The Malcolm Effect

A 3 way conversation with the legendary Robin Kelley. In this episode Christian and I discuss with Robin Kelley on matters related to our present moment and his works. 

Born in New York City, Kelley earned his Bachelor's degree from California State University, Long Beach, in 1983. By 1987 he had earned a masters in African history and doctorate in US history from UCLA.[8]

After earning his doctorate, he began his career as an Assistant Professor at Southeastern Massachusetts University, then to Emory University, and the University of Michigan, where he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. He later moved to the Department of History at New York University, where he was promoted to the rank of Professor and taught courses on U.S. history, African-American history, and popular culture. At the age of 32, he was the youngest full professor at NYU.[8] He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford.

Kelley has spent most of his career exploring American and African-American history, with a particular emphasis on radical social movements and the political dynamics at work within African-American culture, including jazz, hip-hop, and visual arts.[9][10][11]

Although influenced by Marxism, Kelley has eschewed a doctrinaire Marxist approach to aesthetics and culture, preferring a modified surrealist approach. He has described himself in the past as a "Marxist surrealist feminist who is not just anti something but pro-emancipation, pro-liberation."[12]

Kelley has also used the concept of racial capitalism in his work

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What is revolutionary education? Sham and I discuss the current educational system and why reading Paulo Freire's Pedagogy can provide much needed insight into developing a radical education

Sham is a Baghdad born Masters in Law graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations and Development. Sham so the co-founder of A is for Activism, a local grassroots bookclub that focuses on works of radical Marxists

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Are you aware how racism plays a role in climate justice activism? Athian helps me unpack how the two are connected.

Athian Akec is an 18 year old activist, writer and speaker. His main areas of focus are climate change, youth violence and racial inequality. As a part of this he's written for the Guardian, Independent, Huffpost, I-d magazine, Huck Magazine, Hunger Mag and other national newspapers. Additionally he's spoken in the House of Commons as a part of the UK Youth Parliament. Athian also sits on the board of a youth charity and a commission in Camden focusing on economic renewal following the pandemic.

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A catch up with my dear friend Christian on some of the things we’re thinking about currently. 

Christian Joseph is a recent college graduate, who has a keen interest in political economy and questions that concern Black liberation 

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We often here that you cannot separate race from capitalism or that we can reform capitalism and make it more ethical. Listen in as I discuss with Dr. CBS on what is the link between race and capitalism, the myth of black capitalism, black liberals and advice on how we should organise

Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is the 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar in the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago and an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College. She is the co-lead of the Black Alliance for Peace Research & Political Education Team. A scholar of critical Black studies, political theory, political economy, and intellectual history, Burden-Stelly is the co-author, with Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Antiblackness, Anticommunism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the United States. Burden-Stelly’s published work appears in journals including Small Axe, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, and the CLR James Journal. Her public scholarship can be found in venues including Monthly Review, Boston Review, and Black Perspectives. She is the host of “The Last Dope Intellectual” podcast, which is part of the Black Power Media network and the co-editor of The Black Agenda Review.

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We are still reeling from the government’s terrible race report. Listen in to my conversation with Deej about what our focuses should be in terms of organising and going forward. 

Khadijah Diskin is a PhD Researcher in Psychology. Her research explores the psychosocial dimension of Black students experiences in British higher education, using Lacanian discourse analysis to interrogate the intersubjective convergences of race, coloniality and neoliberalisation.

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The Government’s Race report has concluded that there is no institutional racism in the U.K. 

Listen in as I discuss with Dr. Nick Guyatt as we unpack the report

Nick Guyatt teaches American history at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He’s written about history, race and politics for the Guardian, the New York Times, the London Review of Books and many other publications. His most recent book is Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (Basic Books, 2016). 

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A lot of you asked me to do a breakdown of commonly used terminology that we hear in politics and economics. So I sat down with Vijay Prashad, where we talk all things Marxism. 

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, commentator, and a Marxist intellectual. He is an executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books.

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What does it mean to be a pan African feminist? In this episode I had the privilege to speak to Dr. Layla Brown-Vincent as she helped unpack these terms.  

Layla Brown-Vincent is a member of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party-GC and currently works as an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.  

Layla earned a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University in her home state of North Carolina where her research focused on Black racial identity formation in Latin America and the US and its impact on Black Radical Organising in the era of Black Lives Matter.  She is currently working on her first book manuscript Return to the Source: The Dialectics of 21st Century Pan-African Liberation based largely on her dissertation research.  

Layla spent all of 2020 as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study where her research expanded to examine the crisis of racial capitalism and the COVID-19 pandemic.  In the fall of 2021 she will be a Senior Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research. Her most recent scholarly work “The Pandemic of Racial Capitalism: Another World Is Possible” can be found in From the European South: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities.

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