Marta Figlerowicz thinks Maria Janion’s political insights are key to navigating our present chaos

Marta Figlerowicz thinks Maria Janion’s political insights are key to navigating our present chaos

Why does the nation trigger so much emotion in us? How does being from a specific country shape our understanding of identity, and when does it drift into dangerous territory? Maria Janion, one of Eastern Europe’s most profound and original intellectuals, explores this fine line, and Marta Figlerowicz unpacks the trajectory of her thinking for us in The Bad Child. Janion witnessed some of the most consequential events of the turbulent twentieth century: the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland, German occupation during World War II, Soviet control, and Poland’s uneasy integration into the West. As Western countries face their own nationalist resurgences, Figlerowicz believes that Maria Janion’s insights on political ontology are tools for helping us navigate our present chaos. Marta Figlerowicz teaches comparative literature at Yale University. She is a theorist of literature from the eighteenth century to the present and of contemporary visual media. Working in over ten languages, she studies how aesthetic objects depict and mediate interpersonal and transcultural communication. Her first two books, Flat Protagonists (2016) and Spaces of Feeling (2017) reflect on trans-personal and transcultural communication within the purview of literary studies. Her current book in progress, It Must Be Possible: Global Modernisms and the Problem of Transcultural Knowledge, offers an intellectual history of the entanglements of anthropology and comparative literature at the beginning of the twentieth century from the perspectives of ethnically, racially, or (geo)politically marginalized modernist writers. Alongside her academic writing, she comments on contemporary American and Eastern European literature, film, and politics in venues such as Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Paris Review, and Boston Review. Figlerowicz was born in Poznan, Poland, and moved to the United States as a teenager. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her doctorate from UC Berkeley. A member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, her research has also been sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two daughters.#philosophy #psychoanalysis #nationalism #theory #identitypolitics #race #belonging #territory #subjectivity #mariajanion #sovietunion #anticolonialism

Alexander Gallant & Joel Plaskett harmonize on concept albums & finding the lyrical in everyday life

Alexander Gallant and Joel Plaskett are songwriters based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They have both written extraordinary records that take genre and move it a few degrees to the left to make something unexpected. In this conversation, we talk about Plaskett's foundational relationship to the Halifax Pop Explosion of the 1990s, the music that made that scene, and the ways that sacred spaces for musicmaking and performance solidify a sense of place. Joel was a member of Thrush Hermit in the 1990s, but has written and produced albums solo and with The Emergency in the decades since. Alexander is a prolific folk songwriter with a remarkable new album called The Prince of Birchy Head that is replete with meditations on being pulled madly out in opposite directions: toward love, away from greed, but also toward struggle and away from beauty. We chat about where their inspiration comes from, the pitfalls of social media, the power of working collectively to build and protect vitality at the local level, and how their paths converge at 45 Portland Street in gritty, gorgeous downtown Dartmouth. When you hear a song that speaks to you, listen again. If it stays with you, it pays to wonder why. #songwriting [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/songwriting] #writing [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/writing] #creativity [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/creativity] #inspiration [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/inspiration] #music [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/music] #musicians [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/musicians] #producing [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/producing] #sound [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/sound] #popculture [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/popculture] #art [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/art] #mcluhan [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/mcluhan] #novascotia [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/novascotia] #dartmouth [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/dartmouth] #halifax [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/halifax] #livemusic [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/livemusic] #historyofmusic [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/historyofmusic] #localmusic [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/localmusic]

Steven Swarbrick conceives of a world where Palestine is free because none of us "belong"

What might the politics of masochism be able to do for the dangerously stagnant politics of liberation Is masochism more mobilizing than empathy? Empathy requires the Palestinian to be a "perfect victim," to use Mohammed El-Kurd's phrase. It says that the other must remain othered in its incomprehensible but familiar suffering. Masochism, on the other hand, insists that we are all Palestinian, or that we are not free until we are all free.It's too easy to forget that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. The idea of building solidarity by engaging with the question of how solidarity is created and sustained feels relevant right now, as even ersatz or gestural solidarity fades from view. Even when it was front and center, that gestural solidarity clearly wasn't generating the systemic transformation needed to produce an end to Israeli apartheid, the Zionist regime's immiseration and domination of Gaza. The expanding solidarity the world has seen since 2023--with the erasure of thousands of Palestinian lives, the reduction of Gaza to rubble, the increased suffocation of life in the West Bank and the ramping up of Israel's imperial ambitions in the region more broadly--has done effectively nothing to stem the perpetrating of ethnonationalist violence. Dwelling with that fact leads us to talk about the encampments that spontaneously formed on university campuses as part of the global solidarity movement. At the core of the discussion is this question of how a movement that seems unstoppable can still be stopped, and what it means to try and keep going, especially at a time when ultra-right militarism and US-Israeli nationalism is becoming more explicitly fascistic in nature. As Swarbrick puts it in his book: the US state is now focused on what you call "maintenance." This is "maintenance of the idea that this is it, that there can be no other way of things, no other world but the world as we know it, a world devoid of the event, truth, equality, and freedom." I ask Steven, ultimately, whether there is any choice but the choice of division, the choice of opposing oneself against the fascist goons who talk openly about wanting to see the world burn. His response hinges on the inherent violence of "belonging," and the goal of embracing a different kind of radical love that isn't just invested in identification with a cause. ⁠#freegaza⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#don⁠⁠tstoptalkingaboutpalestine ⁠⁠#israel⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#zionism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#usempire⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#imperialism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#lebanon⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#iran⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#antioppression⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#anticolonialism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#antiimperialism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#psychoanalysis⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#liberation⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#leftpolitics⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#nationalism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#ethnonationalism⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#genocide⁠⁠ ⁠⁠#gazagenocide⁠⁠

