his recently published Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence. Though this is a scholarly book published by a university press, Maxamed deviates from the academic format by making his own life story central to the text. He writes about his family’s journey as they fled the civil war in Somalia and spent many years in a refugee camp in Kenya before being resettled to the US.

In the US, Maxamed realized that the violence of American military interventions in Somalia during the 1990s that had displaced his family and turned them into refugees boomeranged right back into their lives in San Diego, California. This violence had become part of the daily lives of the large population of Somali refugees in the San Diego area in the form of “militarized police units breaking down people's doors to deliver search warrants…Imagine someone who experienced the trauma of war, refugee resettlement and now has militarized SWAT teams breaking down their doors?”

Even as Maxamed explores this vicious cycle of surveillance, policing, and brutality in great depth, he foregrounds the fact that “Somalis have found a way to resist that violence and to build life and homes in the context of deprivation.” Maxamed witnessed these modes of resistance and world-making firsthand with his family and the larger community. He speaks about “the ways in which we came together, we organized, we built lives, we built community without very little state intervention, where that intervention was often violence.”

While Black Muslim Refugee focuses on San Diego’s Somali refugee community, it also stages a much broader intervention. For starters, the book offers a history of contemporary Somalia, tracing where the country, as well as its diaspora, finds itself today. Secondly, given his personal experience and having conducted extensive interviews with Somalis who have spent years in limbo in refugee camps, Maxamed formulates a complex and cogent critique of humanitarianism.

In particular, we speak about “humanitarian violence,” a concept that seems like an oxymoron to many who see humanitarianism as force for benevolence and charity. Here, Maxamed explains that the refugee camps are places of great precarity where people are enclosed and lack freedom of movement. Food scarcity is a daily reality and cruel forms of calorie rationing means that families often go hungry. In addition, the policing and hyper-securitized environment are not conducive to safety and general wellbeing.

Finally, a key feature of Black Muslim Refugee is Maxamed’s exploration of the experiences of the Somali triple identity formation of simultaneously Black, Muslim, and a refugee. At a time when border regimes are more draconian than ever, when anti-Muslim hatred is on the rise and when anti-Blackness has become structural to policing, Maxamed’s research feels particularly poignant. By virtue of being Black, Muslim and refugee all at once, he believes that Somalis might be able to pave the path for strategic organizing against police and against militarism, broadly.

The Black Lives Matter movement became a turning point for young Somalis as African-Americans, Somalis, Nigerians and Caribbean people came together against police harassment. For Somalis, it became clear that straddling all three identities meant they had a unique understanding of the situation, and Somali youth began mobilizing and coming together more than they had before. “Now, as of 2025, Somali youth are in leadership positions in Black Lives Matter movement.”

Maxamed believes that these Black, Muslim and refugee Somalis are changing the system from within by arguing that BLM is not just an American issue but that violence against Blacks and Muslims is a global and diasporic issue. Thus, “young Somalis are actually changing BLM organizing to think beyond the United States.”

Is there any hope for radical futures when it comes to the abolition of policing? I ask. Maxamed is hopeful. Exposure to BLM activism and organizing has allowed us to see a future “in which police are not considered natural and normal, but are an aberration to everyday life.” Maxamed believes that a radical future is possible due to a radical past: history has shown us that “there have been alternatives to policing that have existed and continue to exist, and that we can function as society outside of that.”

Further reading: 

Black Muslim Refugee: Militarism, Policing, and Somali American Resistance to State Violence by Maxamed Abumaye. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/black-muslim-refugee/paper 

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If you’re being censored or policed, “you learn to recognize the signals your body sends you,” writer Anna Badkhen explains. A few months ago, Anna had turned down an invitation to participate in PEN America’s World Voices festival to protest their “absolutely despicable treatment” of Palestinian writers and journalists. She articulated the reasons for her boycott in a letter which she posted on social media, and in response, Anna received a missive from PEN America that, to her, sounded very much like a threat. She realized right away that it physically triggered memories from when she was a young journalist working within the totalitarian state structure in Russia.

Censorship did not always mean obviously grisly modes of surveillance and violence, and Anna understood this early on in her career. Her recent article titled “The Pen and the Sword: Censorship Threatens Us All” exposes the ways in which dissenting opinions are censored without any legible arm twisting involved. In publishing and in journalism, the “machine of censorship” does not simply involve strikethrough edits or refusal to publish a particular author or a straight-up ban. It can be much subtler with an editor pushing for certain line edits, tonal changes or asking for the use of different terminology. It can also come in the guise of a conversation where the threat to comply is veiled. It is about making the writer bend to a particular narrative through subtle turns in language and style.

Anna has refused to take off her keffiyeh for the last two years, and says that Palestine has unmasked everything and everybody. She believes that “the literary establishment and all the so-called liberal intelligentsia in the United States and in the West overall” can be placed in three categories today: “Groups that are genocide deniers, groups that are unable to stand by in silence, and then a group that is racist enough to be okay with not saying anything.”

