“Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957” with Sarah Balakrishnan

Fanon and Glissant on Breaking with the Colonial Past with David Ventura

Show notes: In this episode, I'm joined by David Ventura, Associate Res earcher at Newcastle University, whose work engages the Black Radical Tradition, colonial temporality, and practices of refusal. We discuss his recent article, "History and Histories: Fanon and Glissant on Breaking with the Colonial Past," which revisits an enduring question within decolonial thought: What relationship should struggle for liberation have to the past? Drawing together the work of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, Ventura challenges readings that position the two thinkers in opposition. Instead, he argues that both provide indispensable resources for thinking about how colonial histories continue to structure contemporary life, while also illuminating the traces of resistance, invention, and fugitivity that make decolonized futures imaginable. Our conversation explores Fanon's psychiatric practice in Algeria, Glissant's distinction between History with a capital "H" and plural histories, the political significance of creolization, debates surrounding Negritude, and competing interpretations of revolutionary rupture, historical memory, and the possibility of invention. Along the way, we consider what it means to read Fanon and Glissant together, not as rivals, but as complementary thinkers whose work helps us better understand the temporalities of colonialism, the persistence of its afterlives, and the poetic and ethical practices through which they might be refused. Biography: David Ventura is an Associate Researcher at Newcastle University (UK), where he recently completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship focused on Édouard Glissant. Broadly speaking, David’s work engages the Black radical tradition to interrogate how the history of transatlantic slavery continues to structure the political coordinates of today’s world, as well as the radical practices and poetics through which that structuration might be displaced and refused. David’s research has featured in Philosophy & Social Criticism, The C.L.R. James Journal, and with German Primera, he recently co-edited a special issue of Paragraph on the topic of time and refusal. David is currently working on a book project, titled Poetics of Refusal: Refiguring Fugitivity with Édouard Glissant, which expounds Glissant’s imaginary of refusal by examining a series of figures of refusal that appear in his fictional writings.  Links: https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase26?openform&fp=clrjames&id=clrjames_2024_0030_0001_0221_0248 [https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase26?openform&fp=clrjames&id=clrjames_2024_0030_0001_0221_0248]

Western Civilization in Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism with Zeyad el Nabolsy

Patreon.com/everythingisideology [https://Patreon.com/everythingisideology] Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology [https://Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology] Show Notes: In this episode of  I sit down with philosopher Zeyad el Nabolsy to discuss his article, "The Concept of Western Civilization in Black Marxism: Cedric Robinson as an Ethnophilosopher." Together, we explore one of the most influential and debated texts in Black Studies and political theory: Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism. Our conversation examines Robinson's conception of Western civilization as a transhistorical formation structured by racism, his account of the Black Radical Tradition, and his critique of Marxism. We discuss whether racism can be understood as a continuous essence running from classical antiquity to the modern world, the relationship between capitalism and racial domination, and the historical development of concepts such as equality, human rights, slavery, and dehumanization. Along the way, we explore the Valladolid debate, Aristotle's theory of natural slavery, the Haitian Revolution, liberalism and its emancipatory possibilities, the influence of Western intellectual traditions on anti-colonial thinkers such as C.L.R. James and Amílcar Cabral, and the methodological debates surrounding ethnophilosophy and African philosophy. We also consider Robinson's treatment of Islam, Orientalism, and the broader question of how intellectual traditions travel, transform, and become tools for liberation in new historical contexts. Biopgraphy: Zeyad el Nabolsy has a Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He has an M.A. in philosophy and a B. Eng. (in chemical engineering) from McMaster University. Zeyad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at York University. His main area of focus is modern African Intellectual History. His dissertation "Science, Modernity, and Progress in Nineteenth Century West and North Africa: A Comparative Study of Africanus Horton and Rifa’a al-Tahtawi" seeks to answer the question: how does our understanding of the role of modern science in African societies change when we cease to ignore the early reception of some of the modern sciences by nineteenth century African intellectuals such as Africanus Horton (1835–1883) in West Africa and Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801 - 1873) in North Africa, prior to the Scramble for Africa? Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08935696.2025.2516348 [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08935696.2025.2516348]

“Fueling Masculinity: How Ads for Plant-Based Burgers and Electric Trucks Reinforce Gender Norms and Resist Sustainable Imaginaries" with Emily Contois