Vijay Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan want a world where "sustainability" isn't meaningless

Vijay Kolinjivadi is an assistant professor at the School for Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is also a co-editor of the website Uneven Earth. The co-author, with Aaron Vansintjan, of The Sustainability Class (The New Press), he has been published in Al Jazeera, New Internationalist, Truthout, and The Conversation. He lives in Montreal.Aaron Vansintjan is the founder and co-editor of Uneven Earth and co-author of The Future Is Degrowth. He has been published in The Guardian, Truthout, openDemocracy, and The Ecologist. The co-author, with Vijay Kolinjivadi, of The Sustainability Class (The New Press), he lives in Montreal. The Sustainability Class is about those wealthy “progressive” urbanites convinced that we can save the planet through individual action, smart urbanism, green finance, and technological innovation. Kolinjivadi and Vansintjan challenge many of the popular ideas about environmentalism, showing that it is actually the sustainability class itself that is unsustainable. The solutions they propose work to safeguard an elite minority, exclude billions of people, and ultimately hasten ecological breakdown, not reverse it. A sustainability apartheid is emerging. More than ever, urban residents want to be green, yet to cater to their interests, a green-tech service economy has sprung up, co-opting well-intentioned concerns over sustainability to sell a resource-heavy and exclusive “lifestyle environmentalism.” This has made cities more unsustainable and inaccessible to the working class.#sustainability [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/sustainability] #cooptation [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/cooptation] #greencities [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/greencities] #lifestyleenvironmentalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/lifestyleenvironmentalism] #lifestyle [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/lifestyle] #climateaction [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/climateaction] #radicalpolitics [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/radicalpolitics] #anticapitalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/anticapitalism] #anticonsumerism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/anticonsumerism] #ecosocialism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/ecosocialism] #solidarityisaverb [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/solidarityisaverb]

Arang Keshavarzian examines the politics of modern Iran and devises an escape from perpetual war

Arang Keshavarzian is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He’s one of the most shrewd thinkers you’ll see on the politics of modern Iran and the Persian Gulf because he pays serious attention to how social and economic hierarchies constrain the formation of political solidarity. His most recent book is Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East. That text studies the history of the Persian Gulf both in terms of the politics of its naming, and the politics of geography. This idea, that geography is political, stands at the centre of our conversation here. With the world’s publics, news outlets and governments hyper-focused on the Strait of Hormuz, Keshavarzian is focused on helping others grasp the fact that while the strait is currently a chokepoint, it has historically been a gateway. What if international relations could be revolutionized to protect the strait with something other than drones and bombs? The weapon of multilateralism is underused, but Keshavarzian believes that it might be the most powerful way to open up new pathways to environmental protection, social vibrancy and a more inclusive model of prosperity. In his article “Iran Transformed,” he historicizes the rise of austerity economics and politics in Iran, and the ways that this funneled wealth to a ruling elite in a country already beset by sanctions and isolation. This shift to privatization and monopoly capitalism “entrenched and empowered” the ruling class “by halting the economic redistribution that had been underway prior to 2012.” Iran’s support for Palestinian liberation is a key focus here, too, as it has in many ways defined its relationships with other states in the region, especially the genocidal regime in Israel. Fundamentally, though, the interview gravitates to the question of orientalism and Islamophobia, and its geopolitical consequences. Keshavarzian insists that “depictions of the region” present it as “peripheral to world history, an endemic zone of conflict, an energy depot for expanding industrial capitalism elsewhere, or a bastion of traditional tribalism and petro-monarchies.” The world, though, is beginning to realize that it the so-called “Middle East” is a fulcrum of global politics, and a part of the Earth that much of the planet is still reliant upon, and not just for fossil energy.#straitofhormuz [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/straitofhormuz] #oilshock [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/oilshock] #economiccrisis [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/economiccrisis] #globalrecession [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/globalrecession] #iran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/iran] #iranpolitics [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/iranpolitics] #iranianrevolution [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/iranianrevolution] #persiangulf [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/persiangulf] #anticolonialism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/anticolonialism] #palestine [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/palestine] #freepalestine [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/freepalestine] #israel [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/israel] #uspolicy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/uspolicy] #usforeignpolicy [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/usforeignpolicy] #neoliberalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/neoliberalism] #waroniran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/waroniran] #freeiran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/freeiran] #islamophobia [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/islamophobia] #orientalism [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/orientalism] #revolution [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/revolution]