For Anna who is a writer with 7 books to her name and over 30 years of experience in writing about war, it is the third group, the silent ones, that are deeply disconcerting. Their silence is not only a sign of complicity but of a more troubling type of self-censorship. Even if any individual writer or journalist or academic has everything to lose from speaking out about Palestine, Anna insists that we should all be cultivating a “moral sense of proportion.” After all, it is not her home that is being “firebombed” but it is the Palestinians that are living with extraordinary levels of savagery wreaked upon them for over 600 days.

Yet another mode of stealthy censorship that Anna exposes is the kind of journalism practiced by the New York Times who have succeeded in creating and sustaining a caste of people who are “Progressive Except for Palestine.” This PEP group has fomented deep divisions in the US and Anna believes that the New York Times must be taken to court “the way that Radio Mille Collines went on trial after Rwanda.” Justice could come sooner, however. Resistance would require journalists to walk out of newsrooms right now yet the structures of dehumanization are so deeply embedded within the very people who claim to do the work of truth-telling. This dehumanization has become the norm because we are currently living in “a world order facilitated by the absolute failure of love.”

As we contend with gloomy, existential questions about a world gone awry with hatred and violence, Anna insists on snapping out of it to speculate upon radical futures for our planet. She evokes James Baldwin’s beautiful line about how love has never been a popular movement: “The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people,” Baldwin said. Anna builds on Baldwin to remind us that “love is an active verb” and that love has “to be practiced, to be maintained.” It is simple. Rising out from the spiral of hatred and from the ashes of violence can only happen if we “cultivate love.”

What is the role of writer in a time of genocide, I ask? Her reply comes through a poem by Zbigniew Herbert who wrote that “you were saved not in order to live, you have little time, you must give testimony.” For Anna, this translates into an “obligation to remember to speak with humility” and “an obligation to remember the difference between professional risks and the daily life and death of the people to whom we owe witness.”

Further reading:

-The Pen and the Sword: Censorship Threatens Us All by Anna Badkhen, The Markaz Review: https://themarkaz.org/the-pen-and-the...

-For all the writing by Anna Badkhen: https://www.annabadkhen.com/

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Whether its legacy figures like Cecil Rhodes, Mahatma Gandhi and B.R Ambedkar, or various military men or aggressive phallic sculptures, statues are the public’s direct and unavoidable encounter with institutionally constructed histories. They represent the supremacy of colonialism, race, caste and gender, and so movements centered on either dismantling  or building them have become critical for understanding charged debates around history and memory today. Rahul Rao’s book The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire explores these global controversies, and offers radical insights into how the past, present and future is made and re-made through statues and monuments in the public spheres. 

Rahul’s inquiry began with a simple question: “How can an apparently inanimate object like a statue arouse so much fervor, and affect those attacking it and those seeking to preserve it?” These questions about arousal and attachment led to the realization that like large advertisement billboards, statues are non-consensual: “They enter our sight lines without permission, right?” They wield power because of their assaulting presence. Rahul found himself turning to the language of psychoanalysis to understand our collective relationship to statues and to move past the “ordinary observation that statues are phallic objects. He found that statues are a “a peculiar combination of aggression and vulnerability,” and this is precisely why their exposure in the public sphere “makes them vulnerable to attack and to reinscription.” 

These questions prompted a journey through places where statues and monuments have elicited a frenzy: South Africa, Ghana, US, UK and India where protesters were dismantling statues, as powerful political institutions were erecting new ones. These overlapping and opposing actions were occurring at a dizzying speed, as movements like RhodesMust Fall, Black Lives Matter as well the Covid-19 pandemic were unmasking systemic inequality worldwide. 

India, for Rahul, is at the heart of this book with two of the middle chapters dedicated to exploring statues of figures of Gandhi, Ambedkar, Vallabhbhai Patel who are in a volatile constellation of moving and shifting,  resurrected and felled within the Indian polity. The popular Indian culture of “darshan”—the act of making eye contact with god (rather, the idol of a god) —is a significant moment of worship and, in fact, manifests itself in the building of statues not just of gods but also of revered figures. They become ways to both claim space, and of“asserting identity, asserting pride in a particular community, in its history, in its mythology, in its icons.” From the 1960s onwards, the Dalit movement was successful in building statues of Ambedkar all over India and this was “probably the most viral statue building phenomenon anywhere in the world.” 

However, Rahul zooms in on the last 10 years, as the Hindu right-wing attempts to respond to history and memory-making through their own rush to build statues. He travels around Gujarat in the hope of understanding the ways in which the legacies of Vallabhai Patel and Gandhi are being valorized and desecrated, respectively. In an attempt to build tourist infrastructure for the museumization of figures like Patel, indigenous people are forcibly displaced from their land. Thus, within this “heartland of Hindu right politics” Rahul encounters a dystopic new India where dynamics of settler colonialism are “unfolding in the postcolonial state.” 

The book, as well as our conversation, returns to decolonization, and ways in which the concept has been co-opted and corrupted by right-wing movements. Even as the world looks bleak and the situation in Palestine only worsens, Rahul urges new ways of reading and re-engaging with old school thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ambedkar. “We need to relate to these figures less like trophies or canon. We need to engage in less of the sacral reading and in a more comradely reading.”

Further reading:

The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire by Rahul Rao (Pluto Press, 2025) https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745350769/the-psychic-lives-of-statues/

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