The Chatterbox

In this episode, Professor Mamadou Diawara (MIASA Director Germany) and Vanessa Barish (MECAM) speak with Dr. Abdourahamane Seck. Dr. Seck provides a compelling analysis of Memography, an approach that centers African in knowledge production. He explores how knowledge is generated, shared, and contested within African contexts, offering fresh insights into the broader conversations on inequality and freedom.

Featured Guest:

Dr. Abdourahamane Seck from Gaston Berger University in Senegal is a prominent scholar with a multidisciplinary background encompassing philosophy, anthropology, and modern and contemporary African history. Dr. Seck was a Fellow at MIASA from September to December 2023. He has widely published on Islam, migration, and the question of the in-commons in Africa (West Africa – Senegal).

One issue where President-elect Trump hammered home the differences between his plans and those of Kamala Harris was immigration. For a decade, the public has been increasingly worried about the number of people turning up at the southern border, the number of people seeking asylum in the US, and perhaps more quietly, about the changing face of America.

Ray Suarez spoke with Ted Hesson, immigration reporter for Reuters, about how the Trump administration will handle immigration differently than Joe Biden. Then, he shares what he learned while reporting and writing We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century, with veteran journalist Shereen Marisol Meraji.

Guests: 

Ted Hesson, immigration reporter for Reuters

Shereen Marisol Meraji, assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism

Host:  

Ray Suarez, host, On Shifting Ground

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In this wonderfully esoteric yet very important episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on Alejandro Pedregal to discuss his marvelous co-authored historical article The Early Socio-ecological Dimensions of Tricontinental (1967–1971) : A Sovereign Social Metabolism for the Third World.  This piece was published in one of our favorite journals, a resource that you really should all be utilizing, Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy.  In this discussion, we talk about OSPAAAL, the Cuban Third World solidarity institution and in particular its magazine Tricontinental, the way it framed sovereignty and the implicit ecological messaging within.  A fascinating conversation, and one which we think you will find a lot of use in!

Alejandro Pedregal is a Research Council of Finland Fellow, and is based at Aalto University.  You can keep up to date with Alejandro's work by checking out his institutional page from Aalto University, and by following him on twitter @AlejoPedregal

Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

On this week's MACRODOSE: James Meadway explores the new Cold War as Trump gears up to escalate US-China trade tensions (1:47) and examines the broader geopolitical and environmental shifts challenging the postwar order (12:04).

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From rock & roll to contemporary pop, Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music (Repeater, 2024) is a timely and original exploration of popular music’s role in shaping our society. Told through a Marxist lens, Toby Manning traces the last seventy years of political and social upheavals through its most iconic US and UK-based music.

Mixing Pop and Politics examines the connections between popular music and political ideology and explores themes like the liberation of rock ’n’ roll, containment of girl groups, defiance of glam, resignation of soft rock, the communal spirit of disco, and the individualism of 1980s pop. Spanning the early 1950s to today, the book reveals how music—from doo-wop to hip-hop, punk to crunk, and grunge to grime—has both reflected and resisted the political forces of its time.

Toby Manning is the author of The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd (2006) and John le Carré and the Cold War (2018).

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The first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by a science fiction fan. So opens Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness, a book that traces ideas about white nationalism through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine and inhabit the future. Here, Carroll is joined in conversation with David M. Higgins.

Jordan S. Carroll is the author of Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (Stanford University Press, 2021) and Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). He received his PhD in English literature from the University of California, Davis. He was awarded the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and his first book won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars. Carroll’s writing has appeared in American Literature, Post45, Twentieth-Century Literature, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and The Nation. He works as a writer and educator in the Pacific Northwest.

David M. Higgins (he/they) is associate professor of English and chair of the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide, and a senior editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. David is the author of Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood, which won the 2022 Science Fiction Research Association Book Award. He has also published a critical monograph examining Ann Leckie’s SF masterwork Ancillary Justice (2013), and his research has been published in journals such as American Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa, and Extrapolation. In the public sphere, David has been a featured speaker on NPR’s radio show On Point, and his literary journalism has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Guardian. David serves as the second vice president for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).

EPISODE REFERENCES:
James H. Madole

Richard B. Spencer

Dune (Frank Herbert)

The Iron Dream (Norman Spinrad)

Samuel Delany

Alain Badiou

Francis Parker Yockey / “destiny thinking”

“Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind” by Elisabeth Zerofsky, on Robert Paxton. New York Times Magazine.

Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky)

Fredric Jameson

Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

“Carroll reminds us that our future is contingent. Fascists have a vision for the future that excludes most of humanity, but fascists can be defeated. The future is for everyone—if we make it that way.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

In part two of our series about the 1970s journalistic experiment known as the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, IDEAS turns to journalists who continue to grapple with the challenges that were first highlighted more than five decades ago. Their concerns and critiques about representation and fairness at the heart of those conversations persist in newsrooms today. 

Our modern global trading system is broken. How can we fix it?

We seem to have moved beyond the free trade consensus of the globalization era. Few politicians today still publicly support the assumption that trade, unrestricted by national borders, makes everyone more prosperous. Under President Trump, the United States has wielded tariffs and industrial policy to reshape the international trade order to better serve American interests, and the Biden administration has upheld and doubled down on many of these. But these interventions do not yet add up to a new trade policy consensus.

This week's episode dives into a provocative new argument: in order to achieve freer trade, the world needs more trade interventions. What is global trade policy doing wrong? What new trade rules are needed to create a system that both harnesses the benefits of free trade and preserves nations' freedom to direct their economies? And what policy interventions might help foster this future of freer trade? Sophia discusses these questions and more with Michael Pettis, a nonresident Senior Fellow for Carnegie China and expert on China's economy.

1. Michael Pettis and Erica Hogan, "Trade Intervention for Freer Trade," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 3, 2024.