patreon.com/everythingisideology [https://patreon.com/everythingisideology] buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology. [https://buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideology.] Show notes: In this episode, I sit down with Emily Contois to discuss her recently published article, “Fueling Masculinity: How Ads for Plant-Based Burgers and Electric Trucks Reinforce Gender Norms and Resist Sustainable Imaginaries.” We explore the politics of food, masculinity, consumer culture, and advertising. Drawing on her work in food studies, media studies, and public health, Contois examines how everyday objects—from Impossible Burgers to Ford F-150s—become powerful cultural symbols through which ideas about gender, identity, expertise, and citizenship are constructed and contested. Together, we discuss the hidden ideologies embedded in food marketing, the relationship between meat consumption and hegemonic masculinity, the rise of alternative proteins, the gendered history of dieting, and the surprising parallels between the advertising of electric vehicles and plant-based meat. Along the way, we explore concepts such as petromasculinity, food anxiety, and carno-nostalgia, as well as the ways advertising simultaneously reflects and shapes our collective visions of the future. Biograhpy: Emily Contois researches media within consumer culture, focusing on how identities are formed at the vital intersection of food, the body, and ideas about health. She is the author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) and co-editor of Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation (University of Illinois Press, 2022). A richly interdisciplinary scholar, her academic work has been published in Advertising & Society Quarterly, American Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Gastronomica, and Fat Studies, among others. She has also written for NBC News, Jezebel, and Nursing Clio; been interviewed on podcasts, such as The Sporkful, Gastropod, and Good Food; and appeared on CBS This Morning and Ugly Delicious on Netflix. She is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, where she also serves as Faculty in Residence. She holds a PhD and an MA in American Studies from Brown University, an MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University, and an MPH focused in Public Health Nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley.

“Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)” With Noreen Kane

Show Notes: When we think about colonialism, countries like Britain, France, and Spain often come immediately to mind. Italy, by contrast, is frequently imagined through a different set of narratives—art, culture, food, and, perhaps most significantly, a national mythology that has long obscured the realities of its colonial past. In this episode, we're joined by scholar Noreen Kane to discuss her article “Intergenerational trauma and complex implication in Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019)” examining how contemporary writers Igiaba Scego and Maaza Mengiste confront these silences through fiction. Drawing on trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and memory studies, Kane explores how these authors challenge dominant narratives of Italian innocence by revealing the interconnected histories of colonialism, fascism, the Holocaust, and present-day migration. Our conversation moves across a wide range of themes: the persistence of the "good Italian" myth, the relationship between colonial violence and collective memory, the politics of naming and forgetting, and the ways literature can make visible histories that official narratives often leave unspoken. We also explore concepts such as the implicated subject, multidirectional memory, and cosmological trauma, asking how fiction creates new possibilities for reckoning with the past and imagining more ethical futures. Biography: Noreen Kane has a BA and MA in Italian Studies from University College Dublin and worked for over a decade in English language education. In January 2026, she received her PhD from University College Cork. Her thesis, entitled “Transgenerational Trauma and the Gendered Body: Postcolonial Women’s Writing in Italy”, was funded by the Irish Research Council and a National University of Ireland Travelling Doctoral Studentship. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Quaderni d’italianistica, and Atlantic Studies. She is currently guest editor for a special issue of Notes in Italian Studies on Memory in Italian Culture. She has lectured on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses at University College Cork and University College Dublin on topics including contemporary Italian women’s writing, trauma narratives, Italian hip-hop, and Italian mobilities. Her research interests are cultural memory studies, decolonial feminist approaches to trauma, and postcolonial Irish and Italian women’s writing and music.  Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2024.2384916 [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449855.2024.2384916]

“On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” with Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs

Show notes: I’m joined by Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs for a wide-ranging conversation on their article, “On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” we explore why honesty has become such a central aesthetic category in popular music and what it means when listeners begin to understand themselves through artists they consume.  Throughout the conversation, we discuss how confessional pop music creates what Max and Jacob describe as a “two-way authentication,” where listeners are not simply consuming an artist’s private life, but actively projecting themselves into the music. We think through the politics of intimacy, headphone listening, TikTok, fandom, neoliberal selfhood, indie aesthetics, and the blurred boundary between performer and listener. Along the way, we unpack the genealogy of confessional expression from mid-century poetry to singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and contemporary pop icons, asking how authenticity itself became a marketable aesthetic.  We also spend time thinking about fragmentation, mirrors, broken glass, fantasy imagery, monstrosity, reinvention, and the strange tension between vulnerability and hyper-capitalism in Taylor Swift’s music and public persona. We close by reflecting on the ethical and political stakes of confessional culture more broadly — from celebrity branding and fandom to politics, social media, and the contemporary obsession with “rawness” and transparency. Biography: Max Blansjaar is a musician and writer from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He holds a BA in Music from St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, where he was awarded the Gibbs Prize by the Faculty of Music in 2024. His work centres around cultural politics in popular music and the negotiation of social identities and relations through music and sound, with recent essays published in Sound Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, as well as the popular magazines Dirt, The Mortar, and The Story. He currently holds a Clarendon Scholarship at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Biography: Dr Jacob Kingsbury Downs is Departmental Lecturer in Music and Chair of Faculty in the Faculty of Music, as well as Organizing Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. He is also Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. He studies listeners’ and musicians’ experiences with music and sound technologies, combining qualitative empirical methods with historical research and theoretical approaches drawn from the fields of musicology, sound studies, phenomenological philosophy, and music psychology. He is currently working on two book projects. He Received his PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2021, studying under Nicola Dibben. Links: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/37/2/117/212143/On-Taylor-Swift-and-Broken-GlassConfessional-Pop [https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/37/2/117/212143/On-Taylor-Swift-and-Broken-GlassConfessional-Pop]